This
was kind at least; but hear his expressions: "I have taken her a room; I
have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
her a guinea.... I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any
claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she
had such a claim--which she has not, neither during my life nor after my
death. She did all this like a good girl." And then he took advantage of
the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for a
certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her"; and he
accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
fawning." This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he
was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes,
your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind them. I will
take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare
away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you." Again, on the
21st: "Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
through death, and for ever?... How rich am I to have such a treasure as
you!... 'The Lord God knoweth,' and, perhaps, 'Israel he shall know,' my
love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember you in my
prayers." By the 7th of April, seventeen days later, he had already
decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife. A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct
is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns,
to whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and
self-respect. This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but
there is no doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a
sincere determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a
loan of a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor
girl whom he had ruined? It was true he could not do as he did without
brutally wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault;
he was, as he truly says, "damned with a choice only of different
species of error and misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept
the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead
a man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been
strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
stands among changing events without foundation or resource. [3]


  DOWNWARD COURSE

It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but
it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he
contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as
I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to
break or to perpetuate. He neither loved nor respected his wife. "God
knows," he writes, "my choice was as random as blind man's buff." He
consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her; that
she "has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him"; that she has
a good figure; that she has a "wood-note wild," "her voice rising with
ease to B natural," no less. The effect on the reader is one of
unmingled pity for both parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in
his own words) could "enter into his favourite studies or relish his
favourite authors"; this was not even a wife, after the affair of the
marriage lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust. Let her
manage a farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long,
she would still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity
rather than of equal affection. She could now be faithful, she could now
be forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching
degree; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown
herself worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away,
which could neither change her husband's heart nor affect the inherent
destiny of their relation. From the outset, it was a marriage that had
no root in nature; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting
Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest
language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately
beyond any question with Anne Park. Alas! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future. He had been
idle for some eighteen months, superintending his new edition, hanging
on to settle with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with Willie
Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M'Lehose; and in this period the
radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his
habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apologetical
biographers assure us of the contrary; but from the first he saw and
recognised the danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is "enervated to
an alarming degree," by idleness and dissipation; and again, "my mind
has been vitiated with idleness." It never fairly recovered. To business
he could bring the required diligence and attention without difficulty;
but he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that
superior effort of concentration which is required for serious literary
work. He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only amused
himself with letters. The man who had written a volume of masterpieces
in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for
any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is
itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as
polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong,
and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is,
for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The
change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he
had written the "Address to a Louse," which may be taken as an extreme
instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come upon the
rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the
second.