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ROBERT BURNS

HE Life of Robert Burns has been written so often, the

T history of his career has been so intensely scrutinized,

his poetry has passed under the eyes of critics so numerous and so distinguished that to say about him what is both new and true is perhaps impossible. The discovery of fresh letters or other manuscripts may add to our information and our pleasure, but cannot alter our estimate of his character and his genius. Burns has suffered from the good offices of apologists, who absolve him where he very frankly condemns himself. To say anything whatever about him, good or bad, is, and always has been to lay unhallowed hands on the Ark, and to provoke certain Scotch enthusiasts who talk much more about their national poet than they read hin. These fanatics nobody can please, nor is it my intention to try to please them.

Robert Burns (as he decided to spell his name) was the son of William Burness (or Burnes), a native of Kincardineshire. His father left his birthplace, and went into southern Scotland, in 1748. The family had dwelt on the estate of the Earl Marischal, forfeited after the Rising of 1715. The Earl then went abroad, and, after many adventures, became the friend of Frederick the Great, renounced the Jacobite cause (not without discontenting his Scotch neighbours) was pardoned by the English Government, and died at Potsdam in extreme old age. Burns loved to believe that his own ancestors fought for the White Rose: "what they could they did, and what they had they lost." Mr Robert Chambers prints a story which makes the Burnses originally Campbells of Burnhouse, who about 1688, fell into disgrace with their chief for their attachment to their King. They settled in Glenbervie (Kincardineshire), adopted the name of Burnhouse, and cor

ROBERT BURNS

rupted it into Burness. The poet could find no Arms of Burns at the Herald's Office, but a descendant of his own family, in an older branch, obtained a patent for Arms founded on those of Campbell. Mr Chambers points out the weak points in the legend, but maintains that, in 1742, the Duke of Argyll carried on, under the name Burnus, a correspondence with the exiled James III. Horace Walpole is the authority for a fable which the Duke would have bitterly resented. Mr Chambers thinks that, if any of Burns's ancestors were "out," it must have been as tenants bound to follow their lord, the Earl Marischal, in 1715. But Burns liked to think that his ancestors had been "out." "Every Scottishman has a pedigree," says Sir Walter Scott. To Burns the belief that his forbears took their honourable part in a good cause was a pleasure, and, thus moved, he wrote the Last Birthday Ode for the last Royal Stuart who ever buckled on claymore. Tout finit par des chansons !

Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in the cottage which he has celebrated, some two miles south of Ayr. His mother's maiden name was Agnes Brown, or Broun, who in her youth had lived with her maternal grandmother. She, again, in her early days, "had sheltered the persecuted Covenanters," being a Carrick woman, where Whigs abounded. Burns had thus, probably, in his family, the two contradictory but, to the Scottish people, almost equally dear traditions of the outlawed Hill Folk, and of the exiled line; of loyalty to Christ's ain kirk and Covenant, or to the king across the sea.

His father, it is thought, may have been of a family originally Episcopalian, and, in place of Calvinism, he leaned to the more humane doctrines of Arminius. He was, indeed, an exemplary man, grave, even severe, but devoted to the intelligent education of his children, not only by procuring for them a master, but by means of conversation. The mother, a valiant, industrious woman, is reported to have been learned in old songs and ballads, to which Burns was always devoted. The piety, honesty, and intelligence of the parents, were of the best old Scottish kind, and Burns was born into a far higher "culture" than many men more favoured by worldly fortune. This was no unusual lot in Scotland, before Educa* See Lady Louisa Stuart's Introduction to the Diary of Lady Mary Coke.

INTRODUCTION

tion destroyed the traditional culture in religion, and in things ancient, noble, and romantic, supplying their place mainly by the newspaper. Only in Gaelic-speaking parts of the Highlands do we now find the elements of natural hereditary culture.

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At the time of Burns's birth his father was a gardener, and also tilled a few acres in his own interest. In 1766 he moved to the small farm of Mount Oliphant. His landlord died, there was a hard "factor," and the Burnses had to endure his insolence, while the lads were overworked, physically, before they attained maturity. They remained at Mount Oliphant from 1766 to 1777, and left it for Lochlea, the poorer after all their labour, when Burns was in his nineteenth year. The nature of their education, the tuition of Mr Murdoch, Burns's delight in books, particularly in patriotic poetry on Wallace wight, are familiar matters. Burns credits himself, as a child, with "an enthusiastic idiot piety," and the relics of this frame of mind, encountering his early tendencies to license, at a later period inspired some melancholy religious verse. Burns could not take the advice pecca fortiter. He was ever what Tertullian calls one of "Satan's penitents, and when on the easy downward slope cast a backward glance at the austere joys of the narrow way. Some of his more audacious verses are a form of whistling to keep his spirits up. The conflict of his divided personalities, of his passions and his principles, may readily be detected in his verse and in his letters. The relentless necessity to toil, at this period of undeveloped strength, the grimness of poverty, under the rich man's contumely, "a factor's snash," probably injured Burns's health, and also caused the bitterness of his social grudge. This occasionally shews itself in a childish manner, as when he complains of having to keep out of the way of a carriage in the streets of Edinburgh. A Duke, if he is walking, has to show just as much respect to an omnibns or a costermonger's cart. The enviousness which his brother attributes to him, his jibes at rank and wealth, are undeniably natural, and even pardonable in a man of his powers and his experience in youth. He was embittered. He fiercely resented the lack of attention paid to a dirge which he sent to a man of rank, who, in the distress and confusion of a

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father's death, may well have thrown a manuscript elegy into the fire without looking at the signature. Burns's ode on a dead woman, whose funeral attendants occupied an inn, and caused him to make a long ride in the rain, is the most unfortunate poetical result of a rancour which, in the interests of his happiness, we may regret, but cannot affect not to understand.

Even in the very early years at Mount Oliphant the dark, powerful lad was committing poetry to memory, was criticising, imitating, trying his own strength in rustic love-ditties. Even then his patriotism, a fervent passion of love for an old and renowned native land, inspired him with the wish "to sing a sang at least" for his country. In a passage which anticipates, and possibly suggested, a line of Tennyson's, he compares his efforts to "the blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops around the walls of his cave." Keats wondered that Burns did not write an epic; in this simile of his there is an epical sublimity.

In Burns's seventeenth year he went, as he chronicles, to a dancing school, a thing which his father resented, as Davie Deans would have done. This caused a coldness which Burns always regretted. His passions were as precociously ardent as Byron's, yet were for years, he says, entirely innocent. The period at Lochlea, in Tarbolton parish, lasted from his nineteenth to his twenty-sixth year, and before the close of this epoch he was an ardent rural lover, and an adept in the pastime of "chapping out"-that is, summoning the fair one to nocturnal interviews. Lockhart takes a favourable sense of "chapping out" in his Life of Burns; in his earlier work, Peter's Letters to His Friends (1819), Lockhart is less gracious, and probably more accurate. Burns was apparently seventeen, not nineteen, when he went to the smuggling town of Kirkoswald to learn mensuration and other things: "to fill my glass and mix without fear in a drunken squabble." He read, and loved, and rhymed, but not till his twenty-third year, when he passed six months at Irvine, were his ideas and conduct deeply affected by the society of roisterers. He himself says that he found much matter in the class of men commonly called blackguards often fine fellows, only destitute of the tamer virtues. At Irvine he studied flax-dressing, suffered from

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INTRODUCTION

hypochondria and religious melancholy, and lost his flax in a fire caused by a New-Year's revel. He was also disappointed in an honourable love affair; and he tells his father that his only pleasurable employment is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way." "I foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me.' Now, the consciousness of power and the passion of ambition were, from the first, extremely strong in Burns. He would be distinguished were it but in the colour of his plaid and the dressing of his hair. The Cyclops was not so blind but that he knew himself born for greatness, born to be conspicuous, but how? In poverty, toil, in an unregarded rank, expecting the old age of a "gaberlunzie man" entertained for his talk and his tales, Burns felt, more than youth commonly feels, the darkness of the future and the thwartings of the world. Often, in company, he would be moody and thoughtful—

"Like some bold seer in a trance

Seeing all his own mischance

With a glassy countenance."

For

But, once roused to talk, his genius, his humour, his knowledge of literature, French and English, made him the king of his society. The eyes that were the finest Scott ever saw would glow, and flax-dressers, smugglers, tapsters, wenches, would, like the Duchess of Gordon, be "carried off their feet. He must have known it, yet the world lay black before him, all the gates were closed, all that force seemed destined to be lost, leaving him poor and obscure. others the portals opened, for young lairds who splashed the poet as they rode by to a meet; to young collegians, even to young ministers, the paths were clear, but Burns never shewed a vocation for the pulpit. Many a Scot no better born, and no stronger in body, has cut his way to honour in the wars, but Burns did not "fight the foreign_loons in their ain countrie." We seem to see him, at Irvine, like Bellerophon, "eating his own heart, shunning the path of men." Happily, at Irvine, he met with the poems of Robert Fergusson, the St Andrews student, who died young, in a mad-house, and this revived his interest in verse. Fergusson he always acknowledged, with equal

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