In the Kirk's Alarm, wherein he again reverted to his Mossgiel period, he displayed all his former force of satire, as well as his sympathy with those who advocated rational views in religion. Dr. Macgill had written a book which the Kirk declared to be heretical, and Burns, at the request of some friends, fought for the doctor in his usual way, though with little hope of doing him any good. 'Ajax's shield consisted, I think, of seven bull-hides and a plate of brass, which altogether set Hector's utmost force at defiance. Alas! I am not a Hector, and the worthy doctor's foes are as securely armed as Ajax was. Ignorance, superstition, bigotry, stupidity, malevolence, self-conceit, envy—all strongly bound in a massy frame of brazen impudence; to such a shield humour is the peck of a sparrow and satire the pop-gun of a schoolboy. Creation-disgracing scelerats such as they, God only can mend, and the devil only can punish.' The doctor yielded, Cunningham tells us, and was forgiven, but not the poet; pertinently adding, 'so much more venial is it in devout men's eyes to be guilty of heresy than of satire.'

Into political as well as theological matters Burns also entered with all his wonted enthusiasm. Of his election ballads, the best, perhaps, are The Five Carlins and the Epistle to Mr. Graham of Fintry. But these ballads are not to be taken as a serious addition to the poet's works; he did not wish them to be so taken. He was a man as well as a poet; was interested with his neighbours in political affairs, and in the day of battle fought with the weapons he could wield with effect. Nor are his ballads always to be taken as representing his political principles; these he expressed in song that did not owe its inspiration to the excitement of elections. Burns was not a party man; he had in politics, as in religion, some broad general principles, but he had 'the warmest veneration for individuals of both parties.' The most important verse in his Epistle to Graham of Fintry is the last:

'For your poor friend, the Bard, afar He hears and only hears the war, A cool spectator purely: So, when the storm the forest rends, The robin in the hedge descends, And sober chirps securely.'

Burns's life was, therefore, quite full at Ellisland, too full indeed; for, towards the end of 1791, we find him disposing of the farm, and looking to the Excise alone for a livelihood. In the farm he had sunk the greater part of the profits of his Edinburgh Edition; and now it was painfully evident that the money was lost. He had worked hard enough, but he was frequently absent, and a farm thrives only under the eye of a master. On Excise business he was accustomed to ride at least two hundred miles every week, and so could have little time to give to his fields. Besides this, the soil of Ellisland had been utterly exhausted before he entered on his lease, and consequently made a miserable return for the labour expended on it. The friendly relations that had existed between him and his landlord were broken off before now; and towards the close of his stay at Ellisland Burns spoke rather bitterly of Mr. Miller's selfish kindness. Miller was, in fact, too much of a lord and master, exacting submission as well as rent from his tenants; while Burns was of too haughty a spirit to beck and bow to any man. 'The life of a farmer is,' he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, 'as a farmer paying a dear, unconscionable rent, a cursed life.... Devil take the life of reaping the fruits that others must eat!'

The poet, too, had been overworking himself, and was again subject to his attacks of hypochondria. 'I feel that horrid hypochondria pervading every atom of both body and soul. This farm has undone my enjoyment of myself. It is a ruinous affair on all hands.' In the midst of his troubles and vexations with his farm, he began to look more hopefully to the Excise, and to see in the future a life of literary ease, when he could devote himself wholly to the Muses. He had already got ranked on the list as supervisor, an appointment that he reckoned might be worth one hundred or two hundred pounds a year; and this determined him to quit the farm entirely, and to try to make a living by one profession. As farmer, exciseman, and poet he had tried too much, and even a man of his great capacity for work was bound to have succumbed under the strain. Even had the farm not proved the ruinous bargain it did, we imagine that he must have been compelled sooner or later to relinquish one of the two, either his farm or his Excise commission. Circumstances decided for him, and in December 1791 he sold by auction his stock and implements, and removed to Dumfries, 'leaving nothing at Ellisland but a putting-stone, with which he loved to exercise his strength; a memory of his musings, which can never die; and three hundred pounds of his money, sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all augured happiness.'



CHAPTER VIII

DUMFRIES

When Burns removed from Ellisland to Dumfries, he took up his abode in a small house of three apartments in the Wee Vennel. Here he stayed till Whitsunday 1793, when the family removed to a detached house of two storeys in the Mill Vennel. A mere closet nine feet square was the poet's writing-room in this house, and it was in the bedroom adjoining that he died.

The few years of his residence in Dumfries have been commonly regarded as a period of poverty and intemperance. But his intemperance has always been most religiously exaggerated, and we doubt not also that the poverty of the family at this time has been made to appear worse than it was. Burns had not a salary worthy of his great abilities, it is true, but there is good reason to believe that the family lived in comparative ease and comfort, and that there were luxuries in their home, which neither father nor mother had known in their younger days. Burns liked to see his Bonnie Jean neat and trim, and she went as braw as any wife of the town. Though we know that he wrote painfully, towards the end of his life, for the loan of paltry sums, we are to regard this as a sign more of temporary embarrassment than of a continual struggle to make ends meet. The word debt grated so harshly on Burns's ears that he could not be at peace with himself so long as the pettiest account remained unpaid; and if he had no ready money in his hands to meet it, he must e'en borrow from a friend. His income, when he settled in Dumfries, was 'down money L70 per annum,' and there were perquisites which must have raised it to eighty or ninety. Though his hopes of preferment were never realised, he tried his best on this slender income 'to make a happy fireside clime to weans and wife,' and in a sense succeeded.

What he must have felt more keenly than anything else in leaving Ellisland was, that in giving up farming he was making an open confession of failure in his ideal of combining in himself the farmer, the poet, and the exciseman. There was a stigma also attaching to the name of gauger, that must often have been galling to the spirit of Burns. The ordinary labourer utters the word with dry contempt, as if he were speaking of a spy. But the thoughts of a wife and bairns had already prevailed over prejudice; he realised the responsibilities of a husband and father, and pocketed his pride. A great change it must have been to come from the quiet and seclusion of Ellisland to settle down in the midst of the busy life of an important burgh.

Life in provincial towns in Scotland in those days was simply frittered away in the tittle-tattle of cross and causeway, and the insipid talk of taverns. The most trifling incidents of everyday life were dissected and discussed, and magnified into events of the first importance. Many residents had no trade or profession whatever. Annuitants and retired merchants built themselves houses, had their portraits painted in oil, and thereafter strutted into an aristocracy. Without work, without hobby, without healthy recreation, and cursed with inglorious leisure, they simply dissipated time until they should pass into eternity. The only amusement such lumpish creatures could have was to meet in some inn or tavern, and swill themselves into a debauched joy of life. Dumfries, when Burns came to it in 1791, was no better and no worse than its neighbours; and we can readily imagine how eagerly such a man would be welcomed by its pompously dull and leisured topers. Now might their meetings be lightened with flashes of genius, and the lazy hours of their long nights go fleeting by on the wings of wit and eloquence. Too often in Dumfries was Burns wiled into the howffs and haunts of these seasoned casks. They could stand heavy drinking; the poet could not. He was too highly strung, and if he had consulted his own inclination would rather have shunned than sought the company of men who met to quaff their quantum of wine and sink into sottish sleep. For Burns was never a drunkard, not even in Dumfries; though the contrary has been asserted so often that it has all the honour that age and the respectability of authority can give it. There was with him no animal craving for drink, nor has he been convicted of solitary drinking; but he was intensely convivial, and drank, as Professor Blackie put it, 'only as the carnal seasoning of a rampant intellectuality.' There is no doubt that he came to Dumfries a comparatively pure and sober man; and if he now began to frequent the Globe Tavern, often to cast his pearls before swine, let it be remembered that he was compelled frequently to meet there strangers and tourists who had journeyed for the express purpose of meeting the poet. Nowadays writers and professional men have their clubs, and in general frequent them more regularly than Burns ever haunted the howffs of Dumfries. But we have heard too much about 'the poet's moral course after he settled in Dumfries being downward.' 'From the time of his migration to Dumfries,' Principal Shairp soberly informs us, '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 other ministers.' Poor lairds! Poor ministers! If they preferred their own talk of crops and cattle and meaner things to the undoubted brilliancy of Burns's conversation, surely their dulness and want of appreciation is not to be laid to the charge of the poet. I doubt not had the poet lived to a good old age he would have been gradually dropped out of acquaintance by some who have not scrupled to write his biography. Politics, it is admitted, may have formed the chief element in the lairds' and ministers' aversion, but there is a hint that his irregular life had as much to do with it. Is it to be seriously contended that these men looked askance at Burns because of his occasional convivialities? 'Madam,' he answered a lady who remonstrated with him on this very subject, 'they would not thank me for my company if I did not drink with them.' These lairds, perhaps even these ministers, could in all probability stand their three bottles with the best, and were more likely to drop the acquaintance of one who would not drink bottle for bottle with them than of one who indulged to excess. It was considered a breach of hospitality not to imbibe so long as the host ordained; and in many cases glasses were supplied so constructed that they had to be drained at every toast. 'Occasional hard drinking,' he confessed to Mrs. Dunlop, 'is the devil to me; against this I have again and again set my resolution, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally abandoned; it is the private parties in the family way among the hard-drinking gentlemen of this county that do me the mischief; but even this I have more than half given over.' Most assuredly whatever these men charged against Robert Burns it was not drunkenness. But he has been accused of mixing with low company! That is something nearer the mark, and goes far to explain the aversion of those stately Tories. But again, what is meant by low company? Are we to believe that the poet made associates of depraved and abandoned men? Not for a moment! This low company was nothing more than men in the rank of life into which he had been born; mechanics, tradesmen, farmers, ploughmen, who did not move in the aristocratic circles of patrician lairds or ministers ordained to preach the gospel to the poor. It was simply the old, old cry of 'associating with publicans and sinners.'

We do not defend nor seek to hide the poet's aberrations; he confessed them remorselessly, and condemned himself. But we do raise our voice against the exaggeration of occasional over-indulgence into confirmed debauchery; and dare assert that Burns was as sober a man as the average lairds and ministers who had the courage of their prejudices, and wrote themselves down asses to all posterity.

But here again the work the poet managed to do is a sufficient disproof of his irregular life. He was at this time, besides working hard at his Excise business, writing ballads and songs, correcting for Creech the two-volume edition of his poems, and managing somehow or other to find time for a pretty voluminous correspondence. His hands were full and his days completely occupied. He would not have been an Excise officer very long had he been unable to attend to his duties. William Wallace, the editor of Chambers's Burns, has studied very carefully this period of the poet's life, and found that in those days of petty faultfinding he has not once been reprimanded, either for drunkenness or for dereliction of duty. There were spies and informers about who would not have left the Excise Commissioners uninformed of the paltriest charge they could have trumped up against Burns. Nor is there, when we look at his literary work, any falling off in his powers as a poet. He sang as sweetly, as purely, as magically as ever he did; and this man, who has been branded as a blasphemer and a libertine, had nobly set himself to purify the polluted stream of Scottish Song. He was still continuing his contributions to Johnson's Museum, and now he had also begun to write for Thomson's more ambitious work.

Some of the first of his Dumfriesshire songs owe their inspiration to a hurried visit he paid to Mrs. Maclehose in Edinburgh before she sailed to join her husband in the West Indies. The best of these are, perhaps, My Nannie's Awa' and Ae Fond Kiss. The fourth verse of the latter was a favourite of Byron's, while Scott claims for it that it is worth a thousand romances—

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

Another song of a different kind, The Deil's awa wi' the Exciseman, had its origin in a raid upon a smuggling brig that had got into shallow water in the Solway. The ship was armed and well manned; and while Lewars, a brother-excisemen, posted to Dumfries for a guard of dragoons, Burns, with a few men under him, watched to prevent landing or escape. It was while impatiently waiting Lewars's return that he composed this song. When the dragoons arrived Burns put himself at their head, and wading, sword in hand, was the first to board the smuggler. The affair might ultimately have led to his promotion had he not, next day at the sale of the vessel's arms and stores in Dumfries, purchased four carronades, which he sent, with a letter testifying his admiration and respect, to the French Legislative Assembly. The carronades never reached their destination, having been intercepted at Dover by the Custom House authorities. It is a pity perhaps that Burns should have testified his political leanings in so characteristic a way. It was the impetuous act of a poet roused to enthusiasm, as were thousands of his fellow-countrymen at the time, by what was thought to be the beginning of universal brotherhood in France. But whatever may be said as to the impulsive imprudence of the step, it is not to be condemned as a most absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum. We were not at war with France at this time; had not even begun to await developments with critical suspicion. Talleyrand had not yet been slighted by our Queen, and protestations of peace and friendship were passing between the two Governments. Any subject of the king might at this time have written a friendly letter or forwarded a token of goodwill to the French Government, without being suspected of disloyalty. But by the time the carronades had reached Dover the complexion of things had changed; and yet even in those critical times Burns's action, though it may have hindered promotion, does not appear to have been interpreted as 'a most absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum.' That interpretation was left for biographers made wise with the passions of war; and yet they have not said in so many words, what they darkly insinuate, that the poet was not a loyal British subject. His love of country is too surely established. That, later, he thought the Ministry engaging in an unjust and unrighteous war, may be frankly admitted. He was not alone in his opinion; nor was he the only poet carried away with a wild enthusiasm of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Societies were then springing up all over the country calling for redress of grievances and for greater political freedom. Such societies were regarded by the Government of the day as seditious, and their agitations as dangerous to the peace of the country; and Burns, though he did not become a member of the Society of the Friends of the People, was at one with them in their desire for reform. It was known also that he 'gat the Gazeteer,' and that was enough to mark him out as a disaffected person. No doubt he also talked imprudently; for it was not the nature of this man to keep his sentiments hidden in his heart, and to talk the language of expediency. What he thought in private he advocated publicly in season and out of season; and it was quite in the natural course of things that information regarding his political opinions should be lodged against him with the Board of Excise. His political conduct was made the subject of official inquiry, and it would appear that for a time he was in danger of dismissal from the service. This is a somewhat painful episode in his life; and we find him in a letter to Mr. Graham of Fintry repudiating the slanderous charges, yet confessing that the tender ties of wife and children 'unnerve courage and wither resolution.' Mr. Findlater, his superior, was of opinion that only a very mild reprimand was administered, and the poet warned to be more prudent in his speech. But what appeared mild to Mr. Findlater was galling to Burns. In his letter to Erskine of Mar he says: 'One of our supervisors-general, a Mr. Corbet, was instructed to inquire on the spot and to document me—that my business was to act, not to think; and that whatever might be men or measures it was for me to be silent and obedient.'

We can hardly conceive a harsher sentence on one of Burns's temperament, and we doubt not that the degradation of being thus gagged, and the blasting of his hopes of promotion, were the cause of much of the bitterness that we find bursting from him now more frequently than ever, both in speech and writing. That remorse for misconduct irritated him against himself and against the world, is true; but it is none the less true that he must have chafed against the servility of an office that forbade him the freedom of personal opinion. In the same letter he unburdens his heart in a burst of eloquent and noble indignation.

'Burns was a poor man from birth, and an exciseman by necessity; but—I will say it—the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase; his independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not subdue.... I have three sons who, I see already, have brought into the world souls ill-qualified to inhabit the bodies of slaves.... Does any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation? I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence.'

What the precise charges against him were, we are not informed. It is alleged that he once, when the health of Pitt was being drunk, interposed with the toast of 'A greater than Pitt—George Washington.' There can be little fault found with the sentiment. It is given to poets to project themselves into futurity, and declare the verdict of posterity. But the occasion was ill-chosen, and he spoke with all a poet's imprudence. In another company he aroused the martial fury of an unreasoning captain by proposing the toast, 'May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.' A very humanitarian toast, one would think, but regarded as seditious by the fire-eating captain, who had not the sense to see that there was more of sedition in his resentment than in Burns's proposal. Yet the affair looked black enough for a time, and the poet was afraid that even this story would be carried to the ears of the commissioners, and his political opinions be again misrepresented.

Another thing that came to disturb his peace of mind was his quarrel with Mrs. Riddell of Woodley Park, where he had been made a welcome guest ever since his advent to this district. That Burns, in the heat of a fever of intoxication, had been guilty of a glaring act of impropriety in the presence of the ladies seated in the drawing-room, we may gather from the internal evidence of his letter written the following morning 'from the regions of hell, amid the horrors of the damned.' It would appear that the gentlemen left in the dining-room had got ingloriously drunk, and there and then proposed an indecorous raid on the drawing-room. Whatever it might be they did, it was Burns who was made to suffer the shame of the drunken plot. His letter of abject apology remained unanswered, and the estrangement was only embittered by some lampoons which he wrote afterwards on this accomplished lady. The affair was bruited abroad, and the heinousness of the poet's offence vastly exaggerated. Certain it is that he became deeply incensed against not only the lady, but her husband as well, to whom he considered he owed no apology whatever. Matters were only made worse by his unworthy verses, and it was not till he was almost on the brink of the grave that he and Mrs. Riddell met again, and the old friendship was re-established. The lady not only forgot and forgave, but she was one of the first after the poet's death to write generously and appreciatively of his character and abilities.

That the quarrel with Mrs. Riddell was prattled about in Dumfries, and led other families to drop the acquaintance of the poet, we are made painfully aware; and in his correspondence now there is rancour, bitterness, and remorse more pronounced and more settled than at any other period of his life. He could not go abroad without being reminded of the changed attitude of the world; he could not stay at home without seeing his noble wife uncomplainingly nursing a child that was not hers. He cursed himself for his sins and follies; he cursed the world for its fickleness and want of sympathy. 'His wit,' says Heron, 'became more gloomy and sarcastic, and his conversation and writings began to assume a misanthropical tone, by which they had not been before in any eminent degree distinguished. But with all his failings his was still that exalted mind which had raised itself above the depression of its original condition, with all the energy of the lion pawing to free his hinder limbs from the yet encumbering earth.'

His health now began to give his friends serious concern. To Cunningham he wrote, February 24, 1794: 'For these two months I have not been able to lift a pen. My constitution and my frame were ab origine blasted with a deep, incurable taint of hypochondria, which poisons my existence.' A little later he confesses: 'I have been in poor health. I am afraid that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical friends threaten me with a flying gout, but I trust they are mistaken.' His only comfort in those days was his correspondence with Thomson and with Johnson. He kept pouring out song after song, criticising, rewriting, changing what was foul and impure into songs of the tenderest delicacy. He showed love in every mood, from the rapture of pure passion in the Lea Rig, the maidenly abandon of Whistle and I'll come to you, my Lad, to the humour of Last May a Braw Wooer and Duncan Gray, and the guileless devotion of O wert thou in the Cauld Blast. But he sang of more than love. Turning from the coldness of the high and mighty, who had once been his friends, he found consolation in the naked dignity of manhood, and penned the hymn of humanity, A Man's a Man for a' that. Perhaps he found his text in Tristram Shandy: 'Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal, but gold and silver pass all the world over with no other recommendation than their own weight.' Something like this occurs in Massinger's Duke of Florence, where it is said of princes that

'They can give wealth and titles, but no virtues; This is without their power.'

Gower also had written—

'A king can kill, a king can save; A king can make a lord a knave, And of a knave a lord also.'

But the poem is undoubtedly Burns's, and it is one he must have written ere he passed away. Scots wha hae is another of his Dumfries poems. Mr. Syme gives a highly-coloured and one-sided view of the poet riding in a storm between Gatehouse and Kenmure, where we are assured he composed this ode. Carlyle accepts Syme's authority, and adds: 'Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns; but to the external ear it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind.' Burns gives an account of the writing of the poem, which it is difficult to reconcile with Mr. Syme's sensational details. It matters not, however, when or how it was written; we have it now, one of the most martial and rousing odes ever penned. Not only has it gripped the heart of Scotsmen, but it has taken the ear of the world; its fire and vigour have inspired soldiers in the day of battle, and consoled them in the hour of death. We are not forgetful of the fact that Mrs. Hemans, who wrote some creditable verse, and the placid Wordsworth, discussed this ode, and agreed that it was little else than the rhodomontade of a schoolboy. It is a pity that such authorities should have missed the charm of Scots wha hae. More than likely they made up for the loss in a solitary appreciation of Betty Foy or The Pilgrim Fathers.

Another martial ode, composed in 1795, was called forth by the immediate dangers of the time. The country was roused by the fear of foreign invasion, and Burns, who had enrolled himself in the ranks of the Dumfriesshire Volunteers, penned the patriotic song, Does Haughty Gaul Invasion threat? This song itself might have reinstalled him in public favour, and dispelled all doubt as to his loyalty, had he cared again to court the society of those who had dropped him from the list of their acquaintance. But Burns had grown indifferent to any favour save the favour of his Muse; besides, he was now shattered in health, and assailed with gloomy forebodings of an early death. For himself he would have faced death manfully, but again it was the thought of wife and bairns that unmanned him.

Not content with supplying Thomson with songs, he wrote letters full of hints and suggestions anent songs and song-making, and now and then he gave a glimpse of himself at work. We see him sitting under the shade of an old thorn crooning to himself until he gets a verse to suit the measure he has in his mind; looking round for objects in nature that are in unison and harmony with the cogitations of his fancy; humming every now and then the air with the verses; retiring to his study to commit his effusions to paper, and while he swings at intervals on the hind legs of his elbow-chair, criticising what he has written. A common walk of his when he was in the poetical vein was to the ruins of Lincluden Abbey, whither he was often accompanied by his eldest boy; sometimes towards Martingdon ford, on the north side of the Nith. When he returned home with a set of verses, he listened attentively to his wife singing them, and if she happened to find a word that was harsh in sound, a smoother one was immediately substituted; but he would on no account ever sacrifice sense to sound.

During the earlier part of this year Burns had taken his full share in the political contest that was going on, and fought for Heron of Heron, the Whig candidate, with electioneering ballads, not to be claimed as great poems nor meant to be so ranked, but marked with all his incisiveness of wit and satire, and with his extraordinary deftness of portraiture. Heron was the successful candidate, and his poetical supporter again began to indulge in dreams of promotion: 'a life of literary leisure with a decent competency was the summit of his wishes.' But his dreams were not to be realised.

In September his favourite child and only daughter, Elizabeth, died at Mauchline, and he was prostrated with grief. He had also taken very much to heart the inexplicable silence of his old friend, and for many years constant correspondent, Mrs. Dunlop. To both these griefs he alludes in a letter to her, dated January 31, 1796: 'These many months you have been two packets in my debt. What sin of ignorance I have committed against so highly valued a friend I am utterly at a loss to guess. Alas! madam, I can ill afford at this time to be deprived of any of the small remnant of my pleasures. I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power to pay my last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock when I became myself the victim of a severe rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful, until, after many weeks of a sickbed, it seems to have turned up life.'

There was an evident decline in the poet's appearance, Dr. Currie tells us, for upwards of a year before his death, and he himself was sensible that his constitution was sinking. During almost the whole of the winter of 1795-96 he had been confined to the house. Then follows the unsubstantiated story which has done duty for Shakspeare and many other poets. 'He dined at a tavern, returned home about three o'clock in a very cold morning, benumbed and intoxicated. This was followed by an attack of rheumatism.' It is difficult to kill a charitable myth, especially one that is so agreeable to the levelling instincts of ordinary humanity, and of such sweet consolation to the weaker brethren. Of course there are variants of the story, with a stair and sleep and snow brought in as sensational, if improbable, accessories; but such stories as these all good men refuse to believe, unless they are compelled to do so by the conclusive evidence of direct authority; and that, in this case, is altogether awanting. All evidence that has been forthcoming has gone directly against it, and the story may be accepted as a myth. The fact is that brains have been ransacked to find reason for the poet's early death,—as if the goings and comings of death could be scientifically calculated in biography,—and the last years of his 'irregular life' are blamed: Dumfries is set apart as the chief sinner. No doubt his life was irregular there; his duties were irregular; his hours were irregular. But Burns in his thirty-six years, had lived a full life, putting as much into one year as the ordinary sons of men put into two. He had had threatenings of rheumatism and heart disease when he was an overworked lad at Lochlea; and now his constitution was breaking up from the rate at which he had lived. Excess of work more than excess of drink brought him to an early grave. During his few years' stay at Dumfries he had written over two hundred poems, songs, etc., many of them of the highest excellence, and most of them now household possessions. Besides his official duties, we know also that he took a great interest in his home and in the education of his children. Mr. Gray, master of the High School of Dumfries, who knew the poet intimately, wrote a long and interesting letter to Gilbert Burns, in which he mentions particularly the attention he paid to his children's education. 'He was a kind and attentive father, and took great delight in spending his evenings in the cultivation of the minds of his children. Their education was the grand object of his life; and he did not, like most parents, think it sufficient to send them to public schools; he was their private instructor; and even at that early age bestowed great pains in training their minds to habits of thought and reflection, and in keeping them pure from every form of vice. This he considered a sacred duty, and never to his last illness relaxed in his diligence.'

Throughout the winter of 1795 and spring of 1796, he could only keep up an irregular correspondence with Thomson. 'Alas!' he wrote in April, 'I fear it will be long ere I tune my lyre again. I have only known existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of sickness, and counted time by the repercussion of pain. I close my eyes in misery and open them without hope.' Yet it was literally on his deathbed that he composed the exquisite song, O wert thou in the Cauld Blast, in honour of Jessie Lewars, who waited on him so faithfully. In June he wrote: 'I begin to fear the worst. As to my individual self I am tranquil, and would despise myself if I were not; but Burns's poor widow and half a dozen of his dear little ones—helpless orphans!—there, I am weaker than a woman's tear.'

From Brow, whither he had gone to try the effect of sea-bathing, he wrote several letters all in the same strain, one to Cunningham; a pathetic one to Mrs. Dunlop, regretting her continued silence; and letters begging a temporary loan to James Burness, Montrose, and to George Thomson, whom he had been supplying with songs without fee or reward. Thomson at once forwarded the amount asked—five pounds! To his wife, who had not been able to accompany him, he wrote: 'My dearest love, I delayed writing until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing was likely to produce. It would be injustice to deny it has eased my pain.... I will see you on Sunday.'

During his stay at Brow he met again Mrs. Riddell, and she has left in a letter her impression of his appearance at that time. 'The stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity.... He spoke of his death with firmness as well as feeling as an event likely to happen very soon.... He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise, and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him, to the injury of his future reputation.... The conversation was kept up with great evenness and animation on his side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more collected.'

When he returned from Brow he was worse than when he went away, and those who saw him tottering to his door knew that they had looked their last on the poet. The question in Dumfries for a day or two was, 'How is Burns now?' And the question was not long in being answered. He knew he was dying, but neither his humour nor his wit left him. 'John,' he said to one of his brother volunteers, 'don't let the awkward squad fire over me.'

He lingered on for a day or two, his wife hourly expecting to be confined and unable to attend to him, and Jessie Lewars taking her place, a constant and devoted nurse. On the fourth day after his return, July 21, he sank into delirium, and his children were summoned to the bedside of their dying father, who quietly and gradually sank to rest. His last words showed that his mind was still disturbed by the thought of the small debt that had caused him so much annoyance. 'And thus he passed,' says Carlyle, 'not softly, yet speedily, into that still country where the hailstorms and fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest laden wayfarer at length lays down his load.'



CHAPTER IX

SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE

In Mrs. Riddell's sketch of Burns, which appeared shortly after his death, she starts with the somewhat startling statement that poetry was not actually his forte. She did not question the excellence of his songs, or seek to depreciate his powers as a poet, but she spoke of the man as she had known him, and was one of the first to assert that Burns was very much more than an uneducated peasant with a happy knack of versification. Even in the present day we hear too much of the inspired ploughman bursting into song as one that could not help himself, and warbling of life and love in a kind of lyrical frenzy. The fact is that Burns was a great intellectual power, and would have been a force in any sphere of life or letters. All who met him and heard him talk have insisted on the greatness of the man, apart from his achievements in poetry. It was not his fame as a poet that made him the lion of a season in Edinburgh, but the force and brilliancy of his conversation; and it needs more than the reputation of a minstrel to explain the hold he has on the affection and intelligence of the world to-day.

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to accept his intellectual greatness as a mere tradition of those who knew him, and to regret that he has not left us some long and ponderous work worthy of the power he possessed. It is an absurd idea to imagine that every great poet ought to write an epic or a play. Burns's powers were concentrative, and he could put into a song what a dramatist might elaborate into a five-act tragedy; but that is not to say that the dramatist is the greater poet. After all, the song is the more likely to live, and the more likely, therefore, to keep the mission of the poet an enduring and living influence in the lives of men.

Still Burns might have been a great song-writer without becoming the name and power he is in the world to-day. The lyrical gift implies a quick emotional sense, which in some cases may be little more than a beautiful defect in a weak nature. But Burns was essentially a strong man. His very vices are the vices of a robust and healthy humanity. Besides being possessed of all the qualities of a great singer, he was at the same time vigorously human and throbbing with the love and joy of life. It is this sterling quality of manhood that has made Burns the poet and the power he is. He looked out on the world with the eyes of a man, and saw things in their true colours and in their natural relations. He regarded the world into which he had been born, and saw it not as some other poet or an artist or a painter might have beheld it,—for the purposes of art,—but in all its uncompromising realism; and what his eye saw clearly, his lips as clearly uttered. His first and greatest gift, therefore, as a poet was his manifest sincerity. His men and women are living human beings; his flowers are real flowers; his dogs, real dogs, and nothing more. All his pictures are presented in the simplest and fewest possible words. There is no suspicion of trickery; no attempt to force words to carry a weight of meaning they are incapable of expressing. He knew nothing of the deification of style, and on absolute truthfulness and unidealised reality rested his poetical structure. Wordsworth speaks of him—

'Whose light I hailed when first it shone, And showed my youth How verse may build a princely throne On humble truth.'

It is this quality that made Burns the interpreter of the lives of his fellow-men, not only to an outside world that knew them not, but to themselves. And he has glorified those lives in the interpretation, not by the introduction of false elements or the elimination of unlovely features, but simply by his insistence, in spite of the sordidness of poverty, on the naked dignity of man.

Everything he touched became interesting because it was interesting to him, and he spoke forth what he felt. For Burns did not go outside of his own life, either in time or place, for subject. There are poetry and romance, tragedy and comedy ever waiting for the man who has eyes to see them; and Burns's stage was the parish of Tarbolton, and he found his poetry in (or rendered poetical) the ordinary humdrum life round about him. For that reason it is, perhaps, that he has been called the satirist and singer of a parish. Had he lived nowadays, he would have been relegated to the kailyard, there to cultivate his hardy annuals and indigenous daisies. For Burns did not affect exotics, and it requires a specialist in manure to produce blue dandelions or sexless ferns. In the narrow sense of the word he was not parochial. Whilst true to class and country, he reached out a hand to universal man. A Scotsman of Scotsmen, he endeared himself to the hearts of a people; but he was from first to last a man, and so has found entrance to the hearts of all men. Although local in subject, he was artistic in treatment; he might address the men and women of Mauchline, but he spoke with the voice of humanity, and his message was for mankind.

Besides interpreting the lives of the Scottish peasantry, he revived for them their nationality. For he was but the last of the great bards that sang the Iliad of Scotland; and in him, when patriotism was all but dead, and a hybrid culture was making men ashamed of their land and their language, the voices of nameless ballad-makers and forgotten singers blended again into one great voice that sang of the love of country, till men remembered their fathers, and gloried in the name of Scotsmen. His patriotism, however, was not parochial. It was no mere prejudice which bound him hand and foot to Scottish theme and Scottish song. He knew that there were lands beyond the Cheviots, and that men of other countries and other tongues joyed and sorrowed, toiled and sweated and struggled and hoped even as he did. He was attached to the people of his own rank in life, the farmers and ploughmen amongst whom he had been born and bred; but his sympathies went out to all men, prince or peasant, beggar or king, if they were worthy of the name of men he recognised them as brothers. It is this sympathy which gives him his intimate knowledge of mankind. He sees into the souls of his fellows; the thoughts of their hearts are visible to his piercing eye. He who had mixed only with hard-working men, and scarcely ever been beyond the boundary of his parish, wrote of court and parliament as if he had known princes and politicians from his boyhood. The goodwife of Wauchope House would hardly credit that he had come straight from the plough-stilts—

'And then sae slee ye crack your jokes O' Willie Pitt and Charlie Fox; Our great men a' sae weel descrive, And how to gar the nation thrive, Ane maist would swear ye dwalt amang them, And as ye saw them sae ye sang them.'

But his intuitive knowledge of men is apparent in almost all he wrote. Every character he has drawn stands out a living and breathing personality. This is greatly due to the fact that he studied those he met, as men, dismissing the circumstance of birth and rank, of costly apparel, or beggarly rags. For rank and station after all are mere accidents, and count for nothing in an estimate of character. Indeed, Burns was too often inclined from his hard experience of life to go further than this, and to count them disqualifying circumstances. This aggressive independence was, however, always as far removed from insolence as it was from servility. He saw clearly that the 'pith o' sense and pride o' worth' are beyond all the dignities a king can bestow; and he looked to the time when class distinctions would cease, and the glory of manhood be the highest earthly dignity.

'Then let us pray that come it may— As come it will for a' that— That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, May bear the gree and a' that! For a' that, and a' that, It's comin' yet, for a' that, That man to man, the warld o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that!'

Besides this abiding love of his fellow-man, or because of it, Burns had also a childlike love of nature and all created things. He sings of the mountain daisy turned up by his plough; his heart goes out to the mouse rendered homeless after all its provident care. Listening at home while the storm made the doors and windows rattle, he bethought him on the cattle and sheep and birds outside—

'I thought me on the ourie cattle Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O' wintry war, And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle Beneath a scaur.'

Nor is there in his love of nature any transcendental strain; no mawkish sentimentality, and consequently in its expression no bathos. Everywhere in his poetry nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail, at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is telling and effective, yet always in harmony with the feeling of the poem, and always subordinate to it. His descriptions of scenery are never dragged in. They are incidental and complementary; human life and human feeling are the first consideration; to this his scenery is but the setting and background. He is never carried away by the force or beauty of his drawing as a smaller artist might have been. The picture is given with simple conciseness, and he leaves it; nor does he ever attempt to elaborate a detail into a separate poem. The description of the burn in Hallowe'en is most beautiful in itself, yet it is but a detail in a great picture—

'Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, As thro' the glen it wimpl't; Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays; Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't; Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle; Whyles cookit underneath the braes, Below the spreading hazel, Unseen that night.'

That surely is the perfection of description; whilst the wimple of the burn is echoed in the music of the verse!

Allied to the clearness of vision and truthfulness of presentment of Burns, growing out of them it may be, is that graphic power in which he stands unexcelled. He is a great artist, and word-painting is not the least of his many gifts. He combines terseness and lucidity, which is a rare combination in letters; his phrasing is as beautiful and fine as it is forcible, which is a distinction rarer still. Hundreds of examples of his pregnant phrasing might be cited, but it is best to see them in the poems. Many have become everyday expressions, and have passed into the proverbs of the country.

Another of Burns's gifts was the saving grace of humour. This, of course, is not altogether a quality distinct in itself, but rather a particular mode in which love or tenderness or pity may manifest itself. This humour is ever glinting forth from his writings. Some of his poems—The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare, for example—are simply bathed in it, and we see the subject glowing in its light, soft and tremulous, as of an autumn sunset. In others, again, it flashes and sparkles, more sportive than tender. But, however it manifest itself, we recognise at once that it has a character of its own, which marks it off from the humour of any other writer; it is a peculiar possession of Burns.

Perhaps the poem in which all Burns's poetic qualities are seen at their best is The Jolly Beggars. The subject may be low and the materials coarse, but that only makes the finished poem a more glorious achievement. For the poem is a unity. We see those vagabonds for a moment's space holding high revel in Poosie Nansie's; but in that brief glance we see them from their birth to their death. They are flung into the world, and go zigzagging through it, chaffering and cheating, swaggering and swearing; kicked and cuffed from parish to parish; their only joy of existence an occasional night like this, a carnival of drink and all sensuality; snapping their fingers in the face of the world, and as they have lived so going down defiantly to death, a laugh on their lips and a curse in their heart. Every character in it is individual and distinct from his neighbour; the language from first to last simple, sensuous, musical. Of this poem Matthew Arnold says: 'It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach's cellar of Goethe's Faust seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakspeare and Aristophanes.'

The Cotter's Saturday Night has usually, in Scotland, been the most lauded of his poems. Many writers give it as his best. It is a pious opinion, but is not sound criticism. Burns handicapped himself, not only by the stanza he selected for this poem, but also by the attitude he took towards his subject. He is never quite himself in it. We admire its many beauties; we see the life of the poor made noble and dignified; we see, in the end, the soul emerging from the tyranny of time and circumstance; but with all that we feel that there is something awanting. The priest-like father is drawn from life, and the picture is beautiful; not less deftly drawn is the mother's portrait, though it be not so frequently quoted:

'The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy What makes the youth so bashfu' and so grave; Weel pleased to think her bairn's respected like the lave.'

The last line gives one of the most natural and most subtle touches in the whole poem. The closing verses are, I think, unhappy. The poet has not known when to stop, keeps writing after he has finished, and so becomes stilted and artificial.

It is in his songs, however, more than in his poems, that we find Burns most regularly at his best. And excellence in song-writing is a rare gift. The snatches scattered here and there throughout the plays of Shakspeare are perhaps the only collection of lyrics that can at all stand comparison with the wealth of minstrelsy Burns has left behind him. This was his undying legacy to the world. Song-writing was a labour of love, almost his only comfort and consolation in the dark days of his later years. He set himself to this as to a congenial task, and he knew that he was writing himself into the hearts of unborn generations. His songs live; they are immortal, because every one is a bit of his soul. These are no feverish, hysterical jingles of clinking verse, dead save for the animating breath of music. They sing themselves, because the spirit of song is in them. Quite as marvellous as his excellence in this department of poetry is his variety of subject. He has a song for every age; a musical interpretation of every mood. But this is a subject for a book to itself. His songs are sung all over the world. The love he sings appeals to all, for it is elemental, and is the love of all. Heart speaks to heart in the songs of Robert Burns; there is a freemasonry in them that binds Scotsmen to Scotsmen across the seas in the firmest bonds of brotherhood.

What place Burns occupies as a poet has been determined not so much by the voice of criticism, as by the enthusiastic way in which his fellow-mortals have taken him to their heart. The summing-up of a judge counts for little when the jury has already made up its mind. What matters it whether a critic argues Burns into a first or second or third rate poet? His countrymen, and more than his countrymen, his brothers all the world over, who read in his writings the joys and sorrows, the temptations and trials, the sins and shortcomings of a great-hearted man, have accepted him as a prophet, and set him in the front rank of immortals. They admire many poets; they love Robert Burns. They have been told their love is unreasoning and unreasonable. It may be so. Love goes by instinct more than by reason; and who shall say it is wrong? Yet Burns is not loved because of his faults and failings, but in spite of them. His sins are not hidden. He himself confessed them again and again, and repented in sackcloth and ashes. If he did not always abjure his weaknesses, he denounced them, and with no uncertain voice; nor do we know how hardly he strove to do more.

What estimate is to be taken of Burns as a man will have many and various answers. Those who still denounce him as the chief of sinners, and without mercy condemn him out of his own mouth, are those whom Burns has pilloried to all posterity. There are dull, phlegmatic beings with blood no warmer than ditch-water, who are virtuous and sober citizens because they have never felt the force of temptation. What power could tempt them? The tree may be parched and blistered in the heat of noonday, but the parasitical fungus draining its sap remains cool—and poisonous. So in the glow of sociability the Pharisee remains cold and clammy; the fever of love leaves his blood at zero. How can such anomalies understand a man of Burns's wild and passionate nature, or, indeed, human nature at all? The broad fact remains, however much we may deplore his sins and shortcomings, they are the sins and shortcomings of a large-hearted, healthy, human being. Had he loved less his fellow men and women, he might have been accounted a better man. After all, too, it must be remembered that his failings have been consistently exaggerated. Coleridge, in his habit of drawing nice distinctions, admits that Burns was not a man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius. Burns was neither the one nor the other. In spite of the occasional excesses of his later years, he did not degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the sense of his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had ever been. Had he lived a few years longer, we should have seen the man mellowed by sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as he had done all along with the passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with the fortitude and dignity of one who had learned that contentment and peace are gifts the world cannot give, and, if he haply find them in his own heart, which it cannot take away. That is the lesson we read in the closing months of Burns's chequered career.

But it was not to be. His work was done. The message God had sent him into the world to deliver he had delivered, imperfectly and with faltering lips it may be, but a divine message all the same. And because it is divine men still hear it gladly and believe.

Let all his failings and defects be acknowledged, his sins as a man and his limitations as a poet, the want of continuity and purpose in his work and life; but at the same time let his nobler qualities be weighed against these, and the scale 'where the pure gold is, easily turns the balance.' In the words of Angellier: 'Admiration grows in proportion as we examine his qualities. When we think of his sincerity, of his rectitude, of his kindness towards man and beast; of his scorn of all that is base, his hatred of all knavery which in itself would be an honour; of his disinterestedness, of the fine impulses of his heart, and the high aspirations of his spirit; of the intensity and idealism necessary to maintain his soul above its circumstances; when we reflect that he has expressed all these generous sentiments to the extent of their constituting his intellectual life; that they have fallen from him as jewels ... as if his soul had been a furnace for the purification of precious metals, we are tempted to regard him as belonging to the elect spirits of humanity, to those gifted with exceptional goodness. When we recall what he suffered, what he surmounted, and what he has effected; against what privations his genius struggled into birth and lived; the perseverance of his apprenticeship; his intellectual exploits; and, after all, his glory, we are inclined to maintain that what he failed to accomplish or undertake is as nothing in comparison with his achievements.... There is nothing left but to confess that the clay of which he was made was thick with diamonds, and that his life was one of the most valiant and the most noble a poet ever has lived.'

With Burns's own words we may fitly conclude. They are words not merely to be read and admired, but to be remembered in our hearts and practised in our lives—

'Then gently scan your brother Man, Still gentler sister Woman; Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang, To step aside is human: One point must still be greatly dark, The moving Why they do it; And just as lamely can ye mark, How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us, He knows each chord—its various tone, Each spring—its various bias: Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted'

THE END