THE SERIES OF SATIRES
Before we can clearly see and understand Burns's attitude to the Church,
we must have studied the nature of the man himself, and we must know
something also of his religious training. It will not be enough to
select his series of satires, and, from a study of them alone, try to
make out the character of the man. His previous life must be known; the
natural bent of his mind apprehended, and once that is grasped, these
satires will appeal to the heart and understanding of the reader with a
sense of naturalness and expectedness. They are as inevitable as his
love lyrics, and are read with the conviction that his merciless
exposure of profanity masquerading in the habiliments of religion, was
part of the life-work and mission of this great poet. He had been born,
it is recognised, not only to sing the loves and joys and sorrows of his
fellow men and women, but to purge their lives of grossness, and their
religion of the filth of hypocrisy and cant. Let it be admitted, that he
himself went 'a kennin wrang.' What argument is there? We do not deny
the divine mission of Samson because of Delilah. Surely that giant's
life was a wasted one, yet in his very death he was true to his mission,
and fulfilled the purpose of his birth. In other lands and in other
times the satirist is recognised and his work appraised; the abuses he
scourged, the pretensions he ridiculed, are seen in all their
hideousness; but when a great satirist arises amongst ourselves to probe
the ulcers of pharisaism, he is banned as a profaner of holy things,
touching with impious hands the ark of the covenant. Why should the
_cloth_--as it is so ingenuously called--be touched with delicate hands,
unless it be that it is shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the
eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the
Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties;
he typifies the conventional righteousness and religion of his time.
Let us have done with all this timidity and coward tenderness. If the
Church is filthy, it must be cleansed; if there be money-changers within
its gates, let them be driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe
of the _cloth_, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains of a
pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with the manliness and courage
of true religion. But prophets have no honour in their own country,
rarely in their own time; they have ever been persecuted, and it is the
Church's martyrs that have handed down through the ages the light of the
world.
The profanities and religious blasphemies Burns attacked were evils
insidious and poisonous, eating to the very heart of the religious life
of the country, and they required a desperate remedy. Let us be thankful
that the remedy was applied in time; and, looking to the righteousness
he wrought, let us bless the name of Burns.
Burns's father, stern and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict
Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious
Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William
Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical
Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too
loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and
unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that day has
been here softened down into something not very far from Arminianism. He
had had a hard experience in the world himself, and that may have drawn
him nearer to his suffering fellow-men and into closer communion with
his God. He had learned that religion is a thing of the spirit, and not
a matter of creeds and catechisms. Of Robert Burns's own religion it
would be impertinent to inquire too curiously. The religion of a man is
not to be paraded before the public like the manifesto of a party
politician. After all, is there a single man who can sincerely, without
equivocation or mental reservation, label himself Calvinist, Arminian,
Socinian, or Pelagian? If there be, his mind must be a marvel of
mathematical nicety and nothing more. All that we need know of Burns is
that he was naturally and sincerely religious; that he worshipped an
all-loving Father, and believed in an ever-present God; that his charity
was boundless; that he loved what was good and true, and hated with an
indignant hatred whatever was loathsome and false. He loved greatly his
fellow-creatures, man and beast and flower; he could even find something
to pity in the fate of the devil himself. That he was not orthodox, in
the narrow interpretation of orthodoxy in his day, we are well enough
aware, else had he not been the poet we love and cherish.
In his early days at Mount Oliphant there is a hint of these later
satires. 'Polemical divinity about this time was,' he says, 'putting the
country half-mad, and I, ambitious of shining on Sundays, between
sermons, in conversation parties, at funerals, etc., in a few years
more, used to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion that I
raised a hue and cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this
hour.' And heresy is a terrible cry to raise against a man in Scotland.
In those days it was Anathema-maranatha; even now it is still the
war-slogan of the Assemblies.
The polemical divinity which he refers to as putting the country
half-mad was the wordy war that was being carried on at that time
between the Auld Lights and the New Lights. These New Lights, as they
were called, were but a birth of the social and religious upheaval that
was going on in Scotland and elsewhere. The spirit of revolution was
abroad; in France it became acutely political; in Scotland there was a
desire for greater religious freedom. The Church, as reformed by Knox,
was requiring to be re-reformed. The yoke of papacy had been lifted
certainly, but the yoke of pseudo-Protestantism which had taken its
place was quite as heavy on the necks of the people. So long as it had
been new; so long as it had been of their own choosing, it had been
endured willingly. But a generation was springing up--stiff-necked they
might have been called, in that they fretted under the yoke of their
fathers--that sought to be delivered from the tyranny of their pastors
and the fossilised formalism of their creed. To the people in their
bondage a prophet was born, and that prophet was Robert Burns.
It was natural that a man of Burns's temperament and clearness of
perception should be on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of
his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the
strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,--surely in
itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter
of religion,--we have an interesting reflection which gives us some
insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many
instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason and
common sense in matters of religion. Whenever we neglect or despise
those sacred monitors, the whimsical notions of a perturbed brain are
taken for the immediate influences of the Deity, and the wildest
fanaticism and the most inconsistent absurdities will meet with abettors
and converts. Nay, I have often thought that the more out of the way and
ridiculous their fancies are, if once they are sanctified under the name
of religion, the unhappy, mistaken votaries are the more firmly glued to
them.'
The man who wrote that was certainly not the man, when the day of battle
came, to join himself with the orthodox party, the party that stuck to
the pure, undiluted Puritanism of Covenanting times. Yet many
biographers have not seen the bearing that such a letter has on Burns's
attitude to the Church. Principal Shairp seems to say that Burns, had it
not been for the accident of ecclesiastical discipline to which he had
been subjected, would have joined the orthodox party. The notion is
absurd. Burns had attacked orthodox Calvinism even in his boyhood, and
was already tainted with heresy. 'These men,' the worthy Principal
informs us, 'were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and stout
protesters against patronage. All Burns's instincts would naturally have
been on the side of those who wished to resist patronage and "cowe the
lairds" had not this, his natural tendency, been counteracted by a
stronger bias drawing him in an opposite direction.' This is a
narrowing--if not even a positive misconception--of the case with a
vengeance. The question was not of patronage at all, but of moral and
religious freedom; while the democracy of those ministers was a terribly
one-sided democracy. The lairds may have dubbed them democrats, but they
were aristocratic enough, despotic even, to their herds. But Principal
Shairp has been led altogether wrong by imagining that 'Burns, smarting
under the strict church discipline, naturally threw himself into the
arms of the opposite or New Light party, who were more easy in their
life and in their doctrine.' More charitable also, and Christ-like in
their judgments, I should fain hope; less blinded by a superstitious awe
of the Church. 'Nothing could have been more unfortunate,' he continues,
'than that in this crisis of his career he should have fallen into
intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded men.' Surely this zeal
for the Church has carried him too far. Were these men all coarse
minded? Nobody believes it. The coarse-minded Dr. Dalrymple of Ayr, and
the coarse-minded Mr. Lawrie of Loudon! This is not argument. Besides,
it is perfectly gratuitous. The question, again, is not one of men--that
ecclesiastical discipline has been an offence and a
stumbling-block--either coarse minded or otherwise. It is a question of
principle, and Burns fought for it with keen-edged weapons.
It would be altogether a mistake to identify Burns with the New Light
party, or with any other sect. He was a law unto himself in religion,
and would bind himself by no creed. Because he attacked rigid orthodoxy
as upheld by Auld Light doctrine, that does not at all mean that he was
espousing, through thick and thin, the cause of the New Light party. He
fought in his own name, with his own weapons, and for humanity. It ought
to be clearly understood that in his series of satires he was not
attacking the orthodoxy of the Auld Lights from the bulwarks of any
other creed. His criticism was altogether destructive. From his own
conception of a wise and loving God he satirised what he conceived to be
their irrational and inhuman conception of Deity, whose attitude towards
mankind was assuredly not that of a father to his children. Burns's God
was a God of love; the god they worshipped was the creation of their
creed, a god of election. It is quite true that Burns made many friends
amongst the New Lights, but we are certain he did not hold by all their
tenets or subscribe to their doctrine. In the _Dictionary of National
Biography_ we read: 'Burns represented the revolt of a virile and
imaginative nature against a system of belief and practice which, as he
judged, had degenerated into mere bigotry and pharisaism.... That Burns,
like Carlyle, who at once retained the sentiment and rejected the creed
of his race more decidedly than Burns, could sympathise with the higher
religious sentiments of his class is proved by _The Cotter's Saturday
Night_.'
Principal Shairp, however, has not seen the matter in this broad light.
All he sees is a man of keen insight and vigorous powers of reasoning,
who 'has not only his own quarrel with the parish minister and the
stricter clergy to revenge, but the quarrel also of his friend and
landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county lawyer who had fallen under church
censure for neglect of church ordinances,'--a question of new potatoes
in fact,--'and had been debarred from the communion.'
It is pleasing to see that the academic spirit is not always so blinding
and blighting. Professor Blackie recognises that the abuses Burns
castigated were real abuses, and admits that the verdict of time has
been in his favour. 'In the case of _Holy Willie_ and _The Holy Fair_,'
he remarks, 'the lash was wisely and effectively wielded'; and on
another occasion he wrote, 'Though a sensitive pious mind will naturally
shrink from the bold exposure of devout abuses in holy things, in _The
Holy Fair_ and other similar satires, on a broad view of the matter we
cannot but think that the castigation was reasonable, and the man who
did it showed an amount of independence, frankness, and moral courage
that amply compensates for the rudeness of the assault.'
Rude, the assault certainly was and overwhelming. Augean stables are not
to be cleansed with a spray of rose-water.
Lockhart, whilst recognising the force and keenness of these satires,
has regretfully pointed out that the very things Burns satirised were
part of the same religious system which produced the scenes described in
_The Cotter's Saturday Night_. But is this not really the explanation of
the whole matter? It was just because Burns had seen the beauty of true
religion at home, that he was fired to fight to the death what was false
and rotten. It was the cause of true religion that he espoused.
'All hail religion! Maid divine,
Pardon a muse so mean as mine,
Who in her rough imperfect line
Thus dares to name thee.
To stigmatise false friends of thine
Can ne'er defame thee.'
Compare the reading of the sacred page, when the family is gathered
round the ingle, and 'the sire turns o'er with patriarchal grace the big
ha'-bible' and 'wales a portion with judicious care,' with the reading
of _Peebles frae the Water fit_--
'See, up he's got the word o' God,
And meek and mim has viewed it.'
What a contrast! The two readings are as far apart as is heaven from
hell, as far as the true from the false. It is strange that both
Lockhart and Shairp should have stumbled on the explanation of Burns's
righteous satire in these poems; should have been so near it, and yet
have missed it. It was just because Burns could write _The Cotter's
Saturday Night_ that he could write _The Holy Tulzie_, _Holy Willie's
Prayer_, _The Ordination_, and _The Holy Fair_. Had he not felt the
beauty of that family worship at home; had he not seen the purity and
holiness of true religion, how could such scenes as those described in
_The Holy Fair_, or such hypocrisy as Holy Willie's, ever have moved him
to scathing satire? Where was the poet's indignation to come from? That
is not to be got by tricks of rhyme or manufactured by rules of metre;
but let it be alive and burning in the heart of the poet, and all else
will be added unto him for the perfect poem, as it was to Burns. That
Burns, though he wrote in humorous satire, was moved to the writing by
indignation, he tells us in his epistle to the Rev. John M'Math--
'But I gae mad at their grimaces,
Their sighin', cantin', grace-prood faces,
Their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces,
Their raxin' conscience,
Whase greed, revenge, and pride disgraces
Waur nor their nonsense.'
The first of Burns's satires, if we except his epistle to John Goudie,
wherein we have a hint of the acute differences of the time, is his poem
_The Twa Herds_, or _The Holy Tulzie_. The two herds were the Rev. John
Russell and the Rev. Alexander Moodie, both afterwards mentioned in _The
Holy Fair_. These reverend gentlemen, so long sworn friends, bound by a
common bond of enmity against a certain New Light minister of the name
of Lindsay, 'had a bitter black outcast,' and, in the words of Lockhart,
'abused each other _coram populo_ with a fiery virulence of personal
invective such as has long been banished from all popular assemblies.'
This degrading spectacle of two priests ordained to preach the gospel of
love, attacking each other with all the rancour of malice and
uncharitableness, and foaming with the passion of a pothouse, was too
flagrant an occasion for satire for Burns to miss. He held them up to
ridicule in _The Holy Tulzie_, and showed them themselves as others saw
them. It has been objected by some that Burns made use of humorous
satire; did not censure with the fiery fervour of a righteous
indignation. Burns used the weapon he could handle best; and a powerful
weapon it is in the hands of a master. We acknowledge Horace's satires
to be scathing enough, though they are light and delicate, almost
trifling and flippant at times. He has not the volcanic utterance of
Juvenal, but I doubt not his castigations were quite as effective.
'Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?' Burns might have well
replied to his censors with the same question. Quick on the heels of
this poem came _Holy Willie's Prayer_, wherein he took up the cudgels
for his friend, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, and fought for him in his own
enthusiastic way. The satire here is so scathing and scarifying that we
can only read and wonder, shuddering the while for the wretched creature
so pitilessly flayed. Not a word is wasted; not a line without weight.
The character of the self-righteous, sensual, spiteful Pharisee is a
merciless exposure, and, hardest of all, the picture is convincing. For
Burns believed in his own mind that these men, Holy Willie and the crew
he typified, were thoroughly dishonest. They were not in his
judgment--and Burns had keen insight--mere bigots dehumanised by their
creed, but a pack of scheming, calculating scoundrels.
'They take religion in their mouth,
They talk o' mercy, grace, and truth,
For what? to gie their malice skouth
On some puir wight,
And hunt him down, o'er right and ruth
To ruin straight.'
But it must be noted in _Holy Willie_ that the poet is not letting
himself out in a burst of personal spleen. He is again girding at the
rigidity of a lopped and maimed Calvinism, and attacking the creed
through the man. The poem is a living presentment of the undiluted,
puritanic doctrine of the Auld Light party, to whom Calvinism meant only
a belief in hell and an assurance of their own election. It is evident
that Burns was not sound on either essential. _The Address to the Unco
Guid_ is a natural sequel to this poem, and, in a sense, its
culmination. There is the same strength of satire, but now it is more
delicate and the language more dignified. There is the same condemnation
of pharisaism; but the poem rises to a higher level in its appeal for
charitable views of human frailty, and its kindly counsel to silence;
judgment is to be left to Him who
'Knows each cord, its various tone,
Each spring its various bias.'
Of all the series of satires, however, _The Holy Fair_ is the most
remarkable. It is in a sense a summing up of all the others that
preceded it. The picture it gives of the mixed and motley multitude
fairing in the churchyard at Mauchline, with a relay of ministerial
mountebanks catering for their excitement, is true to the life. It is
begging the question to deplore that Burns was provoked to such an
attack. The scene was provocation sufficient to any right-thinking man
who associated the name of religion with all that was good and beautiful
and true. Such a state of things demanded reformation. The
churchyard--that holy ground on which the church was built and
sanctified by the dust of pious and saintly men--cried aloud against the
desecration to which it was subjected; and Burns, who alone had the
power to purify it from such profanities, would have been untrue to
himself and a traitor to the religion of his country had he merely
shrugged his shoulders and allowed things to go on as they were going.
And after all what was the result? For the poem is part and parcel of
the end it achieved. 'There is a general feeling in Ayrshire,' says
Chambers, 'that _The Holy Fair_ was attended with a good effect; for
since its appearance the custom of resorting to the occasion in
neighbouring parishes for the sake of holiday-making has been much
abated and a great increase of decorous observance has taken place.' To
that nothing more need be added.
In this series of satires _The Address to the Deil_ ought also to be
included. Burns had no belief at all in that Frankenstein creation. It
was too bad, he thought, to invent such a monster for the express
purpose of imputing to him all the wickedness of the world. If such a
creature existed, he was rather sorry for the maligned character, and
inclined to think that there might be mercy even for him.
'I'm wae to think upon yon den,
Even for your sake.'
Speaking of this address, Auguste Angellier says: 'All at once in their
homely speech they heard the devil addressed not only without awe, but
with a spice of good-fellowship and friendly familiarity. They had never
heard the devil spoken of in this tone before. It was a charming
address, jocund, full of raillery and good-humour, with a dash of
friendliness, as if the two speakers had been cronies and companions
ready to jog along arm in arm to the nether regions. He simply laughs
Satan out of countenance, turns him to ridicule, pokes his fun at him,
scolds and defies him just as he might have treated a person from whom
he had nothing to fear. Nor is that all. He must admonish him, tell him
he has been naughty long enough, and wind up by giving him some good
advice, counselling him to mend his ways. This was certainly without
theological precedent. It was, however, a simple idea which would have
arranged matters splendidly.... Even to-day to speak well of the devil
is an abomination almost as serious as to speak evil of the Deity. There
was assuredly a great fortitude of mind as well as daring of conduct to
write such a piece as this.'
The poem has done more than anything else to kill the devil of
superstition in Scotland. After his death he found, it is averred, a
quiet resting-place in Kirkcaldy, where pious people have built a church
on his grave.
When Burns later in life made the witches and warlocks dance to the
piping of the devil in Alloway's auld haunted kirk, he was but
assembling them in their fit and proper house of meeting. Here had they
been called into being; here had they the still-born children of
superstition been thrashed into life and trained in unholiness. One can
imagine them oozing out from the walls that had echoed their names so
often through centuries of Sabbath days. The devil himself, by virtue of
his rank, takes his place in the east, rising we have no doubt from the
very spot on which the pulpit once had stood. In the church had
superstition exorcised this hellish legion out of the dead mass of
ignorance into the swarming maggots that batten on corruption; and it
was in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that here their
spirits should abide, and, when they took bodily shape, that they should
assume the form and feature in which their mother Superstition had
conceived them.
Upon the holy table too lay 'twa span-lang wee unchristened bairns.' For
this hell the poet pictures is the creation of a creed that throngs it
with the souls of innocent babes. 'Suffer little children to come unto
me,' Christ had said; 'for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' 'But
unbaptized children must come unto me,' the devil of superstition said;
'for of such is the kingdom of hell.'
What pathos is in this line of Burns! There is in its slow spondaic
movement an eternity of tears. Could satire or sermon have shown more
forcibly the revolting inhumanity of a doctrine upheld as divine? Yet
were there devout men, in other things gentle and loving and charitable,
who preached this as the law of a loving God. With one stroke of genius
they were brought face to face with the logical sequence of their
barbarous teaching, and that without a word of coarseness or a touch of
caricature.
Only once again did Burns return to this attack on bigotry and
superstition, and that was when he was induced to fight for Dr. Macgill
in _The Kirk's Alarm_. But he had done his part in the series of satires
of this year to expose the loathsomeness of hypocrisy and to purge holy
places and the most solemn ceremonies of what was blasphemous and
grossly profane. That in this Burns was fulfilling a part of his mission
as a poet, we can hardly doubt; and that his work wrought for
righteousness, the purer religious life that followed amply proves. The
true poet is also a prophet; and Robert Burns was a prophet when he
spoke forth boldly and fearlessly the truth that was in him, and dared
to say that sensuality was foul even in an elder of the kirk, and that
profanities were abhorred of God even though sanctioned and sanctified
under the sacred name of religion.