No More Learning

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. It has been questioned by his first biographer,
whether the refinement of mind, which follows the reading of books of
eloquence and delicacy,--the mental improvement resulting from such
calm discussions as the Tarbolton and Mauchline clubs indulged in, was
not injurious to men engaged in the barn and at the plough. A
well-ordered mind will be strengthened, as well as embellished, by
elegant knowledge, while over those naturally barren and ungenial all
that is refined or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps
of granite, bringing neither warmth nor life.

In the account which the poet gives to Moore of his early poems, he
says little about his exquisite lyrics, and less about "The Death and
dying Words of Poor Mailie," or her "Elegy," the first of his poems
where the inspiration of the muse is visible; but he speaks with
exultation of the fame which those indecorous sallies, "Holy Willie's
Prayer" and "The Holy Tulzie" brought from some of the clergy, and the
people of Ayrshire.
The west of Scotland is ever in the van, when
mutters either political or religious are agitated. Calvinism was
shaken, at this time, with a controversy among its professors, of
which it is enough to say, that while one party rigidly adhered to the
word and letter of the Confession of Faith, and preached up the palmy
and wholesome days of the Covenant, the other sought to soften the
harsher rules and observances of the kirk, and to bring moderation and
charity into its discipline as well as its councils. Both believed
themselves right, both were loud and hot, and personal,--bitter with a
bitterness only known in religious controversy. The poet sided with
the professors of the New Light, as the more tolerant were called, and
handled the professors of the Old Light, as the other party were
named, with the most unsparing severity. For this he had sufficient
cause:--he had experienced the mercilessness of kirk-discipline, when
his frailties caused him to visit the stool of repentance; and
moreover his friend Gavin Hamilton, a writer in Mauchline, had been
sharply censured by the same authorities, for daring to gallop on
Sundays. Moodie, of Riccarton, and Russel, of Kilmarnock, were the
first who tasted of the poet's wrath. They, though professors of the
Old Light, had quarrelled, and, it is added, fought: "The Holy
Tulzie," which recorded, gave at the same time wings to the scandal;
while for "Holy Willie," an elder of Mauchline, and an austere and
hollow pretender to righteousness, he reserved the fiercest of all his
lampoons. In "Holy Willie's Prayer," he lays a burning hand on the
terrible doctrine of predestination: this is a satire, daring,
personal, and profane. Willie claims praise in the singular,
acknowledges folly in the plural, and makes heaven accountable for his
sins! in a similar strain of undevout satire, he congratulates Goudie,
of Kilmarnock, on his Essays on Revealed Religion. These poems,
particularly the two latter, are the sharpest lampoons in the
language.

While drudging in the cause of the New Light controversialists, Burns
was not unconsciously strengthening his hands for worthier toils: the
applause which selfish divines bestowed on his witty, but graceless
effusions, could not be enough for one who knew how fleeting the fame
was which came from the heat of party disputes; nor was he insensible
that songs of a beauty unknown for a century to national poesy, had
been unregarded in the hue and cry which arose on account of "Holy
Willie's Prayer" and "The Holy Tulzie. " He hesitated to drink longer
out of the agitated puddle of Calvinistic controversy, he resolved to
slake his thirst at the pure well-springs of patriot feeling and
domestic love; and accordingly, in the last and best of his
controversial compositions, he rose out of the lower regions of
lampoon into the upper air of true poetry. "The Holy Fair," though
stained in one or two verses with personalities, exhibits a scene
glowing with character and incident and life: the aim of the poem is
not so much to satirize one or two Old Light divines, as to expose and
rebuke those almost indecent festivities, which in too many of the
western parishes accompanied the administration of the sacrament. In
the earlier days of the church, when men were staid and sincere, it
was, no doubt, an impressive sight to see rank succeeding rank, of the
old and the young, all calm and all devout, seated before the tent of
the preacher, in the sunny hours of June, listening to his eloquence,
or partaking of the mystic bread and wine; but in these our latter
days, when discipline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious
come swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence can
edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, and such as these, the poet
has poured his satire; and since this desirable reprehension the Holy
Fairs, east as well as west, have become more decorous, if not more
devout.