Chapter VII: The Scot 278 (7)

But now that he saw an open road into the Excise Burns’s mind veered round. Farming after all was a more poetical occupation than ‘searching auld wives’ barrels’. Miller was still urging Ellisland upon him, and the possibility of failure there did not look so black when he knew that if he did fail he had the Excise to turn to. He agreed to revisit the farm. No doubt he told himself, as he told Clarinda, that he did so only out of courtesy to Miller, knowing that the Excise must be his lot. His judgement warned him that the farm would not do; his emotions swayed him in its favour. In an effort to strengthen his judgement he invited his old friend, John Tennant of Glenconner, to join the tour of inspection. Glenconner’s mind would not be biased by any poetic considerations. It did not occur to Burns that even the most experienced of farmers, looking at soil different from that he was accustomed to, could scarcely gauge its productivity rightly at the end of February. The rule-of-thumb farming which Glenconner and most of his contemporaries practised required the sight of growing crops for correct judgement. Tennant looked the place over and told Burns it was a bargain at Miller’s price. The opinion astonished the poet, but he failed to realize that it was merely a guess less accurate than the opinion he himself had formed on seeing the place the previous June. Burns frequently made mistakes, but his worst ones were made when he relied on other people’s judgement. In March he signed Miller’s lease and committed himself to three years of struggle and discouragement which swallowed all the capital which had not already been poured into the bottomless morass of Mossgiel.

Legend has it that Burns was offered his choice of two farms on the Dalswinton estate and selected Ellisland because of its more attractive location--‘a poet’s choice and not a farmer’s’. In fact Miller offered no choice, and in drawing up the lease employed all the usual legal technicalities with one or two additions of his own. The rent was to be £50 a year for the first three years and £70 thereafter, and Miller’s zeal for improvements was to have scope even while the tenant was in possession. The landlord reserved the right to take over the riverbank, a twenty-yard-wide belt along the Friars Carse boundary, and two acres of other land at his own choice to plant with trees. He agreed, however, to put money of his own into the place. It had not even a farmhouse when Burns signed the lease, and Miller undertook to provide adequate buildings. The contractor’s delay in constructing these caused further needless anxiety and actual loss to Burns.

After the die was cast all Burns’s earlier doubts about Ellisland and his own ability to handle it returned with redoubled force. His first move was to make sure of his Excise appointment by taking the necessary six weeks of special instructions from the officer at Mauchline, even though this delayed his settlement until mid-June. Inasmuch as these six weeks included also the emotional stress of the ending of the Clarinda romance and his acknowledgement of Jean as his wife, his nerves were overwrought when he finally reached his farm. The prospect there might have discouraged a more phlegmatic man. The farmhouse was not even started, and his only shelter was a leaky and chimneyless labourer’s hovel. The sparse growth of the crops planted by his predecessor confirmed the exhaustion of the soil, and he was confronted as never before with the need for executive skill. That aspect of his nature which led him to remark that somehow he could make himself pretty generally beloved yet never could get the art of commanding respect told heavily against him when he had both to keep his own labourers at work and to bully or cajole the contractor into finishing the farmhouse at the time agreed upon. When he was not present the farmhands lay down on the job; when he was present they found it altogether too easy to engage him in talk while the work suffered. The friendship he formed with Thomas Boyd, the contractor, led among other things to an acquaintance with Thomas Telford, the great engineer, but it did not lead to the speedy completion of his house. As late as March, 1789, he was still pleading with Boyd to get at least the shell of it finished. Moreover he was too sympathetic with his workmen. The margin of profit on such a farm was too small to permit indulgence in humanitarian sentiments, but Burns knew too much of the lives of the lower classes to have the necessary hardness. Two letters to the owner of the neighbouring farm with whom Burns had cooperated in digging a drain do credit to his feelings if not to his business capacity. The labourer who undertook the job at seventeen pence a rood had underestimated the time. In order to give him a fair wage for his labour Burns added three-pence a rood to the contract price for his share and asked the neighbour to do the same--with what result is not recorded.

But there was a still deeper psychological hindrance to success at Ellisland. Even had the soil been productive, even had he secured a foreman who could have kept his hands at work, the Burns who undertook Ellisland was not the Burns of Lochlie or even of Mossgiel. Though by no means setting up as a gentleman farmer, he had become conscious of having a position to maintain. Gilbert, he thought, might be able to take over Ellisland and succeed with it; ‘as he can with propriety do things that I _now_ cannot do.’ Physical debility was also to be reckoned with, for he must have got out of training during almost two years of exemption from regular labour, and his weakened heart would prevent his easily recovering his lost tone. But in fact his mind was filled with other matters and metres. That during his first summer he spent alternate fortnights with Jean in Mauchline was a temporary circumstance without relation to the success of the farm thereafter, but that his work for Johnson’s _Museum_ was filling his mind was a fact less easily discounted. In the middle of his first summer he had a fiddler with him for at least two days playing over a collection of Highland music in quest of lyric tunes for Johnson. It was a prelude to his greatest period of lyric creativeness, but it was not an augury of success in managing a poor farm on limited capital.

The first season’s harvest offered little encouragement. Wet weather and scanty labour made it difficult to salvage whatever thin crop the fields had produced. Before his lease was six months old Burns was confiding to his friends that he was uncertain of his farm’s doing well, but, as he told Ainslie, he had his Excise commission in his pocket and did not care three skips of a cur dog for the gambols of Fortune. The chance of obtaining the commission had made him willing to undertake the farm; possession added still another psychological handicap to its successful conduct. Embittered youthful memories of the humiliations of a tenant farmer had been reinforced by the development of his poetic vocation to clog whole-hearted effort. Now the existence of his commission held always open a door of escape from any threatened renewal of the old humiliation and thereby unconsciously slowed still further the endeavours which were his only safeguard. He was defeated at Ellisland before he began.

By the following spring he had begun to realize his defeat. The farm and his family, including William, were swallowing the remains of his capital so rapidly that it was doubtful if he could hold on without more income than the farm was likely to yield. It occurred to him that he might use his commission while he still held the farm. He had not thought of this at first. The usual procedure for a beginner was to be assigned to some district where a place was vacant, there to serve several months’ apprenticeship without pay. When pay commenced, it had until recently been at the rate of £35 a year, but about the time Burns obtained his commission the initial stipend was raised to £50. Looking about his own neighbourhood, Burns learned that the officer in charge of the rural parishes to the north of Dumfries was a certain Leonard Smith, who had recently inherited money and was not distinguishing himself by activity in the service. Burns decided to play politics.

His commission had been obtained through Robert Graham of Fintry, one of the chief Commissioners for Scotland. Fintry had expressed personal interest in the poet’s welfare in terms which must have soothed his bristling pride, for Burns had already addressed to him both a prose letter of thanks and a poetic epistle in imitation of Pope. Though Fintry never quite supplanted Lord Glencairn in Burns’s esteem, he in fact became the poet’s second patron and in the long run did more for him than even the Earl had done. Graham’s first favour had been the commission itself; his second was the appointment to active duty. Before his first harvest was over Burns coolly suggested that Smith might be relieved from duty without serious loss to himself and perhaps with a gain to the Service. On his visit to Edinburgh in February, 1789, Burns pressed the matter further. Graham promised to do what he could, but pointed out that it was clean against regulations to start a new man at full pay without a probationary period. Nevertheless he undertook to investigate Smith’s conduct and by midsummer had found cause for removing him, had given Burns the place, and had circumvented the rule against starting a new man at full duty and on full pay. For one who had always boasted his independence and had spoken scornfully of the political quest for favours, Burns had done a neat and successful job of wire-pulling.

Having once got his appointment, however, Burns had no intention of treating it as a sinecure. His district covered twelve sparsely-settled parishes and his tours of inspection required, to fulfil the letter of the law, that he ride two hundred miles a week in all weathers and all states of the uniformly bad roads. This meant that he could give little of his time and less of his strength to Ellisland. To provide for the farm he endeavoured to increase his dairy stock, which Jean could supervise in the intervals of having babies and managing her household. The cattle, too, might help in the slow task of rebuilding the worn-out acres.

But the strain of his new duties soon took physical toll. In the late fall of 1789, after less than two months of service, ‘a malignant squinancy and low fever’ laid him up for six weeks. His handwriting indicates that the illness was really serious; the letters written during convalescence are in a hand almost as weak and straggling as that of June and July, 1796. Nevertheless he had proved his qualifications for the job. An official report on various subordinate officers in the Excise bears after Burns’s name the notation ‘a poet--never tried--turns out well.’ He had moreover established friendly relations with his immediate superiors, Alexander Findlater, the Supervisor, and John Mitchell, the Collector, of the Dumfries district. With the latter, indeed, he was already on terms approaching intimacy, sending him gifts of new-laid eggs from Ellisland and accompanying them at least once with a poetic epistle so broadly humorous that no editor has ever printed it all. Both men testified to Burns’s fidelity by defending his character after his death and--what is far more significant--by reporting favourably on him during his life.

He was giving reason for favourable reports. His predecessor had been so slack that Burns was able to appear, at the first session of court after he began duty, with an impressive array of cases of tax evasion. In handling these he again displayed political astuteness. The minor offenders, mostly poor men who could ill afford a fine, he begged off with warnings or suspended sentences. This almost compelled the magistrates to fine the larger offenders for whom he refused to intercede, and inasmuch as Excise officers then, like American customs inspectors today, received a percentage of these penalties, Burns found his procedure remunerative in cash as well as in official credit. He soon discovered, though, that zeal had its drawbacks. Gentlemen of position, including some of the magistrates themselves, had their favourite smugglers or home-brewers, and when Burns caught one of these he started all the machinery of influence and political pressure so familiar to Americans during the prohibition era. Once he told Collector Mitchell, after a hard day’s riding in rounding up witnesses in a case, that he expected for his pains to be clapped in jail for annoying the friends of half the gentlemen in the county. The grosser temptations of bribery, however, did not touch him. The various legends, deriving from highly unreliable oral tradition, of his leniency with small offenders mean no more, even if literally true, than that Burns had learned the common sense of his profession. A customs inspector knows that his job is not to penalize every tourist who has failed to declare a dozen handkerchiefs but to catch the large-scale smuggler. The same was true of the laws Burns had to enforce, which imposed taxes on everything from whisky to candles. Not but what he made ordinary human distinctions between his public and his private capacities. William Lorimer, father of ‘Chloris’, was one of the poet’s intimate friends. He was also a bootlegger whose ways were, ‘like the grace of G--, past all comprehension’. Seemingly Lorimer maintained a moderate legal stock for inspection purposes, but once when he was absent and his wife drunk something slipped in the working of the gentlemen’s agreement, and Burns had to explain to Supervisor Findlater. Another time he helped, as revenue officer, in a series of raids on Dumfries haberdashers who had been selling smuggled French gloves. A few days later, as private citizen, he supplied Maria Riddell with similar gloves from a still unraided dealer’s stock. The problems and conditions of law enforcement are among the few immutables in human history.

After two years’ experience Burns reaffirmed that the Excise was after all the business for him. He added, ‘I find no difficulty in being an honest man in it; the work of itself, is easy; and it is a devilish different affair, managing money matters where I care not a damn whether the money is paid or not; from the long faces made to a haughty Laird or still more haughty Factor, when rents are demanded, and money, alas, not to be had!’ His position as tenant farmer was no longer an irritation; it was an obsession. Ellisland, he told Gilbert, had undone his enjoyment of himself. He looked forward with the same desperate hope as his father’s at Mount Oliphant to the ‘freedom in his lease’. The three-year period of the £50 rental ended in 1791. After that, if he chose to stay, Ellisland would cost £70 a year. Naturally, his discouragement and defeat on the farm had affected his relations with his landlord. Miller’s kindness, he said, had been just such another thing as Creech’s, and the fact that Mrs. Miller had failed to appreciate one of his poorer contributions to Johnson’s _Museum_ did not heighten his esteem for the family. He wanted no more to do with landlords or anything that belonged to them.

His only good luck at Ellisland came at the end. The surrender of the lease did not annoy Miller as Burns had expected, for a purchaser was in the market, and Miller was glad enough to dispose of the farm which the Nith separated from the rest of his estate. After sending Jean and the children to Mauchline, Burns held an auction of his standing crops and provided the lavish drinks expected by auction-goers. One result was that the exhilarated bidders ran up the prices nearly a guinea an acre beyond the market rates; another was that house and stable-yard were strewn with helplessly drunk and retching neighbours. The sale brought ready cash for the first time in two years, and Burns used some of it to clear up a variety of small debts, including the four pounds he owed his namesake, Robert Burn of Edinburgh, for erecting Fergusson’s tombstone. He also celebrated his manumission by a brief visit to Edinburgh to say farewell to Clarinda and to try to do something for sick and penniless Jenny Clow.

While things had been going so badly on the farm his position in the Excise had been improving. After less than a year and a half in his laborious rural division he had wangled a transfer to a vacant ‘footwalk’, the ‘3d, or Tobacco, Division’, in Dumfries. This meant lighter work, and enabled him to dispense with his horse--not too soon, for his poor worn-out mare had given him several nasty falls on the bad roads, bruising him severely and once breaking his arm. In town, though, he had small opportunity for increasing his income through fines and penalties as he had done in the rural division. When at the end of 1791 he moved his family into Dumfries the best quarters he could afford were a crowded and uncomfortable half-of-a-house in the Stinking Vennel, near the river. He was still receiving only the minimum salary of £50 a year, and though Jean said long afterwards that they did not come empty-handed into Dumfries not much cash can have remained after he had discharged his debts. As early as March, 1790, he had estimated that he would be lucky if he did not lose more than £100 out of an investment of little more than £200. Such anticipatory estimates are oftener under the mark than over it; one suspects that if Burns recovered as much as £50 of the money he had put into Ellisland, he was lucky.

By comparison, his prospects in the Excise were roseate. The Port Division in Dumfries, best paid of the subordinate posts, was vacant, and Burns lobbied for it with William Corbet, general supervisor of Excise, as he had done with Graham of Fintry for his first appointment. Corbet was an old friend of Mrs. Dunlop’s, and her intercession was effectively supplemented by a warm recommendation from Findlater, the local supervisor. Burns got the job early in 1792. The salary was £70 a year with various perquisites worth another £20. It scarcely represented luxurious living, but it was a better income than most Scottish schoolmasters or even ministers received in the eighteenth century, and though ‘Robin’s temper was not cold and frugal’ he managed to be fairly comfortable. After a year in the Stinking Vennel he moved to a better house in what was then called Mill Street and is now Burns Street--the last of his numerous abodes.

Even before he left Ellisland Burns’s name had been placed on the list of those eligible for promotion to the rank of Supervisor. This was the most laborious of the Excise posts, for the supervisors did most of the real work of collection and administration. They received salaries of from £200 to £400 a year, but their duties filled most of their waking hours. So long as he was merely Port Officer Burns had time and energy for reading and song-writing. He knew, however, that when in the course of seniority he became a supervisor most of this would cease. But he was already looking beyond. The next rank above Supervisor was Collector, and the collectors held well-paid sinecures. In theory at least supervisors were appointed by merit, but collectorships admittedly went by favour, and Burns began to cultivate political friendships which might in the future secure him the necessary influence.

Not that he had any intention of soldiering on his job and trusting to influence to lift him to a better one. He was taking an intelligent interest in his work and sought the attention of his superiors by his understanding of their business. Thus he had not been long in his Port Division before he wrote to Provost Staig of Dumfries pointing out that the town was losing revenue through failure to assess a tax on imported ale, and backed his statement with an estimate of the sums involved and some shrewd advice as to the best method of getting his chiefs to enforce their collection. A year or so later he pointed out to Robert Graham that one of the Dumfries divisions could be abolished and its duties distributed among the other officers without overburdening them. There cannot be many instances on record of a government employee’s informing his superiors that he was underworked. On this occasion at least Burns took an unusual way of drawing attention to himself. He was also once more suggesting his own advancement at the expense of another man, but admitted the fact and coupled his recommendation with a plea that if the change were made the present incumbent, burdened with an expensive family, be provided for elsewhere.

He would have been the last to claim that these suggestions were free of any ulterior motive beside the general one of making himself known as a thoughtful and efficient officer. He had other and more immediate purposes. Not long after showing Provost Staig the revenue possibilities of the ‘twa pennies’ tax on ale he had a petition to make to the Burgh Council. When he first visited Dumfries in 1787 he had been made an honorary burgess; he now wanted that nominal citizenship converted into a real one so far at least as concerned the local schools. The sons of burgesses were entitled to free tuition at Dumfries Academy, and the chance of getting his boys into a first-rate school was not to be neglected. His petition set forth in detail the help he had given to the local revenues. This may not have been the reason why the Council at once granted his application, but it certainly did not hamper it. Similarly his letters to Graham were frankly motivated by a desire to get a post as acting supervisor at the earliest possible moment and thereby to secure not only some small immediate increase in income but the experience and reputation which would count in his favour when a permanent position opened.

These were reasonable and legitimate efforts to gain prestige. He indulged in others more ticklish and, in the perspective of history, more futile. Burns lacked the right temperament for cultivating politicians, but he could not help trying. He was once introduced, for instance, to that very shady character, the Duke of Queensberry, whom previously he had rated with some justice as a complete scoundrel. At their meeting the Duke proved affable, and hearing that Burns had written a song about the notorious ‘Whistle’ drinking bout mentioned that he would like a copy. Burns sent it to him with a flattering letter, no doubt hoping that at some future date the Duke’s influence might be useful. There was nothing particularly dangerous in this, for the Duke’s rank made him a public character irrespective of what party was in power. But when Burns undertook to meddle in parliamentary contests he was playing with fire. He had of course no vote himself, but he wrote ballads in support of Whig candidates and continued to do so until a few months before his death. From the viewpoint of 1792 something might have been said for this as good strategy, regardless of the poet’s actual sympathies. Except for the brief Rockingham ministry at the end of the American War the Tories had been in power for nearly a generation and a reversal was overdue. When and if the Whigs came in a man who had supported them in their time of adversity would be entitled to special favours. Neither Burns nor anyone else in Britain could foresee Napoleon and realize that Pitt’s ministry, which had already been on the verge of disaster over the Regency Bill, would, thanks to the Frenchman, remain in office until after Burns and most of his parliamentary friends were in their graves. As things turned out, silence would have been the better part for Burns, but he had no gift for silence.

In the same year moreover in which Burns secured his Port Division the effects of the upheaval in France were stirring both Burns and Scotland. The cries of Liberty and Equality and Fraternity were echoed in the North and enlisted as in England a motley collection of supporters who ranged from poetic idealists, like Burns and Wordsworth, through professional agitators like Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke to unprincipled rabble. Burns’s first public gesture of sympathy with the French Revolution came as a by-product of the most exciting episode in his career as an Excise officer. In the early spring of 1792 a smuggling schooner named the _Rosamond_ was caught in the Solway. The ship was heavily armed and thanks to the active co-operation of the coastwise folks, who staved in all their rowboats to keep the Excise officers from using them, she landed her cargo. The _Rosamond_, however, remained aground on the tidal flats and when an armed force of dragoons and Excise officers--Burns among them--waded out to attack her the crew fled after scuttling the ship. Salvaged and towed into the Nith the _Rosamond_ with all her gear was confiscated and sold at auction. Her armament included four carronades which Burns bought for £4 and dispatched as a gift to the French Convention. Such at least is the traditional story, and every detail of it, except the actual dispatch of the carronades, is corroborated by documents found among the Abbotsford papers. The tradition continues that the guns never reached France, being seized by the customs officials at Dover; but here again confirmation is lacking. Legally there was nothing wrong in Burns’s action. France and England were still officially at peace, though their relations were steadily growing tenser. Nevertheless, from the practical viewpoint of a government employee with a dependent family it was a gesture of almost criminal recklessness. The government has never yet existed which looked benevolently upon manifestations of revolutionary sympathies among its servants, and before many months had passed Burns had good reason to be frightened.

The autumn of 1792 saw England ready to join the coalition against revolutionary France, though war was not declared until February 1, 1793. To the privileged classes in England the war had all the characteristics of a crusade except the obligation to take a personal share. The Revolution threatened the very foundations of the aristocratic social system, and the depth of the government’s fear is measured by the violence alike of official denunciations of France and of the suppression of dissenting opinion at home. Charges of sedition were pressed not only against avowed revolutionary sympathizers but against almost anyone who had advocated the slightest modification of the existing order. It was not surprising that Burns, always unguarded in speech and action, should face investigation of his conduct. The details of the charges and their outcome belong in another chapter. For a time Burns thought that all his hopes of advancement were blasted, but the storm soon blew over, and even before he advertised his loyalty by enlisting in the Dumfries Volunteers he had good reason to anticipate that promotion would come in due course.

But though he escaped the storm of persecution he did not escape the economic consequences of the war. It had the usual and inevitable results of tight money and rising prices; a wave of bankruptcies swept over Scotland; the monthly lists of failures in the _Scots Magazine_ increased from an average of half-a-dozen a month to forty-six in July, 1793, and among the victims was Burns’s friend, Walter Auld the saddler. The poet himself was not exempt. The war cut off the greater part of the import trade and with it much of the income and perquisites of Dumfries Port Division. Burns had just begun to extend his expenditures in keeping with his increased income. The carronades and his better house were only part of the expansion. He had backed a friend’s note and had to pay it when the friend defaulted; he had lent considerable sums to another friend, the schoolmaster at Moffat, who was engaged in a long-drawn-out wrangle with the Earl of Hopetoun, patron of the school; there were other smaller loans as well. Caught thus with ready cash exhausted, income reduced, and prices rising, Burns found himself once again in the grimly familiar position of being unable to pay his landlord. That the landlord was a gentleman and a personal friend who did not dun for his money made the situation more painful. In January, 1795, Burns had actually to borrow three guineas from his friend, William Stewart, in order to pay part of his rent. Nevertheless even in these hard times he managed occasional expenditures that came in the class of luxuries--a week’s tour in Galloway with John Syme, the restoration of a Jacobite relic in form of Lord Balmerino’s dirk, even a miniature portrait of himself. He and his family never lacked for the necessaries of life, and though he was somewhat in debt the accounting of his executors is proof that the amount never passed reasonable bounds.

As soon as the excitement over the sedition charges subsided his prospects in the Excise brightened steadily. Friends in Edinburgh were secretly trying to get him transferred to a more lucrative position, but even in Dumfries things looked hopeful. At the end of December, 1794, Supervisor Findlater fell ill, and Burns took over his duties. The work lasted three months or more, and though it is uncertain if Burns received any extra pay for his labour he at least gained valuable experience and competently handled his complex duties. The only adverse criticism of his conduct related to a technical irregularity in his final report, and this was the fault not of Burns himself but of one of his subordinates. The passage of each year brought him higher on the list of candidates for supervisor’s posts. Had he lived another year or two he would automatically have been appointed even if his Edinburgh friends had failed in their efforts to hasten the process.

The prospect of promotion was becoming very real--so real that during the very months when he was acting as supervisor Burns devoted some of his scanty leisure to composing a group of political ballads. Patrick Heron of Heron--the same Heron whose bank failure had once ruined half Ayrshire--was the Whig candidate in a by-election at Kirkcudbright. In return for the support of Burns’s pen Heron asked if he could do anything for the poet. Burns’s reply showed his mind at its coldest level of realism. Nothing could be done, he said, for two or three years, until he reached the head of the supervisors’ list. Then a political friend could be of service in getting him appointed in some agreeable part of the kingdom and of still more service in hastening his next step in rank. Collectorships went by favour, and the time he must spend in the drudgery of a supervisorship would therefore depend on the amount of influence his friends could exert. The letter is graphic proof of Burns’s open-eyed acceptance of the system in which he worked; it is also proof of his irrepressible lack of discretion. From the viewpoint of mere self-interest he would have done better to hold aloof from all political contests and, when the time came, to base his appeal for influence upon his standing as a poet instead of identifying himself with any party. But such calm calculation was not in his nature.

In any case his hopes were vain. His disease was gaining on him; he experienced sharp twinges of pain which he and his doctors called rheumatism, but which were probably angina pectoris. In June and again in December, 1795, he had serious illnesses which left him weak and shaken. In the face of his increasing weakness he had taken on additional labour by enlisting in a volunteer company organized in Dumfries in the early spring. The manual of arms and frequent drills were dangerous medicine for a diseased heart, and to this physical labour Burns added active participation in all the business affairs of the corps. His final breakdown could not in any circumstances have been long delayed, but the Dumfries Volunteers undoubtedly hastened it.

The winter of 1795-6 was a time of famine. Crops had been bad; trade was dislocated by the war. Nearly one-fourth of the inhabitants of Edinburgh were being fed by charity, and flour was so scarce that even those who could afford it were asked to ration themselves to one loaf of bread per capita a week. Conditions in the smaller towns were as bad or worse; there were serious food riots in Dumfries in February and March. With his health steadily declining Burns was exposed to constant worry for the welfare of his family. Excise officers who were unable over long periods to perform their duties because of illness were reduced to half-pay, and as matters stood in the spring of 1796 half-pay would have meant almost starvation for his children. That things did not come to this pass for Burns was due to the generosity of Adam Stobbie, who handled his work for him and refused compensation for the service. This relieved some of his immediate anxiety, but did little to answer the main question of what would become of Jean and the children if he died.

The problem of livelihood, never long absent from his mind, occupied it during his last weeks almost to the exclusion of other thoughts. The only prescriptions the doctors could offer in his illness involved expenditures he could not afford, and his enlistment in the Volunteers now returned to plague him. The tailor who had made his uniform began to dun for payment, and to the poet’s fevered imagination it seemed that his life was going to close as his father’s had, under the shadow of a debtors’ prison. He spent some of his last days of consciousness in writing frantic letters begging the friends to whom he had lent money to repay their loans and asking others like George Thomson and James Burness to advance him money. Thomson was the only one who gave grudgingly. The others willingly and promptly sent what he asked, but too late to lift the cloud from his dying mind. His last articulate words were an imprecation against the tailor who had threatened him, and he died without the comfort of knowing that his death would awaken the generosity he had never experienced in his life, and that the admirers of his poetry would make it possible for Jean to keep her home together and for his children to be decently educated and launched on respectable careers.

VI

SONG

Burns never wrote a ‘Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, and left only a few fragments of his projected satire on ‘The Poet’s Progress’. Yet his letters and journals, as well as the poems themselves, so definitely describe his moods and methods of composition that his poetic psychology can be studied almost as fully as Wordsworth’s own.

Conscious pleasure in poetry read or heard first came to him in boyhood through one of Addison’s hymns; mingled with martial and patriotic sentiment he found it also in ‘The History of Sir William Wallace’ and the Life of Hannibal. This latter, he said, ‘gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up & down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier, while the story of Wallace poured a Scotish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.’ But this, like the similar thrills from all the odds and ends of English poetry and Scottish song which came his way, was commonplace boyish emotion. The need and desire to write poetry of his own did not awaken until his adolescent blood was warmed, in his ‘fifteenth autumn’, by the first consciousness of sexual attraction in the company of Nelly Kilpatrick.

‘I never expressly told her that I loved her.--Indeed I did not well
know myself, why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when
returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice
made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly,
why my pulse beat such a furious ratann when I looked and fingered
over her hand, to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.--Among
her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly, and ’twas
her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in
rhyme.--I was not so presumtive as to imagine that I could make verses
like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my
girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small country
laird’s son, on one of his father’s maids, with whom he was in love;
and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he, for ... he
had no more Scholarcraft than I had.’

‘Thus’, Burns summed up, with a juxtaposition of ideas never far separated in his mind, ‘with me began Love and Poesy.’ In all respects save one the episode was the commonest experience of calf-love. But that one difference was decisive. When a girl roused him to lyric fervour, Burns did not sit down and merely string his emotions together in rime. Another element went to make the song; an element that ultimately would mean more, poetically, to Burns than any girl--namely, a tune. His mind did not work from emotion directly to words; it worked from emotion to music, and the music brought the words which expressed its mood. Herein Burns was almost unique among modern poets. Fully to appreciate his lyrics one must hear them sung to the airs which evoked them. To read many of them in bare print is like reading the libretto of an opera. Even in his satires and epistles the process of composition was usually the same, though another man’s poem, instead of music, fired the train. Acquaintance with his models is almost as illuminating as acquaintance with his tunes.

His first effort at song-writing led to a conscious study of the poet’s craft. The elaborate criticism appended to ‘Handsome Nell’ when Burns copied the poem into his Commonplace Book is too obviously a bravura piece to merit consideration; more noteworthy is his account of how he studied his collection of English songs: ‘I pored over them, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation and fustian.--I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft such as it is.’ But these were _English_ songs, and their effect on his early work shows mainly in such things as ‘My father was a farmer’ and ‘Man was made to mourn’, which latter in the Commonplace Book is entitled, ‘A Song: Tune, Peggy Bawn’. Even his most doleful lines came to him in music.

But lugubrious notes were not the only ones. It was as inevitable that a young Scot should try his hand at metrical paraphrases of the Psalms as that a young Etonian of the same century should paraphrase Horace. The results in both cases are equally negligible. Youth has to repeat the stale patterns of its predecessors before it can find its own. It was much more important that ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ was written in the same way. This is an epigrammatic song in the Restoration manner, and as English in language as in style. But it was written to a Scottish air, ‘Gillicrankie’. The innate Scottish culture of the poet was beginning, as early as 1781, to assimilate and adapt the alien materials of Restoration England.

Though Burns failed to act on Richard Brown’s suggestion that he send some of his early verses to a magazine, the idea stuck. The yeasty stirrings of a still immature mind which had led him in 1780 to plague his friends with pompous discourses on Pride and Courage were slowly giving place to more personal thinking on topics which he better understood. His customary chronological vagueness in referring to his early manhood makes it uncertain whether he began his Commonplace Book before he discovered the poems of Robert Fergusson, or after. The internal evidence indicates the former. So does the elaborate title-page:

‘Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, &c., by Robt. Burness;
a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping
it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty,
and unbounded good-will to every creature--rational or irrational.
As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at
a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his
unpolished, rustic way of life; but, as I believe they are really
_his own_, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of
human-nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the
pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety, Grief, with the like cares and
passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life,
operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all the Species.

“There are numbers in the world who do not want sense to make a
figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities, to put them
upon recording their observations, and allowing them the same
importance which they do to those which appear in print.”--Shenstone.

“Pleasing when youth is long expir’d to trace,
The forms our pencil, or our pen design’d.
Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face!
Such the soft image of our youthful mind.”

Ibidem.’

Burns was already conscious of something more in himself than there was in the average young peasant; as an escape from worries over his own health and the family’s future he was undertaking to leave a record of himself to edify some hypothetical future reader. Whatever tinge of humility there might be on his title-page was, like the pretence at third-person reporting, assumed. He meant to prove that a peasant youth shared the feelings of his betters and could rime and moralize to as good effect as they. But the title-page, the quotations from Shenstone, and the opening paragraph about Love all announce a programme he soon abandoned. When he began the book he was still thinking in the terms of his first letters about Pride and Courage; before he ended it he was thinking in poetry.

Though he might continue to assert that he rimed for fun, the fact was that from the day in April, 1783, when he commenced the Commonplace Book he was composing for publication, though not necessarily for print. His earliest verses were either the expression of a personal emotion, social _jeux d’esprit_, or conventional exercises in versification, with no purpose beyond the momentary and personal one; the ‘Observations, Scraps of Song, &c.’, were to be his legacy to the world. Not by chance did the Commonplace Book and its successor survive the general destruction of his private papers when he supposed himself on the eve of flight to Jamaica. Even though by that time the best of his verse had escaped the hazard of manuscript and was safely enshrined in the good black print of the Kilmarnock volume, he could not bring himself to destroy these records. It was well that he saved them. The Commonplace Book remains the sole record of what Burns was doing, intellectually and poetically, between April, 1783, and October, 1785. Commencing with self-conscious commentaries on life and on his own first efforts at writing, it reveals before its close his steady growth in artistic competence.

Not that it resembles the notebooks of Keats and Shelley, with their evidence of how poems grow in the poet’s mind. Burns’s poems stayed in his mind until they were mature. His poverty and his method of composing to music combined to prevent his committing half-formed ideas to paper. Paper was scarce and expensive; often in his early days he failed to write down his poems even when they were complete. Sometimes he forgot them entirely; sometimes he managed to reconstruct them long afterwards, as he did when he recalled ‘The Mauchline Wedding’ for Mrs. Dunlop’s amusement. One of the few poems composed on paper is the disastrous ‘Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair’, which Burns drafted in his Border journal. Here he was working with an English verse-form for which no melody existed. It took him three different sittings painfully to wring out the first seven stanzas. Again in 1791 he reported that he had ‘these several months been hammering at an Elegy’ on Miss Burnet of Monboddo, but found elegy ‘so exhausted a subject that any new idea on the business is not to be expected’; the original manuscript of the ‘Lament for James Earl of Glencairn’ reveals similar struggles. When no tune sang itself in his head, composition was labour and the results were wooden. The ‘Lament’, with a more lyric stanza and with stronger personal feeling at its root, came nearer than the others to success, but even it cannot be ranked among the great elegies. Declining Cunningham’s suggestion of a theme, he once said, ‘I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish, rather than from the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose.’ In commemorating Lord Glencairn, wish and impulse combined, yet even here he did not wholly succeed because the tune was lacking.

Poetic expression with Burns was not, as with Wordsworth, the fruit of emotion recollected in tranquillity; it was the fruit of emotion expressing itself to music. Though as he grew older the emotion no longer needed to be so strongly personal as when he wrote his earliest songs, the dependence on music became correspondingly greater. How he composed in his later years he told George Thomson in the autumn of 1793:

‘Until I am compleat master of a tune, in my own singing (such as
it is) I never can compose for it.--My way is: I consider the
poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical
expression; then chuse my theme; begin one stanza; when that is
composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the
business, I walk out, sit down now & then, look out for objects in
Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations
of my fancy & workings of my bosom; humming every now & 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, & 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 on.--

Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way.--What damn’d
Egotism!’

Though it would probably be impossible to overstress Robert Fergusson’s influence on Burns’s development, the elder poet’s primary service was to clarify and confirm ideas already present but as yet inarticulate in Burns’s mind. He knew what he liked, and what his own poetic impulses were; the discovery of Fergusson enabled him to define both his method and his objective. To realize how much he matured intellectually between the beginning of the Commonplace Book in 1783 and its conclusion in 1785, one need merely read the strutting, self-conscious, and essentially empty criticism of ‘expletive phrases’ of ‘too serious sentiment’, and ‘flimsy strain’ which he appended to ‘Handsome Nell’, or the pseudo-devotional passage about the grand end of human life being ‘to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life’. These things of 1783 are juvenilia. The following, written in September, 1785, is adult:

‘There is a certain irregularity in the Old Scotch Songs, a
redundancy of syllables with respect to that exactness of accent
and measure that the English Poetry requires, but which glides in,
most melodiously with the respective tunes to which they are set. For
instance, the fine old song of “The Mill Mill O,” to give it a plain
prosaic reading, it halts prodigiously out of measure; on the other
hand, the song set to the same tune in Bremner’s collection of Scotch
Songs which begins “To Fanny fair could I impart,” &c., it is most
exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic,
one above the biasses of prejudice, but a thorough Judge of Nature,
how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely
methodical, compared with the wild-warbling cadence, the heart-moving
melody of the first. This particularly is the case with all those
airs which end with a hypermetrical syllable. There is a degree of
wild irregularity in many of the compositions and fragments which
are daily sung to them by my compeers, the common people--a certain
happy arrangement of Old Scotch syllables, and yet, very frequently,
nothing, not even _like_ rhyme, or sameness of jingle at the ends of
the lines. This has made me sometimes imagine that perhaps, it might
be possible for a Scotch Poet, with a nice, judicious ear, to set
compositions to many of our most favorite airs ... independent of
rhyme altogether....’

With nothing except mother-wit and a sure ear to guide him, Burns had reached conclusions regarding poetic rhythm at complete variance with the critical theories of his century and beyond the practice of even nineteenth-century orthodoxy. He had recognized that the real charm of folk-poetry lies in the fact that it is musical rather than regular. In an age when the essence of poetry was thought to abide in the accurately counted syllables of the heroic couplet such an opinion would have seemed not merely heresy but sheer insanity. Compared with it, Coleridge’s supposed innovation of hypermetrical syllables in _Christabel_ is timid conventionality. Blake alone among Burns’s contemporaries had bolder theories of rhythm, and his work, which the Scotsman never saw, had to wait more than half a century for recognition. Burns later expended much time and ink in trying to persuade George Thomson that a song could be poetry even if all its lines did not count up the same number of syllables, but he was never optimistic enough to offer that silly body a lyric which dispensed with rime.

So, too, in regard to the physiology and psychology of composition, Burns, before he ever published a line, had reached closer to fundamentals than an academician like Hugh Blair could ever go. Like Milton he had recognized from his own experience that there is in many poets a seasonal rhythm of creativeness. In himself it usually began in August, and continued for several months. That month, he said in his autobiography, was always a carnival in his bosom; in 1793 he told Thomson, ‘Autumn is my propitious season. I make more verses in it, than all the year else,’ and at the beginning of the next summer he repeated the assertion: ‘Now, & for six or seven months _I shall be quite in song_.’ In other words, it took all the scanty sunshine of the Scottish summer to bring him physically to that level of well-being at which creation was possible.

The psychology of composition, moreover, which he explained in prose in 1793 he had defined in poetry in the epistle to William Simpson of Ochiltree, composed in May, 1785, and published in the Kilmarnock volume. It is surprisingly like A. E. Housman’s, who recorded that some of his best poems came to him spontaneously while walking on Hampstead Heath and thinking of nothing in particular, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon. Burns’s formula is precisely similar:

The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himself he learn’d to wander
Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
An’ no think lang.

In these circumstances, when his emotional pressure was high enough, lines and stanzas would come unsought to his mind, and it was to this experience he referred when he repeatedly called himself ‘a Bard of Nature’s making’. Burns knew as well as Housman did that this spontaneous birth was only the beginning and not the end of composition. Gilbert reported the process without realizing its significance:

‘Robert often composed without any regular plan. When anything made
a strong impression on his mind, so as to rouse it to any poetic
exertion, he would give way to the impulse, and embody the thought
in rhyme. If he hit on two or three stanzas to please him, he would
then think of proper introductory, connecting, and concluding
stanzas; hence the middle of a poem was often first produced.’