No More Learning

The dress and condition of Burns when he became a poet were not at all
poetical, in the minstrel meaning of the word. His clothes, coarse and
homely, were made from home-grown wool, shorn off his own sheeps'
backs, carded and spun at his own fireside, woven by the village
weaver, and, when not of natural hodden-gray, dyed a half-blue in the
village vat. They were shaped and sewed by the district tailor, who
usually wrought at the rate of a groat a day and his food; and as the
wool was coarse, so also was the workmanship. The linen which he wore
was home-grown, home-hackled, home-spun, home-woven, and
home-bleached, and, unless designed for Sunday use, was of coarse,
strong harn, to suit the tear and wear of barn and field. His shoes
came from rustic tanpits, for most farmers then prepared their own
leather; were armed, sole and heel, with heavy, broad-headed nails, to
endure the clod and the road: as hats were then little in use, save
among small lairds or country gentry, westland heads were commonly
covered with a coarse, broad, blue bonnet, with a stopple on its flat
crown, made in thousands at Kilmarnock, and known in all lands by the
name of scone bonnets. His plaid was a handsome red and white
check--for pride in poets, he said, was no sin--prepared of fine wool
with more than common care by the hands of his mother and sisters, and
woven with more skill than the village weaver was usually required to
exert. His dwelling was in keeping with his dress, a low, thatched
house, with a kitchen, a bedroom and closet, with floors of kneaded
clay, and ceilings of moorland turf: a few books on a shelf, thumbed
by many a thumb; a few hams drying above head in the smoke, which was
in no haste to get out at the roof--a wooden settle, some oak chairs,
chaff beds well covered with blankets, with a fire of peat and wood
burning at a distance from the gable wall, on the middle of the floor.
His food was as homely as his habitation, and consisted chiefly of
oatmeal-porridge, barley-broth, and potatoes, and milk. How the muse
happened to visit him in this clay biggin, take a fancy to a clouterly
peasant, and teach him strains of consummate beauty and elegance, must
ever be a matter of wonder to all those, and they are not few, who
hold that noble sentiments and heroic deeds are the exclusive portion
of the gently nursed and the far descended.

Of the earlier verses of Burns few are preserved: when composed, he
put them on paper, but the kept them to himself: though a poet at
sixteen, he seems not to have made even his brother his confidante
till he became a man, and his judgment had ripened. He, however, made
a little clasped paper book his treasurer, and under the head of
"Observations, Hints, Songs, and Scraps of Poetry," we find many a
wayward and impassioned verse, songs rising little above the humblest
country strain, or bursting into an elegance and a beauty worthy of
the highest of minstrels. The first words noted down are the stanzas
which he composed on his fair companion of the harvest-field, out of
whose hands he loved to remove the nettle-stings and the thistles: the
prettier song, beginning "Now westlin win's and slaughtering guns,"
written on the lass of Kirkoswald, with whom, instead of learning
mensuration, he chose to wander under the light of the moon: a strain
better still, inspired by the charms of a neighbouring maiden, of the
name of Annie Ronald; another, of equal merit, arising out of his
nocturnal adventures among the lasses of the west; and, finally, that
crowning glory of all his lyric compositions, "Green grow the rashes. "
This little clasped book, however, seems not to have been made his
confidante till his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year: he probably
admitted to its pages only the strains which he loved most, or such as
had taken a place in his memory: at whatever age it was commenced, he
had then begun to estimate his own character, and intimate his
fortunes, for he calls himself in its pages "a man who had little art
in making money, and still less in keeping it. "

We have not been told how welcome the incense of his songs rendered
him to the rustic maidens of Kyle: women are not apt to be won by the
charms of verse; they have little sympathy with dreamers on Parnassus,
and allow themselves to be influenced by something more substantial
than the roses and lilies of the muse. Burns had other claims to their
regard then those arising from poetic skill: he was tall, young,
good-looking, with dark, bright eyes, and words and wit at will: he
had a sarcastic sally for all lads who presumed to cross his path, and
a soft, persuasive word for all lasses on whom he fixed his fancy: nor
was this all--he was adventurous and bold in love trystes and love
excursions: long, rough roads, stormy nights, flooded rivers, and
lonesome places, were no letts to him; and when the dangers or labours
of the way were braved, he was alike skilful in eluding vigilant
aunts, wakerife mothers, and envious or suspicions sisters: for rivals
he had a blow as ready us he had a word, and was familiar with snug
stack-yards, broomy glens, and nooks of hawthorn and honeysuckle,
where maidens love to be wooed.
This rendered him dearer to woman's
heart than all the lyric effusions of his fancy; and when we add to
such allurements, a warm, flowing, and persuasive eloquence, we need
not wonder that woman listened and was won; that one of the most
charming damsels of the West said, an hour with him in the dark was
worth a lifetime of light with any other body; or that the
accomplished and beautiful Duchess of Gordon declared, in a latter
day, that no man ever carried her so completely off her feet as Robert
Burns.

It is one of the delusions of the poet's critics and biographers, that
the sources of his inspiration are to be found in the great classic
poets of the land, with some of whom he had from his youth been
familiar: there is little or no trace of them in any of his
compositions. He read and wondered--he warmed his fancy at their
flame, he corrected his own natural taste by theirs, but he neither
copied nor imitated, and there are but two or three allusions to Young
and Shakspeare in all the range of his verse. He could not but feel
that he was the scholar of a different school, and that his thirst was
to be slaked at other fountains. The language in which those great
bards embodied their thoughts was unapproachable to an Ayrshire
peasant; it was to him as an almost foreign tongue: he had to think
and feel in the not ungraceful or inharmonious language of his own
vale, and then, in a manner, translate it into that of Pope or of
Thomson, with the additional difficulty of finding English words to
express the exact meaning of those of Scotland, which had chiefly been
retained because equivalents could not be found in the more elegant
and grammatical tongue. Such strains as those of the polished Pope or
the sublimer Milton were beyond his power, less from deficiency of
genius than from lack of language: he could, indeed, write English
with ease and fluency; but when he desired to be tender or
impassioned, to persuade or subdue, he had recourse to the Scottish,
and he found it sufficient.

The goddesses or the Dalilahs of the young poet's song were, like the
language in which he celebrated them, the produce of the district; not
dames high and exalted, but lasses of the barn and of the byre, who
had never been in higher company than that of shepherds or ploughmen,
or danced in a politer assembly than that of their fellow-peasants, on
a barn-floor, to the sound of the district fiddle. Nor even of these
did he choose the loveliest to lay out the wealth of his verse upon:
he has been accused, by his brother among others, of lavishing the
colours of his fancy on very ordinary faces. "He had always," says
Gilbert, "a jealousy of people who were richer than himself; his love,
therefore, seldom settled on persons of this description. When he
selected any one, out of the sovereignty of his good pleasure, to whom
he should pay his particular attention, she was instantly invested
with a sufficient stock of charms out of the plentiful stores of his
own imagination: and there was often a great dissimilitude between his
fair captivator, as she appeared to others and as she seemed when
invested with the attributes he gave her. " "My heart," he himself,
speaking of those days, observes, "was completely tinder, and was
eternally lighted up by some goddess or other. " Yet, it must be
acknowledged that sufficient room exists for believing that Burns and
his brethren of the West had very different notions of the captivating
and the beautiful; while they were moved by rosy checks and looks of
rustic health, he was moved, like a sculptor, by beauty of form or by
harmony of motion, and by expression, which lightened up ordinary
features and rendered them captivating. Such, I have been told, were
several of the lasses of the West, to whom, if he did not surrender
his heart, he rendered homage: and both elegance of form and beauty of
face were visible to all in those of whom he afterwards sang--the
Hamiltons and the Burnets of Edinburgh, and the Millers and M'Murdos
of the Nith.

The mind of Burns took now a wider range: he had sung of the maidens
of Kyle in strains not likely soon to die, and though not weary of the
softnesses of love, he desired to try his genius on matters of a
sterner kind--what those subjects were he tells us; they were homely
and at hand, of a native nature and of Scottish growth: places
celebrated in Roman story, vales made famous in Grecian song--hills of
vines and groves of myrtle had few charms for him. "I am hurt," thus
he writes in August, 1785, "to see other towns, rivers, woods, and
haughs of Scotland immortalized in song, while my dear native county,
the ancient Baillieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous in
both ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike race of
inhabitants--a county where civil and religious liberty have ever
found their first support and their asylum--a county, the birth-place
of many famous philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the scene of
many great events recorded in history, particularly the actions of the
glorious Wallace--yet we have never had one Scotch poet of any
eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands
and sequestered scenes of Ayr. and the mountainous source and winding
sweep of the Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, and Tweed.