Martha's Mozart

Among the great unanswered questions of life is why the great Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich (b. 1941) never recorded the Brahms Piano Concertos.  Leaving that aside, it's noticeable that she didn't record much Mozart either.  She recorded a couple of concertos for Deutsche Grammophon  in 2014, with Claudio Abbado not long before his death. (Abbado had earlier recorded Mozart concertos with Serkin and Pires, also on DG.)  Two decades earlier, though, Argerich had recorded two solo concertos for the Teldec label  -- No. 19 (K.459) and No. 20 (K.466) -- along with No.10, for two pianos (K.365).  On this recording, the sound is excellent, with plenty of presence for both orchestra and solo instrument.  The orchestra in the solo concertos is the Orchestre di Padova e del Veneto, and the pianist/composer Alexandre Rabinovitch conducts.  Rabinovitch takes the first piano in K.365, with Jorg Faerber conducting the Wurrtemberg Chamber Orchestra.  The two-piano concerto has plenty of energy and charm, but the solo concertos are the main attractions here.  These are spontaneous-sounding, muscular performances, with the left-hand writing given more weight than one usually hears, but there's nothing ponderous or scrappy about the overall effect.  Argerich's playing of the Beethoven cadenza in the first movement of K.466 is alone almost worth the price of the disc, and the probing, almost improvisatory opening of the second movement is engaging and arresting.  Throughout, the sense of interplay between orchestra and soloist is strong.  K. 466 is a turbulent and brooding piece -- reportedly, one of Beethoven's favorites -- and it gets a great performance here, from both pianist and orchestra.  You want to stand up and cheer at the end.

Solti's Beethoven Seventh

Back in the late 1960s, when I started trying to build up a collection of classical recordings, a new vinyl LP cost $16.00, more or less.  I felt that I had to save up my pennies and buy wisely, usually guided by recommendations in whatever magazines I could find, and eventually guided by my sense, as my collection grew, of what I liked and what I liked less -- for had I had money enough then, it would have been nice to buy more than one recording of pieces of music that I found accessible.  As it was, though, I stuck with Szell and Karajan for the Beethoven symphonies -- the 1960s DG Karajan recordings, that is -- and was sufficiently satisfied with them to refrain from adding other versions.  As a result, recordings by Walter, Haitink, Jochum, and Bernstein went by the board, despite my having read positive reviews of some of them.  It never occurred to me to seek out used copies.  I assumed that they would probably be warped or scratched, as my own LPs tended to become over time.  But the CD revolution changed all that -- used CDs can give excellent sound and will continue to do so long after I will be beyond hearing them.  So it was amazing to me recently to pick up for under $3.00 ( and 2017 dollars at that!) a copy of Solti's digital recording from the late 1980s of Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.  By this time, I had quite a lot of Solti's Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss -- and I enjoyed them -- but I had in mind comments I had read years ago about Solti's conducting being "tense" or "overdriven" in earlier music, and so I had never bothered with his Beethoven recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  Two earlier purchases led me to give his Beethoven a try:  I had bought (also cheap) his recording of Mendelssohn's Third and Fourth Symphonies, and his first recording of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutti, which I found very enjoyable.  I like Beethoven's Seventh a lot, so I got it.

Well, it's a very fine recording, in excellent digital sound.  If you think of recorded sound on a spectrum ranging from warm to bright, then Solti is on the bright side, but never to the extent of sounding blaring or glassy.  If you prefer "warm," then Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra on the BIS label are very satisfying, and that recording, like Solti's, has plenty of clarity and energy.  Solti's tempi seem very well-judged to me, and at no time did I feel that anything was rushed or tense.  I liked especially his tempo for the second movement, marked allegretto but often taken too slow. For example, Eugen Jochum, a great conductor, with the Concertgebouw in the 1960s, seems draggy in this movement.  Bernstein's New York recording from the early 1960s paces the allegretto better, as does Carlos Kleiber in the 1970s, with the Vienna Philharmonic, but in both cases the sound doesn't have the clarity and detail of the more modern recordings like Solti's or Vanska's.  For all that, Kleiber's CD pairing of the Fifth and Seventh is perhaps my favorite recording of both -- the way the brass is placed in the overall orchestral balance is very effective -- but Solti's recording isn't to be sneezed at.  I can imagine a listener preferring it, almost on the grounds of the recorded sound alone.  All of the versions I mention here will give much pleasure (as will some others I haven't mentioned).  You can indulge or discover your tastes at the prices these things go for nowadays.  It's a great time for collectors.

The Eighth Symphony on this disc is a well-played, rather straight account.  For some reason, I've always liked Karajan's Eighth from his 1970s set (the second of his three sets for DG) -- it just seems a bit more playful.  But Solti is fine, with the sound good and the dynamic contrasts well pointed.

The McLehose Case . . .

In what follows, I'm interested in a very few weeks of Burns's life -- roughly the six weeks, between mid-February and late March 1788, following his departure from Edinburgh and Agnes McLehose, a time of which Ian McIntyre says that "[t]here is no period in his short life when it is so hard to read Burns . . . . Nor is there a time when it is so difficult to observe his behaviour with any degree of sympathy or understanding."   If those weeks constitute a story, it takes place within a larger story: that of the roughly twelve-week relationship of Burns and Agnes McLehose that began on 4 December 1787, effectively ended around 18 February 1788, flared up for a moment in mid-March 1788, and had a bittersweet coda in a week-to-ten-day period over Christmas and New Year, 1791-92.  This fuller story of Burns and Agnes, from its month-long epistolary phase (4 December 1787 to 6 January 1788), through the following fraught six weeks of meetings of increasing sexual and moral tension, is itself part of a yet-larger story.  We can call it "Burns in Edinburgh," the time frame of which begins in November 1786 and ends also in late March 1788, and which marks (two recent biographers seem to agree) the transition of Burns from simply "poet" to what we might call "cultural conservationist," a transition that refocused his poetic talents in what turned out to be a productive and historically significant way.  But the narrow slice of this story that I'm concerned with has to do with the life, not the art, and while it has perhaps a cultural dimension, the cultural interest is in relation to individual psychology rather than to artistic production.

I will suggest that both Burns's attraction to Agnes and also the specific nature of his disappointment at the failure of their relationship have to do with Burn's expectations of and experiences in Edinburgh between 29 November 1786 and  18 February 1788. Some attention to details of chronology is needed here.  His experience in Edinburgh falls into two periods of about five months each.  Having come up from Ayrshire, he made a largely positive impression in the capital, not only for his poetry but for the force of his personality and the fact that he was well-read, well-informed, and well able to hold his own in company.  To be sure, there were detractors -- but he had had his detractors in Ayrshire too.   During his first stay in Edinburgh, he achieved not only what would now be called "celebrity" but also a measure of genuine respect among the cultured elite of the city, and that enabled him to find the funding, through subscriptions, for the first "Edinburgh" edition of  Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which appeared in April 1787, less than a year after the "Kilmarnock" edition that had brought him to public notice in July 1786.  What I call his "first stay" in Edinburgh ended on 6 May, 1787, after which he toured the Borders and made several excursions into the Highlands, but spent some of June and all of July in Ayrshire. For what I'm calling "the second stay," Burns returned to Edinburgh on 16 September 1787 and stayed until 18 February 1788.

The leading characters in this story besides Burns (b. 1759) and Agnes (b.1758) are Jean Armour (b, 1765), Burn's pregnant Mauchline lover and already the mother of Burns's twin children (b. 1786);  Robert Ainslie (b.1766), a legal apprentice and Burns's traveling companion on a Border tour in May 1787; and Jenny Clow (b. 1766), a domestic servant, apparently employed by Agnes McLehose.  I want to organize my discussion around a chronology of significant events, some of which can be dated precisely and some of whose dates can be fairly accurately inferred.  I call them "significant" events because I'll be suggesting a connection between them that bears on the interpretation of these events that I'll offer.  That organization might seem a bit clumsy, because at times I'll have to explain some of the events with reference to prior ones, and I will blend comment and narration in places, but I hope that this organization will help shed light  on both the events and what connects them.


1(a): Early February 1788  The Admonitory Letter 

Sometime in early February 1788, following a month during which they saw one another frequently at Agnes's lodgings, Agnes received a letter that admonished her for her association with Burns. The letter, which she showed or sent to Burns, has not survived, but we know of it from Burns's angry response, and there seems to be general agreement that it was originally sent to Agnes by either her minister, Mr. Kemp of the Canongate Church, or by her cousin William Craig.  Agnes was financially dependent on Craig to maintain herself in Edinburgh, since she and her children received no support from her estranged husband, who had emigrated to the West Indies.  The Rev. Mr. Kemp was her spiritual advisor and confidant throughout the time of her relationship to Burns, and Agnes recommended to Burns the strict Calvinism that her mother had inculcated and that Kemp endorsed.  In the eyes of Kemp and Craig, Agnes was a married woman, inappropriately connecting herself to a man not her husband and thereby risking both her soul and her reputation.  Although Burns had claimed in one letter to "revere" Agnes's religious principles and to respect her scruples, he reacted angrily and dismissively to her showing him the letter, understanding (correctly, I think) that the judgments that it contained weighed heavily with her.

I think it's possible to see Agnes's forwarding of the admonitory letter to Burns as a defensive move on Agnes's part, as Burns was becoming more insistent on a sexual consummation of their relationship -- a matter that was perhaps increasingly urgent for him as he knew that he would soon be leaving Edinburgh for Ayrshire with no clear prospect of return, given his financial uncertainties.  Agnes certainly had been on the defensive from the beginning, trying to maintain the relationship as a warmly chaste one throughout the famous Sylvander/Clarinda correspondence, initiated by Agnes, who assigned herself the part of the nymph Clarinda and to Burns the role of the rustic swain Sylvander.   The whole pseudo-pastoral epistolary exchange (which started on 6 December 1787) was perhaps from the start defensively employed to afford her a veneer of anonymity (should their letters fall into the wrong hands) and to assure herself that the relationship was a kind of game.  Burns was willing to play the game too, but he was rhetorically resourceful enough to employ it in part as a strategy of seduction.  By the time the admonitory letter entered the picture, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Agnes to keep up the pastoral pretense, and it's possible, I think, to see her using  the admonitory letter as a way of ending the relationship without saying so explicitly.  Be that as it may, Burns left Edinburgh on 18 February 1788.

1(b): Early February 1788  Jenny Clow's Pregnancy

Jenny Clow became pregnant by Burns in early February 1788.  Her child was born in November of that year.  Jenny was a servant-girl, and recent biographers (McIntyre and Crawford) assume that she was in service to Agnes McLehose and was used by her as a carrier of correspondence between her and Burns.  (Earlier biographers like Carswell and Snyder suggest that Burns knew Jenny before he even met Agnes, perhaps during his first visit to Edinburgh.)  Agnes would write Burns a chilly letter seeking financial help for Jenny late in 1788 and another in 1791, when Jenny was dying, probably of tuberculosis.  The question Jenny's pregnancy raises is whether or not Burns's sexual relationship with her was a consequence of his relationship with Agnes.  The moral dimension of that question is whether or not Burns can be seen simply as making use of Jenny without much regard for her reputation or well-being.

These are uncomfortable questions if we're invested in seeing Burns as a gallant and considerate lover -- an impression that we could easily get from his published poems, in which sexual relationships are romanticized and idealized, in keeping with some of the conventions of genteel lyric poetry.  The Merry Muses of Caledonia, of course, tells another story, but even so it isn't one of sexual exploitation;  the poems in Muses can be coarse and ribald, but they're not cruel.  We don't like to think of Burns (or anyone, for that matter) as using others instrumentally.  The question needs to be asked, though, because I will be suggesting that his treatment of Jenny has a parallel in his treatment of Jean Armour in March 1788 and that that treatment has to do with his particular disappointment in Agnes McLehose and the nature of the emotional investment he had made in Agnes between 4 December 1787 and 16 February 1788.

2.  Interlude:  Agnes

My interest is mainly in Burns, but Agnes McLehose was not passive in this affair. What are we to make of her part in it?   She had literary interests and aspirations of her own that no doubt played into her interest in Burns even before she met him, for he was by this time already a famous poet, lionized on the "first stay" in Edinburgh following the 1786 publication of the Kilmarnock Poems.  It's easy (and probably true) to say that it would have been better for her not to have encouraged Burns's interest in the first place, but if her doing so was the result of an impulsive decision, it wouldn't have been the first that Agnes made.  The circumstances leading up to her marriage showed her willing to disregard her family's wishes, and her relationship with Burns showed her willing to put herself in a position in which others might question her good name.  She seems to have believed for a while, at least, that her consciousness of not having in fact committed adultery -- no matter what appearances suggested -- justified her in maintaining a relationship with Burns, but her minister's and her cousin's objections, summed up, I assume, in the "admonitory letter," seem to have convinced her that the appearance of infidelity was as damaging to her as the reality.  She didn't really drag things out: the most intimate part of the relationship lasted only about six weeks, from early January to mid- February, 1788.  Unless we choose to believe that she enjoyed exerting power over Burns by withholding sexual favors, her errors of judgment seem social rather than moral, for if she were the kind of person who did enjoy the exertion of such power, surely she would have dragged it out longer.  It seems to me that she was honest from the beginning about the limits she set on the relationship.  The whole Clarinda/Sylvander game was perhaps, as I suggested above, from Agnes's point of view, a way of keeping Burns at a safe emotional distance by using a pastoral pretense, even if Burns rewrote the rules, so to speak, to suit himself, to a point where the relationship, for Agnes, eventually became unsustainable. The worst thing that Agnes did, perhaps, was to exploit, in her middle and old age, long after Burns's death, the relationship and the correspondence.  She would show people Burns's letters and seems even to have cut out pieces of them to give ( or sell?) to people who wanted Burns's autograph.  Possibly, she set herself up as Burns's purest and truest love, and, of course, she might have claimed that there was "Ae Fond Kiss" to "prove" it.  Harmless vanity?  She certainly never became a public figure on the scale of Maud Gonne, Yeats's muse, who had married and separated from the abusive drunkard John MacBride, and who, when MacBride became lauded as a martyr after Easter 1916, wore black for the rest of her life and presented  herself publicly as Madame MacBride, the hero's widow.  By Maud's standard, Agnes's vanity seems pretty mild.

3(a): Events in Mauchline, February-March 1788

Burns got back to Mauchline from Edinburgh, via Glasgow, on 23 February 1788.  Jean Armour, now in an advanced state of pregnancy, had been cast out by her family and was living with a family in nearby Tarbolton. Burns brought her back to Mauchline and found lodgings for her, and on 3 March 1788 she gave birth to twin girls, one of whom died on 10 March and the other on 22 March,  Neither seems to have been baptized.  Between the times of their deaths, Burns returned briefly to Edinburgh, mainly on business, but he seems to have made a last effort to find his way to Agnes's bed.  He left Edinburgh on 24 March.  In none of his surviving letters from this time is there reference to the deaths of his children.  By the end of April, he and Jean were married.

3(b):  Letters from Mauchline, 23 February-3 March 1788

We would say nowadays -- and it might have been said then too -- that Burns "did the right thing" by Jean.  Indeed, he might have done it much earlier, when Jean's first pregnancy had also resulted in twins in September 1786, if James Armour, Jean's father, had been more forthcoming.  By 1788, Burns was a celebrity and was seeking to solidify his economic position, negotiating a lease on a new farm (Ellisland)  and preparing himself for employment as an exciseman, so James Armour was perhaps more relenting.  But there is one sense in which, I think, Burns did not do the right thing by Jean, though it's doubtful that Jean ever knew of it. Among the letters he wrote on various matters at this time, there were two in which he made use of Jean.  They were written prior to the birth of the twins, and the first was to Agnes, written perhaps as early as 24 February 1788.  He wrote of Jean:   "I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her!  I, while my heart smote me for the prophanity, tried to compare her with my Clarinda; 'twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. -- Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there [i. e. with Agnes] polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender Passion. -- I have done with her and she with me."

The second letter, perhaps written within a week of the one to Agnes, was to Robert Ainslie, his lawyer friend in Edinburgh.  In it Burns presents himself as "prudent and cautious" in persuading Jean to swear to make no claim on him as her husband "neither during my life nor after my death."  "She did all this," Burns goes on, "like a good girl."  But then, there follows an account of how, at the same meeting with Jean, he "took the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones."  "She rejoiced," he tells Ainslie, "with joy unspeakable and full of glory" -- and the letter goes on elaborately with more sexual boasting, in a style that blends the coarse and the hyperbolic in a way that we might think was typical of how he might express himself at all-male drinking parties but which has no counterpart that I know of in his other letters.

There's no reason to think that Jean saw either of these letters, but it's worth asking what we should think of them and why Burns felt compelled to write them.  There's more here than just "bad taste."  Burns is using Jean in a way that's analogous, I think, to his use of Jenny Clow (see 1(b) above), and I think that there's something cruel and ugly in his treatment of both.  Both letters amount to a kind of self-assertion, and the question is what exactly is he asserting and why does he feel the need to assert it?  And, as I asked above, how does it have to do with his particular disappointment in Agnes McLehose and the nature of the emotional investment he had made in Agnes during that second stay in Edinburgh.

4. Reading between and behind the lines

My answers, listed below, are obviously speculative but, I hope, reasonably plausible, given what we know of Burns and think we know of human nature.  They might not all strike the reader as equally plausible -- or plausible at all.

a. It seems at least possible that both of the letters are, to a large extent, works of fiction and that their intent was not to tell "the truth" but rather to make an impression on Agnes and Ainslie.  We know that Ainslie knew Agnes and was privy to Burns's relationship with her, and it seems possible that Burns assumed that he might either show Agnes his letter from Burns or tell her the gist of it.  We can doubt, I think, that Burns found Jean "disgusting," and we can doubt too the details of the mutually ecstatic sexual encounter with Jean who was just days from giving birth to twins.  If he was telling the truth, his behaviour was despicable.  And if he was, as I suspect (and even hope), making things up in order to impress his correspondents, it was still a shameful ploy to use Jean's name in that way.

b.  What Burns is asserting, obviously, is masculinity or virility -- this is what connects the letters with his treatment of Jenny.  He must have felt the need to assert himself so blatantly because his failure to consummate his relationship with Agnes had diminished him as a man in his own eyes.  He was not used to being rejected.  And if Jenny Clow was indeed in Agnes's service, then her liaison with Burns would come sooner or later to Agnes's attention -- as indeed her pregnancy made inevitable.  By that time, though, correspondence between Burns (by then married to Jean) and Agnes had become sporadic and at times stiffly formal.  I think it's likely that Agnes was hurt both by Burns's loss of interest in the correspondence and in what she found out about Jenny. [It isn't clear to me that Agnes knew about Jean's pregnancy and the deaths of the infants.]

c.  The intensity of Burns's pursuit of a fully sexual relationship with Agnes had to do, I think, with his perception of Agnes as being on a different level, socially and intellectually, from other women with whom he had sexual relationships.  Jean I take to have been Burns's social equal -- the daughter of a skilled stonemason would have been considered socially superior to the servant girls that Burns had success with and at least equal to a struggling tenant-farmer.  But the relatively literate, well-connected, and urbane Agnes must have seemed to Burns not just a pretty woman but a possibly more prestigious sexual conquest.  In theory, social class didn't matter to Burns or, ostensibly, to Agnes, but in practice it turned out to be a different matter.  And from Agnes's point of view, social standing depended on reputation, and "Reputation" (so capitalized in one of Agnes's letters) was only one of the things that Agnes had to lose.

d.  Burns's social success in literary, professional, and academic elite circles in Edinburgh during his first five-month stay in 1786-87 -- and the relative ease with which subscriptions for the Edinburgh edition of Poems were raised -- might well have suggested to Burns that his status as "poet" either raised him to the elite class or transcended social class altogether.  When he returned to Edinburgh in September 1787, he had lost no respect among those who valued his work but he suffered the fate of most celebrities and was no longer the centre of attention.  He was also, it would seem, after six weeks of strenuous travel, exhausted and perhaps ill; and he was certainly worried about his financial prospects going forward.  It's possible too that he had had a proposal of marriage rejected by Peggy Chalmers, a young woman he much admired but seems not to have sexually pursued.  We would say today that "he was under a lot of stress."  If indeed he saw Agnes as a representative of the class that had, earlier in the year, lionized him, then making himself the centre of her attention in an intimate way might have compensated him for the loss of celebrity and taken the edge off the stress of his other worries.  All this is highly speculative, of course, but if it's at all plausible, then we have Burns and Agnes pursuing a relationship in which, for all their mutual affection, neither partner was fully attuned to the deepest anxieties of the other, even when both could and did to some extent make these anxieties known in their correspondence and conversation.

Readers who know more about Burns than I do can judge whether or not the speculative comments above have any plausibility, and, plausible or not, explanations are not excuses.  Still, it would be useful to know more particularly the nuances of social distinctions in rural Ayrshire, c. 1780, and the rather different nuances prevalent in Edinburgh at the same period.  It's a pity too that Burns's other sexual partners have no voices of their own, for apart from Agnes, Burns's regular female correspondents were not objects of sexual pursuit.  How the texture, for want of a better word, of his relationship with Agnes compared to that of his other relationships would be interesting to know, for without such knowledge it's all to easy to take the idealized character of the famous love songs at face value.  In particular, it's unfortunate that Jean Armour can't speak to us in her own voice.  She seems to have been both remarkably complaisant and remarkably resilient, to have hung on, so to speak, and hoped for the best -- but did she have any other choice, really?  Burns's letters, taken as a whole, make lively and engaging reading, and neither the artificiality of the Clarinda/Sylvander letters nor the cruelty of the two discussed above seem typical.  That doesn't mean, however, that the "real" Burns or the "essential truth" about Burns can be found in some other sample.   We have to accept the contradictions and make our own judgments about what matters and what doesn't.

5.  Famous last words

There was some sporadic correspondence over the four years following Burns's departure from Edinburgh in February 1788.  Agnes wrote to Burns about Jenny Clow twice, as I've indicated above, and in at least one letter, now lost, probably in March 1789, she accused him of being a "villain," a charge to which he made a disingenuous and self-serving answer of the "I-resisted-temptation-that-no-other-man-could-have-resisted" type.  After their fraught meeting in March 1788 (between the deaths of Jean's twin girls), they met briefly perhaps twice more, the last time being in early December 1791, when Jenny Clow was dying and when Agnes was planning a voyage to Jamaica for what turned out to be a fruitless attempt to reconcile with her husband.  After January 1792, the correspondence petered out.  My interest here is not in their literal last words to one another but in their "last words" about the relationship, the words in which each sought to put his or her stamp on what they had undergone.  Burns's last words I am going to take to be the song "Ae Fond Kiss," which he enclosed, along with two other songs, in a letter to Agnes just after Christmas 1791, and which contains the famous lines "Had we never lov'd sae kindly/Had we never lov'd sae blindly . . ."  Agnes responded with a letter in late January 1792, just before sailing to Jamaica.  "I could have lived or died with you," she wrote, adding a hope that they might meet again in heaven.

As Clarinda, Agnes had cast herself as a pastoral nymph.  In writing "I could have lived or died with you," Agnes is casting herself as a Romantic heroine, perhaps even a tragic one, implying a history in which she made an absolute commitment to a love that was never fulfilled. But that is a fiction.  We know that Agnes very deliberately chose NOT to "live or die" with Burns and that she chose not to on solid, prudential grounds.  These same prudential grounds led her to make clear from the start that their relationship could not be consummated sexually.  As I've suggested, her economic situation was precarious and she had a reputation to maintain: her good name mattered to her too as a communicant of Canongate Church.   Further, she had her children to consider, and a pregnancy would have been a social disaster for her. For all that, as we've seen, her friendship with Burns, even within the limits she set on it, brought her reputation into question.  My point isn't at all that Agnes was wrong to be guided by those prudential considerations, for she had a great deal to lose and probably saw clearly that a leap into adultery with Burns would bring her no guarantee of security.  It simply isn't true, then, that she "could live and die" with Burns.  She couldn't.

For his part, Burns had perhaps given her a chance to construct that Romantic fiction by perpetrating his own in "Ae Fond Kiss."  The famous lines in that poem about loving "sae kindly" and "sae blindly" sound like a version of Othello's "not wisely but too well," but they too at best represent only a half-truth.  Burns and Agnes were almost certainly, in the old sense of "kindly," spontaneously and naturally drawn to one another.  But blind they were not.  Burns knew what he wanted -- a fully sexual relationship with a well-read, charming woman -- and Agnes knew both that he wanted that and that she couldn't afford to give it. So she played the dangerous game of trying to maintain an affectionate but chaste relationship that inevitably disappointed Burns without compromising her reputation.  Both of them knew exactly what they were doing.  There were certainly intense feelings of attraction on either side, and I'm not suggesting that their relationship was merely what we should now call "transactional" -- i. e. that each sought merely to "use" the other for their different satisfactions -- but I think we know enough about the complications of their situation to see that their "last words" around Christmas 1791 and New Year's 1792 enabled both to cast a retrospective glow over their relationship and softened the sometimes harsh judgments that each had made of the other in the wake of their separation and that third parties and relatives had been all too ready to make of both.  If Agnes's 1789 denomination of Burns as a "villain" rankled, his effort almost two years later, with "Ae fond kiss," to idealize the whole business and try to smooth over the rough edges seems to have worked.  By then Agnes was willing to buy into the fiction.

6.  Life and art?

Once a poem or song is in the public domain, there is no umbilical cord tying it to the poet's life.  As a song, "Ae Fond Kiss" will mean what its readers make it mean.  It won't be "about" Agnes McLehose.  As an historical document, it can be seen as apology or a peace-offering or both.  Burns is unlike the so-called "Romantic" poets like Blake and Wordsworth: their poetry is not only autobiographical in origin (perhaps all poetry is), but is seen self-consciously as the product of a unique vision, a vision that in many ways made them unlike their fellow human beings.  They saw their task as poets, then, as being to render the truths of their inner lives in language sufficiently distinctive to mark their uniqueness without losing touch with the humanity they shared with their readers. That's not easy to do, and Blake, for example, was thought mad for decades, except for a few readers.  Burns's poetry is not like this.  His use of the Scots dialect poses problems for readers of standard English, but it is not an arcane language.  It is a language that he shares with his readers, a familiar language used with freshness, force, and wit.  Burns's life, then -- however interesting and eventful -- is not connected to his poetry in the intimate way that, say, Wordsworth's is with his poetry.  So while Burns may refer to personal, social, religious, and political interests, he doesn't, so to speak, interpret his life in his poetry, and so the life won't give us a "key" to the poems, even when the poems may legitimately be used as documents in telling a story of his life.  In that case, our interest in the poems ceases to be aesthetic, and another kind of interest arises.

7. The greatness of Burns

Whatever we think of Burns during this brief period, there's no doubt that he is a very great poet.  There isn't any comic narrative better than"Tam O'Shanter," or any brief satire sharper than "Holy Willie's Prayer."  "The Twa Dogs" and "The Holy Fair" are two kinds of  tour-de-force.  The verse-epistles are fluent and charming, and the genre-piece "The Cotter's Saturday Night" comes across without condescension, and if we suspect that Burns's beliefs weren't very like the Cotter's, the Cotter's human decency and dignity come across with great sympathy.  And then there are the many, many songs, still alive, still sung.

Since we started with Agnes, we can end with a couple of final points: first, was the relationship with Agnes important to Burns as a poet?  Is "Ae Fond Kiss" especially beautiful because its connection to Agnes?  I don't think so.  It's a very lovely song -- not, of course, as beautiful and haunting as "The Lea-Rig" -- but I suspect that "Ae Fond Kiss" could have been written even without Agnes in Burns's life.  In Edinburgh in 1787-88, his most important relationships from a literary point of view were with the engraver James Johnson and later with George Thomson, with whom he engaged in projects to publish (and refurbish) and edit old Scottish songs for their respective collections.  Burns gave himself wholeheartedly to these projects, which were musical as well as literary.  They were the main focus of his cultural interests for the last six or seven years of his life, and they accorded comfortably with a growing radical nationalism in politics that came close to costing him his job as an exciseman.  And -- the second point -- I don't think it's going too far to say that in the years from 1790 or so to about 1830, the idea of "Scotland" was invented and that Burns's poems and songs initiated that invention.  It was Burns, with his generous acknowledgement of earlier Scottish poets like Fergusson and Ramsay, who created the idea of a Scottish poetic tradition.  Then, along came Sir Walter Scott's extraordinarily popular poems and novels, to cement what Burns had started.  The idea of Scotland that they created is still with us, for better or worse.  Burns deserves his celebratory "suppers" -- although I think that Scott deserves some suppers too.  If it weren't for them, Scots might still be living in "North Britain."

NOTE:  In writing this essay, I have drawn on the recent biographies of Burns by Ian McIntyre (1995, rev. 2008) and Robert Crawford (2009).  Both are informative and sensible, and I especially liked the extent to which McIntyre allowed Burns to speak through his letters.  A bibliography would have been helpful, though.  Crawford is more attentive to the poetry.  I consulted earlier biographies (Carswell, Snyder, Fitzhugh), and The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns (2009) has interesting essays and invaluable bibliographies.  The Selected Poems in the Penguin Classics series (edited by Carol McGuirk) has a fine introduction and informative notes and is marred only by the omission of Burns's loveliest song, "The Lea Rig."  Robert P. Irvine's edition, Selected Poems and Songs for the Oxford World's Classics series, sets out the poems and songs helpfully in relation to the sources of publication (the editions in Burns's lifetime, the issues of the Scots Musical Museum, etc.).  Again, no "Lea Rig" -- what's wrong with these people!  There are lots of internet sites about Burns.  Many I looked at were skimpy on detail and factually inaccurate in places.