No More Learning

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. This is a
complaint I would gladly remedy, but, alas! I am far unequal to the
task, both in genius and education. " To fill up with glowing verse the
outline which this sketch indicates, was to raise the long-laid spirit
of national song--to waken a strain to which the whole land would
yield response--a miracle unattempted--certainly unperformed--since
the days of the Gentle Shepherd. It is true that the tongue of the
muse had at no time been wholly silent; that now and then a burst of
sublime woe, like the song of "Mary, weep no more for me," and of
lasting merriment and humour, like that of "Tibbie Fowler," proved
that the fire of natural poesie smouldered, if it did not blaze; while
the social strains of the unfortunate Fergusson revived in the city,
if not in the field, the memory of him who sang the "Monk and the
Miller's wife. " But notwithstanding these and other productions of
equal merit, Scottish poesie, it must be owned, had lost much of its
original ecstasy and fervour, and that the boldest efforts of the
muse no more equalled the songs of Dunbar, of Douglas, of Lyndsay, and
of James the Fifth, than the sound of an artificial cascade resembles
the undying thunders of Corra.

To accomplish this required an acquaintance with man beyond what the
forge, the change-house, and the market-place of the village supplied;
a look further than the barn-yard and the furrowed field, and a
livelier knowledge and deeper feeling of history than, probably, Burns
ever possessed.
To all ready and accessible sources of knowledge he
appears to have had recourse; he sought matter for his muse in the
meetings, religious as well as social, of the district--consorted with
staid matrons, grave plodding farmers--with those who preached as well
as those who listened--with sharp-tongued attorneys, who laid down the
law over a Mauchline gill--with country squires, whose wisdom was
great in the game-laws, and in contested elections--and with roving
smugglers, who at that time hung, as a cloud, on all the western coast
of Scotland. In the company of farmers and fellow-peasants, he
witnessed scenes which he loved to embody in verse, saw pictures of
peace and joy, now woven into the web of his song, and had a poetic
impulse given to him both by cottage devotion and cottage merriment.
If he was familiar with love and all its outgoings and incomings--had
met his lass in the midnight shade, or walked with her under the moon,
or braved a stormy night and a haunted road for her sake--he was as
well acquainted with the joys which belong to social intercourse, when
instruments of music speak to the feet, when the reek of punchbowls
gives a tongue to the staid and demure, and bridal festivity, and
harvest-homes, bid a whole valley lift up its voice and be glad. It is
more difficult to decide what poetic use he could make of his
intercourse with that loose and lawless class of men, who, from love
of gain, broke the laws and braved the police of their country: that
he found among smugglers, as he says, "men of noble virtues,
magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and modesty," is
easier to believe than that he escaped the contamination of their
sensual manners and prodigality. The people of Kyle regarded this
conduct with suspicion: they were not to be expected to know that when
Burns ranted and housed with smugglers, conversed with tinkers huddled
in a kiln, or listened to the riotous mirth of a batch of "randie
gangrel bodies" as they "toomed their powks and pawned their duds,"
for liquor in Poosie Nansie's, he was taking sketches for the future
entertainment and instruction of the world; they could not foresee
that from all this moral strength and poetic beauty would arise.

While meditating something better than a ballad to his mistress's
eyebrow, he did not neglect to lay out the little skill he had in
cultivating the grounds of Mossgiel. The prosperity in which he found
himself in the first and second seasons, induced him to hope that good
fortune had not yet forsaken him: a genial summer and a good market
seldom come together to the farmer, but at first they came to Burns;
and to show that he was worthy of them, he bought books on
agriculture, calculated rotation of crops, attended sales, held the
plough with diligence, used the scythe, the reap-hook, and the flail,
with skill, and the malicious even began to say that there was
something more in him than wild sallies of wit and foolish rhymes. But
the farm lay high, the bottom was wet, and in a third season,
indifferent seed and a wet harvest robbed him at once of half his
crop: he seems to have regarded this as an intimation from above, that
nothing which he undertook would prosper: and consoled himself with
joyous friends and with the society of the muse. The judgment cannot
be praised which selected a farm with a wet cold bottom, and sowed it
with unsound seed; but that man who despairs because a wet season robs
him of the fruits of the field, is unfit for the warfare of life,
where fortitude is as much required as by a general on a field of
battle, when the tide of success threatens to flow against him. The
poet seems to have believed, very early in life, that he was none of
the elect of Mammon; that he was too much of a genius ever to acquire
wealth by steady labour, or by, as he loved to call it, gin-horse
prudence, or grubbing industry.

And yet there were hours and days in which Burns, even when the rain
fell on his unhoused sheaves, did not wholly despair of himself: he
laboured, nay sometimes he slaved on his farm; and at intervals of
toil, sought to embellish his mind with such knowledge as might be
useful, should chance, the goddess who ruled his lot, drop him upon
some of the higher places of the land. He had, while he lived at
Tarbolton, united with some half-dozen young men, all sons of farmers
in that neighbourhood, in forming a club, of which the object was to
charm away a few evening hours in the week with agreeable chit-chat,
and the discussion of topics of economy or love. Of this little
society the poet was president, and the first question they were
called on to settle was this, "Suppose a young man bred a farmer, but
without any fortune, has it in his power to marry either of two women;
the one a girl of large fortune, but neither handsome in person, nor
agreeable in conversation, but who can manage the household affairs of
a farm well enough; the other of them, a girl every way agreeable in
person, conversation, and behaviour, but without any fortune, which of
them shall he choose? " This question was started by the poet, and once
every week the club were called to the consideration of matters
connected with rural life and industry: their expenses were limited to
threepence a week; and till the departure of Burns to the distant
Mossgiel, the club continued to live and thrive; on his removal it
lost the spirit which gave it birth, and was heard of no more; but its
aims and its usefulness were revived in Mauchline, where the poet was
induced to establish a society which only differed from the other in
spending the moderate fines arising from non-attendance, on books,
instead of liquor. Here, too, Burns was the president, and the members
were chiefly the sons of husbandmen, whom he found, he said, more
natural in their manners, and more agreeable than the self-sufficient
mechanics of villages and towns, who were ready to dispute on all
topics, and inclined to be convinced on none. This club had the
pleasure of subscribing for the first edition of the works of its
great associate.