The Real Robert Burns Part 11

Beyond the hills where Stinchar flows.

He did not like the word 'Stinchar,' so he changed it to 'Lugar,' a much more euphonious word. He had no lover named 'Nannie.' Lugar and Stinchar were several miles apart. He was really writing about love, not the love of any one woman, during those four years; and he was writing about other great subjects more than about love, mainly religious and ethical ideals.

From the age of twenty-two he was for three years without a lover. At twenty-five he met Jean Armour, then eighteen. Jean spoke first to the respectfully shy man. At the annual dance on Fair night in Mauchline, Burns was one of the young men who were present. His dog, Luath, who loved him, and whom he loved in return, traced his master upstairs to the dance hall. Of course the dance was interrupted when Luath got on the floor and found his master. Burns kindly led the dog out, and as he was going he said, 'I wish I could find a la.s.sie to loe me as well as my dog.' A short time afterwards Burns was going along a street in Mauchline, and was pa.s.sing Jean Armour without speaking to her, because he had not been introduced to her. She was at the village pump getting water to sprinkle her clothes on the village green, and as he was pa.s.sing her she asked, 'Hae you found a la.s.sie yet to loe you as well as your dog?' Burns then stopped and conversed with her. She was a handsome, bright young woman.

Their acquaintance soon developed a strong love between them, and resulted in a test of the real manhood of the character of Burns. When he realised that Jean was to become a mother, he did not hesitate as to his duty. He gave her a legal certificate of marriage, signed by himself and regularly witnessed, which was as valid as a marriage certificate of a clergyman or a magistrate in Scottish law.

Jean's father compelled her to destroy, or let him destroy, the certificate. This, and her father's threatened legal prosecution, nearly upset the mind of Burns. He undoubtedly loved Jean Armour. In a letter written at the time to David Brice, a friend in Glasgow, he wrote: 'Never man loved, or rather adored, a woman more than I did her; and, to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all.... May Almighty G.o.d forgive her ingrat.i.tude and perjury to me, as I from my very soul forgive her; and may His grace be with her, and bless her in all her future life.'

He had arranged to leave Scotland for Jamaica to escape from his mental torture, when two things came into his life: Mary Campbell, and the suggestion that he should publish his poems. The first filled his heart, the second gave him the best tonic for his mind--deeply and joyously interesting occupation.

Mary Campbell, 'Highland Mary,' he had met when she was a nursemaid in the home of his friend Gavin Hamilton. Meeting her again, when she was a servant in Montgomery Castle, he became acquainted with her, and they soon loved each other. It is not remarkable that Burns should love Mary Campbell, because she was a winsome, quiet, refined young woman, and his heart was desolate at the loss of Jean Armour. He, at the time he made love to Mary, had no hope of reconciliation with Jean. The greater his love for Jean had been, and still was, the greater his need was for another love to fill his heart, and he found a pure and satisfying lover in Mary. Their love was deep and short, lasting only about two months. Two busy months they were, as Burns was preparing his poems for the Kilmarnock edition, till he and Mary agreed to be married. They parted for the last time on 14th May 1785. The day was Sunday. They spent the afternoon in the fine park of Montgomery Castle, through which the Fail River runs for a mile and a half. In the evening they went out of the grounds about half a mile to Failford, a little village at the junction of the Fail with the Ayr. The Fail runs parallel to the Ayr, and in the opposite direction after leaving the castle grounds, until it reaches Failford. There it meets a solid rock formation, which compels it to turn squarely to the right and flow into the Ayr, about three hundred yards away. At a narrow place where the Fail had cut a pa.s.sage through the soft rock on its way to the Ayr, Burns and Highland Mary parted. He stood on one side of the river and Mary on the other, and after they had exchanged Bibles, they made their vows of intention to marry, he holding one side of an open Bible and she the other side. Mary went home to prepare for her marriage, but a relative in Greenock fell ill with malignant fever, and Mary went to nurse him, and caught the fever herself and died.

The poems he wrote to her and about her made her a renowned character.

When in 1919 a s.h.i.+pbuilding company at Greenock, after a four years'

struggle, finally purchased the church and churchyard in which Mary was buried, with the intention of removing the bodies to another place, the British Parliament pa.s.sed an Act providing that her monument must stand forever over her grave, where it had always stood.[4] Though she held a humble position, the beautiful poems of her lover gave her an honoured place in the hearts of millions of people all over the world.

Burns did not go to Jamaica, although he had secured a berth on a s.h.i.+p to take him to that beautiful island. Calls came to him just in time to publish an edition of his poems in Edinburgh. He answered the calls, startled and delighted Edinburgh society, published his poems, and met Clarinda.

Mrs M'Lehose was a cultured and charming gra.s.s-widow. She had been courted and married by a wealthy young man in Glasgow when she was only seventeen years of age. Though a lady of the highest character, on the advice of relatives and friends she left her husband. He then went to Jamaica.

Burns and Mrs M'Lehose mutually admired each other when they met, and their friends.h.i.+p quickly developed into affection. Under the names of Sylvander and Clarinda they conducted a love correspondence which will probably always remain the finest love correspondence of the ages.

Clarinda was a religious and cultured woman; Burns was a religious and cultured man, so their letters of love are on a high plane. Clarinda wrote very good poems as well as good prose, and Burns wrote some of his best poems to Clarinda. His parting song to Clarinda is, in the opinion of many literary men, the greatest love-song of its kind ever written. Those who study the Clarinda correspondence will find not only love, but many interesting philosophical discussions regarding religion and human life.

Thus ends the record of his real loves, notwithstanding the outrageous misstatements that his loves extended, according to one writer, to nearly four hundred. He had just four deep and serious loves, not counting the two deep and transforming affections of his adolescent period for Nellie Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson. He loved four women: Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M'Lehose. At the age of twenty-one he loved Alison Begbie, and, when twenty-two, he asked her to marry him. She declined his proposal. He was too shy to propose to her when he was with her. Get this undoubted fact into your consciousness, and think about it fairly and reasonably, and it will help you to get a truer vision of the real Burns. Read the proposal and his subsequent letter on pages 51-55, and your mind should form juster conceptions of Burns as a lover and as a man. You will find it harder to be misled by the foolish or the malicious misrepresentations that have too long pa.s.sed as facts concerning him as a lover.

From twenty-two to twenty-five he had no lover; then he loved and married Jean Armour. No act of his prevented that marriage-contract remaining in force. When her father forced the destruction of the contract, and much against his will, and in defiance of the love of his heart, he found that he had lost his wife beyond any reasonable hope of reconciliation and reunion, and was therefore free to love another, he loved Mary Campbell, and honourably proposed marriage to her. She accepted his offer, but died soon after. He was untrue to no one when he took Clarinda into his heart.

Of course he could not ask her to marry him, as she was already married.

The first three women he loved after he reached the age of twenty-one years were Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, and Mary Campbell. The first refused his offer; he married the second, and was forced into freedom by her father; the third accepted his offer of marriage, but died before they could be married. The fourth woman whom he loved loved him, but could not marry him, a fact recognised by both of them. There is not a shadow of evidence of inconstancy or unfaithfulness on his part in the eight years during which he loved the four women--the only four he did love after he became a man.

It may be answered that Burns was not loyal to Jean Armour because he loved Mary Campbell and Clarinda after he was married to Jean. Burns absolutely believed that his marriage to Jean was annulled by the burning of the marriage certificate. He would not have pledged matrimony with Mary Campbell if he had known that Jean was still his wife. When Mary died, and he found Jean's father was willing that he might again marry Jean, he did marry her in Gavin Hamilton's home. In writing to Clarinda he forgot himself for a moment and spoke disrespectfully of Jean, but his prompt and honourable action in marrying her soon after showed him to be a true man.

It should ever be remembered that Burns was in no sense a fickle lover. To each of the three women whom he loved, his love was reverent and true. He had a reverent affection for Alison Begbie after she refused him; he loved Jean Armour after she allowed their marriage-certificate to be destroyed; and he loved Mary Campbell, not only till she died, but to the end of his life. The fact that he sat out in the stackyard on Ellisland farm through the long moonlit night, with tears flowing down his cheeks, on the third anniversary of her death, and wrote 'To Mary in Heaven,' proves the depth and permanency of his love.

In 'My Eppie Adair' he says:

By love and by beauty, by law and by duty, I swear to be true to my Eppie Adair.

In these lines Burns truly defines his own type of love.

It is true that Miss Margaret Chalmers told the poet Campbell, after Burns died, that he had asked her to marry him. His letters to her are letters of deep friends.h.i.+p--reverent friends.h.i.+p--not love. It is true that the last poem he ever wrote was written to Margaret Chalmers, and that in it he said:

Full well thou knowest I love thee, dear.

But it must be remembered that Burns had been married to Jean and living happily with her for eight years, so the love of this line was not the love that is expected to lead to marriage, but an expression of reverent affection. The whole tenor of this last poem of his life indicates that he thought her feeling for him was cooling, and his deep affectionate friends.h.i.+p urged him to plead with her for a continuance of their long-existing and quite unusual relations.h.i.+p.

Many people will doubtless say, 'What about Chloris?' Chloris was his name for Jean Lorimer, the daughter of a friend of his who dwelt near him when he lived on Ellisland farm after his second marriage to Jean Armour.

Chloris was a sweet singer and player, who frequently visited Mrs Burns, and who sang for Burns, sometimes, with Mrs Burns the grand old Scottish airs that had long been sung to words that were not pure, and to which he was writing new and pure words nearly every day. A number of these songs were addressed to Chloris, but in a book of his poems presented to Miss Lorimer he states clearly that the love he appeared to be expressing for her was an a.s.sumed, or, as he called it, a 'fict.i.tious,' and not a real love.

When Burns had earned five hundred pounds by the sale of the Edinburgh edition of his poems, he decided 'that he had the responsibility for the temporal and possibly the eternal welfare of a dearly loved fellow-creature;' so again giving proof of his honest manhood and recognising his plain duty, he married Jean Armour a second time, in the home of his dear friend Gavin Hamilton. Of the first three women whom he loved one refused him, one died after their sacred engagement, and the third he married twice. The fourth and last woman that he loved could not marry.

Any one of the first three would have made him a good wife, but no one could have been more considerate or more faithful than the one he married.

Could any reasonable man believe that if Burns had really loved other women, as he loved Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M'Lehose, the names of the other women would not have been known by the world? He never tried to hide his love. He wrote songs of love with other names attached to them, used for variety. In a letter to a friend he regretted the use of 'Chloris' in several of his Ellisland and Dumfries poems, and to her directly he said they were 'fict.i.tious' or a.s.sumed expressions of love. Notwithstanding the foolish or malicious statements that Burns had many lovers, he had but four real loves. One would have been his limit if the first had accepted him and lived as long as he did.

It has been said that 'the love of Burns was the love of the flesh.' It is worth while to examine the love-songs of Burns to learn what elements of thought and feeling dominated his mind and heart. He wrote two hundred and fifty love-songs, and only three or four contain indelicate references; even these were not considered improper in his time.

What were the themes of his love-songs? What were the symbols that he used to typify love? There is no beauty or delight in Nature on earth or sky that he did not use as a symbol of true love. He saw G.o.d through Nature as few men ever saw Him, and he therefore naturally used the beauty and sweetness and glory of Nature to help to reveal the beauty and sweetness and glory of love, the element of the Divine that thrilled him with the deepest joy and the highest reverence.

In his first poem, written when he was fifteen, describing his fourteen-year-old sweetheart, he says:

A bonnie la.s.s, I will confess, Is pleasant to the e'e; But without some better qualities, She's no a la.s.s for me.

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.

Of Peggy Thomson, his second love, he wrote:

Not vernal showers to budding flowers, Not autumn to the farmer, So dear can be as thou to me, My fair, my lovely charmer.

Of Alison Begbie he wrote in 'The La.s.s o' Cessnock Banks':

But it's not her air, her form, her face, Tho' matching beauty's fabled queen; 'Tis the mind that s.h.i.+nes in ev'ry grace, And chiefly in her rogueish een.

In 'Young Peggy Blooms' he describes her:

Young Peggy blooms our bonniest la.s.s, Her blush is like the morning, The rosy dawn, the springing gra.s.s With early gems adorning.

Her eyes outs.h.i.+ne the radiant beams That gild the pa.s.sing shower, And glitter o'er the crystal streams, And cheer each fresh'ning flower.

In 'Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary?' he says:

O sweet grows the lime and the orange, And the apple o' the pine; But a' the charms o' the Indies Can never equal thine.

The following are emblems of beauty in the 'La.s.s o' Ballochmyle':

On every blade the pearls hang.

Her look was like the morning's eye, Her air like Nature's vernal smile.

Fair is the morn in flowery May, And sweet is night in autumn mild.

Describing 'My Nannie O' he says:

Her face is fair, her heart is true; As spotless as she's bonnie, O; The opening gowan, wat wi' dew, daisy Nae purer is than Nannie O.

In 'The Birks [birches] of Aberfeldy' he speaks to his lover of 'Summer blinking on flowery braes' and 'Playing o'er the crystal streamlets;' and the 'Blythe singing o' the little birdies' and 'The braes o'erhung wi'