Robert Burns: How To Know Him. William Allan Neilson
less impressive than that of his father is the intellectual hunger of the future poet himself. We have had Gilbert's testimony to the eagerness with which he devoured such books as came within his reach, and the use he made of his later fragments of schooling points the same way. He had a quarter at the parish school of Dalrymple when he was thirteen; and in the following summer he attended the school at Ayr under his former Alloway instructor. Murdoch's own account of these three weeks gives an idea of Burns's quickness of apprehension; and the style of it is worth noting with reference to the characteristics of the poet's own prose.
“In 1773,” says Murdoch, “Robert Burns came to board and lodge with me, for the purpose of revising English grammar, etc., that he might be better qualified to instruct his brothers and sisters at home. He was now with me day and night, in school, at all meals, and in all my walks. At the end of one week, I told him as he was now pretty much master of the parts of speech, etc., I should like to teach him something of French pronunciation, that when he should meet with the name of a French town, ship, officer, or the like, in the newspapers, he might be able to pronounce it something like a French word. Robert was glad to hear this proposal, and immediately we attacked the French with great courage.
“Now there was little else to be heard but the declension of nouns, the conjugation of verbs, etc. When walking together, and even at meals, I was constantly telling him the names of different objects, as they presented themselves, in French; so that he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases. In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching, that it was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in the business; and about the end of the second week of our study of the French, we began to read a little of the Adventures of Telemachus in Fénelon's own words.
“But now the plains of Mount Oliphant began to whiten, and Robert was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of Calypso, and armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising himself in the fields of Ceres; and so he did, for although but about fifteen, I was told that he performed the work of a man.”
The record of Burns's school-days is completed by the mention of a sojourn, probably in the summer of 1775, in his mother's parish of Kirkoswald. Hither he went to study mathematics and surveying under a teacher of local note, and, in spite of the convivial attractions of a smuggling village, seems to have made progress in his geometry till his head was turned by a girl who lived next door to the school.
So far the education gained by Burns from his schoolmasters and his father had been almost exclusively moral and intellectual. It was in less formal ways that his imagination was fed. From his mother he had heard from infancy the ballads, legends, and songs that were traditionary among the peasantry; and the influence of these was re-enforced by a certain Betty Davidson, an unfortunate relative of his mother's to whom the family gave shelter for a time.
“In my infant and boyish days, too,” he writes in the letter to Doctor Moore already quoted, “I owed much to an old maid of my mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country, of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.”
His private reading also contained much that must have stimulated his imagination and broadened his interests. It began with a Life of Hannibal, and Hamilton's modernized version of the History of Sir William Wallace, which last, he says, with the touch of flamboyancy that often recurs in his style, “poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins, which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.” By the time he was eighteen he had, in addition to books already mentioned, become acquainted with Shakespeare, Pope (including the translation of Homer), Thomson, Shenstone, Allan Ramsay, and a Select Collection of Songs, Scotch and English; with the Spectator, the Pantheon, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Sterne, and Henry Mackenzie. To these must be added some books on farming and gardening, a good deal of theology, and, of course, the Bible.
The pursuing of intellectual interests such as are implied in this list is the more significant when we remember that it was carried on in the scanty leisure of a life of labor so severe that it all but broke the poet's health, and probably left permanent marks on his physique. Yet he had energy left for still other avocations. It was when he was no more than fifteen that he first experienced the twin passions that came to dominate his life, love and song. The girl who was the occasion was his partner in the harvest field, Nelly Kilpatrick; the song he addressed to her is the following:
HANDSOME NELL
O, once I lov'd a bonnie lass,
Aye, and I love her still,
And whilst that virtue warms my breast
I'll love my handsome Nell.
As bonnie lasses I hae seen,
And mony full as braw, fine
But for a modest gracefu' mien
The like I never saw.
A bonnie lass, I will confess,
Is pleasant to the e'e, eye
But without some better qualities
She's no a lass for me.
But Nelly's looks are blithe and sweet,
And what is best of a', all
Her reputation is complete,
And fair without a flaw.
She dresses aye sae clean and neat,
Both decent and genteel;
And then there's something in her gait
Gars ony dress look weel. Makes
A gaudy dress and gentle air
May slightly touch the heart,
But it's innocence and modesty
That polishes the dart.
'Tis this in Nelly pleases me,
'Tis this enchants my soul!
For absolutely in my breast
She reigns without control.
Since there may still be readers who suppose that Burns was a mere unsophisticated singer, without power of self-criticism, it may be as well to insert here a passage from a Commonplace Book written in 1783, ten years after the composition of the song.
Criticism on the Foregoing Song
“Lest my works should be thought below Criticism; or meet with a Critic who, perhaps, will not look on them with so candid and favorable an eye; I am determined to criticise them myself.
“The first distich of the first stanza is quite too much in the flimsy strain of our ordinary street ballads; and on the other hand, the second distich is too much in the other extreme. The expression is a little awkward, and the sentiment too serious. Stanza the second I am well pleased with; and I think it conveys a fine idea of that amiable part of the Sex—the agreeables, or what in our Scotch dialect we call a sweet sonsy Lass. The third Stanza has a little of the flimsy turn in it; and the third line has rather too serious a cast. The fourth Stanza is a very indifferent one; the first line is, indeed, all in the strain of the second Stanza, but the rest is mostly an expletive. The thoughts in the fifth Stanza come fairly up to my favorite idea [of] a sweet sonsy Lass.