Robert Burns Part 5

But a wife and children bind me to struggle with the stream, till some sudden squall shall overset the silly vessel, or in the listless return of years its own craziness reduce it to wreck."

The discomfort of his dwelling-place made him not only discontented with his lot, but also with the people amongst whom he found himself.

"I am here," he writes, "on my farm, but for all the pleasurable part of life called social communication, I am at the very elbow of existence. The only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity and canting.... As for the Muses, they have as much idea of a rhinoceros as a poet."

When he was not in Ayrs.h.i.+re in bodily presence, he was there in spirit. It was at such a time that looking up to the hills that divide Nithsdale from Ayrs.h.i.+re, he breathed to his wife that most natural and beautiful of all his love-lyrics,--

Of a' the airts the wind can blaw I dearly like the west, For there the bonnie la.s.sie lives, The la.s.sie I lo'e best.

His disparagement of Nithsdale people, Allan Cunningham, himself a Dumfriess.h.i.+re man, naturally resents, and accounts for it by supposing that the sooty hovel had infected his whole mental atmosphere. "The Maxwells, the Kirkpatricks, and Dalzells," exclaims honest Allan, "were fit companions for any man in Scotland, and they were almost his (p. 098) neighbours; Riddell of Friars Ca.r.s.e, an accomplished antiquarian, lived almost next door; and Jean Lindsay and her husband, Patrick Miller, the laird of Dalswinton, were no ordinary people. The former, beautiful, accomplished, a writer of easy and graceful verses, with a natural dignity of manners which became her station; the latter an improver and inventor, the first who applied steam to the purposes of navigation." But Burns's hasty judgments of men and things, the result of momentary feeling, are not to be too literally construed.

He soon found that there was enough of sociality among all ranks of Dumfriess.h.i.+re people, from the laird to the cotter, indeed, more than was good for himself. Yet, however much he may have complained, when writing letters to his correspondents of an evening, he was too manly to go moping about all day long when there was work to be done. He was, moreover, nerved to the task by the thought that he was preparing the home that was to shelter his wife and children. On the laying of the foundation-stone of his future house, he took off his hat and asked a blessing on it. "Did he ever put his own hand to the work?"

was asked of one of the men engaged in it. "Ay, that he did, mony a time," was the answer, "if he saw us like to be beat wi' a big stane, he would cry, 'Bide a wee,' and come rinning. We soon found out when he put to his hand, he beat a' I ever met for a dour lift."

During his first harvest, though the weather was unfavourable, and the crop a poor one, we find Burns speaking in his letters of being industriously employed, and binding every day after the reapers. But Allan Cunningham's father, who had every opportunity of observing, used to allege that Burns seemed to him like a restless and (p. 099) unsettled man. "He was ever on the move, on foot or on horseback. In the course of a single day he might be seen holding the plough, angling in the river, sauntering, with his hands behind his back, on the banks, looking at the running water, of which he was very fond, walking round his buildings or over his fields; and if you lost sight of him for an hour, perhaps you might see him returning from Friars Ca.r.s.e, or spurring his horse through the hills to spend an evening in some distant place with such friends as chance threw in his way."

Before his new house was ready, he had many a long ride to and fro through the c.u.mnock hills to Mauchline, to visit Jean, and to return.

It was not till the first week of December, 1788, that his lonely bachelor life came to an end, and that he was able to bring his wife and household to Nithsdale. Even then the house at Ellisland was not ready for his reception, and he and his family had to put up for a time in a neighbouring farm-house called the Isle. They brought with them two farm-lads from Ayrs.h.i.+re, and a servant la.s.s called Elizabeth Smith, who was alive in 1851, and gave Chambers many details of the poet's way of life at Ellisland. Among these she told him that her father was so concerned about her moral welfare that, before allowing her to go, he made Burns promise to keep a strict watch over her behaviour, and to exercise her duly in the Shorter Catechism; and that both of these promises he faithfully fulfilled.

The advent of his wife and his child in the dark days of the year kept dulness aloof, and made him meet the coming of the new year (1789) with more cheerful hopes and calmer spirits than he had known for long. Alas, that these were doomed to be so short-lived!

On New Year's morning, 1789, his brother Gilbert thus (p. 100) affectionately writes to the poet: "Dear Brother,--I have just finished my New Year's Day breakfast in the usual form, which naturally makes me call to mind the days of former years, and the society in which we used to begin them; and when I look at our family vicissitudes, 'through the dark postern of time long elapsed,' I cannot help remarking to you, my dear brother, how good the G.o.d of seasons is to us, and that, however some clouds may seem to lower over the portion of time before us, we have great reason to hope that all will turn out well." On the same New Year's Day Burns addressed to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, which, though it has been often quoted, is too pleasing to be omitted here. "I own myself so little a Presbyterian, that I approve set times and seasons of more than ordinary acts of devotion for breaking in on that habituated routine of life and thought, which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very little superior to mere machinery. This day--the first Sunday of May--a breezy, blue-skied noon some time about the beginning, and a h.o.a.ry morning and calm sunny day about the end, of autumn--these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday.... We know nothing, or next to nothing of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that we should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which on minds of a different cast makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the h.o.a.ry hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers (p. 101) in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the aeolian harp, pa.s.sive, takes the impression of the pa.s.sing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities--a G.o.d that made all things--man's immaterial and immortal nature--and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave!"

On reading this beautiful and suggestive letter, an ornithologist remarked that Burns had made a mistake in a fact of natural history.

It is not the 'gray plover,' but the golden, whose music is heard on the moors in autumn. The gray plover, our accurate observer remarks, is a winter sh.o.r.e bird, found only at that season and in that habitat, in this country.

It was not till about the middle of 1789 that the farm-house of Ellisland was finished, and that he and his family, leaving the Isle, went to live in it. When all was ready, Burns bade his servant, Betty Smith, take a bowl of salt, and place the Family Bible on the top of it, and, bearing these, walk first into the new house and possess it.

He himself, with his wife on his arm, followed Betty and the Bible and the salt, and so they entered their new abode. Burns delighted to keep up old-world _freits_ or usages like this. It was either on this occasion, or on his bringing Mrs. Burns to the Isle, that he held a house-heating mentioned by Allan Cunningham, to which all the neighbourhood gathered, and drank, "Luck to the roof-tree of the house of Burns!" The farmers and the well-to-do people welcomed him gladly, and were proud that such a man had come to be a dweller in their (p. 102) vale. Yet the ruder country lads and the lower peasantry, we are told, looked on him not without dread, "lest he should pickle and preserve them in sarcastic song." "Once at a penny wedding, when one or two wild young lads quarrelled, and were about to fight, Burns rose up and said, 'Sit down and ----, or else I'll hang you up like potatoe-bogles in sang to-morrow.' They ceased, and sat down as if their noses had been bleeding."

The house which had cost Burns so much toil in building, and which he did not enter till about the middle of the year 1789, was a humble enough abode. Only a large kitchen, in which the whole family, master and servants, took their meals together, a room to hold two beds, a closet to hold one, and a garret, coom-ceiled, for the female servants, this made the whole dwelling-house. "One of the windows looked southward down the holms; another opened on the river; and the house stood so near the lofty bank, that its afternoon shadow fell across the stream, on the opposite fields. The garden or kail-yard was a little way from the house. A pretty footpath led southward along the river side, another ran northward, affording fine views of the Nith, the woods of Friars Ca.r.s.e, and the grounds of Dalswinton. Half-way down the steep declivity, a fine clear cool spring supplied water to the household." Such was the first home which Burns found for himself and his wife, and the best they were ever destined to find. The months spent in the Isle, and the few that followed the settlement at Ellisland, were among the happiest of his life. Besides trying his best to set himself to farm-industry, he was otherwise bent on well-doing. He had, soon after his arrival in Ellisland, started (p. 103) a parish library, both for his own use and to spread a love of literature among his neighbours, the portioners and peasants of Dunscore. When he first took up house at Ellisland, he used every evening when he was at home, to gather his household for family wors.h.i.+p, and, after the old Scottish custom, himself to offer up prayer in his own words. He was regular, if not constant, in his attendance at the parish church of Dunscore, in which a worthy minister, Mr. Kirkpatrick, officiated, whom he respected for his character, though he sometimes demurred to what seemed to him the too great sternness of his doctrine.

Burns and his wife had not been long settled in their newly-built farm-house, when prudence induced him to ask that he might be appointed Excise officer in the district in which he lived. This request Mr. Graham of Fintray, who had placed his name on the Excise list before he left Edinburgh, at once granted. The reasons that impelled Burns to this step were the increase of his family by the birth of a son in August, 1789, and the prospect that his second year's harvest would be a failure like the first. He often repeats that it was solely to make provision for his increasing family that he submitted to the degradation of--

Searching auld wives' barrels,-- Och, hon! the day!

That clarty barm should stain my laurels, But--what 'ill ye say?

These movin things, ca'd wives and weans, Wad move the very hearts o' stanes.

That he felt keenly the slur that attached to the name of gauger is certain, but it is honourable to him that he resolved bravely to endure it for the sake of his family.

"I know not," he writes, "how the word exciseman, or the still (p. 104) more opprobrious gauger, will sound in your ears. I, too, have seen the day when my auditory nerves would have felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and children are things which have a wonderful power in blunting this kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year for life, and a provision for widows and orphans, you will allow, is no bad settlement for a poet."

In announcing to Dr. Blacklock his new employment, he says,--

But what d'ye think, my trusty fier, I'm turned a gauger--peace be here!

Parna.s.sian queans, I fear, I fear, Ye'll now disdain me!

And then my fifty pounds a year Will little gain me.

Ye ken, ye ken That strang necessity supreme is 'Mang sons o' men.

I hae a wife and twa wee laddies, They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies; Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is, I need na vaunt, But I'll sned besoms, thraw saugh woodies, Before they want.

He would cut brooms and twist willow-ropes before his children should want. But perhaps, as the latest editor of Burns' poems observes, his best saying on the subject of the excisemans.h.i.+p was that word to Lady Glencairn, the mother of his patron, "I would much rather have it said that my profession borrowed credit from me, than that I borrowed it from my profession."

In these words we see something of the bitterness about his new (p. 105) employment, which often escaped from him, both in prose and verse.

Nevertheless, having undertaken it, he set his face honestly to the work. He had to survey ten parishes, covering a tract of not less than fifty miles each way, and requiring him to ride two hundred miles a week. Smuggling was then common throughout Scotland, both in the shape of brewing and of selling beer and whiskey without licence. Burns took a serious yet humane view of his duty. To the regular smuggler he is said to have been severe; to the country folk, farmers or cotters, who sometimes transgressed, he tempered justice with mercy. Many stories are told of his leniency to these last. At Thornhill, on a fair day, he was seen to call at the door of a poor woman who for the day was doing a little illicit business on her own account. A nod and a movement of the forefinger brought the woman to the doorway. "Kate, are you mad? Don't you know that the supervisor and I will be in upon you in forty minutes?" Burns at once disappeared among the crowd, and the poor woman was saved a heavy fine. Another day the poet and a brother gauger entered a widow's house at Dunscore and seized a quant.i.ty of smuggled tobacco. "Jenny," said Burns, "I expected this would be the upshot. Here, Lewars, take note of the number of rolls as I count them. Now, Jock, did you ever hear an auld wife numbering her threads before check-reels were invented? Thou's ane, and thou's no ane, and thou's ane a'out--listen." As he handed out the rolls, and numbered them, old-wife fas.h.i.+on, he dropped every other roll into Jenny's lap. Lewars took the desired note with becoming gravity, and saw as though he saw not. Again, a woman who had been brewing, on seeing Burns coming with another exciseman, slipped out by the back door, leaving a servant and a little girl in the house. "Has (p. 106) there been ony brewing for the fair here the day?" "O no, sir, we hae nae licence for that," answered the servant maid. "That's no true,"

exclaimed the child; "the muckle black kist is fou' o' the bottles o'

yill that my mither sat up a' nicht brewing for the fair."... "We are in a hurry just now," said Burns, "but when we return from the fair, we'll examine the muckle black kist." In acts like these, and in many another anecdote that might be given, is seen the genuine human-heartedness of the man, in strange contrast with the bitternesses which so often find vent in his letters. Ultimately, as we shall see, the exciseman's work told heavily against his farming, his poetry, and his habits of life. But it was some time before this became apparent. The solitary rides through the moors and dales that border Nithsdale gave him opportunities, if not for composing long poems, at any rate for crooning over those short songs in which mainly his genius now found vent. "The visits of the muses to me," he writes, "and I believe to most of their acquaintance, like the visits of good angels, are short and far between; but I meet them now and then as I jog through the hills of Nithsdale, just as I used to do on the banks of Ayr."

Take as a sample some of the varying moods he pa.s.sed through in the summer and autumn of 1789. In the May-time of that year an incident occurs, which the poet thus describes:--"One morning lately, as I was out pretty early in the fields, sowing some gra.s.s-seeds, I heard the burst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, and presently a poor little wounded hare came hirpling by me. You will guess my indignation at the inhuman fellow who could shoot a hare at this season, when all of them have young ones. Indeed there is something in the business of destroying, for our sport, individuals in the animal creation that (p. 107) do not injure us materially, which I could never reconcile to my ideas of virtue." The lad who fired the shot and roused the poet's indignation, was the son of a neighbouring farmer. Burns cursed him, and being near the Nith at the time, threatened to throw him into the river. He found, however, a more innocent vent for his feelings in the following lines:--

Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art, And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye!

May never pity soothe thee with a sigh, Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!

Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field, The bitter little that of life remains: No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.

Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest, No more of rest, but now thy dying bed!

The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head, The cold earth with thy b.l.o.o.d.y bosom prest.

Perhaps a mother's anguish adds its woe; The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side; Ah! helpless nurslings, who will now provide That life a mother only can bestow!

Oft as by winding Nith, I, musing, wait The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn, And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless fate.

This, which is one of the best of the very few good poems which Burns composed in cla.s.sical English, is no mere sentimental effusion, but expresses what in him was a real part of his nature--his tender feeling towards his lower fellow-creatures. The same feeling finds (p. 108) expression in the lines on _The Mouse_, _The Auld Farmer's Address to his Mare_, and _The Winter Night_, when, as he sits by his fireside, and hears the storm roaring without, he says,--

I thought me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O' wintry war.

Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, Beneath a scaur.

Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, That in the merry months o' spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o' thee?

Whare wilt then cow'r thy chittering wing, And close thy e'e?

Though for a time, influenced by the advice of critics, Burns had tried to compose some poems according to the approved models of book-English, we find him presently reverting to his own Doric, which he had lately too much abandoned, and writing in good broad Scotch his admirably humorous description of Captain Grose, an Antiquary, whom he had met at Friars Ca.r.s.e:--

Hear, Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots, Frae Maidenkirk to Johnnie Groats-- If there's a hole in a' your coats, I rede you tent it: A chield's amang you, takin' notes, And, faith, he'll prent it.

By some auld, houlet-haunted biggin, Or kirk deserted by its riggin, It's ten to ane ye'll find him snug in Some eldritch part, Wi' deils, they say, Lord save's! colleaguin'

At some black art.

It's tauld he was a sodger bred, (p. 109) And ane wad rather fa'n than fled; But now he's quat the spurtle-blade, And dog-skin wallet, And taen the--Antiquarian trade, I think they call it.

He has a fouth o' auld nick-nackets; Rusty airn caps, and jinglin' jackets, Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets, A towmont gude And parritch-pats and auld saut-backets, Before the Flood.

Forbye, he'll shape you aff fu' gleg The cut of Adam's philibeg; The knife that nicket Abel's craig He'll prove you fully, It was a faulding jocteleg Or lang-kail gullie.

The meeting with Captain Grose took place in the summer of 1789, and the stanzas just given were written probably about the same time. To the same date belongs his ballad called _The Kirk's Alarm_, in which he once more reverts to the defence of one of his old friends of the New Light school, who had got into the Church Courts, and was in jeopardy from the attacks of his more orthodox brethren. The ballad in itself has little merit, except as showing that Burns still clung to the same school of divines to which he had early attached himself. In September we find him writing in a more serious strain to Mrs. Dunlop, and suggesting thoughts which might console her in some affliction under which she was suffering. "... In vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but when I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and (p. 110) the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct."

That same September Burns, with his friend Allan Masterton, crossed from Nithsdale to Annandale to visit their common friend Nicol, who was spending his vacation in Moffatdale. They met and spent a night in Nicol's lodging. It was a small thatched cottage, near Craigieburn--a place celebrated by Burns in one of his songs--and stands on the right-hand side as the traveller pa.s.ses up Moffatdale to Yarrow, between the road and the river. Few pa.s.s that way now without having the cottage pointed out, as the place where the three merry comrades met that night.

"We had such a joyous meeting," Burns writes, "that Mr. Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business,"

and Burns's celebration of it was the famous baccha.n.a.lian song,--