Читать книгу The Canongate Burns - Robert Burns - Страница 6

It is not inevitable that out of a background of constantly threatening poverty, a profound sense of communal economic and political dissolution, bloody international warfare on land and sea, failure to make a living after being, initially, declared a poetic genius, a revolutionary spirit will emerge. Oliver Goldsmith, a poet Burns loved, came to the political conclusion that what the age needed to restrain the greedy, fractious aristocracy was an increase in the authority of the King. Burns, however, manifestly belongs to the temporarily dominant radical British literary culture which emerged with the loss of America. Hence all his actual and epistolary connections with the English radicals: Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, William Roscoe, Dr Wolcot (pen name, Peter Pindar). Hence his persistent seeking to publish in not only Edinburgh and Glasgow radical newspapers but, from the very beginning of his career, in London ones. Hence the resemblance in his poetry’s theme in image, if rarely in quality, to the outpouring of Scottish and English radical protest poetry accompanied by his signal influence on the dissenting Ulster radical poets. Hence the manifest parallels, albeit they were quite unaware of each other, with William Blake. De Quincey’s definition of Burns as a Jacobin was anything but singular among the English radicals. John Thelwall, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s political mentor, greatly admired Burns. James Perry, editor of the anti-government Morning Chronicle not only published his poetry but, simultaneously, sought to hire him and Coleridge to work in London for his newspaper. Indeed, this was a conversational paradise lost. Politically, of course, not only Coleridge but Wordsworth knew Burns for the revolutionary spirit which, at that early stage of their lives, they themselves were. In burying their own past, they were important influences in allowing subsequent reactionary critics to deny Burns. This denial of Burns is not the least of the offences Shelley holds against Wordsworth in his parody of him, Peter Bell the Third.

Further, if we look at the pattern of Burns’s career, we can quite clearly discern his membership of politically active groups of an increasingly radical tendency. Freemasonry at Kilwinning led to his connections with Edinburgh’s Crochallan Fencibles which, as well as being a bawdy drinking club, was an extraordinary hot-house for not only brilliantly rhetorical and theoretical, but practical radical political activity. His Dumfries years led not only to his attempt to send carronades to the French Revolutionaries but, as we now know, to his membership of the Dumfries cell of The Friends of the People. By this time he was not only under scrutiny by his masters in The Excise but by Robert Dundas’s extensive security apparatus centred in Edinburgh and reporting to London. Little wonder that after the 1793–4 Sedition Trials Burns should write:

The shrinking Bard adown an alley sculks

And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks

Tho’ there his heresies in Church and State

Might well award him Muir and Palmer’s fate …

Given the poetry and the letters with this mass of corroborative contextual historical evidence from within and without Scotland, it is hard to understand why not only in current Scottish popular culture but, indeed, in significant elements of Scottish academic culture, there is still a persistent compulsion to downplay, even deny, the revolutionary Burns. One cannot imagine kindred spirits like Blake or Shelley being so treated. One tangible reason for the denial is due to the fact that we will never be able to retrieve the full volume of radical writing in the 1790s. Key newspapers, such as The Glasgow Advertiser 1795–7, are irretrievably lost. Governmental scrutiny was intensive against radicals and the postal system monitored to such a degree that communication was furtive and restricted. To corroborate Burns’s radicalism further, he himself was wholly aware of this factor. As he wrote to Patrick Millar in March 1794:

—Nay, if Mr Perry, whose honor, after your character of him I cannot doubt, if he will give me an Adress & channel by which anything will come safe from these spies with which he may be certain that his correspondence is beset, I will now & then send him any bagatelle that I may write.— … but against the days of Peace, which Heaven send soon, my little assistance may perhaps fill up an idle column of a Newspaper.— I have long had it in my head to try my hand in the way of Prose Essays, which I propose sending into the World through the medium of some Newspaper; and should these be worth his while, to these Mr Perry shall be welcome; & my reward shall be, his treating me with his paper, which, by the bye, to anybody who has the least relish for Wit, is a high treat indeed.

In the general implosion of British radical writing culture under governmental pressure, the loss of Burns’s political writings was particularly severe due, as we shall see, to the panic surrounding his premature death at the darkest point of the 1790s.

While significant, however, the denial of Burns’s radicalism is not essentially based on missing texts. The denial of Burns’s actual politics is much more multiform and historically protracted than that. As we shall see, the after-shock of the revolutionary, even insurrectionary, activities of the 1790s was so colossal that it extended deep into the nineteenth century. It was particularly severely felt in Scotland. What we see, then, in Victorian Scotland is Burns, with oceans of whisky and mountains of haggis, being converted into an iconic national figure by a nation in almost complete denial of the political values he stood for. Editorial and critical work inevitably reflected this absurdity with activities which included sanitising, suppressing and trivialising any evidence, textual and otherwise, contrary to the travesty they were creating. Edward Dowden in his seminal The French Revolution and English Literature, written at the end of the nineteenth century, included Burns among writers so affected. If for English radical writers, this book marked the beginning of mature, objective scholarship regarding the reality of their engagement with the political issues of the 1790s, this was ignored by Scottish Burns scholars. Hugh Blair’s remark that ‘Burns’s politics always smell of the smithy’ held sway with almost all subsequent commentators. Indeed, in the early twentieth century W.P. Ker designated Burns as a Tory Unionist. Heroic efforts in the 1930s by that greatest of Burns scholars and critics, tellingly American, Professor De Lancey Ferguson, ended in bitter comments such as his attempt properly to locate Burns in history had been met in Scotland with ‘passionate apathy’. Insofar as Burns was permitted to express political values, the critical strategy was either to claim that his political poems either did not meet their tests of aesthetic quality or that such poetry expressed confusion. These tactics persist. Dr James Mackay has recently noted that ‘Burns’s politics were … never less than moderately confused …’8 Dr Mackay’s opinion is hardly one to cause surprise since essentially his biography presents no advance on the nineteenth-century criticism of Burns but, in fact, is extensively based on and partly plagiarised from nineteenth-century published biographical sources.

Such assertions of confusion are grounded on ignorance of the radical tradition within which Burns was operating. A coherent tradition dating from the Civil War, British radical thought in the latter stages of the eighteenth century combined Scottish and English elements in alternating proportions. Burns is not to be understood as some sort of barely rational political oddity. With Blake, he is a central poet of a long established revolutionary vision. Consciously or otherwise, the vast bulk of Burns criticism has detached him from his proper intellectual, cultural and political context so that, an isolated figure, his politics can be seen as subjective, whimsical, even eccentric. In proper context, he is wholly different. Much of this, of course, smacks of a bourgeois condescension to not only Burns’s class status but also the actual power of poetry itself. Poetry is not, for such minds, ‘hard’ knowledge. Burns himself constantly stresses the ‘bedlamite’ tendencies of the poetic personality but he never confused the turmoil and travails of the process of poetic productivity with the absolute perfection of the formal and linguistic nature of the poetic product. Also what we see constantly in his letters is a polemical and dialectical skill based on a wholly coherent grasp of the key intellectual issues of his age. Maria Riddell was not alone in thinking him an even greater conversationalist than poet. Never granted a public stage, his extraordinary prose suggests he would have been among the greatest in that arguably greatest of rhetorical ages.

Painful reality taught Burns economics, but he was not only aware of Adam Smith’s sentimental theories but his economic ones. As he wrote of his current reading to Robert Graham in 1789:

By and by the excise-instructions you mentioned were not in the bundle.— But ’tis no matter; Marshall in his Yorkshire, & particularly that extraordinary man, Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, find my leisure employment enough.— I could not have given any mere man credit for half the intelligence Mr Smith discovers in the book. I would covet much to have his ideas respecting the present state of some quarters of the world that are or have been the scenes of considerable revolutions since his book was written.

Central to the ‘considerable revolutions’ that had taken place was Burns’s chastened experience that the manifest increase in wealth in the latter part of the century was not accompanied by any growth in equitable distribution. All boats were certainly not rising on this flood tide of new wealth. As David Cannadine has cogently pointed out there was throughout Burns’s adult life an intense massification of wealth among the aristocracy both by carefully calculated pan-British marriages and their capacity to insert themselves in the burgeoning civil and military offices of a state expanding to meet its ultimate conflict with France.9 Nor did the initially reformist middle-class, the ‘stately stupidity of self-sufficient Squires or the luxuriant insolence of upstart “Nabobs”’, offer the people political and financial hope. Thus in The Heron Ballads, Burns lifts a stone on Scottish provincial life to reveal a bourgeois world replete with sexual but mainly fiscal chicanery. His vision of the entrepreneurial personality is significantly close to John Galt. Indeed, his vision of crime and Edinburgh makes him a precursor of R.L. Stevenson. Indeed, even Stevenson never wrote anything quite of this order about his loved and loathed Edinburgh —the letter is to Peter Hill, the Edinburgh bookseller, a correspondent who always evoked his most extraordinary rhetorical salvoes:

I will make no excuses my dear Bibliopolus, (God forgive me for murdering language) that I have sat down to write to you on this vile paper, stained with the sanguinary scores of ‘thae curst horse leeches o’ th’ Excise’. —It is economy, Sir; it is that cardinal virtue, Prudence; so I beg you will sit down & either compose or borrow a panegyric (if you are going to borrow, apply to our friend, Ramsay, for the assistance of the author of those pretty little buttering paragraphs of eulogiums on your thrice-honored & never-enough-to-be-praised MAGIS-TRACY —how they hunt down a [Shop (deleted)] house-breaker with the sanguinary perseverance of a bloodhound —how they outdo a terrier in a badger-hole, in unearthing a resettor of stolen goods —how they steal on a thoughtless troop of Night-nymphs as a spaniel winds the unsuspecting Covey— or how they riot o’er a ravaged B—dy house as a cat does o’er a plundered Mouse-nest —how they new-vamp old Churches, aiming at appearances of Piety —plan Squares and Colledges, to pass for men of taste and learning, &c. &c. &c. —while old Edinburgh, like [a (deleted)] the doting Mother of a parcel a rakehelly Prodigals, may sing ‘Hooly & fairly,’ or cry, ‘Wae’s me that e’er I saw ye,’ but still must put her hand in her pocket & pay whatever scores the young dogs think proper to contract) —I was going to say, but this damn’d Parenthesis has put me out of breath, that you should get the manufacturer of the tinselled crockery of magistratial reputations, who makes so distinguished & distinguishing a figure in the Ev: Courant, to compose or rather to compound something very clever on my remarkable frugality; that I write to one of my most esteemed friends on this wretched paper, which was originally intended for the venal fist of some drunken Exciseman, to take dirty notes in a miserable vault of an Ale-cellar.

Burns’s political thought, then, is created by his perception of political, institutional degeneration driven by individual economic rapacity and how this might be countered by alternative forms of justice-creating communality. The immediate question arising from this is, of course, the question of Burns’s fidelity to the British State of which he was not only a subject but a paid civil-servant who, as Tom Paine had also been, was bound to it by an all-encompassing oath, which cast a shadow over the rest of his life. The Excise oath is deeply revealing of the pressure the British State exerted:

I, …….., do swear that I do, from my Heart, Abhor, Detest, and Abjure, as impious and heretical, that damnable Doctrine and Position, that Princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope, or any Authority of the See of Rome, may be deposed or murdered by their Subjects, or any other whatsoever. And I do declare, that no foreign Prince, Person, Prelate, State or Potentate hath, or ought to have, any Jurisdiction, Power, Superiority, Pre-eminence or Authority, Ecclesiastical or Spiritual, within the Realm: so help me God.10

In part, Burns’s protestations of fidelity to that state were wrung out of him as his masters in the Excise grew ever more worried about his revolutionary tendencies. In protesting fidelity, however, to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Burns was not simply being hypocritically skin saving. That revolution had been acceptable, certainly as a stage to further democratic progress. What he and his fellow radicals believed, however, was that the trajectory of the British State with its Hanoverian monarchy was degenerately downwards. As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop in 1788:

What you mention of the thanksgiving day is inspirational from above. —Is it not remarkable, odiously remarkable, that tho’ manners are more civilised & the rights of mankind better understood, by an Augustan Century’s improvement, yet in this very reign of heavenly Hanoverianism, & almost in this very year, an empire beyond the Atlantic has had its REVO-LUTION too, & for the same maladministration & legislative misdemeanours in the illustrious & sapientipetent Family of H [anover] as was complained in the tyrannical & bloody house of STUART.—

The ‘Empire beyond the Atlantic’ was for Burns, as Blake, a benchmark for his ideal of Republican, democratic virtue. It was the revolution that presaged the desired revolutions to come. As he wrote in The Tree of Liberty:

My blessings ay attend the chiel,

Wha pitied Gallia’s slaves, man

And staw a branch, spite o’ the Deil

Frae ’yont the western waves, man!

The demonic forces of reaction were for Burns, however, usually more successful in hindering and, indeed, destroying the transmission of the forces of liberty. Worse, Britain which had been because of its history the initiator and prime mover in the cause of liberty was now become the chief oppressor. In poetic terms this dialectic between a self-betraying England and a self-creating democratic America achieves its most complete expression in his Ode for General Washington’s Birthday. This is a poem of extraordinary importance in terms of Burns’s political ideas but one which his conservative commentators have almost wholly ignored by conveniently drawing attention to their sense of its linguistic and formal inadequacies caused by the poet’s use of the Pindaric Ode. For Burns himself, however, the subject of the poem was ‘Liberty: you know my honoured friend, how dear the theme is to me.’ For Burns and his fellow radicals the cause of liberty was a pan-European phenomenon, nations were tested by the degree by which they had gone beyond absolutism towards democracy. Most of them, as he testifies in that brilliantly satiric tour de force and tour of Europe, To a Gentleman who had sent a Newspaper, failed the test miserably. It was, however, particularly painful to see England fallen from her pre-eminent position. As he wrote in the ‘Washington’ poem:

Alfred, on thy starry throne,

Surrounded by the tuneful choir,

The Bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre,

And roused the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire,

No more thy England own.—

Dare injured nations form the great design,

To make detested tyrants bleed?

Thy England execrates the glorious deed!

Beneath her hostile banners waving,

Every pang of honor braving,

England in thunder calls— ‘The Tyrant’s cause is mine!’

That hour accurst, how did the fiends rejoice,

And hell thro’ all her confines raise the exulting voice,

That hour which saw the generous the English name

Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!

For Burns an England so fallen, inevitably dragged Scotland down with her. On occasion he could be defiantly nationalistic:

You know my national prejudices. —I have often read & admired the Spectator, Adventurer, Rambler, & World, but still with certain regret that they were so thoroughly and entirely English.— Alas! Have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from a certain Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, & even her very Name! …

Unlike many of his educated compatriots, the Anglo-British empire did not look to Burns a good deal for Scotland. He saw Scots sucked into the deadly wars of empire. He also saw the degeneration of Scottish leadership with Scots as sycophantic Westminster politicians and bullies back home among their countrymen with Henry Dundas, the quintessence of these vices, as his enemy incarnate. At his bleakest, as in Ode on General Washington’s Birthday, Burns’s perceived Scotland, despite her heroic history of asserting her freedom, lost beyond resurrection:

Thee, Caledonia, thy wild heaths among,

Famed for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,

To thee, I turn with swimming eyes.—

Where is that soul of Freedom fled?

Immingled with the mighty Dead!

Beneath the hallowed turf where WALLACE lies!

Hear it not, Wallace, in thy bed of death!

Ye babbling winds in silence sweep;

Disturb not ye the hero’s sleep,

Nor give the coward secret breath.—

Is this the ancient Caledonian form,

Firm as her rock, resistless as her storm?

Shew me that eye which shot immortal hate,

Blasting the Despot’s proudest bearing:

Shew me that arm which, nerved with thundering fate,

Braved Usurpation’s boldest daring!

Dark-quenched as yonder sinking star,

No more that glance lightens afar;

That palsied arm no more whirls on the waste of war.

Opposed to such national pessimism, he also perceived a resurrected not morbid Scotland with himself as National Bard writing, a sort of Yeatsian precursor, a historically derived national mytho-poetry. As he wrote to Alex Cunningham in March 1791: ‘—When political combustion ceases to be the object of Princes & Patriots, it then, you know becomes the lawful prey of Historians and Poets.—’ He knew the explosively, for him, liberating forces locked up in Scottish history. Sir Walter Scott knew them, too, and was terrified of them. Burns, however, proceeded to create poetic time-bombs as in Scots Wha Hae, where the subtext is an attack on the Pittite policies of oppression against Scottish radicals in the Scots vernacular and the words of the French Revolutionaries, making the Tennis Court Oath to do or die, come from the mouths of fourteenth-century Scottish soldiers. It may be questionable history but its purpose is to detect semi-mythical antecedents in the Scottish past as precursors for the reintegrated, resurrected nation. William Wallace and, to a lesser extent, Robert Bruce were the obvious candidates:

What a poor, blighted, rickety breed and the virtues & charities when they take their birth from geometrical hypothesis & mathematical demonstration? And what a vigorous Offspring are they when they owe their origin to, and are nursed with the vital blood of a heart glowing with the noble enthusiasm of generosity, benevolence and Greatness of soul? The first may do very well for those philosophers who look on the world of man as one vast ocean and each individual as a little vortex in it whose sole business and merit is to absorb as much as it can in its own center (sic); but the last is absolutely and essentially necessary when you would make a Leonidas, a Hannibal, an Alfred, or a WALLACE.—

What Burns was attempting was a Scottish variant of the manner in which his English radical contemporaries were retrieving the English past. As Stephen C. Behrendt has remarked, ‘Oppositional Radical rhetoric frequently sought to politicise the masses by linking their interests with ancient British (Saxon) traditions of individual and collective liberty ostensibly preserved in the House of Commons but increasingly imperilled by self-serving initiatives of the aristocracy and the monarchy.’11 In an age whose rapacious entrepreneurial activities increasingly atomised society, Wallace, then, was the heroic selfless embodiment of the spirit of Scottish community. This looking to the past for virtuous political models and heroic embodiment of these models is, of course, characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century republican imagination with, of course, the virtuous pantheon to be derived from the classic republics of Greece and Rome. Like Shakespeare, with little Latin and less Greek, Burns certainly knew that central Real Whig text, Addison’s Cato and he did also draw witty parallels between the reformist Scots of his own era and their classical predecessors:

Erskine, a spunkie Norland billie;

True Campbells, Frederick and Illay;

An’ Livinstone, the bauld Sir Willie;

An’ monie ithers,

Whom auld Demosthenes or Tully

Might own for brithers.

In this discussion of republican tendencies, an immediate difficulty presents itself regarding Burns’s Jacobinism. As Hugh Miller remarked in the nineteenth century: ‘The Jacobite of one year who addressed verses to the reverend defenders of the beauteous Stuart and composed the Chevalier’s Lament had become in the next the uncompromising Jacobin who wrote A Man’s a Man for a’ That.’ In actual fact there is no chronological transition in Burns from Jacobite to Jacobin; these themes intermingle throughout. Nor are they essentially contradictory. Miller’s problem arises, as so many misunderstandings of Burns, from his belief that what he is dealing with is confusion unique to Burns. While Burns’s personal life pursued a self-aware, sometimes chaotic, zigzag course, his political ideation was not similarly eccentric. Miller, however, does not understand how radical culture as a whole integrated the apparently opposing element of Jacobitism into itself. As Fintan O’Toole has cogently remarked in dealing with a similar apparent self-contradiction in the Irish dramatist and Whig politician, R.B. Sheridan:

At first sight, there may seem to be a contradiction between the Jacobite tinge of Sheridan’s political ancestry and the radical Whiggism to which he was now attaching himself. But by the time Sheridan became conscious of public life, the vestiges of Jacobitism had become, paradoxically, a few stray threads in the banners of the radical Whigs. Rather paradoxically, Tory blue became the colour of Wilkes’s supporters. The Public Advertiser which published the Junius Letters also published Jacobite propaganda. Later, a number of prominent former Jacobites, including Sir Thomas Gasgoigne, Frances Plowden and Joseph Ritson, became adherents of the radical Whig, Charles James Fox. Sir Frances Burndett’s family had come out for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45. The apparent conservatism of Jacobitism, its hankering after an increasingly mythic utopia in the past, was not really out of tune with the language and sentiments of the radicals. As Paul Kleber Monod puts it ‘the illusion that a “golden age” might have existed at some time in the past fascinated radicals …’ The old promises of unity and moral regeneration continued to appeal to the imagination of the English radicals even after the Stuart cause collapsed.12

Against Hanoverian triumphalism, misfortune, then, made strange political bedfellows. Also, like Sheridan, Burns’s sense of Jacobitism was familial. His family were not rooted in Ayrshire; his father had come from the North-East Jacobite redoubt. Indeed, Burns claimed that in 1715 they had been ‘out’. As he wrote in 1789 to Lady Winifred Maxwell Constable:

… with your ladyship I have the honor to be connected by one of the strongest and most endearing ties in the whole Moral world —Common Sufferers in a cause where even to be unfortunate is glorious, the cause of Heroic Loyalty! Though my Fathers had not illustrious Honours and vast properties to hazard in the contest; though they left their humble cottages only to add so many units to the unnoted croud that followed their leaders; yet what they could they did, and what they had they lost; with unshaken firmness and unconcealed Political Attachments, they shook hands with Ruin for what they esteemed the cause of their King and their Country.—

This language, and the inclosed verses, are for your Ladyship’s eyes alone.— Poets are not very famous for their prudence; but as I can do nothing for a Cause which is nearly no more, I do not wish to hurt myself.

Excise officers, as part of their routine duty post-1745, were expected to compile and deliver to Edinburgh, a list of all known Jacobite sympathisers in their area. This remained true until the death of Charles Edward Stuart in Rome the year after Burns wrote his dedicatory Birthday Ode to the exiled Stuart. Though he thought Jacobitism in practical terms a spent force, Burns knew it still had enough vitality to get him into trouble with his Hanoverian masters, thus he did not sign his Jacobite songs. Also it provided for him an image of Scottish self-loyalty which he increasingly believed was lacking in the contemporary nation replete with individuals variedly on the make at home and abroad. Nor did he perceive authoritarian kingship and consequent petrified social hierarchy as a solution to the nation’s ills. What he did fear, and this in his last years brought him ever closer to the views of Charles James Fox and the Scottish Foxite Whigs, was that a massification under Pitt of Hanoverian monarchical power was taking place. Thus as early as 1787, at the very moment he was seeking to enter The Excise, he did not only diamond cut these lines on a Stirling window but subsequently published them in an Edinburgh newspaper thinly disguised with the initials R.B.

HERE Stewarts once in triumph reign’d,

And laws for Scotland’s weal ordain’d;

But now unroof’d their Palace stands,

Their sceptre’s fall’n to other hands;

Fallen indeed, and to the earth,

Whence grovelling reptiles take their birth.—

The injur’d STEWART-line are gone,

A Race outlandish fill their throne;

An idiot race, to honor lost;

Who knows them best despise them most.

Indeed, the appeal of the Stewarts to his imagination was a mixture of empathy for their suffering and displacement, as contrast gainers against the loathed Hanoverians and, not least, the aesthetic tradition they represented. They may have had something of the knight about them but, like the devil, they also had all the best tunes:

By the bye, it is singular enough that the Scottish Muses were all Jacobites. I have paid more attention to every description of Scots songs than perhaps any body living has done, I do not recollect one single stanza, or even the title of the most trifling Scots air, which has the least panegyrical reference to the families of Nassau or Brunswick; while there are hundreds satirizing them. This may be thought no panegyric on the Scots Poets, but I mean it as such. For myself, I would always take it as a compliment to have it said, that my heart ran before my head. And surely the gallant but unfortunate house of Stewart, the kings of our fathers for so many heroic ages, is a theme much more interesting than an obscure beef-witted insolent race of foreigners whom a conjuncture of circumstances kickt up into power and consequence.

If the unmerited rise of the Hanoverians excited his rage, the fall of the executed or exiled Stewarts caught his sympathy. Tudor England’s conduct towards Scotland proved as inflammatory to him as that of the contemporary Hanoverians; ‘What a rock-hearted, perfidious Succubus was that Queen Elizabeth! —Judas Iscariot was a sad dog to be sure, but still his demerits sink into insignificance, compared with the doings of infernal Bess Tudor.’ This vision of Mary Queen of Scots or Bonnie Prince Charlie is not, however, an inversion of Burns’s democratic principles. He viewed them, especially the Prince, as Shakespeare viewed Lear. As he wrote: ‘A poor, friendless wand’rer may claim a sigh,/ Still more if that Wand’rer were royal.’ If experience of Jacobite defeat and its ‘Heroic Loyalty’ created social parity between himself and Lady Winifred, it made brothers of a kind between himself and the fallen Prince who was not only an outcast but also the father of an illegitimate child. People so fallen from their proper station into obscurity and poverty constantly preoccupied his imagination and filled his poetry. In contemplating Pitt’s fall from power in 1789, he compared his plight with that of Nebuchadnezzar. Had he known what was to transpire, he might well have wished that Pitt had indeed gone out to grass. He also saw in the fate of the common supporters of the Jacobite cause a grievous expulsion not simply from their ancestral home but into Miltonic hyperspace:

… the brave but unfortunate Jacobite Clans who, as John Milton tells us, after their unhappy Culloden in Heaven, lay ‘nine times the space that measures day and night,’ in oblivious astonishment, prone-weltering on the fiery surge.

This inspired casting of the Highlanders as the fallen angels of Paradise Lost is not only a general expression of Burns’s conceited genius for creatively amalgamating diverse elements but a particular example of his constant, synergic ability to fuse not only Scottish and English poetic elements but also, with regard to radical political philosophy, to be indebted to both English and Scottish sources as means of energising his political poetry and thought. Consider, for example, this little known poem, On Johnson’s Opinion of Hampden;

FOR shame!

Let Folly and Knavery

Freedom oppose:

’Tis suicide, Genius,

To mix with her foes.

Greatly admiring of and influenced by Dr Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, wherein he saw so many of his own pains, Burns was provoked into this remark by Johnson’s acerbic Tory aside that John Hampden was ‘a zealot of rebellion’. Hampden, due to his struggles with Charles I, was an exemplary, indeed iconic figure for Scottish as well as English radicals. Indeed, not only did Burns but all radical thought, as it developed throughout the eighteenth century, was an amalgam of intermingling Scottish and English traditions. As is demonstrated in Caroline Robbins’s seminal work, The Eighteenth-Century Common-wealthmen (1957), eighteenth-century radical political philosophy was a functional construction made from diverse elements. As John Dinwiddy has cogently remarked:

The traditions or discourses on which they drew, and to some of which their conceptions of revolution were related, were numerous and diverse. They included ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘Country’ ideology, the myth of the ancient constitution, millennial religion, natural-rights theory, American republicanism, French Jacobinism, Irish insurrectionalism. Some of them were quite closely linked to one another both historically and conceptually, as American republicanism was to Country ideology. Others, such as historic rights and natural rights were theoretically more distinct; but none the less they were often treated in practise as mutually reinforcing rather than competing modes of argument, and radicals moved to and fro between them without any great regard for logical consistency.13

From what has already been said and from our consequent textual analyses of individual political poems, this description fits Burns like a glove. His ideas are absolutely in the mainstream of eighteenth-century radicalism; it is not his beliefs but, like John Milton or William Blake, the quality of his poetic genius that makes him exceptional.

Should there still be any doubt about Burns’s debt to eighteenth-century radical thought, consider, for example, these extracts from Cato’s Letters published through the early 1720s and, tellingly, jointly English and Scottish authored:

There is nothing moral in Blood or in Title, or in Place; Actions only, and the Causes that produce them are moral. He therefore is best that does best. Noble blood prevents neither Folly, nor Lunacy, nor Crimes, but frequently begets or promotes them: And Noblemen, who act infamously, derive no honour from virtuous Ancestors whom they dishonour. A Man who does base Things, is not noble or great, if he do little Things: A sober Villager is a better Man than a debauched Lord; an honest Mechanick than a Knavish Courtier.14

It is of course no accident that the poet’s closest friend during his period at Ellisland, Robert Riddell, a highly respected Whig polemicist, wrote under the pen name Cato, Or, again from Cato’s Letters, on the rapacious cupidity and the political consequences of the aristocratic and propertied classes at home and abroad:

They will be ever contriving and forming wicked and dangerous Projects, to make the People poor, and themselves rich; well knowing the Dominion follows Property; that where there are Wealth and Power, there will always be crowds of servile Dependents; and that, on the contrary, Poverty dejects the Mind, fashions it to Slavery, and renders it unequal to any generous Undertaking, and incapable of opposing any bold Usurpation. They will squander away the Publick Money in wanton Presents to Minions, and their Creatures of Pleasure or of Burthern, or in Pensions to mercenary and worthless Men and Women, for vile Ends and traiterous Purposes.

They will engage their Country in ridiculous, expensive, fantastical Wars, to keep the Minds of Men in continual Hurry and Agitation, and under constant Fears and Alarms, and, by such means, deprive them both of Leisure and Inclination to look into publick Miscarriages. Men, on the contrary, will, instead of such Inspection, be disposed to fall into all Measures offered, seemingly, for their Defence, and will agree to every wild Demand made by those who are betraying them.15

If this, as it should, sounds familiar so to is the stress that, with Lockean contractuality, power should reside not with a corrupt elite but with the people:

The first principles of Power are in the People; and all the Projects of Men in Power ought to refer to the People, to aim solely at their good, and end in it: And who will ever pretend to govern them without regarding them, will soon repent it. Such Feats of Errantry may do perhaps in Asia: but in the countries where the people are free, it is Madness to hope to rule them against their Wills. They will know, that Government is appointed for their Sakes, and will be saucy enough to expect some Regard and some from their own Delegates.16

While there is some doubt about Aberdonian Thomas Gordon’s commitment to the Right Whig cause after his joint-authorship of The Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, he is certainly the fore-father of a stream of Scots who went south to fill prominent and powerful positions in English radical circles. We need to modify the notion that Scottish writers going south, from giants like Smollett to minnows like Mallett (Malloch), were simply on the make by being hyper-patriotic propagandists in the forging of the Anglo-British Empire. Thus, for example we have the expatriate radical careers of Gilbert and Peter Stuart, Thomas Hardy, Secretary of the London Corresponding Society, James Perry (Pirie), editor of The Morning Chronicle, Dr Alexander Geddes, radical Catholic priest, poet and religious contributor to The Analytical Review and James Oswald, who not only, like a significant number of Scots, went to France, but died in the Vendée fighting for the revolutionary army. Certainly, if they were to emerge from historical darkness, their political values and consequent rhetoric would also help to return Burns to his appropriate cultural, political context. We need also to understand the headlong flight of poets and writers such as James Thomson Callander, James Kennedy and James ‘Balloon’ Tytler, mainly westward to America in the wake of the 1793/4 Treason trials, to see parallels between their lesser political poetry to that of Burns.17 The absence of these radicals voices serves to diminish appreciation of the iron grip Dundas had in suffocating dissent by means not only of the prostitution of the Scottish legal system but because that system was inadequate in terms of defining treasonable behaviour. As John Thelwall, the great English radical and intimate friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, in the 1790s, wrote:

It is a protest against an alarming threat held out —not by the sovereign —not by the legislature but by Mr Secretary Dundas. —He alone it was who had the audacity to threaten the violation and subversion of those yet remaining laws that guarantee Englishmen an impartial trial by Jury of their country, and to substitute in their place, the arbitrary tyrannical practices of the Court of Justiciary in Scotland.18

Perhaps the single greatest source of reformative change affecting Burns, was, however, within Scotland itself and had its origin in that charismatic Ulsterman, Francis Hutcheson and his professorial tenure at Glasgow University. His tradition ended in the 1790s with Professor John Millar whose cosmopolitan scholarship, integrity and passionate commitment to democratic reformation was lost in the vortex of repression. His 1796 Letter of Crito: On the Causes, Objects and Consequences of the Present War, dedicated to his friend Charles James Fox, published along with John McLaurin’s (Lord Dreghorn) anti-war poetry in Edinburgh’s The Scots Chronicle, both confirm Burns’s rhetoric and experiences in the same decade. They also signal the tragic death of Hutcheson’s aspirations for not only Scotland but the still festering sore of the Irish problem. While we do not know if Burns read Hutcheson, there can be no doubt of his teaching’s proximity to the poet’s own values:

In every form of government the people has this right of defending themselves against the abuse of power … the people’s right of resistance is unquestionable.

But when there’s no other way of preserving a people; and when their governors by their perfidious frauds have plainly forfeited their right; they may justly be divested of their power, and others put into their places, or a new plan of power established.

Nor does this doctrine of the right of resistance in defence of the rights of a people, naturally tend to excite seditions and civil wars. Nay they have been more frequently occasioned by the contrary tenets. In all ages there has been too much patience in the body of the people, and too stupid a veneration for their princes or rulers; which for each one free kingdom or state has produced many monstrous herds of miserable abject slaves or beasts of burden, rather than civil polities of rational creatures, under the most inhuman and worthless masters, trampling upon all things human and divine with the uttmost effrontery.19

Such Hutchesonian values would, in any case, have percolated down to Burns through his connection to Glasgow-trained New Licht clergy in Ayrshire. This entails that the wonderful anti-Auld Licht satires of the early Ayrshire period are not provincial storms in a tea cup but a variant on the intense British struggle by reforming religion to shake off the theocratic control of both the Trinitarian Anglican and, in Scotland, the reactionary Presbyterian churches whose vision of the innately sinful, fallen nature of man renders impossible a reformative, never mind utopian, politics. At the heart of the poetry of Burns and Blake is this preoccupation with removing the absolute political power given to the reactionary state by the teaching of what they saw as a perverted institutional Christianity. Burns’s Address to the Deil is profoundly different in language and tone from Blake but not in essential purpose and meaning. Had he been aware of his true English peer he would have been transfixed by such Blakean lines:

… & the purpose of the Priests & Churches

Is to impress on men the fear of death; to teach

Trembling & fear, terror, constriction; abject selfishness.

Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on

In fearless majesty annihilating Self … (Milton, 11.37–41)

As Richard Rorty has written,

The Romantics were inspired by the successes of antimonarchist and anticlericalist revolutions to think that the desire for something to obey is a symptom of immaturity. These successes made it possible to envisage building a new Jerusalem without divine assistance, thereby creating a society in which men and women would lead the perfected lives which had previously seemed possible only in an invisible, immaterial, post-mortem paradise. The image of progress towards such a society —horizontal progress, so to speak— began to take the place of Platonic or Dantean images of vertical ascent. History began to replace God, Reason and Nature as the source of human hope.20

This accounts, too, for the religio-mythical compatibility of Burns and Blake in that both are obsessed with those transgressive figures who destroy the institutional, regressive corruption of the established world in the name of a new earthly heaven. Blake is the more extreme and mythopoetic. Burns never similarly defines Blake’s transgressive Christ as discovered in The Everlasting Gospel. But both are preoccupied with not only the heroic, vitalising figure of ‘Blind John’s’ Satan but with the problematic figure of Job. Cynthia Ozick21 has commented on Job:

Like the noblest of prophets he assails injustice; and still he is unlike them. They accuse the men and women who do evil; their targets are made of flesh and blood. It is human transgression they hope to mend. Job seeks to rectify God. His is an ambition higher, deeper, vaster, grander than theirs; he is possessed by a righteousness more frenzied than theirs; the scale of his justice-hunger exceeds all that precedes him … he can be said to be the consummate prophet. And at the same time he is the consummate violator. If we are to understand him at all, if we are rightly to enter into his passions at the pinnacle, then we ought to name him prophet; but we may not. Call him, instead, antiprophet —his teaching, after all, verges on atheism: the rejection of God’s power. His thesis is revolution.

Both Burns’s poetry and prose are saturated with the deeply varied ways he employed his early exposure to the sermon and his life-long, intense reading of the Bible. No story affected him more deeply than that of Job’s.

Liam McIlvanney, one of a tiny minority of the legion of Burns commentators to have sympathetic knowledge of Burns’s true politics, traces in a particularly fine article, ‘Presbyterian Radicalism and the Politics of Robert Burns’, a similarly long tradition of radical political gestation from a more distinctively Scottish point of view. He highlights the ambivalence at the heart of Burns’s relationship to Presbyterianism thus:

… it remains unfortunate that Burns’s run-ins with the kirk have obscured the extent to which his own political philosophy is grounded in his religious inheritance. His politics are shaped by two complimentary strands of Presbyterian thought: on the one hand, the New Light, with its subjection of all forms of authority to the tribunal of individual reason: on the other, the traditional contractarian political theory long associated with Presbyterianism. These influences are evident in Burns’s repeated avowal of ‘revolution’ principles in his support for the American Revolution and, above all, in his satirical attacks on political corruption. The whole framework of assumption on which Burns’s political satires rest recalls the contractarian principles of Presbyterian thought: that authority ascends from below; that government is a contract, and political power a trust; and that even the humblest members of society are competent to censure their governors. That Burns deplored certain aspects of Calvinism —its harsh soteriology, its emphasis on faith over works— should not blind us to his sincere identification with the Presbyterian political inheritance:

The Solemn league and Covenant

Now brings a smile, now brings a tear.

But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs;

If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.22

Burns, of course, was not the only Scotsman to embrace such radical ideals. We cannot properly understand his life and much of his poetry if we do not understand the degree to which his personal relationships and affiliations were directed towards and driven by seeking out similarly politically sympathetic groups and individuals. It was the Lodge friends and patrons who eased his path towards Edinburgh; that so politically riven city which was to prove so disastrous to him in both life and death. Without, as all his generation, fully understanding the political causes of what happened in the capital, the ever astute Edwin Muir put his finger on the events of his sensational first extended visit to the capital as the cause of Burns’s subsequent accelerating decline:

It was after his first trip to Edinburgh that his nature, strongly built and normal, disintegrated. He had hoped, in meeting the first shock of his astonishing triumph in the capital, that an escape was at last possible from the life of hardly maintained poverty which as a boy he had foreseen and feared. He left Edinburgh recognising that there was no reprieve, that hardship must sit at his elbow to the end of his days. Fame had lifted him on the point of an immediate pinnacle; now the structure had melted away and, astonished, he found himself once more in his native county, an Ayrshire peasant. Some fairy had set him for a little in the centre of a rich and foreign society; then calmly and finally, she had taken it from under his feet. There is hardly another incident in literary history to parallel this brief rise and setting of social favour, and hardly one showing the remorselessness of fortune in the world. The shock told deeply on Burns, working more for evil than the taste for dissipation which he was said to have acquired from the Edinburgh aristocracy.23

Given Muir’s lack of knowledge of the covert political forces operating on Burns, this is well said. It does, however, under-estimate the extraordinary degree to which Burns, in the midst of his Edinburgh triumph, was conscious not only of its transience but the darkness to follow. As he wrote to Robert Ainslie on 16th December 1786:

You will very probably think, my honoured friend, that a hint about the mischievous nature of intoxicated vanity may not be unreasonable, but, alas! You are wide of the mark. Various concurring circumstances have raised my fame as a poet to a height which I am absolutely certain I have not merits to support; and I look down on the future as I would into the bottomless pit.

He realised that his Edinburgh fame was largely based on the temporary social novelty of a ploughman writing poetry. He also probably realised that his Preface to the Kilmarnock Poems was, as we shall see, a brilliant confidence trick on a willingly gullible genteel Scottish audience, for which a price had to be paid. In the same month he wrote, even more particularly and precisely, to Rev William Greenfield about the consequences of Edinburgh:

Never did Saul’s armour sit so heavily on David when going to encounter Goliath, as does the encumbering robe of public notice with which the friendship and patronage of some ‘names dear to fame’ have invested me. I do not say this in the ridiculous idea of seeming self-abasement, and affected modesty. I have long studied myself and I think I know pretty exactly what ground I occupy, both as a man, & a poet; and however the world or a friend may sometimes differ from me in that particular, I stand for it, in silent resolve with all the tenaciousness of Property. I am willing to believe that my abilities deserved a better fate than the veriest shades of life; but to be dragged forth, with all my imperfections on my head, to the full glare of learned and polite observation, is what, I am afraid, I shall have bitter reason to repent I mention this to you, once for all, merely, in the Confessor style, to disburthen my conscience, and that ‘When proud Fortune’s ebbing tide recedes’ you may hear me witness, when my bubble of fame was at its highest, I stood unintoxicated, with the inebriating cup in my hand. Looking forward, with rueful resolve, to the hastening time when the stroke of envious Calumny, with all the eagerness of vengeful triumph, should dash it to the ground.

Mozarts seem inevitably to have their Salieris. The treachery that Burns so accurately predicted for himself was also to be understood as not only psychologically motivated resentment of genuine creativity, but also essentially driven by political ideology. As the 1793–4 Sedition Trials revealed, Edinburgh was a politically schismatic society. This was not so apparent in 1789 and Burns’s contacts with two utterly contrasting groups has never been fully understood in terms of the consequent conflicting politics or the terrible personal consequences for the poet of this division.

Initially, Burns was lauded by two utterly contrasting groups. He was a member of the boozy, boisterous, in many instances brilliant, radical, reformist club, The Crochallan Fencibles. He was also taken up, mildly patronised, by the aesthetically, politically and religiously conformist pro-Hanoverian group led by Henry Mackenzie and Hugh Blair. What has never been understood is not only how partisan to their own causes both groups were but, indeed, the degree to which, as the political scene darkened in the 1790s, they were sucked into active participation either towards not simply reform but insurrection on the radical side and covert anti-revolutionary activity on the government side. Of such undeclared civil war, Burns was among the chief victims.

Despite some excellent work by John Brims and Elaine MacFar-land we still fall considerably short of understanding the fraught complexity of the extent and intensity of radical protest in Scotland in the 1790s. One consequence of this, of course, has been the contextually impoverished state of Burns criticism. Most of it has been written with the political dimension quite absent. Nor does space here allow anything like the necessary explication of the complex nature of that political culture. What can be said, however, is that most Scottish history seriously underestimates certainly the quantity and, arguably, the quality of radical opposition prevalent in Scotland which became genuinely divisive due to the American War of Independence.

It was that war which created that group so essential to understanding both Burns’s political affiliations and what happened to him, The Crochallan Fencibles. The name was a deliberate parody of the loyalist militia groups springing up in opposition to the American cause. What the American war engendered in the radical, reformist side of Edinburgh can be gauged by the invited open letter of Dr Richard Price in 1784, ‘To the Secretary of the Committee of Citizens of Edinburgh’:

God grant that this spirit might increase till it has abolished all despotic governments and exterminated the slavery which debased mankind. This spirit first rose in America (it soon reached Ireland) it has diffused itself in some foreign countries, and your letter informs me that it is now animating Scotland.24

Ingenuously, late eighteenth-century radicals had a kind of millennial vision of history as an American initiated domino game of collapsing crowns. For a time the reform of a particularly undemocratic Scotland seemed a distinct possibility. The bumpers, bawdy songs and personal badinage which Burns enlisted for with the Fencibles in their howff in Anchor Close was part of what must have seemed the initial stages of an ill-disguised victory celebration. The Fencibles were of course typically a heavy drinking culture. It was not, however, the most erotically inflamed of Scotland’s men’s clubs. Public masturbation was not on the agenda. Certainly, as camouflage, it was this side of the club’s activities to which Burns confessed. He did not always publicly make the connection between libidinal energy and radical politics. Thus he wrote to Mrs Dunlop:

You may guess that the convivial hours of men have their mysteries of wit and mirth, and I hold it a piece of contemptible baseness to detail the sallies of thoughtless merriment, or the orgies of accidental intoxication to the ear of cool sobriety or female delicacy.

Or, as he wrote in conclusion to a brilliant extended parody of The Revelation of St John the Divine in a letter to William Chalmers in December, 1786, that he had never seen ‘as many wild beasts as I have seen since I came to Edinburgh.’ Burns’s own stressing of the social wildness of the Fencibles may have been a deliberate camouflage for the actual reality of their political beliefs and activities. Intellectually, they were an astonishing bunch. William Smellie, commissioned as ‘Hangman’, not only edited the first Encyclopaedia Britannica but had written much of it. Of all Burns’s lost letters, those to Smellie would possibly have been of the most profound political importance. They were destroyed by Smellie’s biographer, Robert Kerr, with an insouciance that we chillingly recognise as seminal for the manner in which Burns’s texts were to be treated not only in the hyper-respectable nineteenth century: ‘Many letters of Burns to Mr. Smellie which remained being totally unfit for publication, and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable people still in life, have been burnt.’ Smellie was also the author of a Philosophy of Natural History which postulated that the most highly refined, developed human consciousness was incompatible with the world. James ‘Balloon’ Tytler was an even more extraordinary polymath. As Burns wrote in November 1788 to Mrs Dunlop:

Those marked T, are the work of an obscure, tippling but extraordinary body of the name of Tytler: a mortal, who though he drudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a sky-lighted hat, & knee buckles as unlike as George-by-the-grace-of-God, & Solomon-the-son-of-David, yet that same unknown drunken Mortal is author and compiler of three-fourths of Elliot’s pompous Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

Poet, song-writer, polymath, Scotland’s first balloonist and eventually so politically active that he fled Scotland in 1793 to Belfast and then volunteered to return to Scotland to promote insurrection:

… he was to traverse Scotland as a Highland Piper. He learned the tongue and was to have gone from town to town to organise a General Insurrection, from there to the South of Ireland (Cork), hence to Paris to enlist the French.25

To Tytler’s extreme irritation, this mission did not take place. Like many others of his creed and generation, his journey was to be westwards to American safety. An almost equally irascible, restless spirit was Dr Gilbert Stuart who had so upset genteel Edinburgh with his writings in Smellie’s Edinburgh Magazine and Review that he had to seek employment in London thus initiating the long tradition of Scots radicals forced South. Obviously extremely important in the Fencibles was the legal profession. Of a considerable number of lawyers, the most prominent was Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and brother of the even greater radical lawyer Thomas. It was Henry Erskine’s fall at the hands of the Robert Dundas faction in the election for Dean of Faculty in 1795 that Burns turned into, in January 1796, a bitterly witty song about the loss of the men of merit and worth to the reactionary loyalists.

In your heretic sins may live and die,

Ye heretic Eight and thirty

But accept, ye Sublime Majority,

My congratulations hearty.

With your Honors and a certain King,

In your servants this is striking—

The more incapacity they bring,

The more they’re to your liking.

This, then, was the intimate company Burns was keeping. Nor did he only wholly share their politics but was an active participant not only in terms of his contributions to the radical press, but in actually attempting to send carronades, captured from the smuggling brig Rosamund as part of his excise duties, to the French revolutionaries. It is little wonder that even during his first Edinburgh visit his relationships with genteel, conformist, pro-Hanoverian society were strained. How strained we can see, for example, in the fury of his riposte to Mrs McLehose when a Mrs Stewart had checked him over his seditious anti-Hanoverian lines on the Stirling window:

I have almost given up the excise idea —I have just been now to wait on a great person, Miss N—’s friend, Mrs. Stewart. — Why will great people not only deafen us with the din of their equipage, and dazzle us with their fastidious pomp, but they must also be so very dictatorially wise? I have been questioned like a child about my matters, and blamed and schooled for my Inscription on Stirling window. Come, Clarinda— ‘Come, curse me Jacob; come, defy me Israel!’

Yet he needed his enemy’s patronage. He did join the Excise. Blair and Mackenzie, with their mixture of lachrymose and evangelical values, expressed a faith not so much of a suffering Christ as a quiescently accepting Christ as exemplar to a politically similarly quiescent, hence an apolitical, common people. As Blake wrote: ‘Pity would be no more, if we did not make someone poor.’ They were, however, able to open doors to publishing connections and offer mainly ill-received poetic advice. In the name of rules and decency, they were always trying to get Burns to tidy up his, to them, unruly act. This had almost no effect other than to irritate the Bard. As he wrote to Greenfield:

… I stumbled on two Songs which I here enclose you as a kind of curiosity to a Professor of the Belle lettres de la Nature: which allow me to say, I look upon as an additional merit of yours: a kind of bye Professorship, not always to be found among the systematic Fathers and Brothers of scientific Criticism.

These tensions were also not confined to matters aesthetic and linguistic. Unlike Heathcliff, Burns was not the brute, sub-literate, threat, that dark erotic stranger, which haunted the bourgeois imagination of the period. They were faced with someone hyper-literate, fecundly allusive to a degree far beyond their powers in canonical literary and biblical tradition, who could not only talk their pants off but, it was feared, those of their wives and daughters too. Command of language was directly related to a fixed hierarchical social order; Burns threatened social anarchy by the very nature of his poetic, rhetorical potency. It offered them some security to classify him as a class-bound ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ rather than great poet.

REPUTATION: CRITICS, BIOGRAPHERS AND BOWDLERISERS Even more than Henry Dundas, Henry Mackenzie was probably the most sustained, malign influence on Burns’s reputation. He may initially have genuinely wanted to help the poet. He also almost certainly sensed a bandwagon that his self-importance would not allow him not to join. As Donald Low has remarked, however, the nature of Mackenzie’s praise was to be in the long term confining and destructive:

… his was a disastrously inaccurate essay in criticism which gave rise to endless distortion of Burns’s poetry. The whole tendency of Mackenzie’s encomium was to emasculate Poems. He paid lip-service to humour and satire, but found them too embarrassing to discuss: introduced a comparison with Shakespeare, only to withdraw it at once: repeatedly shrank from Burns’s characteristic self-expression and fell back on general-isations. He apologised for the language in which the poet did his best work, and concentrated on the poems of sentiment in English. This was to sacrifice truth, and therefore also Burns’s long-term interests as a poet, for instant acclaim.26

From the beginning Mackenzie’s deeply influential aesthetic strictures were socially and politically motivated. Hence Burns is turned into a safe sentimentalist rather than, like Pope or Swift, a turbulent, dissenting satirist of the established, corrupt order. He is a naïve exception rather than, in terms of both poetry and politics, the most knowing of men. Burns was as formally naïve in poetic tradition as Mozart was in musical tradition. They were both examples of creative pieces of ground, as Blake suggests, born spaded and seeded. It was socially unacceptable for Mackenzie to grant Burns such potency. As an extension of this, he had to define Burns as a naïve innocent, coming from peasant origins. Mackenzie also down-grades the actual vernacular language of that world with its elements which bespoke the raw pleasures, pains and, indeed, turbulent discontents of the common people. If there was genuine ambivalence in Mackenzie’s attitude to Burns at the beginning of their relationship, it did not survive the poet’s death. In his résumé of the careers of Scotland three great eighteenth-century poets, Ramsay,

Fergusson and Burns, the first is praised for his achievement of prudent respectability. The latter two are not: Fergusson, dissipated and drunken, died in early life, after having produced poems faithfully and humorously describing scenes of Edinburgh and somewhat of blackguardism. Burns originally virtuous, was seduced by dissipated companions, and after he got into the Excise addicted himself to drunkenness, tho’ the rays of his genius sometimes broke through the mist of his dissipation: but the habit had got too much power over him to be overcome and it brought him, with a few lucid intervals, to an early grave. He unfortunately during the greatest part of his life had called and thought dissipation spirit, sobriety and discretion a want of it, virtues too shabby for a man of genius. His great admiration of Fergusson showed his propensity to coarse dissipation. … How different was the fate of Burns compared with that of a Poet in birth, in Education, and many other circumstances like him, tho’ I do not arrogate to him so much creative genius, Allan Ramsay. He came into notice in a Station as mean as Burns, had no advantage over him in Birth, Connections, or any other circumstances independent of his own genius alas: it was the Patronage and Companionship which Burns obtained, that changed the colour of his later life: the patronage of dissipated men of high rank, and the Companionship of clever, witty, but dissipated men of lower rank. The notice of the former flattered his vanity, and in some degree unsettled his from an anecdote to be immediately mentioned he seemed to mingle with the most amiable feelings —but the levity of his Patrons and his associates Dwelt on the Surface of his Mind and prompted some of his Poetry which offended the serious, and lost him better friends than those which that poetry had acquired —Dugald Stewart who first introduced him to me, told me latterly, that his Conduct and Manners had become so degraded that decent persons could hardly take any notice of him.27

Given Fergusson’s sweet, convivial personality and the terrible nature of his incarcerated death, Mackenzie’s vicious pursuit of him beyond the grave beggars belief. In the history of poetic biographies, Ian Hamilton has remarked that Burns was the first poet to be character assassinated. Given Mackenzie’s treatment of Fergusson, however, we would have to grant Fergusson unhappy precedence. Mackenzie tainted, wrongly, both their reputations with, at best, alcoholic tendencies. This alleged addiction was then implied to lead to other forms of licence where, certainly in Burns’s case, sexual promiscuity was on the charge sheet.

This demonisation of Burns is not to be understood, however, without it being placed in its proper political context. The Mackenzie who penned these personal attacks was the same man who was writing fervid anti-revolutionary polemics in The Edinburgh Herald during 1790–1 under the pen name ‘An Old Tradesman’ and again in 1793, in The Caledonian Mercury, under the pen name ‘Brutus’ to prove that all was for the best in the best of all worn torn, economically distressed Hanoverian worlds. As spokesperson for the old regime he believed that strong government would ‘save the people from that worst enemy of purely democratic states – the people themselves’.28 The pinnacle of his loyalty is the 1792 A Review of the Principal Proceedings of the Parliament of 1784, a defense of William Pitt, when Pitt’s pro-reformist views of 1784 were being thrown back in his face by radicals. Retrospectively referring to that pamphlet Mackenzie described the ideological clash of the 1790’s as an ‘epidemic insanity … which set up certain idols, under the names of Liberty, Equality and The Rights of Man’.29 Pitt personally thanked Mackenzie for his loyal defence, and basking in such praise, he replied ‘My Opinion, Sir, of you as a Minister I hold only in common with the Millions around me.’30 (Letter 93, To William Pitt, March 1792). These ‘millions’ were not so loyal, as Mackenzie informed George Home on 26th March 1792:

There is a Spirit of Sedition gone forth, of which it is very difficult to tell the Extent, but even if not so considerable as some timid people fear, so restless, so busy, so zealous, as to be truly alarming to every considerate Man. I forget the Calculation made of the numbers of Manufactures in England, but we all know it is very great. Of these I believe I may say a Majority, but assuredly a great part, are determined enemies to the present Order of things31 …

Theatre goers, as Mackenzie records, were among this swelling radical ‘enemy’ and in one incident he tells Home, open conflict erupted between radicals and loyalists at London’s Haymarket theatre when the revolutionary song ‘Ca Ira’ was demanded by reformers, but chanted down by loyalist calls for ‘God Save the King’. Similar tensions spread to the provincial theatres, including Dumfries and an unidentified informer reported to the Excise that Burns was in the reformist mob. Mackenzie goes on in the same letter to condemn Scottish academics: ‘From my Communication with Men of Letters here, I can perceive that they are generally on the side of the Malcontents’.32 Fanatically partisan, status obsessed, politically scared, Mackenzie so hated his reforming and radical political enemies that he could not speak their names. To do so would give them a credibility he utterly sought to deny. For Mackenzie the radical was equivalent to the bestial. This is why in Mackenzie and the subsequent Tory criticism he inspired always described Burns as surrounded by destructive groups of unnamed degenerates in Edinburgh and, even worse, Dumfries.

It should further be understood that Burns was not a unique case for such treatment. The heavily subsidised, reactionary literary, magazine and newspaper culture put together by Pitt and Dundas specialised in trashing the radical literary enemy by varied forms of abuse based on the relationship of personal licentiousness to consequent political anarchy if these people were to succeed. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft with whom Burns corresponded received treatment even worse than his, as a promiscuous woman she was even more reprehensible than a randy ploughman. Engrossed in destroying the careers of any radical sympathisers, Mackenzie boasted to the ultra-loyalist George Chalmers, in March 1793:

One thing Mr Young suggests as never yet thought of, which however was thought of here, and enforced in two short Articles in the Newspapers by myself, at the very opening of this Business, namely the resolution of not employing Jacobin Tradesmen, which had a very excellent Effect in this Town.… contrary to my Expectations, the War has I think done good in this Country, given a Sort of Impulse to the good Part of the Community …33

An ever-willing anti-reform propagandist, Mackenzie helped organise the Scottish distribution of a vicious attack, printed by the same George Chalmers, on Tom Paine as a degenerate, dangerous individual. The black art of character assassination, well established before the death of Burns, won rich patronage for the loyal Mackenzie, appointed Comptroller of Taxes in Scotland in 1799.

The degree of Mackenzie’s vindictiveness and his stress of the later Dumfries years, also alert us to one of the most pervasive and politically wilfully misconceived of myths surrounding Burns. Indeed, so pervasive that it has even penetrated the normally sceptical consciousness of Professor T.M. Devine who has recently written of ‘the public recantation of such celebrated supporters of the radical cause as Robert Burns’.34 This alleged recantation stems from one misinterpreted, truncated song, The Dumfries Volunteers. It avoids all the substantial poetic evidence of the Dumfries years to the contrary; not least Extempore [on the Loyal Natives’ Verses]:

Ye true ‘Loyal Natives’, attend to my song,

In uproar and riot rejoice the night long:

From envy and hatred your corps is exempt:

But where is your shield from the darts of contempt?

The poem catches perfectly both Burns’s contempt for the British cause under the war-mongering Pitt and the political company he was keeping in the bitterly politically factionalised little town from which he kept sending out not only radical poems to politically sympathetic London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers, but, as his doctor William Maxwell had, weapons to the French. All this, of course, at ferocious risk to, at best, his Excise position as he was scrutinised by his rightly suspicious masters. This, too, accounts for his attempts in the last years to get free of the claustrophobic cockpit of Dumfries to the relatively safer, because larger Glasgow area where, even more than Edinburgh, Scottish history has still chronically underestimated the depth of a radical opposition to Pitt’s war policy so great that Burke brought it up in the House.

If Burns had made any public recantation, Mackenzie and his ilk would have shouted it from the house-tops. That there was none accounts not only for the intensity of Mackenzie’s malice but also for what we now know about his activities not only as literary propagandist but practically on behalf of the government. The nature of Mackenzie’s key role in the government’s scrutiny of Burns and the subsequent creation of a literary, psychological context by which to sanitise the poetry we now know from the archives of Edinburgh University. Here we have discovered letters from Robert Heron requesting payments from Robert Dundas via Henry Mackenzie for espionage services rendered:

My Lord … Five or six years since, I, too boldly introduced myself to your Lordship, by suggesting that it was requisite to counteract from the Press, the effects of those seditious associations and seditious writings which were then busily corrupting the political sentiments of the people of this country … you were pleased not to disapprove the ingenuiness and honesty of my wishes and intentions. I was, in consequence of this condescending goodness of your Lordship, noticed by the Committee of the Association for the Defence of the Constitution, which was soon after formed. Under the direction —particularly of Mr Mackenzie, Lord Glenlee and Mr Campbell, I was employed to write several little articles for the newspapers, and for other occasions, in order to oppose the malignant efforts of sedition …

… The Committee had, with sufficient liberality, already paid my petty services with the sum of thirty pounds … Your Lordship, within a short time, munificently sent me no less than fifty pounds.35

The core of these services involved his exploitation of a relationship built up with Burns in Edinburgh. Worse, on the poet’s death he rushed to print with a memoir of the poet which was to prove ruinously influential for both Burns and his poetry.

Heron was too talented to be a mere hack. When he was the Rev. Hugh Blair’s assistant he had met Burns in Edinburgh. Heron maintained the relationship and en route to his native Galloway made a point of visiting the poet. The often prescient Bard recorded a visit from Heron to Ellisand thus:

The ill-thief blaw the Heron south!

And never drink be near his drouth!

He tald myself, by work o’ mouth,

He’d take my letter;

I lippened to the chief in trough,

And bade nae better.—

But aiblins honest Master Heron

Had at the time some dainty Fair One,

To ware his theologic care on,

And holy study:

And tired o’ Sauls to waste his lear on,

E’en tried the Body.—

Burns got the scale of the betrayal wrong; it was infinitely in excess of a non-delivered letter to Dr Blacklock. The devil of his political enemies really had blown Heron south. Behind Heron’s black-gowned clerical front, Burns also keenly observed his capacity for chronic alcoholic and sexual dissipation. A familiar of the debtor’s prison, Heron was to die prematurely, again imprisoned for debt, in Newgate in 1807.

Along with the new factual evidence of the Mackenzie/Heron connection, it might have been deduced both from Heron’s slavish taking of Mackenzie tactics against Burns to a biographical extreme and his equally slavish eulogy to his patron’s critical prowess. This is Heron’s account of Mackenzie’s contribution, via his Lounger magazine article, to Burns’s initial Edinburgh success:

That criticism is now known to have been composed by HENRY MACKENZIE Esq, whose writings are universally admired for an Addisonian delicacy and felicity of wit and humour, by which the CLIO of the Spectator is more than rivalled; for a wildly tender pathos that excites the most exquisite vibrations of the finest chords of sympathy in the human heart, for a lofty, vehement, persuasive eloquence, by which the immortal Junius has sometimes perhaps been excelled and often almost equalled!36

Heron’s biographical memoir was not the occasion of his first writing about Burns. In 1793 he published a travel book where he created a contrast on the poet’s not so much varied talents as antipathetic ones as expressed in the difference between The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Tam o’ Shanter. The latter is initially admitted as a masterpiece but this is then significantly qualified: ‘Burns seems to have thought, with Boccacce and Prior, that some share of indelicacy was a necessary ingredient in a Tale. Pity that he should have debased so fine a piece, by any things, — having even the remotest relation to obscenity’. This kind of Mackenzie-initiated sentimentalism was the seminal language of nineteenth-century political pietism which would become, mainly though Blackwood’s, the dominant mode of Scottish Toryism. Burns had to be converted into the pietistic poet of a quiescent common people. Whether they were properly reading its concluding stanzas, The Cotter’s Saturday Night became the Ark of the Covenant for the Scottish upper and middle-classes as, increasingly anxious about the fetid, brutal potentially insurrectionary common life of the new emergent industry-based (coal, iron, tobacco, weaving) towns, they sought the politically calming notion of pastoral, god-fearing peace reigning in the Scottish countryside. Heron is a seminal figure in the concoction of this fantasy:

The whole books of the sacred scriptures are continually in the hands of almost every peasant. And it is impossible, that there should not be some souls among them, awakened to the divine emotions of genius, by that rich assemblage which these books present, of almost all that is interesting in incidents, or picturesque in imagery, or affectingly sublime or tender in sentiments and character. It is impossible that those rude rhymes, and the simple artless music with which they are accompanied, should not excite some ear to fond perception of the melody of verse. That Burns had felt these impulses will appear undeniably certain to whoever shall carefully peruse his ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’; or shall remark with nice observation, the various fragments of scripture sentiment, of scripture imagery, of scripture language, which are scattered throughout his works.37

Of course, Heron knew as well as anyone that the bulk of Burns poetry neither sociologically confirmed this view and expressed anything but personal or popular quiescence in the face of the established order. To deal with this what he did was sycophantically flesh out the bones of Mackenzie’s account of the dead poet. Apparently more in sorrow than anger, Heron constructed the myth of Burns as betrayer of his own earliest spiritual impulses because he lacked ‘that steady VIRTUE, without which even genius in all its omnipotence is soon reduced to paralytic imbecility, or to manic mischievousness’. Thus Burns’s life becomes a melodrama where he always surrendered to those elements in himself which inevitably took him into increasingly bad company.

The bucks of Edinburgh accomplished, in regard to BURNS, that in which the boors of Ayrshire had failed. After residing some months in Edinburgh, he began to estrange himself … from the society of his graver friends. Too many of his hours were now spent at the tables of persons who delighted to urge conviviality to drunkenness, in the tavern, in the brothel, on the lap of the woman of pleasure. He suffered himself to be surrounded by a race of miserable beings who were proud to tell that they had been in company with BURNS, and had seen Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves. He was not yet irrecoverably lost to temperance and moderation, but he was already almost too much captivated with their wanton rivals, to be ever more won back to a faithful attachment to their more sober charms. He now began to contract something of new arrogance in conversation. Accustomed to be among his favourite associates … the cock of the company, he could scarcely refrain from indulging in similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even in presence of persons who could less patiently endure his presumption.38

Here the suppressed rage of sentimental, genteel Edinburgh wells up. The people’s poet had no right to his creative superiority of language. Hence is evolved the fiction of the unstable genius who falls away from his prudent, real friends and into evil company and, by his sinful depravity, betrays not only his better self but the sanctified common people whom he represents. In Burke’s great shadow, a Scottish conservatism is forged which converts the dialectic of opposing secular political systems to one which, on the conservative side, has divine sanction as embodying the inherent nature of reality. By definition, opposition to this is implicitly evil. Burns is a sinner (he suffers but for the wrong things), with even a hint of anti-Christ. As with Mackenzie’s account, the speed of Burns’s descent accelerates in Dumfries. He has crosses to bear, admittedly, but they are not properly borne:

In the neighbourhood were other gentlemen occasionally addicted, like Burns, to convivial excess, who, while they admired the poet’s talents, and were charmed with his licentious wit, forgot the care of his real interests in the pleasure in which they found in his company, and in the gratification which the plenty and festivity of their tables appeared evidently to afford him. With these gentlemen, while disappointments and disgusts continued to multiply upon him in his present situation, he persisted to associate every day more and more eagerly. His crosses and disappointments drove him every day more into dissipation, and his dissipation tended to enhance whatever was disagreeable and by degrees, into the boon companion of mere excisemen, spend his money lavishly in the ale house, could easily command the company of BURNS. The care of his farm was thus neglected, Waste and losses wholly consumed his little capital.39

As with Edinburgh and The Crochallan Fencibles, the political nature of Burns’s affiliations in Dumfries, is not identified. What Heron is mainly referring to here is that Real Whig bibulous bear of a man, Robert Riddell. As we now know, Burns was the middle-man responsible for Riddell’s political essays being published under the pen-name Cato. What, of course, Heron does not narrate is the story of the collapse of Burns’s political hopes under ferocious governmental pressure but a moral fable whereby, in its terminal stage, the sinner is driven to misanthropic blackness. The peculiar fevered tearing apart of Burns’s body, the agony of night sweats and pain wracked joints, is seen as both a consequence of his heavy drinking where, in fact, his rapidly deteriorating health made his tolerance to alcohol ever less. Or, psychosomatically, his bodily agony is seen as a punishing consequence of his sins. In actual fact, a convincing case has been made that medically what was tearing Burns’s body apart in these last terrible months was brucellosis caught from infected milk, although it is generally thought he died of rheumatic heart disorder.40 That alcoholic fornicator Heron, has a quite different ‘spiritual’ diagnosis:

Nor, amidst these agonising reflections, did he fail to look, with an indignation half invidious, half contemptuous, on those, who, with moral habits not more excellent than his, with powers of intellect far inferior, yet basked in the sunshine of fortune, and were loaded in the wealth and honours of the world, while his follies could not obtain pardon, nor his wants an honourable supply. His wit became, from this time, more gloomy sarcastic; and his conversation and writings began to assume something of a tone misanthropical malignity, by which they had not been before, in any eminent degree, distinguished. But, with all these failings; he was still that exalted mind which had raised above the depression of its original condition, with all the energy of the lion, pawing to set free his hinder limbs from the yet encumbering earth: he still appeared not less than an archangel ruined!41

Whether this ‘archangel’ image is knowingly derived from the genuine addict, S.T. Coleridge, the heroic but defeated lion fits perfectly Heron’s sentimentally disguised assassination. Scottish sentimentalists have a penchant for weeping at the gravesides of their victims. Burns’s long-term friend, William Nicol, had other thoughts concerning the death of his once rampantly alive friend. As he wrote almost immediately after Burns’s death to John Lewars:

… it gives me great pain to see the encomiums passed upon him, both in the Scottish and English news-papers are mingled with the reproaches of the most indelicate and cruel nature. But stupidity and idiocy delight when a great and immortal genius falls; and they pour forth their invidious reflections, without mercy, well knowing that the dead Lion, from whose presence they formerly scudded away with terror, and at whose voice they trembled through every nerve, can devour no more.

The fanatics have now got it into their heads, that dreadful bursts of penitential sorrow issued from the breast of our friend, before he expired. But if I am not much mistaken in relation to his firmness, he would disdain to have his dying moments disturbed with sacerdotal gloom, like sacerdotal howls. I knew he would negotiate with God alone, concerning his immortal interests.42

Without the leonine Bard there to protect his manuscripts, the nature of his precipitous, premature death left his papers in disorder. Given that his death coincided exactly with the peak of the scrutiny, censorship and penal repression of the understandably Francophobic Pitt/Dundas security-state such disorder was heavily amplified by his literary executors, mainly anxiety-driven radicals, hiding, dispersing or, at worst, destroying his dissident writings. Some alleged friends, minor Judases like Robert Ainslie, also wished to retrieve their letters or mangle and censor those of the poet’s that they had in their possession.

In his magisterial editorial work of the 1930s, De Lancey Ferguson calculated that 25% of Burns’s epistolary output was irretrievably lost. The poetry undoubtedly suffered similar depredations. There was the difficulty of identifying texts pseudonymously and anonymously published in radical London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers. It seems certain that a key notebook of late, unpublished poems did go to William Roscoe but vanished without trace in 1816. Further, many of the central political poems (e.g. Address of Beelzebub and the Ode on General Washington’s Birthday) appeared erratically and fortuitously in the course of the nineteenth century. A burning of political and erotic material in the 1850s at Lesmahagow by Mr Greenshields (of the stamps fame) may not have been the last instance of genteel Scotland deciding to save the poet’s reputation from himself.

The two men immediately involved in dealing with the manuscripts were the poet’s Dumfries friend John Syme who enlisted a mutual friend, Alexander Cunningham, to help in dealing with the papers and to make an appeal for funds to aid the truly impoverished family. In Edinburgh, enthusiasm had ‘cooled with the corpse’ and Ayrshire proved equally miserly. For such virulent Scotophobes as Hazlitt and Coleridge, this treatment of the nation’s bard gave further evidence, if evidence were needed, of the treacherous, mean-spiritedness of the Scots. As Coleridge wrote in 1796:

Is thy Burns dead?

And shall he die unwept, and sink to earth

‘Without the meed of one melodious tear’?

Thy Burns, and Nature’s own beloved bard,

Who to the ‘Illustrious of his native Land

So properly did look for patronage’

Ghost of Macenas! Hide thy blushing face!

They snatched him from the sickle and the plough—

To gauge ale-firkins.

To be fair to the committee of executors set up in Dumfries, the situation was not only complex but carried real danger with it. Also given the political spirit of the age, much of the material could not be made public far less profitably so. As Ian Hamilton has written:

The Dumfries executors’ committee had already done some preliminary sifting and, fearing piracies, had advertised for any Burns material that was in private hands. The mass of the papers they found at the poet’s house was in ‘utter confusion’ but it took no more than a glance to determine that much of the collection ought probably to be destroyed: ‘viz. Such as may touch on the most private and delicate matters relative to female individuals’. When, in August, a bonfire was arranged, Syme was more hesitant: ‘Avaunt the sacrilege of destroying them and shutting them forever from the light: But on the other hand, can we bring them into the light?’ On this occasion, only a few ‘unimportant’ notes and cards were burnt.43

As well as sexually intimate indiscretions, went political ones. Such were safer out of Scotland given that, comparatively, it was a more politically controlled environment than England.

Establishment Scots were even more zealous than their English masters in hunting down treason in a more demographically controlled environment. The radical English connection that Burns most prided himself on, indeed his intention had been to visit him, was William Roscoe of Liverpool. Roscoe, the centre of a vast web of radical connections was poet, historian and financier. His friend was a Scottish doctor and part-time scholar, Dr James Currie. Currie’s initial response to receiving the papers is replete with the personal and textual terrible harm of which he was to be both initiator and chief agent:

My dear Syme: Your letter of the 6th January reached me on the 12^th, and along with it came the remains of poor Burns. I viewed the large and shapeless mass with astonishment! Instead of finding … a selection of his papers, with such annotations as might clear up any obscurities … I received the complete sweepings of his drawers and of his desk … even to the copy book on which his little boy had been practising writing. No one had given these papers a perusal, or even an inspection … the manuscripts of a man of genius … were sent, with all their sins on their head, to meet the eye of an entire stranger.44

Why Currie, a man of allegedly radical political persuasion quite at odds with Heron’s toadying Toryism was, indeed, complicit with Heron’s account of Burns will probably remain not fully explicable. The most generous explanation is that Currie, given the spirit of the times, produced a work designed to sell to a conformist, bourgeois public in order to gain as much money as possible for the bereft family. The good doctor, however, went well beyond cosmetic surgery. Himself plagued by alcoholic tendencies, he was working in 1797 on a pseudo scientific paper ‘Observations on the Nature of Fever and on the Effects of Opium, Alcohol and Inanition’. Burns’s later letters, replete with confessions of savagely black depressions and not a few severe hangovers were grist to Currie’s diagnostic mill. Worse, one addiction led to another:

His temper now became more irritable and gloomy, he fled from himself into society, often of the lowest kind. And in such company that part of the convivial scene, in which wine increases sensibly and excites benevolence, was hurried over, to reach the succeeding part, over which uncontrolled passion generally presided. He who suffers from pollution of inebriation, how shall he escape other pollution? But let us refrain from the mention of errors over which delicacy and humanity draw the veil.45

As Ian Hamilton has remarked: ‘This then was the autopsy report: alcoholic poisoning plus maybe a touch of venereal disease had killed off Scotland’s greatest poet’. Nor was Currie finished with delivering his patient into the hands of his enemies. Currie enunciated the notion that the poet, of his very nature, was susceptible to addiction. Too sensitive, the poet would always find the world on the margin of the tolerable. Again Burns’s letters supplied Currie with significant evidence for this point of view. For example, this brilliant letter of August 1790 on the essential incompatibility of the poet and the world:

It is often a reverie of mine, when I am disposed to be melancholy, the characters and fates of the Rhyming tribe. There is not among all the Martyrologies that were ever penned, so rueful a narrative as Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. In the comparative view of Wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind: give him a stronger imagination and more delicate sensibility, which will ever between them engender a more ungovernable set of Passions, than the usual lot of man: implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as, arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper (sic) to his haunt by the chirping song, watching the frisks of little minnows in the sunny pool, or haunting after the intrigues of wanton butterflies —in short, send him adrift after some wayward pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of Lucre; yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that only Lucre can bestow; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes, by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity; and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a Poet.

Since Currie edited this letter, there is little wonder about from where his principal biographical evidence comes. Further, he had used for his template that most indulgent of defences of the libertine poet, Dr Johnson’s Life of Savage. Steeped in Burns’s confessional letters, it was not difficult for Currie to articulate the poet’s frequent despairing self-diagnosis of his own tumultuous mood swings and lack of volition. Certainly from Ellisland onwards, the poet became increasingly prone to depression. As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop in June 1789:

Will you take the effusions, the miserable effusions, of low spirits, just as they flow from their bitter spring? I know not of any particular cause for this worst of all my foes besetting me; but for some time my soul has been beclouded with a thickening atmosphere of evil imaginations and gloomy presages.

All trouble, therefore, is located by Currie within Burns; he is an endogenous depressive rather than a reactive one. Yet, he had so much to react against. Ellisland was the last in an unbroken line of fiscal farm traps. After Edinburgh he felt profoundly deprived of creative company. His body was signalling premature dissolution accelerated by the physical and mental grind of his Excise duties. Also to someone so politically attuned he must have had an overbearing awareness of the darkening political scene as a wheel on which his personal and public hopes were to be brutally broken. Currie, setting the programme for all of nineteenth-century biographers and, indeed, most twentieth-century ones, paid no real attention to these grim external forces. Burns was for Currie destructively committed to his irrational, even fallen, self:

His understanding was equal to the other powers of his mind, and his deliberate opinions were singularly candid and just; but like other men of great and irregular genius, the opinions which he delivered in conversation were often the offspring of temporary feelings, and widely different from the calm decisions of his judgement. This was not merely true respecting the character of others, but in regard to some of the most important points of human speculation.46

From this Currie deduced a Burnsian dialectic ‘in which virtue and passion had been at perpetual variance’. Fuelled by alcohol, passion had achieved overwhelming, self-destructive victory. Inevitably, intentionally this diagnosis destroys the poetry as much as the poet. Currie creates a situation in which, from now on, any conformist critical hack can and, indeed, did have the prescriptive power to censor any of Burns’s poetry not conforming to that respectability which was the first line of defence of conservative political correctness. The political poet becomes a malcontented unstable neurotic, not an incisive diagnostician of manifest ills in the body politic.

There is some evidence, both contextual and textual, that Currie politically knew very well what he was up to. De Quincey had always loathed the Liverpool coterie to which Currie belonged to as a group of narcissistic radicals who were, particularly in the case of Burns, deeply condescending, at best, to the alleged object of their shallow affections. He particularly hated Currie as the physician who was ‘unable to heal himself’. His 1801 account of this group is charged with shocked outrage at the gross indifference of these mendacious friends of the people who were deaf to the pain that he, as a Tory, could feel all too clearly:

I had for ever ringing in my ears, during that summer of 1801, those groans that ascended to heaven from his [Burns’s] over-burthened heart those harrowing words, ‘To give him leave to toil’, which record almost as a reproach to the ordinances of God and I felt that upon him, amongst all the children of labour, the primal curse had fallen heaviest and sunk deepest. Feelings such as these I had the courage to express; a personal compliment, or so, I might now and then hear; but all were against me on the matter. Dr Currie said ‘Poor Burns! Such notions had been his ruin’; Mr Sheperd continued to draw on the subject some scoff or groan at Mr Pitt and the Excise … Mr Clarke proposed that I should write a Greek inscription for a cenotaph which he was to erect in his garden to the memory of Burns; and so passed away the solitary protestation on behalf of Burns’s jacobinism, together with the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of that same Verton, in that same summer of 1801 … three men who remain at the most of all who in these convivial meetings held it right to look down upon Burns as one whose spirit was rebellious overmuch against the institutions of man, and jacobinal in a sense which ‘men of property’ and master manufacturers will never brook, albeit democrats by profession.47

With friends like these, Burns’s reputation hardly needed the legion of newspaper and magazine owning enemies whose overt Toryism gave them reason to destroy it. How deep Currie’s radicalism had ever been is impossible to judge. Better men than he had become apostates to the radical cause.48 It is hard not to believe that he knew what he was doing as he linked, albeit obliquely, Burns’s alleged degeneration with political turpitude. He also had that classic bad doctor’s ability to confuse mental or moral symptoms with physical ones:

As the strength of the body decays, the volition fails; in proportion as the sensations are soothing and gratified, the sensibility increases; and morbid sensibility is the parent of indolence, because, while it impairs the regulating power of the mind, it exaggerates all the obstacles to exertion. Activity, perseverance, and self-command, and the great purposes of utility, patriotism, or of honourable ambition, which had occupied the imagination, die away in fruitless resolutions, or in feeble efforts.49

It is little wonder that Coleridge, irretrievably addicted to lauda-num, called Currie’s book ‘a masterly specimen of philosophical biography’. He was so symptomatic of Currie’s account that he must have felt as if struck by a cross-bow bolt from the blue. It is, however, most certainly not Burns. Further, the allusion to patriotism gives Currie’s game away. It is an unequivocal linking of Burns with insurrectionary, hence definably degenerate, forces.

Not content, however, with rendering Burns’s personality a suitable case for mistreatment, Currie followed exactly Heron’s critical criteria for sifting the acceptable, sentimental chaff from the troublesome, satirical wheat. The literary analysis is an attack on the poetry as effective as the wholly related attacks on the Bard’s character. Behind both psychological and aesthetic repudiation lie, of course, the real but unnamed political reasons. Burns’s employment of the vernacular was the primary, obvious place of attack:

The greater part of his earlier poems are written in the dialect of his country, which is obscure, if not unintelligible to Englishmen, and which though adheres more or less to the speech of almost every Scotsman, all the polite and ambitious are now endeavouring to banish from their tongues as well as their writings. The use of it in composition naturally therefore calls up ideas of vulgarity to the mind. These singularities are increased by the character of the poet, who delights to express himself with a simplicity that approaches to nakedness, and with an unmeasured energy that often alarms delicacy, and sometimes offends taste. Hence in approaching him, the first impression is perhaps repulsive: there is an air of coarseness about him which is with difficulty reconciled with our established notions of poetical excellence.50

Along with such fundamental creative castration went covert politically motivated readings of these two satirical masterpieces with which Burns deliberately opened the Kilmarnock edition. That wickedly irreverent dialogue, The Twa Dogs, is defined, absurdly, as Burns’s plan ‘to inculcate a lesson of contentment on the lower classes of society by showing that their superiors are neither much better nor happier than themselves.’ The quite extraordinary postscript to The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer with its terrible national images of the Highland soldier slaughtered in the service of an alien Hanoverian cause and ‘Mother Scotland’ as an incontinent crone, are described as purely humorous. Currie, in fact, set a tactical fashion for conservative criticism of Burns to laugh, damagingly, in the wrong places. Needless to say, one poem floats free of the clarty waters occupied by the bulk of the achievement:

… the representation of these humble cottagers forming a wider circle round their hearth and uniting in the worship of God, is a picture most affecting of any which the rural muse has ever presented to the view. Burns was admirably adapted to this delineation.… The Cotter’s Saturday Night is tender and moral, it is solemn and devotional, and rises at length into a strain of grandeur and sublimity which modern poetry has not surpassed. The noble sentiments of patriotism with which it concludes correspond with the rest of the poem. In no age or country have the pastoral muses breathed such elevated accents, if the ‘Messiah’ of Pope be excepted, which is indeed a pastoral in form only. It is to be regretted that Burns did not employ his genius on other subjects of the same nature which the manners and customs of Scottish peasantry would have amply supplied.51

Praise, indeed, but praise granted at the price of near complete distortion. Currie’s misreading of the last two stanzas of the poem apart, this post-Burkean account of a peasant world of piety, humility and hence, hierarchical loyalty is used as the criterion by which the rest of Burns’s poetry is not only judged but condemned.

In his 1808 review of Cromek’s Reliques in The Edinburgh Review Jeffrey also expresses inordinate enthusiasm for this, indeed, exceptional poem: ‘The exquisite description of The Cotter’s Saturday Night affords, perhaps, the finest example of this sort of pathetic. Its whole beauty cannot indeed be discerned but by those whom experience has enabled to judge of the admirable fidelity and completeness of the picture.’ This review of Jeffrey’s is absolutely seminal to an understanding of the image of Burns and his poetry which was to dominate the nineteenth century and, indeed, elements of it still persist into the twenty-first. As well as Jeffrey’s legally fine-honed intellect he was from 1802 to 1829 the editor of The Edinburgh Review. This magazine having freed itself from reviewing as a mere vehicle for the book trade was not only independent but, in terms of payment to contributors, unprecedently wealthy. Ironically, it was a Whig magazine, which was on political issues almost uniformly reformative. Hence its support of Catholic emancipation and its attacks on the sale of army commissions, flogging in the British Navy and Army and the Test and Corporations Act. So exceptional were its fiscal and intellectual powers that, with the subsequent Tory Blackwood’s, it unprecedently, if temporarily, moved the locus of British critical intelligence from London to Edinburgh. It was from such a position of unparalleled authority that Jeffrey, with near total success, decided to contain, if necessary by emasculation and vilification, what he perceived to be the threat of the revolutionary impetus of Burns as man and poet. Jeffrey’s arguments derived from Currie but even, in some instances, exceeding the latter’s account are not to be understood in literary terms without understanding the politics that underlay the aesthetics.52 Like all men of his class, the French terror had bitten into his soul. Evidence real or invented of a common people diligently, culturally, passively loyal was everywhere sought. Burns had consequently to be fitted to the procrustean bed of their political anxieties and phobias. Hence this account of the degree to which Burns and the Scottish peasantry exceed all others in educated, hence, conformist virtue:

We shall conclude with two general remarks — the one national, the other critical. The first is, that it is impossible to read the productions of Burns, along with his history, without forming a higher idea of the intelligence, taste, and accomplishments of the peasantry, than most of those in the higher ranks are disposed to entertain … it is evident … that the whole family, and many of their associates, who have never emerged from the native obscurity of their condition, possessed talents, and taste, and intelligence, which are little suspected to lurk in those humble retreats. His epistles to brother poets, in the rank of farmers and shopkeepers in the adjoining villages, — the existence of a book-society and debating club among persons of that description, and many other incidental traits in his sketches of his youthful companions, — all contribute to show, that not only good sense, and enlightened morality, but literature and talents for speculation, are far more generally diffused in society than is generally imagined; and that the delights and the benefits of these generous and humanizing pursuits, are by no means confined to those whom leisure and affluence have courted to their enjoyment. That much of this is peculiar to Scotland, and may be properly referred to our excellent institutions for parochial education, and to the natural sobriety and prudence of our nation, may certainly be allowed … It is pleasing to know, that the sources of rational enjoyment are so widely disseminated; and, in a free country, it is comfortable to think, that so great a proportion of the people is able to appreciate the advantages of its condition, and fit to be relied on in all emergencies where steadiness and intelligence is required.53

As analysis, this is, of course, an inversion of the cultural and political truth. The common readers of the Scottish late eighteenth century, especially key groups like the weavers, were more likely to be reading Tom Paine than anything else. Also, given that Burns’s ‘carnivalesque’ poetry is the quintessence of dissidence against the prevailing church and state, it is not easy to see how it can be squared with the pacific vision of the lower orders. What Jeffrey did was to use his enormous authority to impose a crude binary division on Burns’s poetry so that we have the ‘good’ acceptable poet as opposed to the ‘bad’ rejected one. Among other things this involved him in reinventing the Scottish vernacular tradition with that ‘bletherin’ bitch’s’ unique capacity for reductive, derisory satire, acute psychological insight, and often bitter realism, transformed into a mode suitable for historical and psychological regressive nostalgia. The Kailyard begins here:

We beg leave too, in passing, to observe, that this Scotch is not to be considered as a provincial dialect, the vehicle only of rustic vulgarity and rude local humour. It is the language of a whole country, — long an independent kingdom, and still separate in laws, character and manners. It is by no means peculiar to the vulgar; but is the common speech of the whole nation in early life, — and with many of its most exalted and accomplished individuals throughout their whole existence; and, if it be true that, in later times, it has been, in some measure, laid aside by the more ambitious and aspiring of the present generation, it is still recollected, even by them, as the familiar language of their childhood, and of those who were the earliest objects of their love and veneration. It is connected, in their imagination, not only with the olden times which is uniformly conceived as more pure, lofty and simple than the present, but also with all the soft and bright colours of remembered childhood and domestic affection. All its phrases conjure up images of childhood innocence and sports, and friendships which have no pattern in succeeding years. Add to all this, that it is the language of a great body of poetry, with which almost all Scotchmen are familiar; and, in particular, of a great multitude of songs, written with more tenderness, nature and feeling, than any other lyric compositions that are extant, and we may perhaps be allowed to say, that the Scotch is, in reality, a highly poetical language; and that it is an ignorant, as well as an illiberal prejudice, which would seek to confound it with the barbarous dialects of Yorkshire or Devon.54

Opposed to this, was the dissident Burns who had, as man and poet, to be condemned to outer darkness as quickly as possible. While Currie could grant Burns’s satirical poetry some virtue, Jeffrey could conceive of nothing in it but the malign manifestations of the poet’s personality:

The first is, the undisciplined harshness and acrimony of his invective. The great boast of polished life is the delicacy, and even the generosity of its hostility, —that quality which is still the characteristic as it is that denomination of a gentleman, — that principle which forbids us to attack the defenceless, to strike the fallen, or malign the slain, —and enjoins us, in forging the shafts of satire, to increase the polish exactly as we add to their keenness or their weight … His ingenious and amiable biographer has spoken repeatedly in praise of his talents for satire, —we think, with a most unhappy partiality. His epigrams and lampoons appear to us, one and all, unworthy of him; —offensive from their extreme coarseness and violence, —and contemptible from their want of wit or brilliancy. They seem to have been written, not out of playful malice or virtuous indignation, but out of fierce and ungovernable anger. His whole raillery consists in railing; and his satirical vein displays itself chiefly in calling names and in swearing.55

In fact Jeffrey’s criticism of Burns is overwhelmingly ad hominem. The poet is seen as the great transgressor in terms of his multiple morbid and impolite discontents. He is a threat, not least a sexual threat (‘his complimentary effusions to ladies of the higher rank, is forever straining them to the bosom of her impetuous votary’) to the desired, indeed, necessary order of things. Burns, in fact, is corrupted by the Romantic, revolutionary spirit of the age with its absolute moral dispensation for the self-anointed man of genius:

But the leading vice in Burns’s character, and the cardinal deformity of all his productions, was his contempt or affectation of contempt for prudence, decency and regularity; and his admiration of thoughtlessness, oddity and vehement sensibility; his belief, in short, in the dispensing power of genius and social feeling, in all matters of morality and common sense. This is the very slang of the worst German plays, and the lowest of our out of town-made novels; nor can anything be more lamentable, than that it should have found a patron in such a man as Burns, and communicated to a great part of his productions a character of immortality, at once contemptible and hateful.56

Granted the applicability of contempt and hate for his poetry, Jeffrey returns to the fallible, fallacious nature of a man who, having forgotten the ordinary duties of life, loses himself in various forms of self-absorbed licentiousness:

It requires no habit of deep thinking, nor anything more, indeed, than the information of an honest heart, to perceive that it is cruel and base to spend in vain superfluities, that money which belongs of right to the pale industrious tradesman and his famishing infants; or that it is a vile prostitution of language, to talk of that man’s generosity or goodness of heart, who sits raving about friendship and philanthropy in a tavern, while his wife’s heart is breaking at her cheerless fireside, and his children pining in solitary poverty.57

This, of course, is derived from the language of The Anti-Jacobin of the previous decade with its insistent connection of exaggerated moral fallibility, especially sexual, with political anarchy. (The Anti-Jacobin of 1797 looked forward to an emergent generation of loyalist Tory poets to emulate and surpass the ‘bards of Freedom’ of the 1790s, with their ‘wood-notes wild’. This latter description was, of course, on Burns’s waxen seal.) Character assassination was and, indeed, is an essential establishment weapon. Jeffrey’s intemperate indulgence in it gave open season to varied lesser talents as that for the first two decades of the nineteenth century memoir writers and biographers of Burns outdid each other in denigrating him. Such personal denigration always carried within it the connection between his varied irresponsible, dissolute behaviour and his revolutionary politics. Here again, Jeffrey provides the model:

This pitiful cant of careless feeling and eccentric genius, accordingly, has never found much favour in the eyes of English sense and morality. The most signal effect which it ever produced, was on the muddy brains of some German youth, who left college in a body to rob on the highway, because Schiller had represented the captain of a gang as so very noble a creature. But in this country, we believe, a predilection for that honourable profession must have proceeded this admiration of the character. The style we have been speaking of, accordingly, is now the heroics only of the hulks and the house of correction; and has no chance, we suppose, of being greatly admired, except in the farewell speech of a young gentleman preparing for Botany Bay.58

This brutal allusion to the horrendous events of 1793–4 which manifested the criminal breakdown of the Scottish legal system with Braxfield as front-man for the Dundas clan demonstrates the depths of vindictive fear in Jeffrey’s heart for radicalism. Hence Burns himself is to be spared nothing:

It is humiliating to think how deeply Burns has fallen into this debasing error. He is perpetually making a parade of his thoughtlessness, inflammability and imprudence, and talking with much complacency and exultation of the offence he has occasioned to the sober and correct part of mankind. The odious slang infects almost all his prose, and a very great proportion of his poetry; and is, we are persuaded, the chief if not only the source of the disgust with which, in spite of his genius, we know that he is regarded by many very competent and liberal judges.59

Jeffrey then, condescendingly, lets Burns wriggle, if not escape from, the hook on which he has impaled him:

His apology, too, we are willing to believe, is to be found in the original lowness of his situation, and the slightness of his acquaintance with the world. With his talents and powers of observation, he could not have seen much of the beings who echoed this raving, without feeling for them that distrust and contempt which would have made him blush to think he had ever stretched over them the protecting shield of genius.60

The alleged naïvety inherent in inferior social status has forever haunted Burns criticism and commentary. Jeffrey’s attempt to detach Burns from radical, Romantic connections was as successful as it was erroneous. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and The Edinburgh Review appeared simultaneously and it was Jeffrey’s intention, from the magazine’s inception, to do as much harm to Wordsworth’s poetic reputation as possible because he saw inherent in it a perverse democratic tendency which really was a manifestation of culturally and politically regressive tendencies. In Jeffrey there is, in fact, contempt and fear of the lower classes as not only threatening political disruption but of dragging civilised achievement backwards. Jeffrey feared that the adult condition which he believed his society had attained might be lost in the childish state inherent in socially inferior persons. One of his most repeated protests against the Romantics, Wordsworth in particular, was that their poetic diction was both an expression of and invitation to such regression. Infantilism was its essential mode of speech and society was thereby threatened. Wordsworth, linguistically, offended the law of literary progress:

But what we do maintain is, that much of the most popular poetry in the world owes its celebrity chiefly to the beauty of its diction; and no poetry can be long or generally acceptable, the language of which is coarse, inelegant, or infantine.

… the new poets are just as great borrowers as the old; only that, instead of borrowing from the more popular passages of their illustrious predecessors, they have preferred furnishing themselves from vulgar ballads and plebian nurseries.61

Given this principle, it was absolutely necessary for Jeffrey to detach Burns from any possibility of his poetry being infected by Wordsworth. It was not really his Europhobic attitude to Schiller’s The Robbers but his attitude to Wordsworth in whom he discerned the dangerous source of aesthetic, psychological and political contagion. Thus he wrote:

… the followers and patrons of that new school of poetry, against which we have thought it our duty to neglect no opportunity of testifying. Those gentlemen are outrageous for simplicity; and we beg leave to recommend to them the simplicity of Burns. He has copied the spoken language of passion and affection, with infinitely more fidelity than they have ever done … but he has not rejected the help of elevated language and habitual associations, nor debased his composition by an affectation of babyish interjections, and all the puling expletives of an old nursery maid’s vocabulary. They may look long enough among his nervous and manly lines, before they find … any stuff about dancing daffodils and sister Emmelines … with what infinite contempt the powerful mind of Burns would have perused the story of Alice Fell and her duffle coat … Let them contrast their own fantastical personages of hysterical schoolmasters and sententious leech-gatherers, with the authentic rustics of Burns’s ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, and his inimitable songs … Though they will not be reclaimed from their puny affectations by the example of their learned predecessors, they may, perhaps, submit to be admonished by a self-taught and illiterate poet, who drew from Nature far more directly than they can do, and produced something so much like the admired copies of the masters whom they have abjured.62

Not the least of the consequences of Jeffrey’s obsessive fear and contempt and what he, initially and derogatorily, named as the Lake School, was a blindness, which this edition supplementing recent modern scholarship seeks to rectify, about the actual relationship of Wordsworth to Burns. As Wordsworth wrote in At the Grave of Burns, 1803: Seven Years After His Death:

I mourned with thousands, but as one

More deeply grieved, for He was gone

Whose light I hailed when first it shone,

And showed my youth

How Verse may build a princely throne

On humble truth.

What enraged Jeffrey was not simply the belief that the aesthetically highest art should engage with the socially lowest class, it was the radical political commitment behind that poetry. Aesthetically, linguistically to deny any possible connection between the English Wordsworth and the Scottish Burns was to deny a radical Scottish political poetry. In the 1790s Burns (especially in the Kilmarnock Edition) and Wordsworth were creatively preoccupied with precisely the same economic and political issues. Hence Wordsworth’s retrospective account of Guilt And Sorrow, or Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain, is not only, as we shall see, related to Burns’s A Winter’s Night, but could be read as a summary of the Scottish poet’s political sympathies and preoccupations at exactly the same period:

During the latter part of the summer of 1793, having passed a month in the Isle of Wight, in view of the fleet which was then preparing for sea off Portsmouth at the commencement of the war, I left the place with melancholy forebodings. The American war was still fresh in memory. The struggle which was beginning, and which many thought would be brought to a speedy close by the irresistible arms of Great Britain being added to those of the Allies, I was assured in my own mind would be of a long continuance, and productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation. This conviction was pressed upon me by having been a witness during a long residence in revolutionary France, of the spirit which prevailed in that country. After leaving the Isle of Wight, I spent two days in wandering on foot over Salisbury Plain …

The monuments and traces of antiquity, scattered in abun-dance over that region, led me unavoidably to compare what we know or guess of those remote times with certain aspects of modern society, and with calamities, principally those consequent upon war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject.63

Jeffrey’s example opened the floodgates to a tide of abuse, denigration, innuendo which constantly made the connection between licentious character flaws and radical politics. In a gallantly unsuccessful attempt to stop this, an Edinburgh lawyer, Alexander Peterkin, brought out in 1815 A Review of the Life of Robert Burns, and of Various Criticisms of his Character and Writings. As well as mounting a lucid empirical case for the defence, he enlisted Gilbert Burns, James Gray of the Edinburgh High School, Alexander Findlater of the Excise and George Thomson, song publisher, to testify to Burns’s actual practices as family man and gauger. In a controlled rage against what he considered a simian caricature of the poet, derived from ‘the drivelling fanaticism’ of right-wing politics, Peterkin wrote:

We hold the adversaries of Burns to be aggressors; misguided, we are inclined to think, and ready, we trust, in charity, to renounce their errors on satisfactory proof, that they have been misinformed, or have misconstrued the conduct and writing of Burns. But by their public and voluntary assertions and reflections of an injurious tendency, they have, successively, thrown down the gauntlet to every Scotchman who takes an interest in the honour of his country, of its literature, and of human nature … from the system of reitered critical preaching, which has become fashionable in all the recent publications about Burns … remaining uncontradicted and unexposed, we are afraid that future biographers, might be misled by longer silence, and adopt declamatory ravings as genuine admitted facts. The most celebrated literary journal of which Britain can boast, and of which, as Scotchmen, we are proud, began the cry; all the would-be moralists in newspapers, magazines, and reviews, have taken it up, and have repeated unauthenticated stories as grave truths: at length these have found a resting-place in large and lasting volumes.64

Given the quantity and quality of the vilification of Burns as documented in Peterkin (not least Walter Scott’s anonymous, execrable account in The Quarterly Review), Burns might have vanished from view perhaps beyond resurrection. What his critics also offered him, moreover, was celebrity on their terms. The bibulous, gustatory junketings which became ritualised in the Burns Supper began in the first decade of the nineteenth century with Jeffrey presiding. Burns was thus both for a period simultaneously radical scapegoat and sentimental national icon. To misquote Edwin Muir, he was the real Bard of a false nation. As the political anxieties calmed, the sentimental Burns of corrupt national imagining could occupy centre stage. He was a multi-purpose deity. The amnesia purging of Burns’s radical politics, meant the nation could forget the actual events of the 1790s when not only Burns, but a generation of enlightened Scottish writers, political idealists and academics were driven into internal psychological exile or exile in England, France, Australia and America.

The subsequent Victorian Burns cult was bizarrely multicausal.65 The anglophobic Professor John Wilson (Christopher North) harangued a crowd of 40,000 at the opening of the Burns mausoleum. The body was exhumed three times in the nineteenth century partly to seek phrenological confirmation of his genius. As with ‘Ossian’ MacPherson and John Home, Burns was seen as a titanic national poet fit to face down Shakespeare. This compensatory cultural account, partly derived from Scotland’s lack of real political power, quite missed the point that Burns had much more of a creative relationship with Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley and the still disgraced Byron, quite absent from his relationship to his bourgeois Scottish apostles. Carlyle, that anti-democratic antithesis of everything the reforming humanism of the Enlightenment stood for, discovered in Burns a Scottish peasant who, like himself, had made good. Indeed, forgetting the bitter marginalised reality of Burns’s premature death, Scotland saw in him the archetype of the ‘lad o’ pairts’, the man whose sheer talent brings him to the top. Also, a society locked into the squalid suffering and mortality of the horrors of urban industrialization read Burns as a pseudo-pastoral antidote to everyday reality. As Richard J. Finlay has cogently put it:

The important point to emphasise here is that … for most of the nineteenth century his work was used to give credence to laissez-faire liberalism. Burnsian notions of freedom and liberty and the dignity of mankind were ideally suited to Scottish middle-class self-perception and the erection of statues in his honour throughout the country reinforced the belief that talent was God-given and not the preserve of noble birth. The achievement of Burns’s rise from lowly birth was something that all Scots could aspire to emulate … Burns could be used to promote notions that the dignity of hard work, the perseverance of toil and calm stoicism in the face of adversity were values that were intrinsic to Scottish society.

Burns was praised for inculcating family values. According to Rosebery, Burns ‘dwells repeatedly on the primary sacredness of the home and the family, the responsibility of fatherhood and marriage’. The vision of family life in ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ was an antidote to the widespread unease about moral degeneracy in the sprawling slums of urban Scotland. He was likewise praised for making respectable the old Scottish songs which contained language that was crude and vulgar and unfit for genteel company. Burns transformed the baseness of Scottish society into something sublime.66

Or as Lord Rosebery put it in his conception of an entirely apolitical poet:

A Man’s A Man for A’ That is not politics — it is the assertion of the rights of humanity in a sense far wider than politics. It erects all mankind; it is the character of self-respect … it cannot be narrowed into politics. Burns’s politics are indeed nothing but the occasional overflow of his human sympathy into past history and current events.

Hollow rhetorical misrepresentation disguised as eulogy, Rosebery’s straw man cum icon is hoisted free of the contextual political events and ideals that helped forge the democratic anthem. Distortion and abuse of the dead artist’s memory is the theme of Patrick Kavanagh’s marvellous poem A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue, dealing with the small minded betrayals and corruptions of Irish society to its artists. It catches better than anything what was done to Burns during the nineteenth century:

They put a wreath upon the dead

For the dead will wear the cap of any racket,

The corpse will not put his elbows through his jacket

Or contradict the words some liar has said.

The corpse can be fitted out to deceive—

Fake thoughts, fake love, fake ideal,

And rogues can sell its guaranteed appeal,

Guaranteed to work and never come alive.

The poet would not stay poetical

And his humility was far from being pliable,

Voluptuary tomorrow, today ascetical,

His morning gentleness was the evening’s rage.

But here we give you death, the old reliable

Whose white blood cannot blot the respectable page.67

As well as the particularly Scottish virulent, conformist forces controlling the response to both Burns’s reputation and writings, Burns was also a victim, as most eighteenth-century writers of substance, of a pronounced shift of the boundary of sexual accept-ability in nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Gulliver’s Travels is expurgated and on such as Smollett and Sterne the library key is firmly turned. Writing about Mozart, in several respects Burns’s kindred spirit, Saul Bellow noted that:

The nineteenth century gave us an interregnum of puritanism. I have often thought that ‘repression’ and ‘inhibition’ as described by Freud refer to a temporary shift of ‘moral’ emphasis. Students of English literature are familiar with this move from the open sensuality of Fielding and Laurence Sterne to Victorian prudery (‘propriety’) in Dickens or Trollope. Rousseau’s Confessions or Diderot’s Les Bijoux Indiscrets confirm this … Seventy years ago, my Russian immigrant uncles, aunts, and cousins were still speaking freely and colourfully about bodily functions and things sexual — ‘country matters’, as Shakespeare called them in Hamlet. (Such lewd double entendres are common in his plays, specialists in Tudor and Stuart literature have collected them.) Bawdry has a long pedigree. Conversation in the courts of Elizabeth and James I was not what we came later to call ‘respectable’.68

Of course, Eros may have been driven underground in the Victorian world. He could not be obliterated. Prostitution and pornography flourished and Burns himself became a set text for the elbow-nudging male smoking room.

It is, however, this sort of respectability that, in part, conditions Matthew Arnold’s influential view of Burns. Despite his virtuous courage in opposing the crass, material philistine Victorian world, Arnold’s ethnic prescriptions for literature were not happy ones. Having designated, indeed invented, Celtic literature as fey and ethereal, he saw in Burns’s Scottish writing, the very opposite of this, as often nauseatingly tangible. Thus he wrote in November, 1879:

I have been reading Chaucer a great deal, the early French poets a great deal, and Burns a great deal. Burns is a beast with splendid gleams, and the medium in which he lived, Scotch peasants, Scotch Presbyterianism, and Scotch drink, is repulsive. Chaucer on the other hand pleases me more and more, and his medium is infinitely superior.69

This epistolary remark, he fleshed out in The Study of Poetry:

We English turn naturally, in Burns, to the poems in our own language, because we can read them easily; but in real poems we have not the real Burns.

The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems. Let us say that much of his poetry, a poetry dealing perpetually with Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a Scotchman’s estimate is apt to be personal. A Scotchman is used to this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners; he has a tenderness for it; he meets its poet half way. In this tender mood he reads pieces like the ‘Holy Fair’ or ‘Halloween’. But this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against a poet and not for him, when it is not a partial countryman who reads him; for in itself it is not a beautiful world, and no one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beautiful world. Burns’s world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world; even the world of his ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is not a beautiful world. No doubt a poet’s criticism of life may have such truth or power that it triumphs over its world and delights us.70

In one respect Arnold simply represents the consequences of the insistent Scottish claims for exclusive possession of Burns. Arnold, with a vengeance, locates him in a brutally circumscribed ethnic world. In another respect, Arnold is quite wildly wrong. He assumes Burns as a naïve realist, almost a poetic pig in clover in a Scottish sty, whereas Burns was a political satirist of the very elements, especially Hebraic spiritual and material hypocrisy, which Arnold himself attacks. Worse, he disconnects Burns, partly linguistically, from the radical British fraternity of the 1790s to which he belongs. Burns’s accent and examples are Scottish; his themes and insights are comparable to Blake. Despite Edward Dowden’s The French Revolution and English Literature (1897) which reintegrates Burns with his English peers, Arnold’s authority caused damage so severe that elements of it still exist. It may indeed have influenced the even more authoritative figure of T.S. Eliot, that provincial American who so yearned for Arnoldian metropolitan status, so that he saw in Burns the last flare-up of a subsequently redundant Scottish tradition, rather than a poet who used that tradition to write some of the greatest radical poetry of the late eighteenth century. Given of course, Eliot’s monarchical, High Anglican tendencies, it was not in his interest to see in the Scottish literary tradition such virile, dissident flexibility.71

By the latter part of the nineteenth century and with the embryonic stirring of Modernism, the roots of the later self-defined Scottish Renaissance Movement, a crucial problem for Scottish creative writers was whether Burns could be exhumed as a creative force from under the growing mountains of verbiage, false history and commercial artefacts. The initial movement in this direction came from R.L. Stevenson with his acutely attuned antennae both to contemporary world literature and to the Scottish tradition. Along with that went a peculiar, even psychic, identification with Robert Fergusson and associated fellow-feeling with Burns. He also grasped the degree to which Burns was indebted to Fergusson. Hence his haunted, near death retrospective of Edinburgh’s ‘three Robins’:

Burns alone has been just to his promise: follow Burns, he knew best, he knew whence he drew fire — from the poor, white-faced, drunken, vicious boy that raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse. Surely there is more to be gleaned about Fergusson, and surely it is high time the task was set about … We are three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre this last century. Well the one is the world’s, he did it, he came off, he is for ever: but I and the other—ah! What bonds we have—born in the same city: both sickly, both pestered one nearly to madness, one to the madhouse with a damnatory creed … and the old Robin, who was before Burns and the flood, died in his acute, painful youth and left the models of the great things that were to come … you will never know, nor will any man, how deep this feeling is; I believe Fergusson lives in me.72

Despite the genuine intensity of this feeling, Stevenson felt the task of resurrection of Fergusson and Burns beyond him. The Calvinist and genteel claustrophobia of Edinburgh which he believed had destroyed his namesake was something, with Joycean acumen, from which he fled into ever geographically further exile. Before doing so, however, he diagnosed in his earliest journalistic writings the remarkably over-inflated literary culture that infected Victorian Scotland in general and Burns’s false reputation in particular. Rather than Arnold’s vision of the Scots retreating north of the Tweed, clutching to their bosoms their shibboleth poet, Stevenson, with much more literary sociological realism, saw the Scots as enormously successful commercial exporters and exploiters of a pseudo-national literary tradition. While the more mature Stevenson would not have adhered to these disparaging remarks about Burns’s vernacular poetry, his sense of national literary narcissism did not abate:

It is somewhat too much the fashion to pat Scotch literature on the back. Inhabitants of South Britain are pleased to commend verses, which, short of a miraculous gift of tongues, it is morally impossible they should comprehend. It may interest these persons to learn that Burns wrote a most difficult and crude patois … there are not so very many people alive in Scotland who could read his works without a furtive reference to the margin … any Englishman need not be ashamed to confess he can make nothing out of the vernacular poems except a raucous gibberish — which is the honest belief of the present reviewer, is about the measure of his achievement. It is partly to this that we must attribute the exaggerated favour of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, by no means one of his best poems, but one of the most easily understood …

But even the least intelligent condescension of the South Briton is better than the hysterical praise with which Mr Grant Wilson bedaubs his native literature … Wilson thinks that Burns spoke ‘with too much extravagance’ when he called The Gentle Shepherd ‘the most glorious poem ever written’ … this barbarous gallimaufry or hotch-potch of indiscriminate laudation does not come fairly to the boil, until we hear that Falconer’s ‘Shipwreck’ placed its author ‘in the front rank of Scottish poets’ … Was there ever such an irreverent hurly-burly of names, such a profane morris-dance of great men and little poetasters? Whaur’s Wullie Shakespeare noo?73

At the end of this assault on the unfortunate James Grant Wilson, we also find this remark on Burns:

A point of curiosity is the rest of Burns’s Ode about Washington, some lines of which appear already in his Correspondence. It is a very poor performance, but interesting as another testimony to the profound sympathy of Burns for all democratic movements. Why does Mr. Wilson tell us no more about the history of the piece.74

Or, indeed, why did Stevenson, given his brilliantly innovative essay on Walt Whitman in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, not himself write about the democratic Burns. Partly perhaps because when talking about Scottish subjects he was infected by a sort of internalized Calvinism so that the empathy he could extend to Villon and Baudelaire (he was preoccupied with both these anarchic French spirits) could not be replicated for Burns who, like Hazlitt, he declared a sexually out-of-bounds bounder.75

A second wave was to follow Stevenson in the wake of the First World War. The British imperial economic and political project was damaged beyond repair, as correctly interpreted by the tiny Scottish avant garde, and it was felt that Scotland needed to be reconnected to its roots. Obstacles to this were the travesty of Celticism present in the sentimental tartanisation of the nation. ‘Out of the Celtic twilight’, as MacDiarmid wrote, ‘and into the Gaelic sun’. Another cultural, political phenomenon as destructive to what the avant garde considered vital to a resurrected Scotland was the Burns phenomenon now incorporated into The Burns Federation. Between the avant garde and the established Burnsians there was no co-operation and, indeed, relations were soon to turn to active hostility. Catherine Carswell’s honest, passionate biography of Burns was met with a bullet sent through the post to her. Written from her Lawrentian influenced position of a reintegrative instinctual and erotic vision, such open discussion of the poet’s sexual nature was unacceptable. By far the greatest of all Burns’s scholars the American John De Lancey Ferguson, as his correspondence with Mrs Carswell shows, was met not with open hostility but a marked lack of co-operation from the Federation regarding his magisterial edition of the poet’s letters. His subsequent biography, the fine The Pride and the Passion, was met with, as he ruefully put it, ‘passionate apathy’. Presbyterian Tory-Unionism would not release its death grip on a poet to whom, unlike Sir Walter Scott, it had absolutely no claim. Edwin Muir, while not personally empathetic to Burns as a poet, concisely summed up what he perceived as an end-game for Burns and Scotland. The occasion for Muir’s observations was the unveiling of a new statue to Burns with that bastion of ‘socialism’, Ramsay McDonald, making the oration:

The symbolism implicit in this scene is quite casual and involuntary. The churchyard could hold only a certain number of people; the ‘platform party’ (in Scotland one is always hitting against platform parties) was naturally chosen from the more well-to-do admirers of the poet: landlords, baronets, and officers in the British army. Objectively one can see that, Scotland being what it is, a ceremony in honour of its greatest poet should just take this form and no other. But at the same time one is driven to ask what can have happened to Burns since his death to make him now the implicit property of the middle and upper classes, when he was the property of the poor man at the beginning. This change may be briefly described by saying that Holy Willie, after being the poet’s butt, has now become the keeper of his memory …

Burns set the world in a roar of laughing at the people who now unveil statuary in his honour. Why is it that they are so kind to his kail and potatoes?

One reason for this is that the figure of Burns has become quite vague, and that the vaguer he becomes the more universally he pleases his countrymen. His words no longer mean anything.76

Muir then turns to an exemplary example of this vagueness by dealing with MacDonald’s eulogy to Burns. At this time Scottish society was in a state of political unrest, although somewhat different from the 1790s. There existed, however, a similar pattern of economic breakdown, profiteering and war weariness though the revolutionary cloud on the horizon was Russia, not France. Muir quotes MacDonald’s maunderings on Burns as revolutionary whereby ‘Burns’s revolution, was a revolution in soul, a revolution in being, a revolution in manliness, a revolution in humanity’. That is, of course, a revolution whereby everything except economic power and social justice are effectively changed. With his customary lucidity, Muir pointed out how the events of the darkening 1930s cast their shadow on the then contemporary interpretations of the 1790s:

I think I have said enough to show that Burns has been ostentatiously but securely swallowed and digested by Holy Willie during the century and a bit since his death. Burns was not the revolutionist who Mr. MacDonald makes him out to be, but he was an honest writer. And though he was a revolutionist, he showed his sympathy with the French Revolution in a quite practical way, without stopping to consider whether it was a mere revolution in circumstance or a revolution in soul. We cannot imagine the Burns whose statue Mr. MacDonald unveiled sending arms even to the constitutional government of Spain against the expressed wishes of the established order, as the living Burns did to the leaders of the French revolution against a similar prohibition. Something has happened to him since his death, and it is what happens to all writers after their death, no matter what they have written. It may not be true that all writers reflect the economic ideology of the society in which they live—I do not think it is—but it does seem to be true that their writings are finally and in the long run made to reflect that ideology, by a process of elimination and transformation, until the most influential classes in society can finally put their seal on the result. This necessity for social elimination and transformation probably accounts for Mr. MacDonald’s sharply condemnatory but vague references to Burns’s recent biographers (he could only have meant Mrs. Catherine Carswell’s plain-spoken and entirely sympathetic Life). For an honest biography helps to destroy the imposed image and to undo careful work of social transformation.77

Muir, of course, was not to know that in 1993, Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, toasted the ‘Immortal Memory’ in the Edinburgh Central constituency (we are reliably informed by a still enraged Old Labour source) without mentioning Burns at all.

One would have anticipated that Hugh MacDiarmid, bourgeois Scotland’s worst nightmare, with his celebration of John Maclean, Lenin and his intended book on Red Clydeside would have been prolix on the parallels between the 1790s and 1930s. With his early involvement in the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.), he was, overtly and expansively, a far more politically committed writer than Muir. Even so, he rarely mentions Scottish culture’s constant, mendacious denial of Burns as a democratic revolutionary. He was, however, constantly caustic about the literary implications of the Burns cult and how it had diverted attention not only from Burns’s poetry but poetry per se into a morass of biographical, antiquarian trivia. As he wrote:

Those who love poetry best today, and understand best its nature and function, have least to say of Burns as poet. To the quest for increased facilities of human self-expression —to the evolution of the art of poetry— Burns contributes nothing. It is almost exclusively in non-literary circles, amongst people who seldom read poetry of any kind, that Burns is still enthusiastically acclaimed as a great poet.… Burns the satirist is another matter. And the Burns of the verses that are not to be found in the expurgated editions —those little lewd revelations which enable us to discern in him (sed longe intervallo) a forerunner of James Joyce.78

Burns, for MacDiarmid, had a Janus-face. He saw him, by analogy with Joyce, as a proto-modernist capable of literary innovation and the changing of human consciousness. But he also saw him as a redundant poet not entirely irresponsible for the sterile cult created in his name. As MacDiarmid grew older, culminating in his dreadful polemic, Burns Today and Tomorrow (1958), the latter view prevailed. Initially, however, he thought that he could not only co-opt Burns but the Burns Federation into his programme for his version of radical, revolutionary change. Hence the sestet of this appalling sonnet To Duncan McNaught, LLD., J.P., President of the Burns Federation, written in 1923:

Burns International! The mighty cry

Prophetic of eventual brotherhood

Rings still, imperative to be fulfilled.

M’Naught, who follows you must surely try

To take his stand, where living, Burns had stood

Nor save on this foundation can he build.79

This grimly bad version of third-rate post-Miltonic Wordsworth was addressed to Dr McNaught who had distinguished himself by declaring that, ‘After Burns became a Government official he was a shorn Samson whose duty was to be “silent and obey”; and his daily realisation of his dependant position dampened his energies and restrained the free action of his powers’. This was not propitious and led MacDiarmid to remark that, ‘The same type of mind that quite unjustly vilified Burns is now most busily engaged in quite unnecessarily white-washing him’. By 1934, however, he had lost hope of the Burns Federation as a revolutionary agent for change, and indeed increasingly saw it as the antithesis of everything Burns stood for and what Scotland had been and should become:

What an organization the World Federation of Burns Clubs could have been—could even yet become—if it were animated with the true spirit of Burns and fulfilling a programme based on his essential motives applied to crucial contemporary issues as he applied them while he was living to the crucial issues of his own time and generation! What a true Scottish Internationale that would be —what a culmination and crown of Scotland’s role in history, the role that has carried Scotsmen to every country in the world and given them radical leadership everywhere they went!80

What obsessed MacDiarmid was not simply the need to galvanise his retarded nation but to put it at the very vanguard of what he perceived as a quantum, science-driven evolution in human consciousness. What he was faced with was an actual situation where the global network of Burns Clubs provided locations for the transmission, not of innovative consciousness, but of the worst aspects of sentimental banality. Within Scotland, things were even worse:

It is an organisation designed to prevent any further renaissance of the Scottish spirit such as he himself encompassed, and in his name it treats all who would attempt to renew his spirit and carry on his work on the magnificent basis he provided as he himself was treated in his own day — with obloquy and financial hardship and all the dastardly wiles of suave Anglicized time servers …

It has produced mountains of rubbish about him — to effectively bury the dynamic spirit — but not a single good critical study …

It has failed … to get Burns or Scottish literature or the Scottish language to which Burns courageously and rightly and triumphantly reverted from English, taught in Scottish schools.

Its gross betrayal of the Scots language — its role as a lying agent of the Anglicizing process Burns repudiated — was well seen in its failure to support the great new Scots dictionaries.

… the need to follow his lead at long last is today a thousand times greater than when he gave it.

We can — if we will … We can still affirm the fearless radical spirit of the true Scotland. We can even yet throw off the yoke of all the canting humbug in our midst. We can rise and quit ourselves like men and make Scotland worthy to have had a Burns — and conscious of it; and we can communicate that consciousness powerfully to the ends of the earth.

… if we don’t, if we won’t, the Burns cult will remain a monstrous monument to the triumph of his enemies.81

What appears about this time in MacDiarmid’s poetry is the image of Burns as a latter day Christ crucified by his cultish followers. This is best known from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Less well known is this disturbing English sonnet, They Know Not What They Do:

Burns in Elysium once every year

Ceases from intercourse and turns aside

Shorn for a day of all his rightful pride,

Wounded by those whom yet he holds most dear.

Chaucer he leaves, and Marlowe, and Shakespeare,

Milton and Wordsworth —and he turns to hide

His privy shame that will not be denied,

And pay his annual penalty of fear.

But Christ comes to him there and takes his arm.

‘My followers too,’ He says, ‘are false as thine,

True to themselves and ignorant of Me,

Grieve not thy fame seems so compact of harm;

Star of the Sot, Staff of the Philistine

—Truth goes from Calvary to Calvary!’82

MacDiarmid saw Burns as an incomplete revolutionary when compared to Byron, Baudelaire and (by implication) MacDiarmid himself:

He was intimidated in the most insidious fashion by the existing order of things … The pity about Burns is that he never got beyond good and evil. If he had been able to kick the traces over completely his potential genius might have been liberated —as was Gaugin’s for instance, when he ceased to be a stockbroker and reverted to savagery. Burns went in the opposite direction —from genius to ‘gauger’.83

This concept of an early Modernist, definably post-Nietzschean Burns, MacDiarmid may have derived from a little known poem by Swinburne (a poet he admired), Burns: An Ode (1896):

And Calvin, night’s prophetic bird,

Out of his home in hell was heard

Shrieking; and all the fens were stirred

Whence plague is bred;

Can God endure the scoffer’s word?

But God was dead.84

Not only does the poem personify Burns within terms of late nineteenth-century atheism and, perhaps expectedly, finds him inferior to Chaucer, but also, quite unexpectedly, it sees him as inferior to Dunbar:

But Chaucer’s daisy shines a star

Above his ploughshare’s reach to mar,

And mightier vision gave Dunbar

More strenuous wing

To hear around all sins that are

Hell dance and sing.

Ironically, MacDiarmid’s slogan ‘Not Burns, but Dunbar’ may have been derived from an English source. What is certain, however, is that it was not Burns but Byron whom he saw as the quintessence of Scottish literary and associated virtues:

Byron will come to his own yet in his own country, however. Scotland is shedding its super-imposed and unnatural religiosity. Unlike English literature Scottish literature remains amoral—full of illimitable potentialities, unexplored, let alone unexhausted, in the Spenglerian sense. And Byron was beyond all else a Scottish poet—the most nationally typical of Scottish poets, not excluding Burns. He answers — not to the stock conceptions, the grotesque Anglo-Scottish Kailyard travesty, of Scottish psychology — but to all the realities of our dark, difficult, unequal and inconsistent national temper.85

Implicit in MacDiarmid’s concept of Byron as the essential Scottish writer, is the notion that he is also definably the pure, uncompromised revolutionary spirit. This is hardly borne out by either history or biography. Was the mine-owning self-dramatising aristocrat ever under the cosh in the way Burns was? Is individual nihilism of the Byron, Baudelaire variety the necessary prelude to utopian change? MacDiarmid seems not to have read Dostoevsky deeply enough to have understood that Russian’s genius in tracing the demonically possessed connection between such nihilism and social catastrophe. In fact, MacDiarmid, as hierarchically preoccupied as Ezra Pound, was, at best, antipathetic to the universal democratic revolution of the late eighteenth century.86 His revolution was predicated on a quantum leap in human consciousness to be made by a scientifically attuned, necessarily tiny avant garde. Iain Crichton Smith thought that this position destroyed him as a poet, committing his later poetry to versified, programmatic propaganda for his science-manual saturated version of beyond the human.87 That is why he loathed Burns’s A Man’s A Man, seeing in it not a profound statement of fraternity but only crassly self-indulgent sentimentality. According to MacDiarmid, the real Scottish tradition, manifest in Byron, would return Scots to their hard, pristine selves, purged of the cloying psychological excesses and political corruptions of an imposed, Anglicised identity.

The failure to claim Byron for Scottish literature — the deference paid to English standards of taste in that and other ‘Scottish’ anthologies — is a characteristic of the Anglicisation of Scotland. All the natural perspectives of Scottish literature are arbitrarily manipulated in the light of entirely false interpretations of Scottish character. The type of people who are constrained to whitewash Burns are naturally anxious to disavow Byron—whom it would be impossible to ‘puritanise’ … He stands outwith the English literary tradition altogether. He is alien to it and not to be assimilated. English literature … has developed moral limitations — a quality of censorship which renders it impossible to naturalise certain attitudes of life, certain tendencies in expression …88

MacDiarmid’s capacity for intellectual absolutism, albeit frequently self-contradictory, has the ideological danger inherent in literary criticism of thesis-driven misreading. There is no little irony in the fact that it is an Englishman, W.H. Auden, who made a much more convincing distinction between Burns and Byron and, in so doing, makes one of the most acute critical remarks about the essence of Burns’s genius:

At the beginning of the Romantic age stand two writers of Light Verse who were also major poets, Burns and Byron, one a peasant the other an aristocrat. The former came from a Scottish parish which, whatever its faults of hypocrisy and petty religious tyranny, was a genuine community where the popular tradition in poetry had never been lost. In consequence Burns was able to write directly and easily about all aspects of life, the most serious as well as the most trivial. He is the last poet of whom this can be said. Byron, on the other hand, is the first writer of Light Verse in the modern sense. His success lasts as long as he takes nothing very serious; the moment he tried to be profound and ‘poetic’ he fails. However much they tried to reject each other, he was a member of ‘Society’, and his poetry is the result of his membership. If he cannot be poetic, it is because smart society is not poetic.89

MacDiarmid’s nationalist essentialism offers a heady, narcissistic appeal. If, however, history should be written about relationships between states not about mythically essential nations, literary history has constantly to concern itself with the inherent, ongoing dialogue between literatures. This is why Burns and the 1790s have been so misunderstood. Jeffrey wanted all relationships between Burns and the English Romantics, especially Wordsworth, terminated because the Scots were naturally loyal. MacDiarmid inverts the terms of the equation, the Scots are innate radicals and the English inherent constitutionalists, but he too achieves the same end in divorcing Scottish and English writing. This, particularly, in the 1790s is nonsense. Albeit in differently accented voices, Blake and Burns are deeply compatible, just as Cowper and Burns are. That savagely funny, neglected English satirist and friend of James Perry of The Morning Chronicle, Professor Richard Porson, produced polemics in a Scots-styled stanza that could, to the untrained eye, be easily mistaken for Burns. Wordsworth in particular, but almost all English radical writers of that decade, knew exactly what politics were inherent in Burns’s poetry. Indeed they were influenced by his example as man and poet. Equally, Burns along with the innate strengths of his native vernacular and the profound influence of Fergusson in particular, creatively plundered Shakespeare, Milton, the Tory Augustans, the Eighteenth-century Novel, and his sentimental English and Irish (Goldsmith) contemporaries to create a unique synthesis. As Thomas Preston has notably remarked in viewing Burns through the highly rewarding perspective of Bakhtin:

Burns’s poetry offers a gold mine of contestation among Scottish, English, classic, European, and non-European matters — a wondrous intertextuality of quotations, traditions, dictions, idioms, dialects, languages, meanings. His texts do not produce, I suggest, the agonistic of conflicted tongues heard by Thomas Crawford nor the Smollettian dialect of synthesized literary traditions sought by Carol McGuirk. Instead they orchestrate a polyphony of voices contesting languages, literary traditions, and cultures. Burns’s poetic project is dialogical through and through, internally within and between poems and externally within and between Scottish and other cultures. It scripts a future Scottish national culture that is inherently diverse — an imagined community whose lack of uniformity would appal Tobias Smollett, whose last and dying years, despite his anglicizing in aid of a sublated British culture, nevertheless were spent, perhaps fittingly, outside of Britain. Kenneth Simpson has written the most persuasively, I think, of Burns’s varying roles and poses, a poetic strategy he considers a reflection of the protean eighteenth-century Scot undergoing the dissociation of sensibility caused by the Union. Burns, he thinks, ‘became trapped behind the roles he so readily created’. I would suggest instead that these roles register the rich profusion of personal and cultural possibilities, opportunities, and identities made available to both individuals and Scottish society by the dialogic — indeed postmodern — world Burns’s poetic project scripts. This paper serves merely to suggest the many possibilities for exploration that Burns’s dialogism offers. Alan Bold misleadingly argues that Burns ‘looked back in ecstasy and did not take the future of Scotland into account’. It can be argued that dominant Scottish discourse since the Union has instead looked back in ecstasy while enacting the literati’s rather than Burns’s implied national script, and this possibility may cause some subconscious guilt that the ‘great tartan monster’ and the annual Burns Supper orgies seek to absolve. If this is so, tartanry and toasts to the ‘Immortal Memory’ yet also serve to keep alive the possibility of attending to Burns’s script.90

Preston’s essay is a deeply perceptive and provocative argument in favour of Burns creating a sort of healthily open, dialogically energised Scottish literature which was in opposition to the integration of Scottish writing into the standardised language, envisaged by such as the Irishman Thomas Sheridan and advocated by Edmund Burke and James Boswell, of the Anglo-British empire. Burns knew and loathed the power and accent of the Scots who served that imperium: ‘Thou Eunuch of language—Thou Englishman who was never south of the Tweed —Thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms’. Henry Dundas would be the prime example of that category though he, according to a jealous Boswell, had hardly the capacity to put pen to paper. Preston’s account requires only the modification that the relationship with English literature in the 1790s was not only dialogical but collusive in that these writers were seeking a republican reorientation of the British state through the resurrected democratic nationalism of its English, Scottish, Irish parts. The failure of this ambition is, as we shall see, tragically embodied in Ode for General Washington’s Birthday. Though, as Preston notes, two hundred years later we seem to be entering similar territory. It is the primary impulse behind this edition, then, to make Burns available to a contemporary Scottish consciousness that is hopefully more openly responsive to the man, his values and, above all, his poetry than has largely been the case over the last two centuries.