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The Real Robert Burns. James L. Hughes
Mailie’s Elegy’ is a natural expression of sorrow in the heart—the great, loving heart of Burns—for the death of the pet lamb. He says:
He’s lost a friend and neighbour dear
In Mailie dead.
Thro’ a’ the toun she trotted by him;
A lang half-mile she could descry him;
Wi’ kindly bleat, when she did spy him,
She ran wi’ speed;
A friend mair faithfu’ ne’er cam nigh him,
Than Mailie dead.
So in the pathos and emotion shown for the mouse whose home his plough destroyed at the approach of winter; for the wounded hare that limped past him; for the starving thrush with which he offered to share his last crust; and for the scared water-fowl that flew from him, when he regretted that they had reason to do so on account of man’s treatment of them, he gives ample evidence of the warmth of the glow of his sympathy.
One of the most prominent characteristics of Burns was loyalty to his native land. One of his earliest dreams, when he was a boy, was a hope that some day he might be able to do something that would bring honour to Scotland. In his Epistle to Mrs. Scott of Wauchope-House he says:
I mind it weel, in early date,
When I was beardless, young, and blate, bashful
······
When first amang the yellow corn
A man I reckoned was,
······
E’en then a wish (I mind its power),
A wish that to my latest hour
Shall strongly heave my breast;
That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake
Some usefu’ plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least.
The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear, barley
I turned the weeder-clips aside
And spared the symbol dear:
No nation, no station,
My envy e’er could raise;
A Scot still, but blot still, without
I knew nae higher praise.
The boy who had such a reverent feeling in his heart for the thistle, the symbol of his native land, that he did not like to cut it, continued throughout his life to have a reverence for the land itself, and tried to honour it in every possible way.
He did make the book and sing the songs that brought more lasting glory to Scotland than any other work done by any other man or combination of men in his time.
He wrote more than two hundred and fifty love-songs, and he refused to accept a shilling for them, though he needed money very badly. Many of his love-songs were the direct out-pouring of his heart, the overflow of his love for Nellie Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson, the girl lovers of his boyhood; and for Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs. M’Lehose; but most of his love-songs were ‘fictitious,’ as he said they were in the inscription on the copy of his works presented to Jean Lorimer, the Chloris of his Ellisland and Dumfries period. They were written mainly to provide pure language and thought for fine melodies of Scotland composed long before his time; but the words of the songs that were sung to them were indelicate. He wrote his unequalled songs for Scotland’s sake, and by doing so he gave to Scotland the gift of the sweetest love-songs ever written. But for these sacred songs his patriotic spirit resented the idea of acceptance of material reward. No higher revelation of genuine patriotism was ever shown than this.
Burns was a sensitive and very shy man. He is commonly supposed to have been just the opposite. He was brought up in a home at Mount Oliphant where he rarely associated with other people. Months sometimes passed without an evening spent in any other way than in reading and discussions of the matter read by his father, Gilbert, and himself; so in boyhood and early youth he was reserved. When he began to go out among other young men his comparatively developed mind, his very unusual stores of knowledge—not merely stored, but classified and related—and his extraordinary power of eloquence made him at once a leader and a favourite, so he soon overcame his reserve and shyness with young men. It was not so with young women. He had been trained to wait for introductions to them. He was walking past Jean Armour, when she was at the town pump at Mauchline getting water to sprinkle the clothes on the bleaching-green, without speaking to her, and she spoke to him, recalling a remark she heard him make at the annual dance on the evening of the fair. He was twenty-five, and she was eighteen. He would have passed close to her in respectful silence if she had not spoken.
Sir Walter Scott wrote: ‘I was told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential.’
Scott did not mean to suggest a doubt about what he was told, but just to intimate that he had not had opportunity to observe the fact. Scott met Burns only once in company, and Scott was a boy at the time.
He dearly and reverently loved Alison Begbie when he was twenty-one. She was the first woman whom he asked to become his wife. She was a servant in a farm-house on the banks of Cessnock Water, in the neighbourhood of Lochlea farm. He was twenty-two when he asked her to marry him, and he was so shy, even at that age, that he could not propose when he was with her. She did not accept his offer. Few women of his acquaintance would have refused to accept his written proposal. Probably none of them—not even Alison Begbie—would have refused him if he had been able to overcome his shyness, and had proposed in person instead of by letter.
He wrote five letters to Alison Begbie, and definitely asked her to marry him in the fourth letter. In the first he said: ‘I am a stranger in these matters, as I assure you that you are the first woman to whom I ever made such a declaration, so I declare I am at a loss how to proceed. I have more than once come into your company with a resolution to say what I have just now told you; but my resolution always failed me, and even now my heart trembles for the consequence of what I have said.’
The following copies of the letter containing his proposal (the fourth), and of his reply to her refusal, if read carefully, should reveal several admirable characteristics of Burns.
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