The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

  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 Indis
crets 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: