No More Learning

"Man was made to
Mourn'" takes the part of the humble and the homeless, against the
coldness and selfishness of the wealthy and the powerful, a favourite
topic of meditation with Burns. He refrained, for awhile, from making
"Death and Doctor Hernbook" public; a poem which deviates from the
offensiveness of personal satire, into a strain of humour, at once
airy and original.

His epistles in verse may be reckoned amongst his happiest
productions: they are written in all moods of mind, and are, by turns,
lively and sad; careless and serious;--now giving advice, then taking
it; laughing at learning, and lamenting its want; scoffing at
propriety and wealth, yet admitting, that without the one he cannot be
wise, nor wanting the other, independent. The Epistle to David Sillar
is the first of these compositions: the poet has no news to tell, and
no serious question to ask: he has only to communicate his own
emotions of joy, or of sorrow, and these he relates and discusses with
singular elegance as well as ease, twining, at the same time, into the
fabric of his composition, agreeable allusions to the taste and
affections of his correspondent. He seems to have rated the intellect
of Sillar as the highest among his rustic friends: he pays him more
deference, and addresses him in a higher vein than he observes to
others. The Epistles to Lapraik, to Smith, and to Rankine, are in a
more familiar, or social mood, and lift the veil from the darkness of
the poet's condition, and exhibit a mind of first-rate power, groping,
and that surely, its way to distinction, in spite of humility of
birth, obscurity of condition, and the coldness of the wealthy or the
titled. The epistles of other poets owe some of their fame to the rank
or the reputation of those to whom they are addressed; those of Burns
are written, one and all, to nameless and undistinguished men. Sillar
was a country schoolmaster, Lapraik a moorland laird, Smith a small
shop-keeper, and Rankine a farmer, who loved a gill and a joke. Yet
these men were the chief friends, the only literary associates of the
poet, during those early years, in which, with some exceptions, his
finest works were written.

Burns, while he was writing the poems, the chief of which we have
named, was a labouring husbandman on the little farm of Mossgiel, a
pursuit which affords but few leisure hours for either reading or
pondering; but to him the stubble-field was musing-ground, and the
walk behind the plough, a twilight saunter on Parnassus. As, with a
careful hand and a steady eye, he guided his horses, and saw an evenly
furrow turned up by the share, his thoughts were on other themes; he
was straying in haunted glens, when spirits have power--looking in
fancy on the lasses "skelping barefoot," in silks and in scarlets, to
a field-preaching--walking in imagination with the rosy widow, who on
Halloween ventured to dip her left sleeve in the burn, where three
lairds' lands met--making the "bottle clunk," with joyous smugglers,
on a lucky run of gin or brandy--or if his thoughts at all approached
his acts--he was moralizing on the daisy oppressed by the furrow which
his own ploughshare had turned. That his thoughts were thus wandering
we have his own testimony, with that of his brother Gilbert; and were
both wanting, the certainty that he composed the greater part of his
immortal poems in two years, from the summer of 1784 to the summer of
1786, would be evidence sufficient. The muse must have been strong
within him, when, in spite of the rains and sleets of the
"ever-dropping west"--when in defiance of the hot and sweaty brows
occasioned by reaping and thrashing--declining markets, and showery
harvests--the clamour of his laird for his rent, and the tradesman for
his account, he persevered in song, and sought solace in verse, when
all other solace was denied him.

The circumstances under which his principal poems were composed, have
been related: the "Lament of Mailie" found its origin in the
catastrophe of a pet ewe; the "Epistle to Sillar" was confided by the
poet to his brother while they were engaged in weeding the kale-yard;
the "Address to the Deil" was suggested by the many strange portraits
which belief or fear had drawn of Satan, and was repeated by the one
brother to the other, on the way with their carts to the kiln, for
lime; the "Cotter's Saturday Night" originated in the reverence with
which the worship of God was conducted in the family of the poet's
father, and in the solemn tone with which he desired his children to
compose themselves for praise and prayer; "the Mouse," and its moral
companion "the Daisy," were the offspring of the incidents which they
relate; and "Death and Doctor Hornbook" was conceived at a
freemason-meeting, where the hero of the piece had shown too much of
the pedant, and composed on his way home, after midnight, by the poet,
while his head was somewhat dizzy with drink. One of the most
remarkable of his compositions, the "Jolly Beggars," a drama, to which
nothing in the language of either the North or South can be compared,
and which was unknown till after the death of the author, was
suggested by a scene which he saw in a low ale-house, into which, on a
Saturday night, most of the sturdy beggars of the district had met to
sell their meal, pledge their superfluous rags, and drink their gains.
It may be added, that he loved to walk in solitary spots; that his
chief musing-ground was the banks of the Ayr; the season most
congenial to his fancy that of winter, when the winds were heard in
the leafless woods, and the voice of the swollen streams came from
vale and hill; and that he seldom composed a whole poem at once, but
satisfied with a few fervent verses, laid the subject aside, till the
muse summoned him to another exertion of fancy. In a little back
closet, still existing in the farm-house of Mossgiel, he committed
most of his poems to paper.

But while the poet rose, the farmer sank. It was not the cold clayey
bottom of his ground, nor the purchase of unsound seed-corn, not the
fluctuation in the markets alone, which injured him; neither was it
the taste for freemason socialities, nor a desire to join the mirth of
comrades, either of the sea or the shore: neither could it be wholly
imputed to his passionate following of the softer sex--indulgence in
the "illicit rove," or giving way to his eloquence at the feet of one
whom he loved and honoured; other farmers indulged in the one, or
suffered from the other, yet were prosperous. His want of success
arose from other causes; his heart was not with his task, save by fits
and starts: he felt he was designed for higher purposes than
ploughing, and harrowing, and sowing, and reaping: when the sun called
on him, after a shower, to come to the plough, or when the ripe corn
invited the sickle, or the ready market called for the measured grain,
the poet was under other spells, and was slow to avail himself of
those golden moments which come but once in the season. To this may be
added, a too superficial knowledge of the art of farming, and a want
of intimacy with the nature of the soil he was called to cultivate. He
could speak fluently of leas, and faughs, and fallows, of change of
seed and rotation of crops, but practical knowledge and application
were required, and in these Burns was deficient. The moderate gain
which those dark days of agriculture brought to the economical farmer,
was not obtained: the close, the all but niggardly care by which he
could win and keep his crown-piece,--gold was seldom in the farmer's
hand,--was either above or below the mind of the poet, and Mossgiel,
which, in the hands of an assiduous farmer, might have made a
reasonable return for labour, was unproductive, under one who had
little skill, less economy, and no taste for the task.

Other reasons for his failure have been assigned. It is to the credit
of the moral sentiments of the husbandmen of Scotland, that when one
of their class forgets what virtue requires, and dishonours, without
reparation, even the humblest of the maidens, he is not allowed to go
unpunished. No proceedings take place, perhaps one hard word is not
spoken; but he is regarded with loathing by the old and the devout; he
is looked on by all with cold and reproachful eyes--sorrow is foretold
as his lot, sure disaster as his fortune; and is these chance to
arrive, the only sympathy expressed is, "What better could he expect? "
Something of this sort befel Burns: he had already satisfied the kirk
in the matter of "Sonsie, smirking, dear-bought Bess," his daughter,
by one of his mother's maids; and now, to use his own words, he was
brought within point-blank of the heaviest metal of the kirk by a
similar folly. The fair transgressor, both for her fathers and her own
youth, had a large share of public sympathy. Jean Armour, for it is of
her I speak, was in her eighteenth year; with dark eyes, a handsome
foot, and a melodious tongue, she made her way to the poet's
heart--and, as their stations in life were equal, it seemed that they
had only to be satisfied themselves to render their union easy. But
her father, in addition to being a very devout man, was a zealot of
the Old Light; and Jean, dreading his resentment, was willing, while
she loved its unforgiven satirist, to love him in secret, in the hope
that the time would come when she might safely avow it: she admitted
the poet, therefore, to her company in lonesome places, and walks
beneath the moon, where they both forgot themselves, and were at last
obliged to own a private marriage as a protection from kirk censure.
The professors of the Old Light rejoiced, since it brought a scoffing
rhymer within reach of their hand; but her father felt a twofold
sorrow, because of the shame of a favourite daughter, and for having
committed the folly with one both loose in conduct and profane of
speech.