But gie me just a true guid fellow give
Wi' right ingine, wit
And spunkie ance to mak us mellow, liquor enough
An' then we'll shine!
Burns was not a drunkard. He seems to have taken little alone, and in the houses of some of his more fashionable friends he resented the pressure to drink more than he wanted. Nor did he allow dissipation to interfere with his work on the farm, or his duties in the excise. Yet, even when contemporary manners have received their share of responsibility, it must be allowed that on the poet's own confession he drank frequently to excess, and that this abuse had a serious share in the breakdown of his constitution, weakened as it was by the excessive toil of his youth.
He was fond of women, and this passion more than any other has been the center of the disputes that have raged round his life and character. Again, contemporary and class customs have to be taken into account. In spite of the formal disapproval of public opinion and the censure of the church, the attitude of his class in the end of the eighteenth century toward such irregularities as brought Burns and Jean Armour to the stool of repentance was much less severe than it would be in this country to-day. Burns himself knew he was culpable, but the comparative laxity of the standards of the time made it easier for him to forgive himself, and prompted him to defiance when he believed himself criticized by puritan hypocrites. Thus in his utterances we have a curious inconsistency, his feeling ranging from black remorse and melancholy, through half-hearted excuse and justification, to swaggering bravado. And none of them makes pleasant reading.
But his relations with the other sex were not all of the nature of sheer passion. He was capable of serious friendship, warm respect, abject adoration, and a hundred other variations of feeling; and in several cases he maintained for years, by correspondence and occasional visits, an intercourse with ladies on which no shadow of a stain has ever been cast. Such were his relations with Margaret Chalmers and Mrs. Dunlop. These facts have no controversial bearing, but they are necessary to be considered if we are to have a complete view of Burns's relations to society.
In estimating him as a poet, nothing is lost in keeping in mind the historical relations which have been so strongly emphasized in recent years. He himself would have been the last to resent being placed in a national tradition, but, on the contrary, would have been proud to be regarded as the last and greatest of Scottish vernacular poets. Patriotic feeling is frequent in his verse; we have seen how consciously he performed his work for Johnson and Thomson as a service to his country; and to the “Guidwife of Wauchope House” he professed, speaking of his youth,
E'en then, a wish (I mind its pow'r),
A wish that from my latest hour