Part 13 (1/2)
One feels disposed to pa.s.s over in silence the ”Burns Monument,” which was built in 1820, at a cost of over three thousand pounds; ”a circular temple supported by nine fluted Corinthian columns, emblematic of the nine muses,” say the guide-books. It stands in a garden overlooking the Doon, and is a painful sight. But in a room in the base of it are to be seen some relics at which no Burns lover can look unmoved,--the Bibles he gave to Highland Mary, the ring with which he wedded Jean (taken off after her death), and two rings containing some of his hair.
It is but a few steps from this monument down to a spot on the ”banks o' bonnie Doon,” from which is a fine view of the ”auld brig.” This s.h.i.+ning, silent water, and the overhanging, silent trees, and the silent bell in the gable of Alloway Kirk, speak more eloquently of Burns than do all nine of the Corinthian muse-dedicated pillars in his monument.
So do the twa brigs of Ayr, which still stand at the foot of High Street, silently recriminating each other as of old.
”I doubt na, frien', ye'll think ye'r nae sheep-shank When ye are streekit o'er frae bank to bank,”
sneers the Auld; and
”Will your poor, narrow foot-path of a street, Where twa wheelbarrows tremble when they meet, Your ruined, formless bulk o' stane and lime, Compare wi' bonny brigs o' modern time?”
retorts the New; and ”the sprites that owre the brigs of Ayr preside”
never interrupt the quarrel. Spite of all its boasting, however, the new bridge cracked badly two years ago, and had to be taken down and entirely rebuilt.
The dingy little inn where
”Tam was glorious, O'er a' the ills o' life victorious,”
is still called by his name, and still preserves, as its chief claims to distinction, the big wooden mug out of which Tam drank, and the chair in which he so many market-nights
”Gat planted unco richt.”
The chair is of oak, wellnigh black as ebony, and furrowed thick with names cut upon it. The smart young landlady who now keeps the house commented severely on this desecration of it, and said that for some years the house had been ”keepit” by a widow, who was ”in no sense up to the beesiness,” and ”a' people did as they pleased in the hoos in her day.” The mug has a metal rim and base; but spite of these it has needed to be clasped together again by three ribs of cane, riveted on.
”Money couldn't buy it,” the landlady said. It belongs to the house, is mentioned always in the terms of lease, and the house has changed hands but four times since Tam's day.
In a tiny stone cottage in the southern suburbs of Ayr, live two nieces of Burns, daughters of his youngest sister, Isabella. They are vivacious still, and eagerly alive to all that goes on in the world, though they must be well on in the seventies. The day I called they had ”just received a newspaper from America,” they said. ”Perhaps I knew it. It was called 'The Democrat.'” As I was not able to identify it by that description, the younger sister made haste to fetch it. It proved to be a paper printed in Madison, Iowa. The old ladies were much interested in the approaching American election, had read all they could find about General Garfield, and were much impressed by the wise reticence of General Grant. ”He must be a vary cautious man; disna say enough to please people,” they said, with sagacious nods of approbation. They remembered Burns's wife very well, had visited her when she was living, a widow, at Dumfries, and told with glee a story which they said she herself used to narrate, with great relish, of a pedler lad who, often coming to the house with wares to sell in the kitchen, finally expressed to the servant his deep desire to see Mrs.
Burns. She accordingly told him to wait, and her mistress would, no doubt, before long come into the room. Mrs. Burns came in, stood for some moments talking with the lad, bought some trifle of him, and went away. Still he sat waiting. At last the servant asked why he did not go. He replied that she had promised he should see Mrs. Burns.
”But ye have seen her; that was she,” said the servant.
”Eh, eh?” said the lad. ”Na! never tell me now that was 'bonnie Jean'!”
Burns's mother, too (their grandmother), they recollected well, and had often heard her tell of the time when the family lived at Lochlea, and Robert, spending his evenings at the Tarbolton merry-makings with the Bachelors' Club or the Masons, used to come home late in the night, and she used to sit up to let him in. These doings sorely displeased the father; and at last he said grimly, one night, that he would sit up to open the door for Robert. Trembling with fear, the mother went to bed, and did not close her eyes, listening apprehensively for the angry meeting between father and son. She heard the door open, the old man's stern tone, Robert's gay reply; and in a twinkling more the two were sitting together over the fire, the father splitting his sides with half-unwilling laughter at the boy's inimitable descriptions and mimicry of the scenes he had left. Nearly two hours they sat there in this way, the mother all the while cramming the bed-clothes into her mouth, lest her own laughter should remind her husband how poorly he was carrying out his threats. After that night ”Rob” came home at what hour he pleased, and there was nothing more heard of his father's sitting up to reprove him.
They believed that Burns's intemperate habits had been greatly exaggerated. Their mother was a woman twenty-five years old, and the mother of three children when he died, and she had never once seen him the ”waur for liquor.” ”There were vary mony idle people i' the warld, an' a great deal o' talk,” they said. After his father's death he a.s.sumed the position of the head of the house, and led in family prayers each morning; and everybody said, even the servants, that there were never such beautiful prayers heard. He was a generous soul.
After he left home he never came back for a visit, however poor he might be, without bringing a present for every member of the family; always a pound of tea for his mother, ”and tea was tea then,” the old ladies added. To their mother he gave a copy of Thomson's ”Seasons,”
which they still have. They have also some letters of his, two of which I read with great interest. They were to his brother, and were full of good advice. In one he says:--
”I intended to have given you a sheetful of counsels, but some business has prevented me. In a word, learn taciturnity. Let that be your motto. Though you had the wisdom of Newton or the wit of Swift, garrulousness would lower you in the eyes of your fellow-creatures.”
In the other, after alluding to some village tragedy, in which great suffering had fallen on a woman, he says,--
”Women have a kind of steady sufferance which qualifies them to endure much beyond the common run of men; but perhaps part of that fort.i.tude is owing to their short-sightedness, as they are by no means famous for seeing remote consequences in their real importance.”
The old ladies said that their mother had liked ”Jean” on the whole, though ”at first not so weel, on account of the connection being what it was.” She was kindly, cheery, ”never bonny;” but had a good figure, danced well and sang well, and wors.h.i.+pped her husband. She was ”not intellectual;” ”but there's some say a poet shouldn't have an intellectual wife,” one of the ingenuous old spinsters remarked interrogatively. ”At any rate, she suited him; an' it was ill speering at her after all that was said and done,” the younger niece added, with real feeling in her tone. Well might she say so. If there be a touching picture in all the long list of faithful and ill-used women, it is that of ”bonnie Jean,”--the unwedded mother of children, the forgiving wife of a husband who betrayed others as he had betrayed her,--when she took into her arms and nursed and cared for her husband's child, born of an outcast woman, and bravely answered all curious questioners with, ”It's a neebor's bairn I'm bringin' up.” She wrought for herself a place and an esteem of which her honest and loving humility little dreamed.
There is always something sad in seeking out the spot where a great man has died. It is like living over the days of his death and burial.
The more sympathetically we have felt the spell of the scenes in which he lived his life, the more vitalized and vitalizing that life was, the more are we chilled and depressed in the presence of places on which his wearied and suffering gaze rested last. As I drove through the dingy, confused, and ugly streets of Dumfries, my chief thought was, ”How Burns must have hated this place!” Looking back on it now, I have a half-regret that I ever saw it, that I can recall vividly the ghastly graveyard of Saint Michael's, with its twenty-six thousand gravestones and monuments, crowded closer than they would be in a marble-yard, ranged in rows against the walls without any pretence of a.s.sociation with the dust they affect to commemorate. What a ballad Burns might have written about such a show! And what would it not have been given to him to say of the ”Genius of Coila, finding her favorite son at the plough, and casting her mantle over him,”--that is, the sculptured monument, or, as the s.e.xton called it, ”Mawsolem,” under which he has had the misfortune to be buried. A great Malvern bathwoman, bringing a bathing-sheet to an unwilling patient, might have been the model for the thing. It is hideous beyond description, and in a refinement of ingenuity has been made uglier still by having the s.p.a.ces between the pillars filled in with gla.s.s. The severe Scotch weather, it seems, was discoloring the marble. It is a pity that the zealous guardians of its beauty did not hold it precious enough to be boarded up altogether.