THE title here proposed, while in one sense
ideally appropriate, is in another as certainly a misnomer —the Life of Robert Burns.
In one sense, Burns was the most intensely living man modern times have produced—had
a perpetually active and seething brain; a heart beating in big and almost audible throbs;
a "pulse’s maddening play;" the most living and eloquent lips that ever
spoke in Scotland; a hand that if you touched it threatened to burn your’s from the
sole of the foot to the crown of the head he was a Man, and forms, thus, one of the best
themes for biography. But, in another view, his life was so short, so fragmentary, so
contradictory to itself that the words, the Life of Robert Burns, sound like cruel
irony—sad, shadowed, and incoherent as it was; and tbe feeling is not lessened, but
increased, and the disturbance of the whole rendered more painful and mysterious, by the
Arabesque border of wild happiness and lofty inspiration, too, by which it was begirt, but
never either penetrated or pervaded. Besides the difficulties connected with such a
strange, exceptional existence as was his, there meets us also on the threshold of our
enterprise the fact that the tale of his life, with its union or disunion of elements, has
been so often told, that it seems hopeless to seek to give it any new interest, or to draw
from it any stronger moral than has been drawn. Nevertheless, we have decided to attempt
it, and to do our best. Burns’ life, said an accomplished gentleman to us the other
day, must be written with the heart, and this qualification for writing it we
unhesitatingly claim. We add, it should be written with determined honesty, and to that
too we lay fearless claim.
Robert Burns was born on the 25th of January,
1759. His father was William Burns or Burness, a native of Kincardineshire, usually called
the Mearns, westward from Glenbervie, which was the cradle of the Burness family. The
country is called the howe or Hollow of the Mcarns, a fertile region lying low between two
ridges of hills—the ridge of Garvock on the south side, and those of Strathfenella or
Strathfindlay and Auchcairnie on the north. Laurencekirk, the birthplace of James Beattie,
and connected with the memory of Lord Gardenstone and the still more famous Lord Monboddo,
stands the centre or capital of this beautiful district. Eastward the ground rises, while
it gets more bleak, and swells gradually into heights, partly amble and partly moorish;
and among these heights is Glenbervie, from which farther on there is a deep and rapid
descent toward Stonehaven and the sea. Burness, Burnes, and Burns, as the name is
variously spelled, is derived from the Anglo Saxon Beorn, "a chief with the affix nes
for possession. The name De Burnes is found early in English records. The name of
Brunhouse of Kair, in the county of Kincardine, appears as early as the reign of Robert
the Bruce. In 1547 we find persons named Burnes renting the lands of Inchbreck, in the
parish of Glenbervie. One of these, named William, took in Glenbervie a farm called
Bogjorgan, where he died in 1715. Before his death he gave up the farm to his sons,
William and James. After holding it some time at a joint lease James removed to Inches, a
farm in the same county, while William remained in Bogjorgan. Robert Chambers gives a copy
of the inventory of the homesteading at Bogjorgan at the time of the separation—a
document remarkable among other things for spelling the name Burnasse. William Burness had
a son (or, Dr. Rogers says, a brother), who settled in the farm of Brawlinmuir,
Glenbervie. On one occasion he outwitted some caterans who were hovering in the
neighbourhood, and who ultimately entered his house to rob it, by concealing his money in
the nave of an old wheel, which lay in the jaw-hole before the door as a kind of
stepping-stone. One of his sons, Robert Burnes, rented the lands of Clochanhill, six miles
west from Stonehaven, on the estate of Dunottar, which belonged to the Earl of MarischaL
He had three sons, James, Robert, and William—lst, James, who went to Montrose, and
became the father of the Writer there, who corresponded with the poet, and the
great-grandfather of the famous Sir Alexander Burness of Bokhara and Cabul memory; 2nd,
Robert, who left his father’s house, as we will see immediately, at the same time
with his brother, William, for England, remained there for a number of years, and died at
Ellisland in 1789; and 3rd, William, the father of the Scottish Bard.
Robert Burns himself fostered the belief (in
which there is also some traditionary credence)—the wish being with him father to the
thought—that some of his ancestors were "out" in the Rebellion. The author
of the "Chevalier’s Lament" and "Drummossie Muir" had a strong
Jacobitical prejudice, mingling in his bosom with that patriot passion of which he speaks
to Dr. Moore, and "which was to boil on in his bosom till the flood-gates of life
were to shut in eternal rest;" and we might wish that it had been yet stronger, since
in this case it might have inspired a hundred Jacobite melodies as good as those we now
possess—better they could hardly be. Some of his remoter relations may have shared in
the Rebellion of 1715—16; but his father was not born then, and procured ere he left
his home a certificate that he had no part in the late "wicked rebellion."
William Burness and his elder brother,
Robert, left Clochanhill together — driven southward by the same stress of poverty.
Gilbert Burns tells us that they parted on the summit of a hill on the confines of their
native place—very probably on the top of Garvock, with its wide view northward of the
Howe of the Mearns, its fields of billowy grain, edged by a margin of blue hills soaring
upwards to the loftier heights of Wirren, Caterthun, and Clochnaben; and southward of the
ocean, with "ships dim-discovered dropping from the clouds" in the distance, and
the coast from Bervie to Montrose and the Red Head stretching below. From this the coast
road strikes away to Montrose, and thence to Edinburgh, via Dundee; while, on the other
side, a road goes right through the Howe of the Mearns, by Brechin, to Perth, and thence
to England. At this point the brothers had to part—the one going to Edinburgh, the
other to England. And there would be here the elements of a tragedy, for both the men were
of the blood of Burns; and with tears in their eyes, and anguish like despair in their
hearts, they would tear themselves asunder—Robert, we suppose, remaining last on the
hill, and watching his brother William slowly descending toward Den Fenella and St. Cyrus,
and often turning back to the summit to take a last look—it is the last—of his
younger brother. They never met again. William hied him to Edinburgh, and there, or in its
immediate neighbourhood, procured some employment as a gardener, working and faring hard,
and always contriving to save and send a little money home to Clochanhill to gladden the
hearts of his aged parents. Once a bank note of some value arrived. They stared at it with
astonishment. They had perhaps seen such a thing before only in the hands of haughty
lairds or cruel factors, at an unapproachable distance. But now that it was theirs, as the
schoolboy feels to his first shilling, they hardly know how to use it. Had the poet been
there, he who wrote verses about a bank note and often on bank notes, might have inscribed
a sonnet or a song on the "First Bank Note (and the Last) in Clochanhill."
From Edinburgh William Burness found his way
to the West; but found it not, alas! more genial or hospitable than the East had been. He
got a situation first under the Iaird of Fairlie, and then under Crawford of Doonside. He
afterwards leased seven acres near the Bridge of Doon as nursery ground. Here he built the
"auld clay biggin’" with his own hands, and on 15th December, 1757, brought
home to it Agnes Brown, his young bride. The poet’s mother was a comely person, with
red hair, bordering on yellow, and with ‘fine dark eyes, which she left, along with a
poetic temperament, as a legacy to her son. She had been taught to read, but not to write.
Her memory was stored with old ballads and songs, which she sang uncommonly well. She was
of exceedingly active habits, of a cheerful disposition—a helpmeet to her husband and
a kind mother to her children. Having been early left "a mitherless bairn
"—sent out from her home to the care of a maternal grandmother, and afterwards
mistrysted, as they say in Scotland, with a love affair—’ her career was to some
extent prophetic of her son 5. The low deal chair in which she nursed all her children is
still preserved in Closeburn Hall, in Dumfriesshire, the seat of Sir James Menteith.
William Burness was thirty-one years of age, and Agnes Brown twenty-six, when they were
married. No epithalamium was sung at their nuptials, no marriage presents of value given
to the young couple, although there would be the usual reels and rejoicings of a Scottish
wedding; but here was a more memorable conjunction than Astronomy has ever
recorded—rustic loveliness, sense, and sensibility in Agnes Brown, united to strong
intellect, high moral principle, and indomitable perseverance in William Burness,
recalling the fine words of Gerald Massey—
"See Strength and Beauty, hand in hand,
Step forth into the golden land."
Alas! in this case, however, it was no golden
land, only a humble house with a but and a ben, a hut, in which the boy Burns was to
appear thirteen months afterwards; and beyond a piece of garden ground bordering on the
sea, with the old road from Ayr to the south on its edge, a spot altogether consecrated to
the genius of poverty and toiL But the "golden land" lay in their mutual love,
and that was soon to be sealed by the birth of the most extraordinary man in native power
and genius Scotland ever produced.
Thirteen months passed away in love and
labour, the love sweetening the labour, the labour strengthening the love, till at last
the consummation arrived. But Burns, who was not in the roll of common men, could not be
like common men in the circumstances of his birth. No Owen Glendower prodigies, indeed,
were to attend his arrival amongst us. It was fit that the handsel of Nature’s great
Scottish poet should be given by one of the genuine blasts of his own stormy sky. Not,
indeed, on the 25th January, 1759, but some days afterwards (Gilbert Burns says, on the
3rd or 4th of February) came a loud tempest with lashing rains—
"That day, a child might understand,
The Deil had business on his hand."
But if his purpose was to destroy or drown
his future bard and murderer (who, as Dr. Waddell intimates, scoffed him out of belief, if
not of being), his purpose was foiled. True, the two jambs of the "auld clay
biggin"’ threw the gable off its centre, and it falling down got so shattered
that it was thought necessary to carry the squalling poet through the storm to a
neighbour’s house, where he remained a week. The horoscope of the hapless Duke of
Buckingham was thus read by Davy Ramsay ("Fortunes of Nigel")
"Full moon and high sea,
Great man shalt thou be;
Red dawning, stormy sky,
Bloody death shalt thou die."
That of Burns, to a poetic augur vaticinating
on the ground of this storm, might seem to portend wild tumult and skiey wrath, ending in
safety, the poet triumphing over the tempest which sought his life, the storm of calumny,
opposition, and passion subdued into peace. But, alas, No!
Many years ago (in June, 1846) we visited the
"auld clay biggin’," at that time (and we believe still) ahostelrie for
dispensing Burns’ beloved beverage, and other good things of this life. We remember
one rather odd circumstance: when looking at the concealed bed in which the poet was born,
our companion (the gifted Rev. Dr. W. B. Robertson of Irvine, the orator and poet of the
West) exclaimed, "Here‘s a laddie, here‘s wee Bobbie Burns". A cry
from the bed confirmed the words, and drawing near we tried to complete the glamourie of
the scene by imagining that this boy who lifted up his arms and smiled was the inspired
child to whose birthplace, in that humble cottage, the civilized world has flocked for
well-nigh one hundred years. From the cottage we pursued the road along which Tam 0’
Shanter led his weird and tipsy gallop to Alloway Kirk (which seemed too small a stage for
such a phantasmagoria as was transacted there, as though "Macbeth" were enacted
in a barn-loft), but found metal more attractive in the grave-stone erected by the poet to
the memory of his parents, which, although not to weeping given, touched us to tears by
the simple pathos of the story it tells of them, and the feeling it discovered in him.
After this the elaborate monument on the Doon seemed an impertinence; but the haunted
bridge restored and intensified the spirit of the spot, receiving and shedding down the
magic light of the Past upon the stream, which combined music and legendary mystery in the
murmur of its immemorial waters. How thankful we were from all we had heard of it, that we
had not been present, as we once intended to have been, at the Burns’ Festival in
1844. To-day there had been a partial disenchantment, then it had been total; and how
terrible always is the fall of a long-cherished ideal to a young enthusiast!
Of the infant years of the poet we know
little. The first glimpse we get of him is sitting at his father’s fireside,
listening to the ballads and stories of an old woman, one Betty Davidson a relation of
the-family; and, as Wandering Willy says in "Redgauntlet," she had "some
fearsome anes, that mak the auld canines shake in the settle, and the bits o’ weans
skin on their minnies out frae their beds." Her stories roused in Burns the sleeping
elements of wonder and poetry, and probably fascination would sometimes overpower fear,
and he would cry out in spirit with Outis in the "Odyssey," "More, give me
more, it is divine!" He owns to the feeling continuing in after life; and if so, how
strong it would be in early days! William Burness sent Robert in his sixth year to a
little school at Alloway Mill, taught by one Campbell, who. however, soon migrated to a
better place in Ayr, and William Burness united with some neighbours in employing a young
man, named John Murdoch, as teacher to the children of several families. This worthy man
taught Robert and his younger brother, Gilbert, English and English grammar, besides
writing, and was much gratified by their proficiency. Murdoch lent him the "Life of
Hannibal," and two years after he got from a blacksmith who shod their horses the
"Life of Sir William Wallace," which he read with the utmost avidity and with
important results, for it poured into his veins that tide of Scottish prejudice of which
he predicates, as we have seen, the life-long endurance.
In 1766 his father left his cottage at
Alloway, and took the small farm of Mount Oliphant, two miles off. Robert, however, and
Gilbert continued to attend Murdoch’s school, till at the end of two years he removed
to Carrick. It was on a parting visit of the excellent Dominie to the cottage that there
occurred the famous scene at the reading of "Titus Andronicus," where the whole
party were so much moved at some of the melodramatic horrors of the play that they were
all dissolved in tears, and Robert threatened, if it were left in the house, to burn it.
Dr. Currie it is, we think, who asks why this silly play is still bound up with the
writings of Shakspeare. But although it is certainly far inferior to his usual mark, there
are passages in it (witness Aaron’s address to his black illegitimate child by the
queen) which bear the stamp of Shakspeare. Schlegel remarks that Shakspeare alone was
capable of producing either its beauties or faults, although Hazhitt thinks Marlowe, who
was only a little lower than the Myriad-minded, might have written it. Perhaps Shakspeare
added the better passages to the play, just as Burns himself often made an old, stupid,
and scandalous ballad his own by inserting some stroke of consummate wit or genius. It is
curious that Murdoch preferred Gilbert to Robert, and thought, because the former was the
merrier of the two, that he was more likely to turn out a poet. Little did he see what a
deep current of enthusiasm was running below, or knew what dark stern cogitations were
saddening the brow of the wondrous boy, who already knew that he was a "poor
man’s son," and was already noted for a sturdy stubborn something in his
disposition, for an "enthusiastic idiot piety," and whose mirth at all seasons
of his life was only the silver lining on the cloud of the thickest melancholy!
From the date of Murdoch’s departure
William Burness undertook himself the charge of his children’s education, and whiled
away the heavy labours of the farm by conversing familiarly with them on useful subjects.
He borrowed Salmon’s Dictionary for them—made it their text-book in Geography;
and instructed them in Natural History and Astronomy out of Derham’s "Physico
and Astro Theology" and Ray’s "Wisdom of God in the Creation," a book
once very popular, till supplanted by Paley’s works, as these in their turn have been
supplanted by the "Bridgewater Treatises "—very different fare from Thomas
Boston’s Fourfold State," so strongly recommended (see the "Life of Thomas
Davidson, the Scottish Probationer"), and with what slender results and left-handed
gratitude to the gifted author of "Ariadne in Naxos." Burns, however, had read,
and refers more than once to, honest Thomas’ book; and whatever he might think of its
religious theories, he no doubt did ample justice (as Carlyle also does) to Boston’s
excellent motives and thorough simplicity of character. Burns became acquainted, too, with
Stackhouse’s "History of the Bible" (afterwards edited by the venerable
Bishop Gleig, of Stirling, father to the author of the "Subaltern" and the
"Life of Warren Hastings") and with a collection of letters by eminent writers,
which became his standard and model for epistolary composition. When about thirteen or
fourteen years of age, he and Gilbert were sent to the parish school of Dalrymple, three
miles from their home, for a summer quarter, to improve their handwriting; and about this
time Robert got hold of some of Richardson’s, Fielding’s, Smollett’s,
Hume’s, and Robertson’s works. Shortly after, his old master, Murdoch, was
appointed English teacher in Ayr; and resuming his acquaintance with the Mount Oliphant
family, he lent Robert Pope’s works, and took him, at his father’s desire, to
Ayr to assist him in revising his grammar and learning a little French. Burns was advised
to begin Latin, too; but proceeded only a short way in that study—not farther, he
used to say waggishly, than to understand the words, Amor vincit omnia, although he
resumed it occasionally afterwards; and whenever any reverse of fortune or disappointment
befell him, he was wont to hum, "But I’ll to my Latin again," as he
snatched up Ruddiman. Some of his biographers have regretted that, along with the Bible
and the ballads of Scotland, Burns had so much intercourse at this time with
"shallow, sharp, and polished writers, like Pope, Addison, Swift, and Steele, with
their stilted stops and methodical periods." In this slump judgment we do not agree.
These writers alone might have been bad models; but united to others of a loftier mood,
they materially assisted the education of his taste, and aided him in acquiring such a
comparatively correct prose style as his letters exemplify. They gave him the form; his
own genius supplied the fire. They helped him, as ruled paper helps a beginner in the art
of writing. Nor can we coincide with this estimate of the authors referred to. Surely
Addison is one of the sweetest and most natural writers in the language. We knew a very
clever and scholarly man who used to say that he would rather have written the
"Vision of Mirza" than all Byron’s poetry; and Burns himself speaks of his
early delight in perusing that exquisite allegory. Pope, according to Sir Walter Scott,
was a "Deacon in his trade "—the finest of artists, and not the least
gifted of poets, although too often, as his defender Lewes has it –
"Malice, Pope, denies thy page
Its own celestial fire;
While critics and while bards in rage,
Admiring, won’t admire."
And to call Swift—the masculine, the
ingenious, the sensible, the master of strong, simple, sinewy English, the greatest
satirist of his age, the wittiest man in the wittiest nation of the world, and if you
will, the ablest libeller of human nature that ever lived—" shallow," is to
betray a narrowness of judgment and a want of appreciation of one of the giants of British
literature as strong an(l as unique, in his own style, as Shakspeare or Milton. Apart from
what Burns derived from the wits of Queen Anne (we will show by and by it was not unmixed
good) and the poets of the Elizabethan period (the latter very imperfectly known to him),
he must have reaped a great deal of advantage from such master novelists as Richardson,
Fielding and Smollett; and such historians as Hume and Robertson. The one class tended to
educate his feelings and develop his dramatic power, a power he possessed in a great
measure, and often used, though he never wrote a play; and the second, to enlarge his
views and to strengthen his understanding. Burns read, Gilbert tells us, two volumes of
"Pamela," a novel which, from its subject and its heart-rending pathos, must
have been peculiarly suggestive to him at this period of his life.
At Ayr Burns continued three weeks in
Murdoch’s house, diligently employed in learning French. Murdoch in a long letter
gives an interesting account of this visit, which was terminated by the coming on of
harvest, at ‘which Burns, who at fifteen did the full work of a man, could not be
spared. The most notable thing in this letter is its panegyric on William Burness, who
seems to have been one of Nature’s uncrowned nobility—a man almost
perfect—not of that kind of virtue either which must be taken for granted, but which
was tested by every kind of severe suffering, except that of remorse for gifts misused,
opportunities neglected, and errors committed. That was the lot of his son; but ere we
place him hopelessly beneath his father, let us remember that no meteor rays streamed
before the parent’s eyes, no passions hot as those of a hundred hearts beat in his
bosom. Robert Burns did, at all events, to his father what no Murdoch or Gilbert Burns
could have done for him, he repaid the gift of life with immortality. It was of his father
he said—
"Then kneeling down to Heaven’s
Eternal King,
The priest, the father, and the husband prays."
Before closing this chapter we may merely pursue for a moment
the fate of John Murdoch, the excellent preceptor of the poet. After Burns left for the
harvest rigg Murdoch often visited him at his father’s house, and helped him with his
learning. He continued for some years a respected citizen and teacher in Ayr, till a
quarrel in his cups ‘with Dr. Dalrymple, the all-powerful parish minister there,
forced him to migrate to London, where he became a private teacher of French, and wrote
some books on the French language—such as, "A Radical Vocabulary of the French
Language," "On the Pronunciation and Orthography of the French Language," a
"Dictionary of Distinctions.’ He also rendered valuable assistance to Walker
when preparing his excellent "English Dictionary.’ He heard in the midst of the
mighty London of the fame of his pupil, and could scarcely for a while believe that this
prodigy of genius had ever walked by his side along the whitening ridges of Mount
Oliphant, or lain in bed with him conjugating French verbs! He soon warmly welcomed his
rise, but never seems to have thought of comparing him for a moment with his father.
Murdoch’s connection, however, with Burns was of service to him in his declining
years. Although he had taught English to many distinguished persons in .London, such as
Talleyrand, he fell into poverty and ill-health. An appeal was made on his behalf to the
friends and admirers of Burns, who raised some money to relieve his wants. He died in
1824, aged seventy-seven, having survived for twenty-eight years his excitable and
ill-starred scholar. |
