Burns was but a visitor, the lion of a season, and therefore we are not called upon to associate with Edinburgh the whole tragic story of his life. And yet his appearance was one of the most remarkable that has distinguished the ancient town. He arrived among all the professors, the men of letters, the cultured classes who held an almost ideal pre-eminence, more like what a young author hopes than is generally to be met with among men—his heart beating with a sense of the great venture on which he was bound, and a proud determination to quit himself like a man whatever were the magnitudes among which he should have to stand. Mere Society so called, with all its bustle of gaiety and endless occupation about nothing, might have exercised upon him something of the fascination which fine names and fine houses and the sweep and whirl of hurried life certainly possess; but he who expresses almost with bitterness his disgust to see a blockhead of rank received by one of his noble patrons with as much, nay more, consideration than is given to himself, would probably have had very little toleration for the butterflies of fashion: whereas Edinburgh society impressed him greatly, as of that ideal kind of which the young and inexperienced dream, where the best and brightest are at the head of everything, where poetry is a passport to the innermost sanctuary and conversation is like the talk of the gods. They were all distinguished for one literary gift or grace or another, philosophers golden-mouthed, poets of the most polished sort: their knowledge, their culture, their intellectual powers, were the foundation upon which their little world was built. The great people who were to be found among them were proud to know these scholars and sages—it was they, and not an occasional family of rank, or still more rare man of wealth, who gave character and meaning to Edinburgh. To be received in such society was the highest privilege which a young poet could desire; and it was worthy to receive and foster and encourage that new light that came from heaven.
On their side the heads of society in Edinburgh were much interested in this young man. There had been an article in the Lounger, fondly deemed a Scotch Spectator, an elegant literary paper widely read not only in Scotland but even beyond the Border, upon him and his works. "The Ayrshire Ploughman" was the title of the article, and it set forth all the imperfections of his breeding, his want of education, his ignorance both of books and of the world, and yet the amazing verses he had produced, which, though disguised in a dialect supposed to be unknown to the elegant reader, and for which Henry Mackenzie, the Man of Feeling, supplied a glossary—living, he himself, in an old-fashioned house in the South Back of the Canongate and within the easiest reach of those wonderful old ladies who spoke broad Scotch, and left no one in any doubt as to the strong opinions expressed therein—were certified to be worthy the perusal of the most fastidious critic. Lord Monboddo, who was the author of speculations which forestalled Darwin and who considered a tail to be an appendage of which men had not long got rid, on the one side, and the metaphysicians and philosophers on the other, would no doubt prick up their ears to hear of this absolutely new being in whom there might be seen some traces of primeval man. We forget which of the early Jameses it was who is said to have shut up two infants with a dumb nurse in one of the islands of the Firth to ascertain what kind of language they would speak when thus left to the teaching of nature. The experiment was triumphantly successful, for the heaven-taught babies babbled, the chroniclers tell us, a kind of Hebrew, thus proving beyond doubt that the language of the Old Testament was the original tongue of man. The Edinburgh savants must have received Burns with something of the same feeling: for here was a new soul which had been shut up amid the primeval elements, and the language it spoke was Poetry! yet poetry disguised in imperfect dialect which might yet be trained and educated into elegance. They asked him to dinner as a first step, and gathered round him to hear what he would have to say; to observe the effect produced by the sight of learning, criticism, knowledge; to enjoy his awe, and note the improvement that could not but ensue. This curiosity was full of kindness; their hearts were a little touched by the ploughman, by his glowing eyes, and by the strange sight of him there among them in the midst of their high civilisation, a rustic clown who knew nothing better than a thatched cottage and a clay floor. No doubt they had the sincerest desire that he should be made to understand how much he was deficient, what a great deal he had to learn, and be taught to use fine language, and turn his attention to higher subjects, and be altogether elevated and brought on in the world. The situation is very curious and full of human interest, even had the stranger been less in importance than he was. It is wonderfully enlightening in any circumstances to see such an encounter from both sides, to perceive the light in which it appears to them, and the very different light in which it is seen by him. There was the usual great divergence between the views of the visitor and the highly-cultured community to which he came. For he indeed did not come there at all to be enlightened and trained and put in the way he should go. He came full of delightful hope that he was coming among his own kind, that he was for the first time to meet his own species, and recognise in other human faces the light that shone about his own path, but in none of the other muddy ways of the country-side; to make friends with his natural brethren, and be understood of them as no one yet had been found to understand him. In his high anticipations, in his warm enthusiasm of hope, he himself figured dimly as a sort of noble exile coming back to his father's house. So does every child of fancy regard the world of which he knows nothing, the world of the great and famous, where to dazzled fancy all the beautiful things, words, and thoughts for which he has been sighing all his life are to be found.
They met, and they were, if not mutually disappointed, yet strangely astonished and perplexed. Burns would seem to have been always on his guard, too much on his guard we should be disposed to say, suspicious of the intention to guide, to chasten, to educate and refine, which was indeed in the kindest way at the bottom of everybody's thoughts. He was determined to be astonished by nothing, to keep his head so that no one should ever be able to say that it was turned by his new experiences—an attitude which altogether bewildered the good people, who were willing to give him every kind of education, to excuse any rudeness or roughness or imperfection, but not to see a man at his ease, appearing among them as if he were of them, requiring no allowance to be made for him, holding his head high as any man he met. All the accounts we have of his appearance in Edinburgh agree in this. He was neither abashed nor embarrassed; no rustic presumption or vulgarity, but quite as little any timidity or awkwardness, was in the Ayrshire ploughman. His shoulders a little bent with the work to which he had been accustomed, his dress like a countryman, a rougher cloth perhaps, a pair of good woollen stockings rig and fur, his mother's knitting, instead of the silk which covered limbs probably not half so robust—but so far as manners went, nothing to apologise for or smile at. The accounts all agree in this. If he never put himself forward too much, he never withdrew with any unworthy shyness from his modest share in the conversation. Sometimes he would be roused to eloquent speech, and then the admiring ladies said he carried them "off their feet" in the contagion of his enthusiasm and emotion. But this was a very strange phenomenon for the Edinburgh professors and men of letters to deal with: a novice who had not come humbly to be taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. He was not perhaps altogether unmoved by their insane advices to him, one of the greatest of lyrical poets, a singer above all—to write a tragedy, to give up the language he knew and write his poetry in the high English which, alas! he uses in his letters. Not unmoved, and seriously inclining to a more lofty measure, he compounded addresses to Edinburgh:
"Edina, Scotia's darling seat!"
and other such intolerable effusions. One can imagine him roaming through the fields between the old town and the new, and looking up to the "rude rough fortress," and on the other side to the brand-new regular lines of building, where
"Architecture's noble pride
Bids elegance and splendour rise,"
and musing in his mind how to celebrate them in polished verse so that even the critics may be satisfied—
"Thy sons, Edina! social, kind,
With open arms the stranger hail;
Their views enlarged, their liberal mind,
Above the narrow, rural vale;
Attentive still to sorrow's wail,
Or modest merit's silent claim;
And never may their sources fail!
And never envy blot their name!"
One wonders what the gentlemen said to this in the old town and the new—whether it did not confuse them still further, as well intended perhaps, but not after all like the "Epistle to Davie," though they had all advised him to amend that rustic style. A very confusing business altogether—difficult for the kind advisers as well as for the poet, and with no outlet that any one could see.
