| AGNES
Craig, the heroine of this part of Burns’ life, was no ordinary person, was of no
common origin, and had no ordinary antecedents. She was the grandniece of Cohn MacLaurin,
the celebrated mathematician; and he was brother of MacLaurin the divine, whose sermon,
"Glorying in the Cross of Christ," has been called the most eloquent in the
English language. She was the full cousin of Lord Craig, who wrote the pathetic paper on
Michael Bruce in the Mirror, and the daughter of a respectable Glasgow physician. She was
herself a lady of considerable accomplishments—wit, poetical warm temperament, and a
feeling and a style beauty approaching the voluptuous. Her history had been singular. Her
husband, James MacLehose, had gained her, it was rumoured, in a peculiar way. Falling in
love with her, he determined to woo her in a fashion of his own. Ascertaining that on a
certain day she was to travel to Glasgow from Edinburgh by stage coach, he took all the
other seats in the coach, and had her to himself for forty miles; and played his game so
effectually that by the time they reached Glasgow they were engaged. Such, at least, was
the on dit, according to Mrs. Johnstone. Married in 1776, she being only
seventeen, they were not happy, and MacLehose went out to the West Indies; and occupied in
business and pleasure, took little thought of his wife and children. She came to reside in
a kind of semi-widowhood, an unprotected female, in Edinburgh. Mrs. MacLehose had
expressed to Miss Nimmo, an elderly lady, an acquaintance of Miss Chalmers, an ardent wish
to meet with Burns; and at her house accordingly they met on the 11th of December, 1787,
and probably he felt this when he wrote afterwards—
"0 May, thy morn was ne’er so sweet
As the mirk right of December"
Their attachment, such as it was, seems to
have begun on both sides, and at once. It is very difficult to settle its exact nature. It
was neither love nor lust. It was in both strongly dashed with vanity, and from first to
last there was need of danger signals and red lights. Yet they escaped, it would seem, as
by a hair’s breadth; or, as Mrs. Jameson says, "were saved so as by fire."
The Correspondence will tell the tale, and on
this point, and this chiefly, is valuable. And although there are some very fine passages,
the letters, as a whole, are as ridiculous rubbish as two intelligent persons, who were at
the same time perfectly sane, ever addressed to each other Foolish, wicked James MaeLehose
never, we believe, in the first heyday of his courtship addressed such trumpery to Agnes
Craig as "Sylvander "—i.e., the greatest poet, and potentially one of the
greatest men of his age— did here to "Clarinda." "Thank God,"
says Matthew Lewis, "even our passions pass away," however much, while they
last, they may do to stunt intellectual stature, and to give the animal or the fiend the
ascendency over the man. Sometimes indeed, on the other hand, passion, aye when it
approaches the brink of insanity, gives a lurid grandeur to the character and an unnatural
life to the intellect. So it did to Schiller and to Hazlitt. But of the infatuation of
passion there was none in Burns feeling for "Clarinda." Compare, in order to
prove this, Hazlitt’s "Liber Amoris" with "Sylvander’s
‘letters. In the one you have the utmost misery, abandonment, and defiance of a
desperate affection, and you hear in every page the eloquence of a broken, bursting heart;
in the other you have every variety of falsetto and fudge—the happiness that of a
drunken night’s dream: the misery, on his side at any rate, more imaginative than
real. Yet strange that when Burns passes from prose to poetry his right hand regains its
cunning; and one or two of his songs—" My Nannie ‘s Awa" and "Ae
fond kiss and then we sever "—if not sincere, show a power of simulating
sincerity almost miraculous. Scott finds the essence of a hundred love tales in the
following stanza:-
"Had we never loved so kindly,
Had we never loved so blindly,
Never met or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken—hearted."
In reference to the letters given in the
Correspondence, we may make a few observations, filling up gaps in the history they tell.
1. Clarinda lived in a house on the western
pavement of Potterrow, a street now taken down in the march of improvement. We visited it
in 1876. We are told that Burns used to pace along the cast pavement and look up to the
window, where, in what was called the General’s Entry (from General Monk), Clarinda
lived. We could not gaze without deep interest on the spot where the brawny poet, still in
the pride of his popularity, clad in buckskins, with his riding whip in his hand, stalked
along and turned up his glowing looks to his cynosure, if haply he might catch a glance
from her eye or a smile from her lips; and entering in we could not look without emotion
at the little old-fashioned room, where, as with Mary Campbell, though in less romantic
circumstances and scenery, he spent one day of parting love ere they were separated for
ever, and by a yet ghastlier gulf than that of death.
2. NotIcing is known about the cause of the
accident which befell Burns but what he tells us—that his carriage was overturned by
a drunken coachman, and his knee terribly bruised. This prevented him fulfilling an
engagement with Clariada, and gave him time for serious reflection and female
correspondence. He did not confine on this any more than on other occasions his attentions
to one lady, for we find him writing to Miss Chalmers too, expressing a wish that she and
Charlotte Hamilton were with him to soothe his tedium and sorrows. He took, he tells us,
tooth and nail to the Bible, and pronounces it a glorious book. He indited, at the
suggestion of Charles Hay, advocate, a poetical elegy on the death of Dundas, the
president of the Court of Session, of no great merit. He writes a funny letter to Francis
Howden, jeweller, along with a silhouette portrait, in which he tells a familiar story
ill—" Everybody has heard the auld wife’s obsetvation when she saw a poor
dog going to be hanged. ‘God help us, that’s the gait we have a’ to
gang.’" This has no point. The real story is, that an ancient maiden, when she
heard of a young lady being married, exclaimed, "That’s the gait we maun a’
gang." Howden used, to tell a story about Burns and Dr. Gregory. "Well, Burns,
what sort of man was your father—a tall man?" "Yes rather." "A
dark-complexioned man? ‘ "Yes." "And your mother?" "My
mother was not a man at all." This, poor as it was, extinguished Gregory for the
nonce by turning the laugh against him. He had his revenge when he wrote his critique on
Burns’ poem "On a Wounded Hare," and Burns cried out, " Gregory
crucifies me!" Gregory attended Burns while ill with his accident, assisted by
Alexander Wood, "Lang Sandy Wood" (see him admirably hit off by James Hogg in
"Geordie Dobson’s Expedition to Hell "), and gave him a present of
Cicero’s select Orations done into English, which he highly appreciated.
3. It is hardly worth while following all the
ups and downs of this eccentric flirtation between Burns and Clarinda—their capping
verses together; Burns alluding to this, and to Clarinda, in a letter to his old friend
Richard Brown, calling her a young widow, and speaking of suicide (in terms which showed
that nothing was farther from his thoughts); her trying to turn the affair into a
religious courtship, and to elicit from him his theological opinions (whence comes in one
letter Burns’ Creed, a very interesting document, if not very orthodox); her allusion
to a noted divine of the day, a Mr. Kemp, whom site wishes Burns to meet, and who,
according to Mrs. Johnstone, got latterly into grief by the report that he extended his
affections from the souls to the persons of his female devotees—a report the truth of
which she leaves uncertain ; time clandestine visits Burns at her request paid her; the
dangers he repeatedly evaded of the moth approaching too near the candle, their interviews
becoming more fascinating and perilous as his departure drew near; and, in fine, his
leaving her for a season to meet again in 1791 and then to part for ever. We think every
true admirer of Burns will be glad when this strange interlude in his history is over, and
may sometimes regret that it has been brought out so much in detail before the public eye.
In 1791, as we will hear again, Clarinda’s husband, quite unexpectedly, invited her
to Jamaica; she went, but was soon glad, from her experience of him and of the climate, to
come back again. She was jealous of Burns, of his attentions to Peggy Chalmers, and very
angry at his marriage with Jean. She died on the Calton Hill in 1841. Poor lady! she
remembered Burns long and warmly. Thus she writes in her journal forty years after: 6th
December, 1831—" This day I never can forget, parted with Burns in the year
1791, never more to meet in this world; Oh, may we meet in heaven !" She was of the
same age with Burns, and survived him forty-five years. Chambers says, " I have heard
Clarinda at seventy-five express the same hope to meet in another sphere the one heart she
had ever found herself able entirely to sympathize with, but which had been divided from
her on earth by such pitiless obstacles." This was in her very beautiful and natural,
but leads to some odd thoughts and perplexed questions. Dr. William Anderson used to speak
of the lover, Burns, meeting his "Mary" in Heaven; and the title of Burns’
famous song, and an expression in one of his letters, would suggest that Burns. expected
this too. But Jean, his long tried and devoted wife, might be named as having also a claim
to
"A blest and a blythe meeting
there"
in the "Land of the Leal." The "Fairest Maid
on Devon Banks" was in his mind’s eye when he was about to leave the earth. Some
enthusiasts might say that in that world of purity and peace, where they, being
disembodied spirits, neither marry nor are given in marriage, all these angels might be
with him and minister to him; but we shall say nothing on the subject.
During all
this time he was not forgetting his friend Johnson, whose second volume appeared in
February, 1788, containing some of Burns’ finest songs, such as
"MacPherson’s Lament," and a few sentences in the Preface are from his pen.
He had inserted in the "Museum" Clarinda’s verses, "Talk not of
Love," and a "Canzonet on a Blackbird," the production of the united hands
of the two lovers. He had been feeling his way, too, toward a situation in the Excise, and
his name had been enrolled in the list of expectant officers. He had been helped in this
by Lang Sandy Wood, a kindred spirit, who notably resembled Burns in his liking for
animals, and was seldom seen in Edinburgh on his professional visits without a pet sheep
following him. It would be thought strange if the amiable "Rab" were seen with
such a friend on his journeys of mercy through the Modern Athens now-a-days! Wood strongly
backed the poet in his humble ambition to "gauge ale firkins!" Burns left
Edinburgh on Monday the 18th of February, 1788. He went first to Glasgow to meet his old
friend Richard Brown, and perhaps enjoy with him some exceptionable talk, as Lord Jeffrey
would say; thence to Paisley; thence to Dunlop House, where he stayed two days; thence to
Kilmarnock, writing to Clarinda at every stage, vowing eternal friendship, and so forth.
On Monday the 25th he seems to have gone to Dumfriesshire along with Mr. James Tennant of
Glenconnar to view and judge Miller’s farms, with one of which he was greatly
pleased, and it he afterwards took. We next find him at Mossgiel, where he found matters
with Jean in a very strange way. It must be remembered that the marriage between him and
Jean Armour might be considered cancelled by her conduct and that of her parents. When
Burns returned triumphant the Armours fawned on him, and, as Burns tells us, made him very
welcome to visit his girl, no doubt expecting that the renewed intimacy might lead to
marriage after all. At this point, we imagine, Burns should have planted his foot, and
never entered her house again. With a man of his temperament and former habits of
familiarity visiting Jean was equivalent to falling into a scrape. This he felt when too
late; and there can be little doubt that the disgust he expresses at her friends’
obsequiousness was aggravated by his yielding to a seduction which he despised. Their
conduct was that of the spider.
"Wilt thou walk into my parlour, said the
spider to the fly."
And he walked in accordingly. What might have
been expected followed—Jean became enceinte, and still no word of marriage.
Nay, Burns was, and they certainly knew he was, in full cry after other ladies. This
provoked the Armours excessively, and they cast out their, daughter in the depth of
winter; and she might have been miserably ill off had it not been for Mrs. Muir, wife of
the owner of "Willie’s Mill," who took her in, and treated her with great
kindness before and after her accouchement, in this acting pro Burns.
Let us try to judge fairly while summing up
the particulars of this strange matter :—1. The conduct of the Armours deserved all
the condemnation of Burns. They had exposed their daughter to danger from mercenary
motives, and had afterwards treated her very harshly— Mrs. Armour, indeed, so far
relenting as to wait on Jean during her confinement. 2. Jean is more to be pitied than
blamed. There was indeed a strong temptation to renew her intercourse with such a lover as
Burns, but she should have resisted it. It would, we believe, have been far better for her
had she never seen Burns again. 3. Burns, for his part, should be both pitied and blamed.
If he still loved Jean with that wild, animal affection he had for her, it was wrong in
him to seek her company. At all events, he saw very well where the danger lay, and
"surely in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird." His duty had been
to have avoided the house entirely, unless he had had a distinct purpose of marriage. But
notice, 4. how the case was now complicated on his return from Edinburgh. he found Jean
cast out to the naked elements, in a condition calling for all his manly sympathy. This
pointed to marriage as the only remedy. In opposition to this there were certain
considerations:- 1st. He had learned, and it was not his fault that he had done so, to
appreciate a higher style of woman, and could not but contrast Jean with Miss Hamilton,
Miss Chalmers, and others he had met and admired. 2nd. Jean must have lowered herself to a
certain degree in his estimation by her recent conduct, and he must have shrunk from the
thought of connecting himself with a family which had used him so ill. And then, 3rd,
there was "Clarinda" entertaining the hope that she might yet win and keep him.
Such was the many-forked dilemma in which Burns was placed; and it says a great deal for
him that he determined to give to poor Jean the benefit of whatever doubts he might have
as to the propriety of his conduct. It was mainly, we think, compassion which caused him
make what was, in many points, a sacrifice. If so, it was virtue rewarded, for she turned
out in many things an excellent helpmeet for him ; and much of the real sunshine of his
later life, besides that which broke on him fitfully from the smile of the Muse, came from
the face of his faithful, industrious, and loving wife. He found for her a lodging in
Mauchline, where she remained till he acknowledged her to be his wife—not formally at
first, but according to Scotch fashion, by calling her "Mrs. Burns" publicly, in
company and in correspondence. A friend of ours remembers well seeing in Mauchhine the
room and the bed where Burns and Jean first slept after their marriage was acknowledged.
Burns left
Mauchline for Edinburgh on the 10th of March. A few days after he writes Miss Chalmers
that he had taken Ellisland. Patrick Miller, brother of the Lord Justice Clerk, had lately
become possessor of an estate which had once belonged to the family of Comyn, whose chief,
the Red Comyn, had been stabbed by Bruce at Dumfries. On this estate of Dalswinton there
were several farms, two of which were rich haugh ground bearing wheat, and the third,
Ellisland, not nearly so rich. Burns, as Allan Cunningham’s father told him, made a
poet’s choice, not a farmer’s. Now it seems most beautifully situated, the river
Nith flowing with measured majesty through bold banks and red scaurs, which are surmounted
by the richest woodland; arable and pasture fields behind; Dalswinton and its deep groves
on the other side of the stream; Friars Carse a little way to the north-west; the house
clean and plain — quite a model farm - house now as well as then—standing over
the river, and before the barnyard where Burns produced his "Mary in Heaven;"
altogether the sweetest, most romantic, and congenial piece of scenery which has any
permanent connection with the history of Burns. Lochlea and Mossgiel have both features of
interest, and around both, as well as around the cottage of his birth, are entwined more
peculiar associations; but none of them can for a moment be compared for beauty with
Ellisland. Could a poet fail to he happy here is a question which at once suggests itself
at the first sight of the place. Assuredly there are other things necessary to happiness
besides a beautiful locality; but it constitutes one element in a a poet's life, which is
by no means to be despised, and which it took a good deal in Burns’ environment
otherwise to counteract. We remember a man of great powers of mind, warm political
feelings, and poetical temperament, unfavourably situated in a northern town, where he had
a great deal of factious opposition to encounter which embittered and shortened his
career, exclaiming, "Were it not for that glorious river (one of the finest of
Highland streams) how wretched I should have been here!" And miserable as Burns often
was at Ellisland, we believe he would have been more so had he not had the red scaur on
which to stride, and the river to contemplate, now with calm emotion when it was calm, and
now with a "stern delight and strange" when its waters were swollen and stormy,
and his spirit required not so much solace as sympathy.
His landlord is said to have been kind to
Burns in his bargain, giving him a lease of seventy-six years at an annual rent of £50
for the first three years, and £70 for the remainder, with other promised advantages.
Miller was himself a remarkable man, of a mechanical genius, and was at this time employed
in trying to propel vessels by means of paddles. He even built a vessel with paddles and a
small steam-engine, and tried it on a lake near Dalswinton. The attempt was successful,
but Miller did not persevere although it was his boat when lying neglected at Port Dundas
that suggested to both Fulton and Henry Bell their better considered mechanisms, by which
the Hudson and the Clyde were to be peopled by those grand imperious vessels, which do not
supplicate but force their way through the waves, and which, when traversed and opposed,
wrestle like demons of kindred power and greater mastery with the angry billows. We
remember seeing a mythical story of this Dalswinton voyage and its crew, said to consist,
among others, of Burns and of Brougham, then a boy student out from Edinburgh; and it had
been a capital subject for a Savage Landor to describe their forgathering, their talk
during the day, and above all their symposium at night, and would remind one in some
points of the scene described by Scott in his "Fair Maid of Perth "—the boy
Crawford, the Tiger Earl, out-talking amid out-drinking such an auld-used hand as Sir John
Ramorny! But the story is; we suspect, a mere fable.
On the 13th March Burns concluded his
arrangement with Miller, and on the 20th of the same month he completed his reckoning with
the much-revolving and slow-rendering William Creech. There are here some puzzling
contradictions in statements of facts. On the one hand, Burns himself says to Dr. Moore,
"I believe I shall clear about £400, some little odds; but even part of this depends
on what the gentleman (Creech) has yet to settle with me." Currie, again, declares at
the close of his memoir, that Burns received a clear profit of £900. William Nicol wrote
to Mr. Lewars, after the poet’s death, that Burns told him that he received £600 for
the Edinburgh edition, and £100 after for the copyright. Heron, again, says that the
whole sum paid to the poet for the copyright, and for the subscription copies of this
book, amounted to nearly £1100. Out of this the expenses of printing the edition for the
subscribers must be deducted. The probability is that Burns only realized £400. For
whatever the round sum he got, there would be deducted from it not only the printing
expenses, but certain debts which we are told the poet had contracted in Edinburgh, and
thus there would he left only £400, and a little odds, as he admits there was. During
this process of arrangement Burns describes himself as nearly crazed, and actually
fevered. No wonder.
On the 24th March, 1788, he left Edinburgh
permanently, doubtless with mingled emotions of gratitude, grief, and perplexity, with
life absolutely to begin again at the age of twenty-nine. He went first to Glasgow, and
thence by a rapid movement to Dumfriesshire. While in Edinburgh he must have heard that
Jean had born him twins, both of whom soon died. On the 30th of March we find him riding
across a track of melancholy moors between Glasgow and Ayrshire on a Sabbath day, and
composing some stanzas, which he afterwards interwove into the "Chevalier’s
Lament," and which bear a strong testimony to the dreary state of his mind. It might
have been called Burns’ Lament, not alas! his last one: for the rest of the life of
this most blithesome (at times) of the sons of men, and who sometimes drank out larger
draughts of intellectual, social, animal, and moral pleasure, than any other man—to
whom, indeed, the word enjoyment meant something else than to most of his kind— meant
rapture or ecstasy—was to be one long lamentation seldom briefly and irregularly
interrupted by what ought to have been in happier circumstances the normal tenor of his
existence. He went next to Ayrshire to receive instructions for an exciseman; and Mr.
James Findlay, Tarbolton, had a charge from the worshipful Excise Corninissioners "to
instruct the bearer, Robert Burns, in the art of gauging casks, and fitting him for
surveying victuallers, rectifiers, chandlers, tanners, tawers, &c.; and after Robert
Burns has been six weeks thus engaged, certifying that he hath cleared his quarters both
for lodgings and diet, and that he has actually paid each of you for his instructions and
examination, and that he hath sufficient at the time to purchase a horse for the
business." A more humiliating document our country does not possess amidst all her
records, from the Ragman’s roll downwards! The brightest, and not by many, many
degrees the worst man in Scotland, doomed to such drudgery as preliminary to drudgery of a
similar sort ranging over his whole future life! And how few felt the appalling
anti-climax of the author of the "Cottar’s Saturday Night" studying gauging
for six weeks at Tarbolton under the eye of a supervisor, James Findlay by name. Nay,we
question if he felt it fully himself; had he done so, we would not have answered for the
consequences. Nevertheless he had some real happiness even then, as all men may reach at
any time by virtuous action. He had before refused to Gavin Hamilton to be security for
his brother, but had truly said that the language of refusal was to him the most difficult
of all language. It was his misfortune, not his fault surely, that his lips could not
easily fold around the monosyllable "No." Now, however, he gave his brother
Gilbert, who was in difficulties and had the support of poor old Mrs. Burns on his
shoulders, £180, about the half he had himself. It was strictly more a gift to his mother
than to his brother, and given at interest. The rest of the sum he put into his farm, with
as little result ultimately as if he had thrown it into the Nith.
Jean was with him while he was receiving his
instructions in the Excise mysteries. Chambers says she preferred another to Burns, and we
hardly wonder at it. She was, we think, incapable of appreciating him fully in himself, or
of seeing him except in the reflex light of the admiration of others. And she knew his
faults so thoroughly. Indeed, our astonishment is that, all things considered, the
marriage turned out so well. As there was little love to begin with, the wonder was that,
like Slender’s, it did not decrease on better acquaintance. With a little money,
however, a little experience, Jean less "glaikit" than she had been, and Burns a
sadder and thinking himself a wiser man, " they," as one in "Caleb
Williams" has it, "turned in together, and thought they would rub on main well
with one another." And so in a manner they did, and the longer the better.
Chambers closes his account of what may be
called the Edinburgh section of Burns’ life with some remarks breathing a good
spirit, but hardly germane to the matter. His talk of Burns as being a prophet, a
Prometheus, and sustaining such a character in Edinburgh, is more suited to the
high-wrought, self-reflecting nature of a Carlyle than to his own sober and sensible style
of thought. We think Burns far greater, though not better, in Dumfries, writing his songs
or cherishing his solitary ideals, rejected by the select society of the place, walking
out lowering and lonely to Lincluden Abbey, or taking the shady side of the street, than
when he was the pet of the Edinburgh public. All we can say of him then is that in
Edinburgh his head was not turned nor his self-possession lost. It may be said that it was
the Sun, and not the Wind, which made the traveller loosen his cloak. But what were the
soft airs and warm glances of his Edinburgh experience, as a trial of manhood, compared
with the forces of the Sun of Sahara and the Simoom, which united latterly against his
naked head? Yet them he withstood. He died, indeed, but died not yielding to them, but
yielding to his own passions and appetites ; for, like Byron’s wounded eagle,
"He nursed the pinion that propelled the
steel."
None but himself was able to destroy himself.
He had undoubtedly a contempt for pensions, but it does not seem to us a wise contempt.
Did a pension necessarily compromise independence? Were all pensions bribes? He thought a
pension a "collar;" but was it not sometimes a becoming badge, such as he had
given to his own "Caesar?"
"His lockit, lettered braw, brass collar,
Showed him the gentleman and scholar."
In his wild spirit of independence Burns
would have spurned even "fairy gold," had it fallen at his door. There was but
one man living then in Britain Burns’ superior—namely, Edmund Burke, his equal
in genius, and incomparably his superior in acquirements. He accepted a pension, and the
most eloquent and powerful of his writings—his "Letter to a Noble Lord" and
his "Letters on a Regicide Peace"—arose to the tune of Government ingots.
He felt he had a title to what he received, and that gave him a proud honesty in using it;
and within his pension, as within a bank, the noble stream of his genius flowed on with
equal dignity and with. greater power than before. |
