Robert Burns, Principal Shairp [warren buffett book recommendations txt] 📗

though with varying degrees of emphasis, on the whole agree, that from the time he settled in Dumfries, "his moral course was downwards."

The social condition of Dumfries at the time when Burns went to live in it was neither better nor worse than that of other provincial towns in Scotland. What that was, Dr. Chambers has depicted from his own youthful experience of just such another country town. The curse of such towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of their inhabitants were either half or wholly idle; either men living on competences, with nothing to do, or shopkeepers with their time but half employed; their only amusement to meet in taverns, soak, gossip, and make stupid personal jokes. "The weary waste of spirits and energy at those soaking evening meetings was deplorable. Insipid toasts, petty raillery, empty gabble about trivial occurrences, endless disputes on small questions of fact, these relieved now and then by a song," - such Chambers describes as the items which made up provincial town life in his younger days. "A life," he says, "it was without progress or profit, or anything that tended to moral elevation." For such dull companies to get a spirit like Burns among them, to enliven them with his wit and eloquence, what a windfall it must have been! But for him to put his time and his powers at their disposal, how great the degradation! During the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enough in doing his duty as an Exciseman. This could now be done with less travelling than in the Ellisland days, and did not require him as formerly to keep a horse. When the day's work was over, his small (p. 137) house in the Wee Vennel, and the domestic hearth with the family ties gathered round it, were not enough for him. At Ellisland he had sung, -

To make a happy fire-side clime,
For weans and wife,
Is the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.

But it is one thing to sing wisely, another to practise wisdom. Too frequently at nights Burns's love of sociality and excitement drove him forth to seek the companionship of neighbours and drouthy cronies, who gathered habitually at the Globe Tavern and other such haunts. From these he was always sure to meet a warm welcome, abundant appreciation, and even flattery, for to this he was not inaccessible, while their humble station did not jar in any way on his social prejudices, nor their mediocre talents interfere with his love of pre-eminence. In such companies Burns no doubt had the gratification of feeling that he was, what is proverbially called, cock of the walk. The desire to be so probably grew with that growing dislike to the rich and the titled, which was observed in him after he came to Dumfries. In earlier days we have seen that he did not shrink from the society of the greatest magnates, and when they showed him that deference which he thought his due, he even enjoyed it. But now so bitter had grown his scorn and dislike of the upper classes, that we are told that if any one named a lord, or alluded to a man of rank in his presence, he instantly "crushed the offender in an epigram, or insulted him by some sarcastic sally." In a letter written during his first year at Dumfries, this is the way he speaks of his daily occupations: - "Hurry of business, grinding the faces of the (p. 138) publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of the Excise, making ballads, and then drinking and singing them; and over and above all, correcting the press of two different publications." But besides these duties by day, and the convivialities by night, there were other calls on his time and strength, to which Burns was by his reputation exposed. When those of the country gentry whom he still knew were in Dumfries for some hours, or when any party of strangers passing through the town, had an idle evening on their hands, it seems to have been their custom to summon Burns to assist them in spending it; and he was weak enough, on receiving the message, to leave his home and adjourn to the Globe, the George, or the King's Arms, there to drink with them late into the night, and waste his powers for their amusement. Verily, a Samson, as has been said, making sport for Philistines!

To one such invitation his impromptu answer was -

The king's most humble servant, I
Can scarcely spare a minute;
But I'll be with you by-and-by,
Or else the devil's in it.

And this we may be sure was the spirit of many another reply to these ill-omened invitations. It would have been well if, on these occasions, the pride he boasted of had stood him in better stead, and repelled such unjustifiable intrusions. But in this, as in so many other respects, Burns was the most inconsistent of men.

From the time of his migration to Dumfries, it would appear that he was gradually dropped out of acquaintance by most of the Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long been by the parochial and all other (p. 139) ministers. I have only conversed with one person who remembered in his boyhood to have seen Burns. He was the son of a Dumfriesshire baronet, the representative of the House of Redgauntlet. The poet was frequently in the neighbourhood of the baronet's country seat, but the old gentleman so highly disapproved of "Robbie Burns," that he forbade his sons to have anything to do with him. My informant, therefore, though he had often seen, had never spoken to the poet. When I conversed with him, his age was nigh four score years, and the one thing he remembered about Burns was "the blink of his black eye." This is probably but a sample of the feeling with which Burns was regarded by most of the country gentry around Dumfries. What were the various ingredients that made up their dislike of him, it is not easy now exactly to determine. Politics most likely had a good deal to do with it, for they were Tories and aristocrats, Burns was a Whig and something more. Though politics may have formed the chief, they were not probably the only element in their aversion. Yet though the majority of the county families turned their backs on him, there were some with which he still continued intimate.

These were either the few Whig magnates of the southern counties, whose political projects he supported by electioneering ballads, charged with all the powers of sarcasm he could wield; or those still fewer, whose literary tastes were strong enough to make them willing, for the sake of his genius, to tolerate both his radical politics and his irregular life. Among these latter was a younger brother of Burns's old friend, Glen Riddel, Mr. Walter Riddel, who with his wife had settled at a place four miles from Dumfries, formerly called Goldie-lea, but named after Mrs. Riddel's maiden name, Woodley (p. 140) Park. Mrs. Riddel was handsome, clever, witty, not without some tincture of letters, and some turn for verse-making. She and her husband welcomed the poet to Woodley Park, where for two years he was a constant and favourite guest. The lady's wit and literary taste found, it may be believed, no other so responsive spirit in all the south of Scotland. In the third year came a breach in their friendship, followed by a savage lampoon of Burns on the lady, because she did not at once accept his apology; then, a period of estrangement. After an interval, however, the Riddels forgave the insult, and were reconciled to the poet, and when the end came, Mrs. Riddel did her best to befriend him, and to do honour to his memory when he was gone.

It ought perhaps to have been mentioned before, that about the time of Burns's first settling at Dumfries, that is towards the close of 1791, he paid his last visit to Edinburgh. It was occasioned by the news that Clarinda was about to sail for the West Indies, in search of the husband who had forsaken her. Since Burns's marriage the silence between them seems to have been broken by only two letters to Clarinda from Ellisland. In the first of these he resents the name of "villain," with which she appears to have saluted him. In the second he admits that his past conduct had been wrong, but concludes by repeating his error and enclosing a song addressed to her in the most exaggerated strain of love. Now he rushed to Edinburgh to see her once more before she sailed. The interview was a brief and hurried one, and no record of it remains, except some letters and a few impassioned lyrics which about that time he addressed to her. The first letter is stiff and formal, as if to break the ice of long estrangement. The others are in the last strain of rapturous devotion - language (p. 141) which, if feigned, is the height of folly; if real, is worse. The lyrics are some of them strained and artificial. One, however, stands out from all the rest, as one of the most impassioned effusions that Burns ever poured forth. It contains that one consummate stanza in which Scott, Byron, and many more, saw concentrated "the essence of a thousand love-tales," -

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

After a time Mrs. M'Lehose returned from the West Indies, but without having recovered her truant husband. On her return, one or two more letters Burns wrote to her in the old exaggerated strain - the last in June, 1794 - after which Clarinda disappears from the scene.

Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with during his Dumfries sojourn, and to these he was ever and anon addressing songs of fancied love. By the attentions which the wayward husband was continually paying to ladies and others into whose society his wife could not accompany him, the patience of "bonny Jean," it may easily be conceived, must have been severely tried.

It would have been well, however, if stray flirtations and Platonic affections had been all that could be laid to his charge. But there is a darker story. The facts of it are told by Chambers in connexion with the earlier part of the Dumfries period, and need not be repeated here. Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel of long-suffering and forgivingness; but the way she bore those wrongs must have touched her husband's better nature, and pierced him to the quick. When his calmer moments came, that very mildness