The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

  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 abr
oad:

  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’ Sata
n 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: