|
BEFORE settling down as a farmer, Burns’ fancy was
crossed by a new ambition, which promised to alter his entire scheme of life, and which
might have led him to fortune and forgetfulness! Feeling that the outlook of a poor
plough-boy was but a gloomy one; aware that, as he tells Dr. Moore, the only two openings
by which he could enter the Temple of Fortune were the gate of niggardly economy, and the
path of little chicaning bargain-making, both of which he detested—the one as narrow,
the other as contaminated; and having a desire, besides, to marry (Ellison Begbie is
supposed at that time to have been his flame, who afterwards jilted him)—he turned
his attention to flax-dressing, in which he had tried some experiments along with Gilbert
at Lochlea, and removed to Irvine to set up his trade. Irvine, now a thriving seaport, was
then the emporium of the flax-dressing trade, generally in connection with farms on which
the material was raised. Here Burns became connected with a man named Peacock, whom the
poet, in a passage of his letters which has not been printed, has strongly denounced. He
possibly had cheated Burns while teaching him his calling. The cottage where he plied his
trade stood on the Smiddy Green, one end being devoted to the work, the other employed by
an individual in keeping workhorses. Flax-dressers, or hecklers, as they were often
called, have been in Scotland a superior, though peculiar class of men. In the town where
we now write (Dundee), they were, we have heard, in the first half of the century, noted
for their knowledge, irregular diligence, occasional bouts of dissipation, great interest
in politics, and expertness in political discussion. The most powerful speakers who, at
the time of George Kinloch’s banishment, stirred the fierce democracy of Dundee, were
hecklers. Their manners, however, and their habits, were often coarse. We suspect that
Burns in Irvine was thrown among a similar class, and his very superiority led him into
snares. He was noted for his powers of conversation. But the inspired heckler found rough
and ready logic more popular than poetical talk. Little else, we believe, is remembered of
him in Irvine than his melancholy. The uncongenial and unsuccessful trade, the rude
society the scoundrel partner, his distance from home, and, it may be, a certain looseness
of habits here acquired, reacted violently on his spirits, and made the brightest man in
the west of Scotland for a year a gloomy hypochondriac. Yet one precious fruit grew on,
and has fallen to us from the baleful tree—we refer to the beautiful letter to his
father, dated December 27, 1781. This itself seems to cast doubt on the insinuation
Professor Walker throws out on the authority of somebody, who boasted that he had taught
Burns looser ideas of religion in Irvine. The expression is of course very vague; but if
the opinions taught him were really loose, and not simply somewhat bolder than his former
sentiments, they do not seem to have rooted themselves very deeply. The heart, at least,
of the author of that noble letter was right, and—
"The heart aye’s the part, aye,
That keeps us richt or wrang.
Yet temptation seems to have attacked him in Irvine from
another direction. Here he met with one Richard Brown (afterwards, we have been assured by
persons who knew him, a very respectable man and citizen), who had been at sea, and talked
of illicit love with the levity of a sailor, although Brown was wont to say that Burns had
nothing to learn on that subject when they got acquainted. This must refer to his Irvine
experience, since we have Gilbert Bums’ testimony and his own that his life in
Lochlea was pure. An account of Brown’s romantic history and his influence on
Burns’ mind may be read in the poet’s famous letter to Dr. Moore. We find him
writing to Brown afterwards with great affection. Burns seems seldom, if ever, to have
lost a friend. He "grappled them to his heart with hooks of steel." He had a
high theoretical idea of the value of friendship; and practically his friendships were
about as strong as his loves, and considerably less fickle. "The lover and the friend
‘ he invariably classes together. Brown had a taste in other directions than the fair
sex. He liked poetry, and Bums alludes in one of his letters to a Sabbath day they passed
in Eglinton woods, then, as now, very beautiful and urnbrageous, when Brown urged Burns to
send some verses he repeated to a magazine—a hint which flattered Bums’ vanity,
although he did not act on it.
Bums, we
saw, had written the plaintive letter to his father on the 27th December, 1781. We find
him with characteristic volatility welcoming in the New Year on the 1st of January, 1782,
in a carousal so prolonged and excessive, that during it his flax shop took fire, was
burned to ashes, and himself left, "like a true poet, without a farthing." He
did not, however, return to Lochlea till March, as is proved by his sisters statement and
by his initials inscribed by himself; with the date (1782), on the chimney-piece of the
little garret where he slept.
The gloom which had cast its shadow over
Burns’ later days at Irvine came home with him, although it seems gradually to have
yielded to various influences—to the summer weather which began, to his resumption
with redoubled energy of his labours in the field, to the counsel and company of his
father, and to the happy fraternal influence of Gilbert. Whatever might have been his
habits in Irvine, and although changed perhaps in tastes, he resumed in Lochlea the same
hard-faring and temperate life as before. He engaged, however, as we shall see, in some
love affairs, although none of much consequence. He attended, as he had done once before,
a dancing school. He began in rivalship with David Sillar (his "Davie ‘), who
was a very respectable poetaster and a "prime fiddler," to practise the
violin—sometimes on a bad day, when he was unable to work in the fields, and
sometimes early in the morning, when he would break up the kitchen gathering coal, and
alarm the family by his untimely scrapings. Fiddling is not a very common accomplishment,
we think, of poets. Dr. Croly, indeed, according to Barry Cornwall, was a good violinist,
although in his later days, when we knew him, he had resigned the practice as unsuitable
to his years, if not to his profession. Burns never succeeded in it, nor in the German
flute, and his voice was tuneless and rough as a boar’s; yet he could read music, and
was keenly susceptible, need we say h to the charms of song. But his chief employment now
was the plough, and his chief relaxation and solace was poetry—and lo! the Ploughman
Poet! He restrung, he tells us, his lyre with renewed vigour.
Six or seven years before this he had
written, as we have seen, his pretty "I dreamed I lay where flower~ were
springing." He tells us he had even sketched the plan of a Tragedy, and has retained
one speech from it supposed to have been spoken by a great oppressor, by whom he meant the
factor who had ground down his father for his arrears at Mount Oliphant. It reads rather
like a bit of Young’s "Revenge" than of Shakspeare. Afterwards he is said
to have composed a song on every toleraMy looking girl in the parish, and finally, one in
which they were all included. Such ditties he usually destroyed. A beautiful one has
survived—" My Nannie, 0," and it is certainly one of the sweetest and
tenderest of all his strains. The river of the song, beyond which were the Carrick hills,
visible from Lochlea, was the Stinchar or Stinsiar, for which he afterwards substituted,
as a more euphonious title, the Lugar, a stream which belonged to a different district. At
this our friend, the late excellent David Jamieson, U.P. minister in Kilmarnock, was very
angry, and has justly abused Burns and Burns’ editors for it in his volume of poems,
"Scenes of Youth." Nannie was one Agnes Fleming, in Tarbolton parish, a
farmer’s daughter and a servant, of no special attractions, and who knew Burns very
slightly—only, indeed, so far that he once told her he had written a "sang"
on her. It is interesting to know that his father lived to see and to be much gratified by
this song, which is indeed pure as the "opening gowan wat wi’ dew." It was
followed by his scornful ditty, "0 Tibby, I hae seen the day," inscribed to a
proud minx named Isabella Steven or Stein. There were some other love strains, which may
be more appropriately treated when we come to the list of his early loves in the next
chapter. His gloomy state of mind at Irvine inspired the copy of verses called
"Winter," with the two lines so affecting in their simplicity of
bitterness—
"The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine."
also his "Prayer Written under the pressure of Violent
Anguish." He had flung off this untimely load crc he struck up the cheerful
strain— "My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border," which, though
written in a ranting style, is a piece of real genius. Many of his poems were composed at
the plough—notably, "Poor Maihie." Burns had bought’ a ewe and two
lambs, and the ewe was tethered in a field adjoining the house of Lochlea. He and Gilbert
were going out with their team, when Hugh Wilson, a curious, awkward-looking boy, clad in
plaiding, came, with much anxiety in his face, to tell that the ewe had entangled herself
in the tether, and was lying in the ditch. Robert caught up the humour in Hughoc’s
look and the pathos in Mailie’s position at once; and after relieving the ewe, went,
with eyes sparkling, to the plough, composed the poem there, and repeated it to his
brother in the evening. To those who remember their own boyhood, and what a Scotch boy
especially is, the best touch in all this simple and quaint effusion lies in the
words—
"Now, honest Hughoc, dinna fail
To tell my master a’ my tale;
And bid him burn his cursed tether,
And for roy sake thous get soy blether."
To the same period (founded partly on a black-letter English
ballad) belongs "John Barleycorn," as spirited an Anacreontic as ever flowed
from the lyre of the Teian Bard, of Herrick, Tom Moore, Byron, or Lytton Bulwer, whose
exquisite song in the "Last Days of Pompeii" has seldom been equalled ;
and the rest of the Bacchanalian brotherhood. Yet Burns, when he wrote it, was habitually
a water drinker; when he did drink, it was in great moderation, and his whole expenditure
on himself was £7 per annum.
"Ye generous Britons, venerate the
plough," cries Thomson; and Burns, since Thomson’s day, has supplied a new
reason for obeying the command. Since the plough of Cincinnatus, no plough that ever cut
the furrow can be named for interest with the plough of Burns. And what was a Roman
patriot, however august and disinterested, to our large-hearted poet, whose bright-blazing
meteoric eyes seemed to be piercing into the deep of thought and feeling, while his
ploughshare was cutting through the clods a way for the seed, the blade, and the full corn
in the ear— the divinity of whose daily toil was proved and complemented in his
experience by the inspiration which descended from above, and seemed the witness of the
gods to his humble, honourable calling here, and their prophecy of his eternal fame
hereafter. To refer to an image Burns used himself afterwards, Elisha was not a prophet
till he left the plough; but to Burns the shaft of the plough was his rod of inspiration
and command, as his mind moved in the wind of the spring day, and his genius expanded and
caught the colours of the April sun. Never was our poet more manly, more simple, often so
bald, but always so beautiful, as in those poems and songs which, composed at the plough,
h& was to commit to his immortal page, leaning over his table or chest in his little
Lochlea garret ere he went to rest!
His labours at the plough were diversified by
various excursions on Sabbaths, and walks in the evenings on other days. The story of
Wallace, as recounted by Blind Harry
"In the veins of the calyx foams and
flows
The blood of the Saniian vine,
But, oh! in the goblet of youth there glows
A Lesbium more divine.
Bright, bright, as the liquid light,
Its waves through tbine eyelids shine.
"Fill up, fill up, to the sparkling brim,
With the juice of the young Lyaeus;
The grape is the key that we owe to him,
From the jail of the world to free us.
Drink, drink, what need to shrink,
When the lamps alone can see us?
"Fill up, fill up, while I quaff from
thine eyes
The wine of a softer tree
Give thy smiles to the god of the grape, thy sighs,
Beloved one, give to me.
Turn, turn, my glances burn,
And thirst for a look from thee."
(abridged by Hamilton of Gilbertfield), had made
a very deep impression on Burns’ mind, especially the words—
"Syne to the Leglen wood, when it was
late,
He made a silent and a safe retreat."
This wood was in his own locality, and tic
chose, he tells us, a fine summer day to visit it and explore every den and dingle where
he supposed his heroic countryman to have been. No wonder though his heart glowed with a
wish to make a song on him in some measure equal to his merits. Bitt two things were yet
wanting to the birth of—
"Scots, wha has wi’ Wallace
bled"
—the wild moors of Galloway, and a mood
caught from the thunder-cloud and the tempest which was beating on the brow of the poet,
careering through it—tire Spirit of the Storm! A poem on Wallace, written in the
Leglen wood at this time of his life, would have been, we fear, a tamer affair. Surely the
sternest Sabbatarian would hesitate crc he condemned in a poor man’s life such
precious breathing times (to quote again the words of Gilbert Burns) as this. It did not
imply the forsaking of the assembling of’ himself entirely, or habitual religious
disloyalty. Burns was generally found by his father’s side in the house of God on the
first day of the week. But sometimes his spirit mnoved him to spend the Sabbath in his own
way—in shall we say for him a higher, holier fashion? to worship God in the solitary
woods, or by the murmuring shores of the sea; there often, too, to seek after, if he might
peradventure find, the Ideal of his Art, which appeared glimpsing away, yet beckoning him
to follow, like a coy maiden, into the depths of the forest; and there sometimes, as he
did to his silent, entranced brother, Gilbert, to repeat the newly composed effusions of
his mind; and might not Nature be figured as becoming more deeply still to listen to the
inspired numbers of the "Cottar’s Saturday Night," and to scan the glowing
features of a poet as he passed "sounding" on his way? There are no such
Sabbath-breakers now!
Robert Chambers describes Burns ascending an
eminence during the agitations of Nature, striding along a summit while the lightning
flashed around him, and amidst the howling of the tempest apostrophizing the Spirit of the
Storm. We remember no authentic record elsewhere of any such high-wrought and affected
raptures. Here is his own well-known, simple, and truly sublime picture of his actual
experience. "There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more (I do not know if I
should call it pleasure, but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me),
than a walk on the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation on a cloudy winter day. and
hear the stormy wind howling among the trees and raving over the plain. It is my best
season for devotion; my mind is rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him who, in the
language of the Hebrew bard, ‘walketh on the wings of the wind.’"
This is an extract from a Common-place Book
Burns began to keep in April, 1789, and which will be found elsewhere. It contains many
pithy and many poetical remarks; and coming from so young and inexperienced a man as Burns
was then, is more wonderful than even his songs or poems, and ranks, though on a smaller
scale, with the Journals kept by Byron, Foster, and Sir Walter Scott, as probally the very
best in the literature of our country. We might have mentioned that Burns had, some time
previously, established at Tarbolton a debating club, called "The Bachelors," a
long history of which, written by the poet, has been preserved.
Thus ran on the life of the bard for two or
three years, peacefully, honourably, and on the whole happily, although not without some
aberrations unknown to his career ere he saw Irvine, with its bay, and links, and steeple.
In those years, as with Rousseau, "Early love his Psyche’s zone unbound,"
but it could be hardly said that she hallowed it with loveliness. If there was delight
there was disenchantment, too, and perhaps he might have exclaimed with his brother
Byron—
"The tree of knowledge has been
plucked—all ‘s known."
We gather this from expressions in his
"Journal," and from the guarded evidence of his friends, as well as from the
dying words of his father immediately to be quoted. Meanwhile, that excellent man was fast
sinking to the grave. He was not old, only sixty-three; but he was quite broken down by
severe labour, anxiety, and misfortune. Burns, in a letter dated 21st June, 1783, gives a
very distressing account of the general condition of the small farmers of the period
—a state of things which, along with a dispute about his lease, preyed terribly on
his father’s constitution, and bowed him to the dust. Indeed, he was only saved from
the horrors of a jail by a consumption; and in fine, on the 13th of February, 1784, he
breathed his last. There were present only Mrs. Begg and Robert. She was crying bitterly,
and her father tried to comfort her, although only able to murmur out a few words, closing
with an injunction to walk in virtue’s paths and to shun every sin. He paused, and
then said there was one of his family for whose future conduct lie felt some anxiety, and
repeated the expression; when Robert stepped up to the bedside and said, "Oh, father,
do you mean me ?" The old man replied, "Yes;" and the poet turned round to
the window, his eyes shining through tears, and his heart heaving with sobs. What a scene
for a painter—a Wilkie, Harvey, or Paton! The good old man on his dying bed; the
February sun shining dim and "mottie through the reek," and showing his
"lyart haffets" waxing thin and bare; his pale, stern, and composed features,
and his frame and aspect—purged, earnest, resolute, and stripped, as of one who was
immediately to join a spiritual company; his eye fixed on his erring but beloved son; the
daughter dissolved in infantile sorrow; and Robert, with his face, and its expression of
anguish, and its large eloquent tears, hid as in that picture of ancient Greece, where the
painter employed to paint Agamemnon’s grief at the sacrifice of Iphigenia made
himself immortal by not painting it at all, but drew a curtain over the unutterable
tragedy; and assuredly Burns’ countenance, with that blended look of sorrow, remorse,
and shame, no pencil could adequately depict. Old William Burns was carried to the banks
of the Doon, where he had begun his married life. The coffin was placed between two horses
ranked before each other in tandem-fashion, and followed by his neighbours and family
also, all on horseback, to Alloway kirkyard. There, in that spot, which of all spots bears
most emphatic witness to the triumphs of his son’s creative genius—near the
"winnock bunker in the east"—lies William Burns. Robert erected a simple
tombstone over his remains, having the following stanzas froni his own pen:-
"Oh ye whose cheek the tear of pity
stains.
Draw near with pious reverence and attend!
Here lies the loving husband’s dear remains,
The tender father, and the gen’rous friend;
The pitying heart that felt for human woe;
The dauntless heart that feared no human pride,
The friend of man, to vice alone a foe,
For even his failings leaned to virtue’s side.’"
Seldom, as said before, have we felt more
than when contemplating this simple stone and inscription. While recording on a page, as
immortal as is the "Cottar’s Saturday Night," the virtues of the father, it
seemed an unanswerable certification also of the heart, the filial piety, the nobility,
and the essential Christianity of the son. It completed in thought, and rendered eternal,
the link of reconciliation which seemed broken at the deathbed of the former, and you
longed for some vacant space on which to inscribe the words, "They met in
Heaven!"
Mrs. Begg has told us much of the excellence
of the father. Twice only had she seen him angry—once when returning exhausted and
irritated from some interview with factors and writers anent the unfortunate lawsuit, he
found a young man, one of his servants, wasting hay; and another time when an old man, to
whom he had been very kind, had told a falsehood about him. As he rebuked the foul-mouthed
railer Mrs. Burns gave him a reproachful look, on which he sternly cried, "There must
be no gloomy looks here." This was, so far as she could say, the first and the last
time on which he ever said a harsh thing to his wife. When Mrs. Begg was employed in
herding the kye her father would approach and tell her about the grasses and wild flowers,
to beguile the tedium of her solitary calling; and as she was afraid of thunder, he,
whenever it threatended a storm, would come to her to soothe her terrors. We may as well
add here, that Mrs Begg used to say to an esteemed friend of ours, "Oh! Mr. S, my
brother Robert was not the vile man they make him out to have been, he was a good, pious,
God-fearing man, like his father!". Valeat quantum valere potest. It was
certainly truer than the other version of his character. |
