National Library of Scotland UlllliUlll *6000182753* THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS ) l > 1 Annan €r Sons We, Robert Burns, by Virtue of a Warrant from Nature’ ‘God Save the Bard’ THE WATSON-REID MINIATURE The Scottish National ^Portrait Gallery. THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS % Catherine Carswell CHATTO & WINDUS : LONDON MCMXXX PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY T. AND A. CONSTABLE LTD. EDINBURGH ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Without D. H. LAWRENCE, my friend, and DONALD CARSWELL, my husband, this book could not have been. I therefore inscribe it to them both— ‘ That I, for poor auld Scotland’s sake, Some usefu’ plan or beuk could make.’ PREFACE BIOGRAPHERS of Burns have all one point at least in common with each other and with their poet. Many eyes ‘ watch for their halting.’ As there has not yet been a Burns biographer worth reading who has made no mistakes, and there probably never will be one, the watchers need never go empty away. Our biographical material has been shockingly dealt with, much of it wantonly mutilated and some of it deliberately destroyed, a fact which in itself has to be reckoned with in attempting to restore just proportions. What remains is widely scattered and deeply imbedded in other matter. In the present case new, hitherto unprinted, material of the first importance has kept cropping up even after the book was in proof, and though no pains have been spared to incorporate it relevantly in the narrative it is highly possible that other existing information has been missed and that more, as yet undiscovered, will be forthcoming. Where possible I have gone direct to the sources. In this endeavour my warmest acknowledgments are due to Professor De Lancey Ferguson of Ohio Wesleyan University, U.S.A., both for allowing me access to the MS. of his forthcoming unique edition of Burns’s letters and for reading my own MS. for inaccuracies; and to Dr. Joseph Hunter, M.P., for most generous and unstinted assistance in many ways, especially in respect of Burns’s latter days in Dumfries. I am deeply grateful also to Mr. George Shirley of the Ewart Public Library, Dumfries, for his valuable guidance on many difficult points. Others who have shown kindness that was as useful as it was unprejudiced, are Mr. J. A. Anderson, Past President of the London Burns Club, Sir viii THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS James Crichton-Browne, the Rev. Dr. J. King Hewison, Mr. Peter Roberts of the Scotsman, and the late Mr. Philip Sulley. I have to thank my brother, Major G. G. Macfarlane, M.C., for the portrait of our great-great- grandfather, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, and Miss F. C. Adamson for the Burns holograph of ‘ The Wee German Lairdie.’ Many more men and women not known to me have provided in the course of correspondence details of special knowledge which were helpful in a narrative of the kind I have attempted. The twentieth-century biographer who would be some- thing more than a summariser of nineteenth-century bio- graphies undertakes a perilous passage between the Scylla of the established Burnsians, who guard their idol with a jealousy not unmixed with fears, and the Charybdis of the ordinary reader, whose indifference is too often tinged with a distaste for which I fear we Burns worshippers must bear some of the blame. As an up-to-date Burns worshipper who was once similarly afflicted with indifference and distaste, I have undertaken that perilous passage. My sustaining faith has been faith in my subject, which has increasingly appeared to me as far above calling for the condescensions of excuse or the suppressions of partial representation, however well- meant. My sustaining hope is that, once the entire Burns is presented to the modern reader, no question can arise con- cerning that ‘ idle Vanity of malevolence ’ which the poet felt only too nearly in his lifetime and dreaded only too comprehensibly in his immediate posterity. Of charity toward Burns I have felt no need. Even in the past the implications of the charitable have perhaps harmed his memory more than the aspersions of the ill-natured. But happily the time is come when the best minds can find nothing shocking in that frankness of the normal man which was so dear to the Bard, so characteristic of his best hours and so disastrous in its effects because of the gentility that PREFACE ix hemmed him in. It was ‘ the contumelious sneer ’ of that gentility, not honest disclosure, that he rightly feared. Even so, he as rightly foresaw that the potential sneerers would be ‘ gone to the regions of oblivion ’ when he and his songs remained an evergreen branch stretching out beyond the confines of the classic grove and over the pathway of the wayfaring man. With the sneerers have gone what he hated almost as much—the need for charitable concealments and cautious moralisings. If practitioners of such remain, they are alike anomalous to modern European thought and incapable of savouring the genuine old Scotland of which Burns was the flaming embodiment. What does remain, and will always remain, is the question of sympathy or lack of sympathy in a biographer. It has seemed to me that to lack sympathy with Burns is to lack sympathy with mankind. Where the incidents of the poet’s life are obscure I have felt obliged for the sake of a plain narrative to make my choice after prolonged study of all the evidence at my dis- posal and to relate my finding as definitely as though it were the only one possible. This method is liable to criticism and the conviction of error, but it has the advantage of being the procedure of life itself and the way in which we all deal with the individual lives around us. If we did not, we could never form or express any vital opinion of our fellows and their actions; for assuredly we can never come into possession of complete evidence concerning them, even when they are of our own household. But, open as it is to mistake, a committed opinion (so long as it be free from the mischief of self-seeking or ill-will) has more of the stuff of life in it than a series of conflicting suggestions offered noncommitally. So, anyhow, I have thought. I have not hesitated to commit myself; and if I have nowhere suppressed any fact I felt to be relevant, I have been equally scrupulous not knowingly to twist facts to fit with any preconceived theory. In the case, for instance, of the quarrel with Mrs. THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS Walter Riddel, I have felt bound, though with reluctance, to admit the latest view (based by Mr. Hugh Gladstone and Professor Ferguson upon dates that show Walter Riddel to have been out of the country on the day of the unlucky party) and so to relate the quarrel as between Burns and Mrs. Robert Riddel in the first place—this, though to my mind it raises as many problems as it settles. In matters of fact I have accepted the latest credible authority or information, always with special reference to reports in the Burns Chronicle. In matters of deduction, without which no living narrative can be constructed, I have relied upon my own conception of Burns formed by years of unremitted study and upon what knowledge I have of life through my own experience. This last may seem a superfluous state- ment, but the factor has been strangely absent in bio- graphers of Burns, most of whom would seem to be immune from experience alike of folly and of passion in themselves. They have felt impelled, as did Burns’s Edinburgh hosts, to ‘ make allowances ’ for something in a ploughman outlandish to their own existences. But now, with the turn of the wheel of the centuries, it is for the Edinburgh hosts that allowances must be made and charity enjoined. C. C. Paris, July 14, 1930. CONTENTS PREFACE page vii PART I. PRELUDE I II. FATHER AND SON 37 III. MOSSGIEL 131 IV. EDINBURGH 209 V. DUMFRIES 327 APPENDIX 457 INDEX 463 xi ILLUSTRATIONS I. ‘ We, Robert Burns, by virtue of a Warrant from Nature.’ FRONTISPIECE ‘ God save the Bard.’ {The Watson-Reid Miniature: the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.) II. John Dowie. {From Kay's‘Edinburgh Portraits.’) TO FACE PAGE 238 in. Patrick Miller. {From a portrait by Nasmyth, now in the possession of Major G. G. Macfarlane.) 342 IV. ‘ The Wee German Lairdie.’ {Copy in Burns's hand, now in the possession of Miss Bessie F. C. Adamson, Stranraer.) 416 xiii \ PART I PRELUDE A CHAPTER I 'HEN material improvements are applied with energy vv to a backward country, many people are bound to suffer ; still more will reap a doubtful benefit. It is with a group of such people, and with the good and the evil done to them in the name of progress, that this narrative concerns itself. The principal persons in it are labouring men and women who were characteristic of their time and place, mostly unfortunate, and remembered only because of the accident of genius in one of them. Because of this accident, however, the narrative must include also a certain element of gentility, even of fashion. The reactions between genius and gentility have been at all times worthy of the utmost attention. Perhaps they were never more so than in the period, place and circumstances here assembled. The period is between 1700 and 1800—more particularly within the latter half of the century ; the place Scotland. If ever there was a backward country it was Scotland at the opening of the eighteenth century.