by Robert Burns
‘When the welfare of Millions is hung in the scale
And the balance yet trembles with fate’
But our friend is already indebted to People in power … so I can apologise for him; for at bottom I am sure he is a staunch friend to Liberty’ (Letter 649).
It is surprising that this letter, let alone the revolutionary song, survived the censorial flames or scissors.
Influenced unduly by this nineteenth century legacy and apparently mistaking politicial bias for literary expertise, Kinsley places The Tree of Liberty in his Dubia section (K625). He, too, accepts many works to the canon without extant mansuscript authority, but not this revolutionary work. Kinsley, though, does not wholly reject the song, but leaves its provenance open. On literary style he claims the song does not truly sound like Burns: ‘the manner here is less firmly and finally expressive and less richly vernacular than that of Burns when he is fully engaged’ (Vol. III, p. 1528).
Is this valid? Scots Wha Hae is certainly Scottish in theme but it is far less so in language. In fact, taking up Kinsley’s key point, it is a revealing contrast to discover that the final verse of A Man’s a Man has only two Scots words. By such language criteria, readers should question the validity of many known works by Burns. The first verse of The Dumfries Volunteers contains one Scots word and the final verse contains no Scots words. If the number of Scots words occurring in The Tree of Liberty is compared to The Dumfries Volunteers and A Man’s a Man, the result for the first four verses is:
Tree of Liberty A Man’s a Man The Dumfries Volunteers
Verse 1 5 2 1
Verse 2 8 4 6
Verse 3 8 5 7
Verse 4 10 6 0
The number of actual words per verse for these three songs is roughly the same. The score of Scots words for A Man’s a Man is increased to a count of 8, 10, 11, and 10 for the first four verses if each occurrence of the repetitive ‘a” meaning all, as in ‘a’ that and a’ that’ is included. The highest scoring verse in all three songs is the final verse of The Tree of Liberty which contains thirteen Scots words. Kinsley’s main objection to The Tree of Liberty, that it is not densely vernacular enough to be from Burns, is, therefore, invalid. Indeed, our comparison shows the opposite to be true.
The ratio of Scots-to-English words is, of course, varied throughout the canon and cannot be employed as criteria to determine provenance. A more important aspect of language which Kinsley might have examined is the appearance of parochial words and regional spellings employed during the 1790s among other Scots poets, in examining the question of whether another poet might have written this song. There is considerable evidence to show that contemporaries of Burns like Alexander Wilson of Paisley, generally employ parochial spellings and words never found in Burns. Wilson’s works are peppered with such spellings. There is no trace of parochial spelling, or non-Burns dialect words within The Tree of Liberty. The poem displays a linguistic fluidity in changing from Scots to English and vice versa, precisely in the manner found in Burns.
There has been no investigation about the Mosesfield manuscript shown to Dr Chambers by Mr James Duncan. Who was the mysterious Mr Duncan who pops up in 1838 and then vanishes? Did Burns know anyone of that name? There is no James Duncan mentioned in the poet’s letters, but a William Duncan comes out of the pages of the Burns story in a letter to Crawford Tait of Edinburgh, 15th October, 1790. Burns wrote of this young friend and courier of the letter to Tait:
Allow me to introduce to your acquaintance the bearer, Mr Will [m] Duncan, a friend of mine whom I have long known & loved. – His father, whose only Son he is, has a decent little property in Ayrshire, & has bred the young man to the Law; in which department he comes up an adventurer to your Good Town (Letter 425).
There is another reference to William Duncan on 25th October, 1787 (Letter 146). It is, of course, purely speculative but it may be that the James Duncan who gave the manuscript to Dr Chambers was a relation, possibly the son of William Duncan.
Mackay accepts the poem into the canon but places its composition with chronological vagueness, declaring that it ‘accords with Burns’s Jacobin sympathies in 1792–3’ (p. 478). This contradicts his public statements to national newspapers during early 1996 when he argued that Burns would not have written ‘lost’ radical poetry from the first week of January 1793 onwards, given his job in the Excise. But The Tree of Liberty refers specifically to the death of the French King in stanza 5, an event that did not occur until the end of January 1793, after the Excise enquiry into the poet’s politics. So, Mackay should have argued that Burns did continue to write radical poetry after being chastised by his Excise employers.
Crawford suggests the possible date of composition for around the end of January 1795, when Burns writes of Dr John Moore’s rather anti-Jacobin book on travelling through France. Crawford tellingly argues, ‘it chimes in perfectly with his prose remarks about the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, which so offended Mrs Dunlop’ (Crawford, p. 246). The letter to Mrs Dunlop, quoted above, does mention the executions in a cold, matter-of-fact manner in the same way that the song almost shockingly, in a style of casual gossip tells of the King’s death, ‘Cut aff his head and a’, man’. A Man’s a Man, written about this time, has many similarities with The Tree of Liberty. Both songs finish on a note of future optimism set in the form of a prayer: ‘Then let us pray that come it may’, and, ‘Syne let us pray, auld England may /Sure plant this far-famed tree, man’. This lexical similarity in sentiment and style is surely no mere coincidence. Crawford is almost certainly correct that The Tree of Liberty was written around the same time as A Man’s a Man. His view that the song is a far better work than some editors have suggested is surely right.
In fact, the poem is developed with considerable skill, in narrative and imagery. It is particularly expressive of the poet’s developing views in mid-to-late 1794, that freedom in England was being crushed by the London government – trees of liberty are not to be found ‘’twixt London and the Tweed’. This is put more forcibly in the Ode for General Washington’s Birthday, where he condemns England for going to war against revolutionary France, then damns her for crushing the green shoots of liberty at home with a brutal tyrannical crackdown. Indeed, Crawford makes a very important point in discussing The Tree of Liberty when he writes, ‘during the Scottish Reform Movement of the 1790s the Tree of Liberty became almost as much a Scottish symbol as the kilt, the lion, the thistle or the holly’ (p. 246).
The current editors have completed a thorough investigation of late-eighteenth-century radical poetic voices in Scotland and have found no other appropriate candidate. It is a powerful reflective work looking back on the development of the French revolution and its influence from the American War of Independence (l. 28). It is written with a fluidity of language that moves from rich vernacular Scots to English passages with the ease so characteristic of Burns. Close linguistic scrutiny and contextual evidence suggests that the lack of an extant manuscript is not a bar to canonical acceptance. It is possible that, as some other political poems, The Tree of Liberty was published in the radical Glasgow Advertiser. Crucially, however, the copies of that newspaper for the years 1795–6 seem irretrievably lost.
Let Me in this ae Night –
Tune: Will Ye Lend Me Yer Loom Lass
First printed in Currie, 1800.
O lassie, are ye sleepin yet,
Or art thou waukin, I wad wit, waking, would bet
For Love has bound me hand and fit, foot
And I would fain be in, jo. — my dear
Chorus
5 O let me in this ae night, one
This ae, ae, ae night;
For pity’s sake this ae night,
O rise and let me in, jo. my dear
Thou hear’st the winter wind an’ weet, wet
10 Nae star blinks thro’ the driving sleet; no
Tak pity on my weary feet,
And shield me frae the rain, jo. — from
O let me in &c.
The bitter blast that round me blaws blows
Unheeded howls, unheeded fa’s; falls
15 The cauldness o’ thy heart’s the cause coldness
Of a’ my care and pine, jo. — pining/distress
O let me in &c.
HER ANSWER
O tell na me o’ wind an’ rain, not
Upbraid na me wi’ cauld disdain, not, cold
20 Gae back the gate ye cam again, go
I winna let ye in, jo. — will not
Chorus
I tell you now this ae night, one
This ae, ae, ae night,
And ance for a’ this ae night, once, all
25 I winna let ye in, jo. will not
The snellest blast, at mirkest hours, coldest, darkest
That round the pathless wanderer pours,
Is nocht to what poor She endures, nothing
That’s trusted faithless Man, jo. —
I tell you now &c.
30 The sweetest flower that deck’d the mead,
Now trodden like the vilest weed —
Let simple maid the lesson read,
The weird may be her ain, jo. — fate, own, my dear
I tell you now &c
The bird that charm’d his summer day,
35 And now the cruel Fowler’s prey,
Let that to witless Woman say,
The gratefu’ heart of Man, jo. —
I tell you now &c.
This lyric, based on a song in Herd’s collection (1769), was sent to Thomson in August 1793 but Burns was unhappy with the female reply and tried his hand at improving it on two separate occasions, eventually sending the final song in February 1795. Thomson printed it in 1805.
From Esopus to Maria
or Fragment – Part Description of a Correction House
First printed, incomplete, by Cunningham, 1834.
From those drear solitudes and frowsy Cells,
Where Infamy with sad Repentance dwells;
Where Turnkeys make the jealous portal fast,
And deal from iron hands the spare repast;
5 Where truant ’prentices, yet young in sin,
Blush at the curious stranger peeping in;
Where strumpets, relics of the drunken roar,
Resolve to drink, nay half — to whore — no more;
Where tiny thieves, not destin’d yet to swing,
10 Beat hemp for others riper for the string:
From these dire scenes my wretched lines I date.
To tell Maria her Esopus’ fate.
‘Alas! I feel I am no actor here!’
’Tis real Hangmen real scourges bear!
15 Prepare, Maria, for a horrid tale
Will turn thy very rouge to deadly pale;
Will make thy hair, tho’ erst from gipsy poll’d,
By Barber woven and by Barber sold,
Though twisted smooth by Harry’s nicest care,
20 Like hoary bristles to erect and stare!
The Hero of the mimic scene, no more
I start in Hamlet, in Othello roar;
Or, haughty Chieftain, ‘mid the din of arms,
In Highland bonnet woo Malvina’s charms;
25 While Sans Culottes stoop up the mountain high,
And steal me from Maria’s prying eye.
Blest Highland bonnet! once my proudest dress,
Now, prouder still, Maria’s temples press!
I see her wave thy towering plumes afar,
30 And call each coxcomb to the wordy war!
I see her face the first of Ireland’s sons,
And even out-Irish his Hibernian bronze.
The crafty Colonel leaves the tartan’d lines
For other wars, where He a hero shines;
35 The hopeful youth, in Scottish Senate bred,
Who owns a Bushby’s heart without the head,
Comes ‘mid a string of coxcombs, to display
That Veni, vidi, vici, is his way —.
The shrinking Bard adown the alley skulks,
40 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:
Still she, undaunted, reels and rattles on,
And dares the public like a noontide sun.
45 What scandal called Maria’s janty stagger
The ricket reeling of a crooked swagger?
[What slander nam’d her seeming want of art
The flimsey wrapper of a rotten heart —].
Whose spleen (e’en worse than Burns’s venom, when
50 He dips in gall unmix’d his eager pen,
And pours his vengeance in the burning line),
Who christen’d thus Maria’s lyre-divine,
The idiot strum of Vanity bemus’d,
And even th’ abuse of Poesy abus’d?
55 Who called her verse a Parish Workhouse, made
For motley foundling Fancies, stolen or strayed?
A Workhouse! ah, that sound awakes my woes,
And pillows on the thorn my rack’d repose!
In durance vile here must I wake and weep,
60 And all my frowzy Couch in sorrow steep:
That straw where many a rogue has lain of yore,
And vermin’d Gypseys litter’d heretofore.
Why, Lonsdale, thus thy wrath on vagrants pour?
Must Earth no Rascal save thyself endure?
65 Must thou alone in guilt immortal swell,
And make a vast Monopoly of Hell?
Thou know’st the Virtues cannot hate thee worse:
The Vices also, must they club their curse?
Or must no tiny sin to others fall,
70 Because thy guilt’s supreme enough for all?
Maria, send me too thy griefs and cares,
In all of thee sure thy Esopus shares:
As thou at all mankind the flag unfurls,
Who on my fair one Satire’s vengeance hurls!
75 Who calls thee, pert, affected, vain coquette,
A wit in folly, and a fool in wit!
Who says that Fool alone is not thy due,
And quotes thy treacheries to prove it true!
Our force united on thy foes we’ll turn,
80 And dare the war with all of woman born:
For who can write and speak as thou and I?
My periods that decyphering defy,
And thy still matchless tongue that conquers all reply!
This partial parody of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard is written in the voice of James Williamson (Esopus is a classic Roman actor) who managed the Dumfries Theatre. Williamson and his crew of players were acting in Whitehaven when a friend of the Earl of Lonsdale (James Lowther, 1736–1802), after attending a play, reported them to the Earl who summoned them and interrogated each actor between 8 o’clock at night and 5 o’clock the next morning. They were handcuffed and jailed in Penrith, supposedly on a charge of vagrancy. From the newspaper clipping preserved and apparently viewed by Henderson and Henley, it appears to have been the content of the play that was reported to Lonsdale and irritated him into taking legal action. (See Vol. II, p. 353).
Previous editors employ the text from a manuscript seen by Cunningham in 1834 which has since vanished, presumed destroyed. Henley and Henderson, who condemn the poem as ‘inept and unmanly’, err in stating that the only authority for the poem is the word of Cunningham (See Vol. II, p. 354). A much earlier transcript in the hand of John Syme is preserved in the Hornel Collection (See The Burns Chronicle, 1935, p. 33). The subtitle now given is also new, taken from the Syme manuscript. Ll. 47–8 are not included by any previous editors, but they have been restored to the poem from the transcript. They are a further slight on Maria Riddell that may have been censored by Cunningham, if he used an original manuscript (probably destroyed to conceal his censorship):
What slander nam’d her seeming want of ar
t
The flimsy wrapper of a rotten heart —.
Textually, the Syme manuscript contains more words in capitals and in italics than the version of the poem normally printed in the bard’s works, originating from Cunningham. This tends to reinforce the view that it represents a better and more accurate version of the poet’s writing style, given his habit of employing capitals and italics throughout his verse. Cunningham was not a professional copyist and may have dropped the poet’s emphasis on several occasions, so we have selected the text of the 1815 transcript made by Syme.
In one of his rare lapses of judgement, De Lancey Ferguson (Modern Philology, xxviii (1930), pp. 17°–84) went to detailed lengths to prove this was not by Burns. Kinsley (p. 1471) very effectively denies this. One of the main points of Kinsley’s case is that Ferguson did not know that, though there was no Burns holograph, there were three extant transcripts of which two denoted that the poem was by Burns.
In retrospect, it is hard to see how a case could be made against his authorship. There is not only the astonishing technical excellence of the opening (ll.1–10); the pathologically jealous inner monologue he creates for James Williamson; the parody of Pope’s poem of absolute sexual love, Eloisa to Abelard but in ll. 39–42 Burns’s own appearance in the poem in the most overt lines he ever wrote about what his existence was like in Dumfries in the wake of the Sedition Trials. In these trials, it should be recalled, Braxfield had announced that since the constitution was perfect any proposals of change were, defin-ably, made by enemies of the state.
The poem is not to be understood, however, without appreciation of the complex, passionate and tormented relationship between Burns and Maria Riddell. All his relationships with upper-class women were deeply problematic but Maria, creatively talented and radically inclined, was in a category of her own. She was Robert Riddell’s sister-in-law. It is impossible to say whether her relationship to Burns was ever physical but, certainly on his side, it was profound. As he wrote to her in February 1792:
