Delphi Complete Works of Robert Burns (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) (105 page)

The Statue of Burns in Dumfries town centre, unveiled in 1882

INTRODUCTIO
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It is not perhaps generally known that the prose of Burns exceeds in quantity his verse. The world remembers him as a poet, and forgets or overlooks his letters. His place among the poets has never been denied — it is in the first rank; nor is he lowest, though little remembered, among letter-writers. His letters gave Jeffrey a higher opinion of him as a man than did his poetry, though on both alike the critic saw the seal and impress of genius. Dugald Stewart thought his letters objects of wonder scarcely less than his poetry. And Robertson, comparing his prose with his verse, thought the former the more extraordinary of the two. In the popular view of his genius there is, however, no denying the fact that his poetry has eclipsed his prose.

His prose consists mostly of letters, but it also includes a noble fragment of autobiography; three journals of observations made at Mossgiel, Edinburgh, and Ellisland respectively; two itineraries, the one of his border tour, the other of his tour in the Highlands; and historical notes to two collections of Scottish songs. A full enumeration of his prose productions would take account also of his masonic minutes, his inscriptions, a rather curious business paper drawn up by the poet-exciseman in prosecution of a smuggler, and of course his various prefaces, notably the dedication of his poems to the members of the Caledonian Hunt.

His letters, however, far exceed the sum of his other-prose writings. Close upon five hundred and forty have already been published. These are not all the letters he ever wrote. Where, for example, is the literary correspondence in which he engaged so enthusiastically with his Kirkoswald schoolfellows? “Though I had not three farthings’ worth of business in the world, yet every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad-plodding son of daybook and ledger.” Where are the letters which brought to the ploughman at Lochlie such a constant and copious stream of replies? The circumstances of his position will explain why they perished: he was then “a youth and all unknown to fame.” It is even doubtful if the five hundred and forty published letters include all the letters of Burns that now exist. Scarcely a year passes but some epistolary scrap in the well-known handwriting is unearthed and ceremoniously added to the previous sum total, And yet, notwithstanding losses past or within recall, it is probable that we have long had the whole of Burns’s most characteristic letters. It was inevitable that these should be preserved and published. His fame was so rooted in the popular regard in his lifetime, that a characteristic letter from his hand was sure to be received as something singularly precious. It must not be forgotten, however, that Burns’s personality was so intense as to colour the smallest fragment of his correspondence, and it is on this account desirable that every note he penned that yet remains unpublished should be produced. It might give no new feature to our conception of his character; but it would help the shading — which, in the portraiture of any person, must chiefly be furnished by the minor and more commonplace actions of his everyday life.

The correspondence of Burns, as we have it, commences, presumably, near the close of his twenty-second year, and extends to all but exactly the middle of his thirty-eighth. The dates are a day somewhere at the end of 1780, and Monday, 18th July 1796. Between these limits lies the printed correspondence of sixteen years. The sum total of this correspondence allows about thirty-four letters to each year, but the actual distribution is very unequal, ranging from the minimum, in 1782, of one, a masonic letter addressed to Sir John Whitefoord of Ballochmyle, to the maximum number of ninety-two, in 1788, the great year of the Clarinda episode. It is in 1786, the year of the publication of his first volume at Kilmarnock, the year of his literary birth, that his correspondence first becomes heavy. It rises at a leap from two letters in the preceding year to as many as forty-four. The phenomenal increase is partly explained by the success of his poems. He became a man that was worth the knowing, whose correspondence was worth preserving. The six years of his published correspondence previous to the discovery of his genius in 1786 are represented by only fourteen letters in all. But in those years his letters, though both numerous and prized above the common, were not considered as likely to be of future interest, and were therefore suffered to live or die as chance might determine. They mostly perished, the recipients thinking it hardly worth their while to be sae nice wi’ Robin as to preserve them.

After the recognition of his power in 1786, the record of his preserved letters shews, for the ten years of his literary life, several fluctuations which admit of easy explanation. Commencing with 1787, the numbers are: — 78, 92, 54, 33, 44, 31, 66, 30, 27, 24. The first of these years was totally severed from rural occupations, or business of any kind, if we except the publication of the first Edinburgh edition of his poems. It was a complete holiday year to him. He was either resident in Edinburgh, studying men and manners, or touring about the country, visiting those places which history, song, or scenery had made famous. Wherever he was, his fame brought him the acquaintance of a great many new people. His leisure and the novelty of his situation afforded him both opportunity and subject for an extensive correspondence. For a large part of the next year, 1788, he was similarly circumstanced, and the number of his letters was exceptionally increased by his entanglement with Mrs. M’Lehose. To her alone, in less than three months of this year, he wrote at least thirty-six letters, — considerably over one-third of the entire epistolary produce of the year. In 1789 we find the number of his letters fall to fifty-four. This was, perhaps, the happiest year of his life. He was now comfortably established as a farmer in a home of his own, busied with healthy rural work, and finding in the happy fireside clime which he was making for wife and weans “the true pathos and sublime” of human duty. He has still, however, time and inclination to write on the average one letter a week. For each of the next three years the average number is thirty-six. In 1793 the number suddenly goes up to sixty-six: the increase is due to the heartiness with which he took up the scheme of George Thomson to popularise and perpetuate the best old Scottish airs by fitting them with words worthy of their merits. He wrote, in this year, twenty-six letters in support of the scheme.

There is a sad falling off in Burns’s ordinary correspondence in the last three years of his life. The amount of it scarcely touches twenty letters per year. Even the correspondence with Thomson, though on a subject so dear to the heart of Burns, rousing at once both his patriotism and his poetry, sinks to about ten letters per year, and is irregular at that. Burns was losing hope and health, and caring less and less for the world’s favour and the world’s friendships. He had lost largely in self-respect as well as in the respect of friends. The loss gave him little heart to write.

Burns’s correspondents, as far as we know them, numbered over a hundred and fifty persons. The number is large and significant. Neither Gray, nor Cowper, nor Byron commanded so wide a circle. They had not the far-reaching sympathies of Burns. They were all more or less fastidious in their choice of correspondents. Burns, on the contrary, was as catholic, or as careless, in his friendships as his own
Cæsar
— who

“Wad spend an hour caressin’
Ev’n wi’ a tinkler gipsy’s messan.”

He moved freely up and down the whole social scale, blind to the imaginary distinctions of blood and title and the extrinsic differences of wealth, seeing true superiority in an honest manly heart, and bearing himself wherever he found it as an equal and a brother. His correspondents were of every social grade — peers and peasants; of every intellectual attainment — philosophers like Dugald Stewart, and simple swains like Thomas Orr; and of almost every variety of calling, from professional men of recognised eminence to obscure shopkeepers, cottars, and tradesmen. They include servant-girls, gentlewomen, and ladies of titled rank; country schoolmasters and college professors; men of law of all degrees, from poor John Richmond, a plain law-clerk with a lodging in the Lawnmarket, to the Honourable Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty; farmers, small and large; lairds, large and small; shoemakers and shopkeepers; ministers, bankers, and doctors; printers, booksellers, editors; knights, earls — nay, a duke; factors and wine-merchants; army officers, and officers of Excise. His female correspondents were women of superior intelligence and accomplishments. They can lay claim to a large proportion of his letters. Mrs. McLehose takes forty-eight; Mrs. Dunlop, forty-two; Maria Riddell, eighteen; Peggy Chalmers, eleven. These four ladies received among them rather more than one-fourth of the whole of his published correspondence. No four of his male correspondents can be accredited with so many, even though George Thomson for his individual share claims fifty-six.

It is rather remarkable that so few of the letters are addressed to his own relatives. His cousin, James Burness of Montrose, and his own younger brother William receive, indeed, ten and eight respectively; but to his other brother Gilbert, with whom he was on the most affectionate and confidential terms, there fall but three; to his wife only two; one to his father; and none to either his sisters or his mother. A maternal uncle, Samuel Brown, is favoured with one — if, indeed, the old man was not scandalised with it — and there are two to James Armour, mason in Mauchline, his somewhat stony-hearted father-in-law.

Burns’s letters exhibit quite as much variety of mood — seldom, of course, so picturesquely conveyed — as his poems. He is, in promiscuous alternation, refined, gross, sentimental, serious, humorous, indignant, repentant, dignified, vulgar, tender, manly, sceptical, reverential, rakish, pathetic, sympathetic, satirical, playful, pitiably self-abased, mysteriously self-exalted. His letters are confessions and revelations. They are as sincerely and spontaneously autobiographical of his inner life as the sacred lyrics of David the Hebrew. They were indited with as much free fearless abandonment. The advice he gave to young Andrew to keep something to himsel’, not to be told even to a bosom crony, was a maxim of worldly prudence which he himself did not practice. He did not “reck his own rede.” And, though that habit of unguarded expression brought upon him the wrath and revenge of the Philistines, and kept him in material poverty all his days, yet, prompted as it always was by sincerity, and nearly always by absolute truth, it has made the manhood of to-day richer, stronger, and nobler. The world to-day has all the more the courage of its opinions that Burns exercised as a right the freedom of sincere and enlightened speech — and suffered for his bravery.

The subjects of his letters are numerous, and, to a pretty large extent, of much the same sort as the subjects of his poems. Often, indeed, you have the anticipation of an image or a sentiment which his poetry has made familiar. You have a glimpse of green buds which afterwards unfold into fragrance and colour. This is an interesting connection, of which one or two examples may be given. So early as 1781 he wrote to Alison Begbie— “Once you are convinced I am sincere, I am perfectly certain you have too much goodness and humanity to allow an honest man to languish in suspense only because he loves you too well.” Alison Begbie becomes Mary Morison, and the sentiment, so elegantly turned in prose for her, is thus melodiously transmuted for the lady-loves of all languishing lovers —

“O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace
Wha for thy sake would gladly dee,
Or canst thou break that heart of his
Wha’s only faut is loving thee?

If love for love thou wiltna gie,
At least be pity on me shown:
A thocht ungentle canna be
The thocht o’ Mary Morison!”

Again, in the first month of 1783 he writes to Murdoch, the schoolmaster— “I am quite indolent about those great concerns that set the bustling busy sons of care agog; and if I have wherewith to answer for the present hour, I am very easy with regard to anything further. Even the last worst shift of the unfortunate and wretched does not greatly terrify me.” Just one year later this sentiment was sent current in the well-known stanza concluding —

“But, Davie lad, ne’er fash your head
Though we hae little gear;
We’re fit to win our daily bread
As lang’s we’re hale an’ fier;
Mair speer na, nor fear na;
Auld age ne’er mind a fig,
The last o’t, the warst o’t,
Is only for to beg!”

Again, in the letter last referred to occurs the passage— “I am a strict economist, not indeed for the sake of the money, but one of the principal parts in my composition is a kind of pride, and I scorn to fear the face of any man living. Above everything I abhor as hell the idea of sneaking into a corner to avoid a dun.” This is metrically rendered, in May
1786, in
the following lines: —

“To catch dame Fortune’s golden smile,
Assiduous wait upon her,
And gather gear by every wile
That’s justified by honour: —
Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.”

It would be easy to multiply examples: he is jostled in his letters by market-men before he is “hog-shouthered and jundied” by them in his verse; and the legends of Alloway Kirk are narrated in a letter to Grose before the immortal tale of Tam o’Shanter is woven for
The Antiquities of Scotland
.