The World's Greatest Books - Volume 10 Part 8

The Life of Robert Burns

John Gibson Lockhart was born, a son of the manse, at Cambusnethan, Lanarkshire, on July 14, 1794. Receiving his early education in Glasgow, he went, at sixteen, with a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1816 he was called to the Scottish Bar; but literature occupied him more than law, and as early as 1819 he wrote the once popular "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk." Next year he married Scott's eldest daughter, Sophia. Lockhart was a leading contributor to the early "Blackwood," where his fine translations of Spanish ballads first appeared, and he edited the "Quarterly Review"

from 1825 to 1853. He died at Abbotsford on November 25, 1854, and was buried at Scott's feet in Dryburgh Abbey. Lockhart's forte was biography, and his "Life of Scott" ranks beside Boswell's "Johnson." The "Life of Burns" was published first in Constable's "Miscellany" in 1828, when the whole impression was exhausted in six weeks. It pa.s.sed through five editions before the author's death. Though many lives of Burns have appeared since, with details unknown to Lockhart, his biography is in many respects the best we possess, and is never likely to be superseded. Even Mr. Henley is "glad to agree with Lockhart." It is this book that is the subject of Carlyle's famous essay on Burns.

_I.--The Poet in the Making_

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in a clay cottage at Alloway, two miles south of Ayr, and near the "auld brig o' Doon." His father, William Burnes, or Burness--for so he spelt his name--was from Kincardineshire. When Robert was born he had the lease of a seven-acre croft, and had intended to establish himself as a nurseryman. He was a man of notable character and individuality, immortalised by his son as "the saint, the father, and the husband" of "The Cottar's Sat.u.r.day Night." "I have met with few," said Burns, "who understood men, their manners, and their ways, equal to my father." Agnes Brown, the poet's mother, is described as a very sagacious woman, with an inexhaustible store of ballads and traditionary tales, upon which she nourished Robert's infant imagination, while her husband attended to "the weightier matters of the law."

When Burns was between six and seven, his father removed to the farm of Mount Oliphant, two miles from the Brig o' Doon. But the soil was poor, and the factor--afterwards pictured in "The Twa Dogs"--so harsh and unreasonable, that the tenant was glad to quit. In 1777 he removed about ten miles to the larger and better farm of Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. Here, after a short interval of prosperity, some trouble arose about the conditions of the lease. The dispute involved William Burnes in ruin, and he died broken-hearted in February, 1784.

Meanwhile, at the age of six, Robert, with his brother Gilbert, was learning to read, write, and sum under the direction of John Murdoch, an itinerant teacher, who has left an interesting description of his pupil.

"Gilbert always appeared to me to possess a more lively imagination,"

says Murdoch, "and to be more of the wit, than Robert. I attempted to teach them a little church-music. Here they were left far behind by all the rest of the school. Robert's ear, in particular, was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable. It was long before I could get them to distinguish one tune from another. Robert's countenance was generally grave and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind.

Gilbert's face said, 'Mirth, with thee I mean to live;' and, certainly, if any person who knew the two boys had been asked which of them was the more likely to court the muses, he would never have guessed that Robert had a propensity of that kind."

When Murdoch left the district, the father himself continued to instruct the boys; but when Robert was about thirteen he and Gilbert were sent, "week about, during a summer quarter," to the parish school of Dalrymple. The good man could not pay two fees, or his two boys could not be spared at the same time from the farm!

"We lived very poorly," says the poet. "I was a dexterous ploughman for my age; and the next eldest to me was a brother [Gilbert], who could drive the plough very well, and help me to thrash the corn. A novel-writer might perhaps have viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I." Burns's person, inured to daily toil, and continually exposed to every variety of weather, presented, before the usual time, every characteristic of robust and vigorous manhood. He says himself that he never feared a compet.i.tor in any species of rural exertion; and Gilbert, a man of uncommon bodily strength, adds that neither he, nor any labourer he ever saw at work, was equal to him, either in the cornfield or on the thrashing-floor.

Before his sixteenth year Burns had read a large amount of literature.

But a collection of songs, he says significantly, "was my _vade mec.u.m_.

I pored over them, driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noticing the true, tender, or sublime from affectation or fustian." It was about this date that he "first committed the sin of rhyme." The subject was a "bewitching creature," a partner in the harvest field, and the song was that beginning "Once I loved a bonnie la.s.s."

After this, though much occupied with labour and love, he found leisure occasionally to clothe the various moods of his mind in verse. It was as early as seventeen that he wrote the stanzas which open beautifully, "I dream'd I lay where flowers were springing," and also the ballad, "My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border," which, years afterwards, he used to con over with delight, because of the faithfulness with which it recalled to him the circ.u.mstances and feelings of his opening manhood. These are the only two of his very early productions in which there is nothing expressly about love. The rest were composed to celebrate the charms of those rustic beauties who followed each other in the domain of his fancy, or shared the capacious throne between them.

The excursions of the rural lover form the theme of almost all the songs which Burns is known to have produced about this period; and such of these juvenile performances as have been preserved are beautiful. They show how powerfully his boyish fancy had been affected by the old rural minstrelsy of his own country, and how easily his native taste caught the secret of its charm.

In 1781, despairing of farming, he went to Irvine to learn flax-dressing with a relative. He was diligent at first, but misfortune soon overtook him. The shop where he was engaged caught fire, and he "was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence." Gilbert Burns dates a serious change in his character and conduct from this six months' residence in the seaport town. "He contracted," he says, "some acquaintance of a freer manner of thinking than he had been accustomed to, whose society prepared him for overleaping the bounds of rigid virtue which had hitherto restrained him."

He had certainly not come unscathed out of the society of those persons of "liberal opinions" with whom he consorted in Irvine; and he expressly attributes to their lessons the sc.r.a.pe into which he fell soon after "he put his hand to plough again." He was compelled, according to the then all but universal custom of rural parishes in Scotland, to do penance in church, before the congregation, in consequence of the birth of an illegitimate child. But not the amours, or the tavern, or drudging manual labour could keep him long from his true calling. "Rhyme," he says, "I had given up [on going to Irvine], but meeting with Fergusson's 'Scottish Poems,' I strung anew my wildly sounding lyre with emulating vigour." It was probably this accidental meeting with Fergusson that in a great measure finally determined the Scottish character of his poetry.

_II.--The Loves of a Peasant Poet_

Just before their father's death, Robert and Gilbert took the cold and ungrateful farm of Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline, to which the family now removed. The four years of Burns's connection with this place were the most important of his life. It was then that his genius developed its highest energies; on the works produced in these years his fame was first established, and must ever continue mainly to rest; it was then also that his personal character came out in all its brightest lights, and in all but its darkest shadows; and indeed from the commencement of this period the history of the man may be traced, step by step, in his own immortal writings.

Burns now began to know that Nature had meant him for a poet; and diligently, though as yet in secret, he laboured in what he felt to be his destined vocation. He was never more productive than at this time, when he wrote such skits on the kirk and its a.s.sociates as "The Twa Herds" (pastors), "Holy Willie's Prayer," "The Holy Fair," and "The Ordination." "Hallowe'en," a descriptive poem, perhaps even more exquisitely wrought than "The Holy Fair," also belongs to the Mossgiel period, as does an even more notable effort.

Burns had often remarked to his brother that there was something peculiarly venerable in the phrase, "Let us worship G.o.d," used by a decent, sober head of a family introducing family worship. To this sentiment we are indebted for "The Cottar's Sat.u.r.day Night," the hint of the plan and t.i.tle of which were taken from Fergusson's "Farmer's Ingle." It is, perhaps, of all Burns's pieces, the one whose exclusion from the collection, were such a thing possible nowadays, would be the most injurious, if not to the genius, at least to the character of the man. In spite of many feeble lines and some heavy stanzas, it appears to me that even his genius would suffer more in estimation by being contemplated in the absence of this poem than of any other single performance he has left us. Loftier flights he certainly has made, but in these he remained but a short while on the wing, and effort is too often perceptible; here the motion is easy, gentle, placidly undulating.

Burns's art had now reached its climax; but it is time to revert more particularly to his personal history. In this his loves very nearly occupy the chief place. That they were many, his songs prove; for in those days he wrote no love-songs on imaginary heroines. "Mary Morison,"

"Behind yon hills where Lugar flows," and "On Cessnock banks there lives a la.s.s," belong to this date; and there are three or four inspired by Mary Campbell--"Highland Mary"--the object of by far the deepest pa.s.sion Burns ever knew, a pa.s.sion which he has immortalised in the n.o.blest of his elegiacs, "To Mary in Heaven."

Farming had, of course, to engage his attention as well as love-making, but he was less successful in the one than in the other. The first year of Mossgiel, from buying bad seed, the second from a late harvest, he lost half his crops. In these circ.u.mstances, he thought of proceeding to the West Indies. Presently he had further cause for contemplating an escape from his native land. Among his "flames" was one Jean Armour, the daughter of a mason in Mauchline, where she was the reigning toast. Jean found herself "as ladies wish to be that love their lords." Burns's worldly circ.u.mstances were in a most miserable state when he was informed of her condition, and he was staggered. He saw nothing for it but to fly the country at once.

Meanwhile, meeting Jean, he yielded to her tears, and gave her a written acknowledgment of marriage, valid according to Scottish law. Her father's wrath was not appeased thereby. Burns, confessing himself unequal to the support of a family, proposed to go immediately to Jamaica in search of better fortunes. He offered, if this were rejected, to abandon his farm, already a hopeless concern, and earn at least bread for his wife and children as a day labourer at home. But nothing would satisfy Armour, who, in his indignation, made his daughter destroy the written evidence of her "marriage."

_III.--Burns at His Zenith_

Such was his poverty that he could not satisfy the parish officers; and the only alternative that presented itself to him was America or a gaol.

A situation was obtained for him in Jamaica, but he had no money to pay his pa.s.sage. It occurred to him that the money might be raised by publishing his poems; and a first edition, printed at Kilmarnock in 1786, brought him nearly 20, out of which he paid for a steerage pa.s.sage from the Clyde. "My chest was on the road to Greenock," he tells; "I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, 'The gloomy night is gathering fast,' when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition."

Blacklock, the blind divine upon whom Johnson "looked with reverence,"

had read the newly published poems, and it was his praise of them that directly prevented Burns from expatriating himself. "His opinion that I would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh fired me so much that away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a single letter of introduction. The baneful star that had so long shed its blasting influence in my zenith for once made a revolution to the nadir." In Edinburgh, which Burns reached in November, 1786, he was introduced by Blacklock to all the _literati_, and within a fortnight he was writing to a friend: "I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John Bunyan; and you may expect to see my birthday inscribed among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin and Aberdeen Almanacks, along with the Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge."

But he bore his honours in a manner worthy of himself. "The attentions he received," says Dugald Stewart, "from all ranks and descriptions of persons were such as would have turned any head but his own. I cannot say that I could perceive any unfavourable effect which they left on his mind." Scott, then a lad of fifteen, met him, and wrote a vivid description of his appearance:

"His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture, but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more ma.s.sive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school--_i.e._, none of your modern agriculturists, who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the _douce gudeman_ who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally _glowed_) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in _malam partem_ when I say I never saw a man in company with his superiors in station and information more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of embarra.s.sment. I was told that his address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. I have heard the late d.u.c.h.ess of Gordon remark this."

It needs no effort of imagination to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars, almost all either clergymen or professors, must have been in the presence of this big-boned, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who had forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a single stride; and it will always be a reflection in their honour that they suffered no pedantic prejudices to interfere with their reception of the poet.

Shortly after his arrival he arranged with Creech, the chief bookseller in Edinburgh, to undertake a second edition of his poems. This was published in March, 1787, the subscribers numbering over 1,500. Out of money thus derived, he provided a tombstone for the neglected grave of Robert Fergusson, his "elder brother in the muses," in the Canongate churchyard. Then he decided to visit some of the cla.s.sic scenes of Scottish history and romance. He had as yet seen but a small part of his own country, and this by no means among the most interesting, until, indeed, his own poetry made it equal, on that score, to any other.

Various tours were, in fact, undertaken, the chief being, however, in the Border district and in the Highlands. Usually he returned to Edinburgh, partly to be near his jovial intimates, and partly because, after the excitement attending his first appearance in the capital, he found himself incapable of settling down contentedly in the humble circle at Mossgiel.

_IV.--The Clarinda Romance_

During the winter of 1787--1788, he had a little romance with Mrs.

McLehose, the beautiful widow to whom he addressed the song, "Clarinda, mistress of my soul," and a series of letters which present more instances of bad taste, bombastic language, and fulsome sentiment than could be produced from all his writings besides. It was the same lady who inspired the lines which furnished Byron with a motto, and Scott declared to be "worth a thousand romances ":

Had we never loved so kindly Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met--or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

At this time the publication of Johnson's "Scots Musical Museum" was going on in Edinburgh; and Burns, being enlisted as a contributor, furnished many of his best songs to that work. From his youth upwards he had been an enthusiastic lover of the old minstrelsy and music of his country; but he now studied both subjects with better opportunities and appliances than he could have commanded previously; and it is from this time that we must date his ambition to transmit his own poetry to posterity, in eternal a.s.sociation with those exquisite airs which had hitherto, in far too many instances, been married to verses that did not deserve to be immortal. Later, beginning in 1792, he wrote about sixty songs for George Thomson's collection, many of which, like "Auld Lang Syne" and "Scots Wha Hae," are in the front rank of popularity. The letters he addressed to Thomson are full of interesting detail of various kinds. In one he writes:

"Until I am complete master of a tune in my own singing, such as it is, I can never compose for it. My way is this. I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression--then choose my theme--compose one stanza. When that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in Nature round me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air, with the verses I have framed. When I feel my muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes. Seriously this, at home, is almost invariably my way."

But to return. During his second winter in Edinburgh, Burns met with a hackney coach accident which kept him to the house for six weeks. While in this state he learned from Mauchline that his intimacy with Jean Armour had again exposed her to the reproaches of her family. The father sternly turned her out of doors, and Burns had to arrange about a shelter for her and his children in a friend's house. In the meantime, through the influence of some sympathisers, he had been appointed an officer of excise. "I have chosen this," he wrote, "after mature deliberation. It is immediate bread, and, though poor in comparison of the last eighteen months of my existence, 'tis luxury in comparison of all my preceding life." However, when he settled finally with Creech about his poems, he found himself with between 500 and 600; and he retained his excise commission as a _dernier ressort_, to be used only if a reverse of fortune rendered it necessary.

He decided now to exchange Mossgiel for Ellisland farm, about six miles from Dumfries. As soon as he was able to leave Edinburgh, he had hurried to Mossgiel and gone through a justice-of-peace marriage with Jean Armour. Burns, with all his faults, was an honest and a high-spirited man, and he loved the mother of his children. Had he hesitated to make her his wife, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian, or that misery of miseries, the remorse of a poet.

Some months later he writes that his marriage "was not, perhaps, in consequence of the attachment of romance, but I have no cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest const.i.tution, and the kindest heart in the country." It was during the honeymoon, as he calls it, that he wrote the beautiful "O a' the airts the wind can blaw." He used to say that the happiest period of his life was the first winter at Ellisland, with wife and children around him. It was then that he wrote, among other songs, "John Anderson, my Jo," "Tarn Glen," "My heart's in the Highlands," "Go fetch to me a pint of wine," and "Willie brewed a peck o' maut."

But the "golden days" of Ellisland were short. Burns's farming speculations once more failed, and he had to take up his excise commission. "I am now," says he, "a poor rascally gauger, condemned to gallop two hundred miles every week to inspect dirty ponds and yeasty barrels." Both in prose and verse he has recorded the feelings with which he first followed his new vocation, and his jests on the subject are uniformly bitter. It was a vocation which exposed him to temptations of the kind he was least likely to resist. His extraordinary conversational powers led him into peril wherever he went. If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were a.s.sembled round the ingle; the largest punch-bowl was produced; and "Be ours this night--who knows what comes to-morrow?" was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed him.

At home, too, lion-gazers from all quarters beset him; they ate and drank at his cost, and often went away to criticise him and his fare, as if they had done Burns and his black bowl great honour in condescending to be entertained for a single evening with such company. Among others who called on him was Captain Grose, the antiquary, and it is to this acquaintance that we owe "Tam o' Shanter," which Burns believed to be the best of all his productions.

_V.--Closing Years of the Poet's Life_