Between Ourselves Page 6

  The house was silent as a grave. As if everyone had left to keep an engagement elsewhere. Only myself for company till finally Betty brought the gruel.

  Turned again to Clarinda’s letter, and was drawn to her melancholy poem written outside the city walls on Bruntsfield Links. She felt utterly abandoned by the one whose nearest duty was to cherish her.

  Go on sweet bird and soothe my care

  Thy cheerful notes will hush despair

  Thy tuneful warblings void of art

  Thrill sweetly through my aching heart.

  Gregory was much taken with this also. It has the true note of sorrow, elegantly expressed in the first stanza at least. Clipped the blackbird’s wings and set her singing to an old Scots melody. Much improved all round.

  Postponed writing my Life till tomorrow. How many times can a man explain himself, and to what purpose?

  Later. Day lightened by a New Year letter from Clarinda, my rural mistress. Many happy returns of the season. Then after some literary nothings, she delivers the coup de grâce. While seeking to deflect amorous intention she achieves the contrary effect. Her intellectual command excites me beyond forbearance. She is my equal, an object of desiring sans compeer.

  Interleaved: Clarinda’s New Year letter.

  Where worth unites with abilities it commands our love as well as admiration. Alas, they are too seldom found in one character! Those possessed of great talents would do well to remember that all depends upon the use made of them. Shining abilities improperly applied only serve to accelerate our destruction in both worlds.

  I loved you for your fine taste in poetry long before I saw you. So I shall not trouble to erase that word applied in the same way to me. You say, ‘there is no corresponding with an agreeable woman without a mixture of the tender passion’. I believe there is no friendship between people of sentiment and of different sexes without a little softness. But when kept within proper bounds it only serves to give a higher relish to such intercourse.

  Love and Friendship are names in everyone’s mouth, but few, extremely few, understand their meaning. Love – or affection – cannot be genuine if it hesitates a moment to sacrifice every selfish gratification to the happiness of its object. On the contrary, when it purchases one at the expense of the other it deserves to be called not Love but a name too gross to mention.

  I therefore contend that an honest man may have a friendly prepossession for a woman whose soul would abhor the idea of an intrigue. These are my sentiments upon this subject; I hope they correspond with yours.

  It is honest in you to wish me to see you ‘just as you are’. I believe I have a tolerably just idea of your character. No wonder, since had I been a man I should have been you. I am not vain enough to think myself equal in abilities, but I am formed with a liveliness of fancy and strength of passion little inferior.

  Situation and circumstances have of course had the effect on us that might be expected. Misfortune has subdued the keenness of my passions, while the adulation of success has nourished and inflamed yours. Both of us are incapable of deceit, since we lack the coolness to command our feelings. Art is what I could never attain to, even in situations where a little would be prudent. Nature has thrown me off in the same mould just after you – we were born I believe in the same year. Madame Nature has some merit by her double handiwork – do you not agree?

  Seriously revised my Life. The letter to Moore has done before, but it is in need of discreet pruning. This will be for Clarinda’s eyes only.

  Once begun I wrote steadily through the day, finishing strongly on religious principle – to counteract my atheistical character. I will make a fair copy ready to leave in her hands when we finally meet. For I cannot trust to those fleeting moments to give a just impression of my poor wayward self. She may already be stockaded about with prejudice – a stout obstacle to any amorous enthusiast.

  Day and evening have been consumed by honest labour. This eased my melancholy, and I retired to rest satisfied and hopeful despite all the troubles of a new year.

  Rarely has a messenger been hailed with such impatience and relief. Clarinda is back in town and in receipt of my poetic offering. She sends me a gentle reproof – talk not of love, it gives me pain, for love has been my foe. Instead she proffers friendship’s pure and lasting joys... but never talk of love.

  The third stanza of her poem needs alteration, and there is a slight inaccuracy of rhyme in the second. But both are easily mended. Set to ‘The Banks of Spey’ this might adorn Johnson’s Musical Museum. I hazard though one more stanza.

  Your thought if love must harbour there

  Conceal it in that thought

  Nor cause me from my bosom tear

  The very friend I sought.

  Could I venture round now to Potterrow in a coach without hurting myself, Clarinda sweetly enquires. How much can two people pass between them without seeing each other?

  By sedan chair I may come, borne by cadies whose every breath is sober, steeled against satiric shafts. If I could be sure of finding you at home…

  I will spend from five to six o’clock with Mrs McLehose. And one other evening before I leave town for good. My mind misgives as to how and when to present my autobiography.

  He who sees Clarinda as I have done and does not love her, deserves to be damned for stupidity. He who loves and would injure her shall be cast into the fiery furnace.

  Adieu, Clarinda, till I meet my Nancy once again in the flesh. Sweet dream, adieu.

  EDINBURGH

  January 1788

  A History of Myself

  by

  Robert Burns

  Marked with Some Emendations and Interleaved at the back of the Journal

  I HAVE TAKEN the resolution to give you a history of myself. You have done me the honour to interest yourself warmly in the poet and his works, and I think that a faithful account of what character of a man I am and how I came by that character may amuse you.

  I will give an honest narrative though I know it will be at the cost of being frequently laughed at. For though I esteem wisdom like a Solomon, I have often turned my eyes to behold madness and folly, and joined hands with them in intoxicating friendship. If after scanning these pages you think them trifling or impertinent, only consider that the poor author penned them with twitching qualms of conscience that perhaps he was doing what he ought not to do, a predicament that he has found himself in more than once.

  I have not even the most distant pretensions to be what the heraldic guardians call a gentleman. Almost every name in the kingdom can claim some mention in the Lord Lyon’s annals but gules, purpure and argent have disowned me.

  My ancestors rented land in Aberdeenshire from the noble Keiths of Martial, and had the honour to share their fate. By honour I do not refer to party principle, but their willingness to accept ruin and disgrace for what they sincerely believed to be the cause of their God and King, the Royal House of Stewart.

  I mention this because it threw my father on the world at large, where after many years’ wanderings and labour he gained a large share of observation and experience to which I have always been indebted. I have met with few people who understood men and their manners as well as my father. Yet stubborn, ungainly integrity along with headlong, ungovernable irascibility are disqualifying circumstances in the world. So I was born a very poor man’s son.

  For the first seven years of my life my father was the gardener to a small estate near Ayr. Had he continued in that situation I would have gone off to be raised as a farm boy in the neighbourhood. But it was his dearest wish to keep his children under a father’s eye till they could discern between good and evil. So, with the assistance of his master, he ventured himself on a small farm in the area.

  As a child I was noted for retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition, and a blind enthusiasm for all things religious and imaginative. Though I cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I was an excellent English scholar and aged ten, a c
ritic in substantive verbs and particles.

  In my infant days, though I was by no means a favourite, I owed much to an old maid of my mother’s, remarkable for her credulity and superstition. Betty Davidson had the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. These wonders cultivated latent seeds of poesy, yet had such an effect on my imagination that to this hour in my nocturnal rambles I keep a sharp lookout, though nobody could be more sceptical in these matters than the poet.

  The earliest composition I remember taking pleasure in was Addison’s hymn beginning ‘How are thy servants blessed, O Lord.’ I still recall one half stanza which caught my boyish ear: ‘For though in dreadful whirls we hang, High on the broken wave’. I met these pieces in Masson’s English Collection, one of my school books.

  The first two books I ever read in private were the Life of Hannibal, and the History of Sir William Wallace. They gave me more delight than any books I have read since. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut up and down in raptures after the recruiting drum and pipes. The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest.

  My closeness to Ayr was a great advantage. I formed many attachments and friendships with other youngsters who possessed superior privileges to mine. Youngling actors busy with the rehearsal of parts, they were destined to feature on a stage behind whose scenes I would be a menial drudge. In these green years the young noblesse and gentry do not have that sense of unbridgeable distance between themselves and their ragged playfellows. It takes a few dashes into the world to give the fledgling Great Man a proper disregard for the mechanics and peasantry around him.

  However these young superiors never insulted the clouterly appearance of my ploughboy carcase, both ends of which were exposed to all the rigours of the seasons. They lent me storybooks, one of which helped me to a little French. Then bit by bit I experienced the sore affliction of partings as one by one they dropped off for the East or West Indies.

  But soon I was called to more serious evils. My father’s generous old master died. Our farm proved a ruinous bargain, and as if to clinch our misfortune we fell into the hands of a factor who was as merciless as he was unjust. My father had already been advanced in years when he married and I was the eldest of seven children. Worn out by early hardship and unfit for labour, his spirit was easily irritated, yet not broken.

  We retrenched expenses, dispensed with hired labour, and lived very poorly. I was a skilled ploughman for my young years, and my nearest brother Gilbert could drive the plough, harvest and thresh with me. The novel writer might view these scenes as pastoral, but in truth I combined the gloom of a hermit with the unceasing toil of a galley slave. Life was accompanied by hurts, strains and miserable soakings. My heart still boils with indignation at that tyrant factor’s threatening letters which reduced all of us to tears.

  It was in my fifteenth year that I first committed the sin of rhyme. The country custom was to couple a man and a woman together, reaping and binding. My partner in that fifteenth autumn was just one year younger. My poor English does her no justice for in Scotch she was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lassie.

  Unwittingly she initiated me into that delicious passion which, in spite of bookworm philosophy and acid disappointment, I still hold to be the first of human joys and the dearest delight of our earthly life.

  I never told her that I loved her, so how she caught the contagion I know not. I did not really know myself why I liked to loiter with her when we came home together in the evening from the fields, why her voice made my heart quiver like a harp, why my pulse beat with a rat-tat-tat when I gently fingered over her hand to pick out the thorns and thistles.

  She also sang sweetly and it was her favourite reel that I tried to set to rhyme. I did not imagine that I could make verses like printed ones – written by men who knew Latin and Greek. But when I heard her sing a country song I felt that I could make something of the same kind. So began for me love and poetry, which till this last year have been my highest enjoyment.

  My father struggled on till he reached the freedom of his lease, when he took a larger farm ten miles further out into the country. This new bargain put a little ready money in his hand for the first few years. We lived comfortably until a lawsuit between us and the landlord tossed and whirled my father into the vortex of litigation. Then consumption kindly stepped in to snatch him from incarceration and convey him to that bourne where the wrecked cease from trembling and the weary are at rest.

  During this time I was still the most ungainly being in the parish. My knowledge was had from school texts and the periodicals. Pope’s poetry, some plays of Shakespeare, Dickson on Agriculture, Stackhouse’s History of the Bible, Taylor’s Doctrine of Original Sin, Allan Ramsay’s Works, Hervey’s Meditations and Select English Songs, were the full extent of my reading. I pored over that song collection, driving my cart or walking to the field, line by line, verse by verse, carefully dividing the tender and sublime from the affected.

  In my seventeenth year I went to a country dancing school to give my manners a brush. My father took against these assemblies but I continued in absolute defiance, which I repent to this hour. As I said before, my father was prey to strong passions, and from this rebellion he took an aversion to me, which I believe was one cause of the dissipation I became party to. I say dissipation, but only in comparison to the sobriety of country Presbyterians of the old Covenanting kind. Whatever thoughtless whims distracted me, ingrained piety and virtue never failed to point the path of innocence.

  The great misfortune of my life was not to have an aim. My early stirrings of ambition were like the blind gropings of a Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I felt bound by my father’s situation to perpetual labour. My only access to livelihood opened onto niggard economy or the chicanery of bargain-making. I could not squeeze myself through that narrow aperture.

  Meanwhile my strong sociability, native hilarity, a pride of observation and remark, a hypochondriac taint that caused me to flee solitude, my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a strength of thought masquerading as good sense, all combined to make me a welcome guest and companion. So where two or three gathered together, there was I in the midst of them.

  But beyond all other impulses, my heart was tinder, eternally lit up by some goddess or another. Sometimes I was crowned with success, sometimes mortified by defeat. At plough, scythe or reaping hook, I feared no competitor and defied want. But I spent the evenings pursuing my own desire. The very goose feather in my hand seems instinctively to know the well-worn tenor of my imagination – the fervent theme of my song. Only with difficulty is it prevented from tracing the amours of my compatriots, lowly denizens of farmhouse and cottage. The grave doctors of science and religion name these follies, but to the sons and daughters of labour they are matters of the most serious import. To them the ardent hope, the stolen interview, the exchange of love, and the tender farewell constitute the finest and most delicious part of their existence.

  My life flowed on in much the same course till my twenty-third year. Vive l’amour and vive la bagatelle were my sole principles of action. But the addition of two more bosom companions gave me great pleasure. Tristram Shandy and The Man of Feeling were my especial favourites. Poetry was still the darling of my walks but it was only a humour of the hour. Usually I had half a dozen or more pieces on hand, taking up and laying them down as it suited my inclination or fatigue. Once lighted my passions raged like so many devils till they got vent in rhyme. Then conning over my verses like a spell soothed all into quiet. None of the rhymes of those days were in print – apart from the ‘Winter Dirge’ – until James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum gave them a home.

  That twenty-third year marked
the first great crisis of my life – the first at any rate arising purely from my own initiative. Partly from whim and partly that I wished to find another means of living, I joined with a flax dresser in the neighbouring town of Irvine. My ambition was to learn his trade and carry on the business of manufacturing and retailing flax.

  This turned out badly. My partner was a scoundrel whose trade was mingled with that of theft. And to finish the whole sorry tale, while we were welcoming in the New Year, by the drunken carelessness of my partner’s wife, our shop was burnt to ashes, leaving me, like the proverbial poet, without sixpence to my name.

  I was obliged to surrender the business, at the very moment when the clouds of misfortune were lowering over my father’s head. Darkest of these was the consumption that was visibly wasting him. Then to crown all, a belle fille whom I adored and who had pledged her soul in the field of matrimony, jilted me at her father’s instigation. Our engagement was spurned and denied in mortifying circumstances.[ Sentence scored out.] My hypochondriac complaint was so inflamed that I spent three months in a diseased state of mind and body.

  Nonetheless I learned something of town life from this episode. And I formed a close friendship with a young man, the first human being whom I had really known in their inner clothing. Though himself a hapless son of misfortune, this young gentleman’s mind was fraught with courage, independence, magnanimity, and every manly noble virtue. He turned my mind, I loved him, I admired him, and I strove to imitate him.

  And in some measure I succeeded. I had the pride before and the passion but he taught them to flow through proper channels. His knowledge of the world was vastly superior to mine and I was attentive to all his lessons. Moreover, he was the only man I ever saw who was a greater fool than myself when woman was the presiding star. Yet he spoke of fashionable failings which I had hitherto regarded in horror with levity. Here at any rate his friendship did me a mischief, and in consequence soon after I resumed the plough, I had to welcome a child whose mother refused me marriage, though I stoutly maintained the duties of fatherhood.