the realm of ideas. The fact that the more influential laity were early
converts to the new doctrines brought into the struggle politics in
its most worldly form. In parishes where the local magnates exercised
the right of presenting the minister, New Light candidates had the
preference. Hence it was the New Lights’ interest to uphold the right
of patronage against the congregation’s democratic claim to elect its
own minister. The supporters of patronage triumphed in the election
of William Robertson as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1763; the
result made the church almost as much a part of the spoils system as
the government was, and gave its leadership into the hands of supple
ecclesiastical politicians. In consequence the spread of New Light
doctrine went hand in hand with a steady decline in the moral influence
of the clergy, while schisms and secessions sapped the organization.
Because the Kirk was morally as well as intellectually bankrupt the
laughter of Burns’s satires shook it to its foundations. To the
church of John Knox such ridicule would have meant no more than a
mosquito means to an elephant. Burns’s Edinburgh friends were right in
maintaining that the conduct and doctrines which he attacked would have
disappeared in another generation without his aid; what neither they
nor he could foresee was that in 1843 it would be the Old Light clergy
who would restore moral leadership to the ministry by daring to give up
their livings for conscience’ sake.
Behind the New Light doctrines expounded by Hutcheson and his
followers lay of course the ideas of such English Deists as Locke
and Shaftesbury. Strong convictions on philosophical and theological
questions were going out of fashion; like Franklin in America the New
Light Scots had persuaded themselves that enlightened self-interest,
sweet reasonableness and common sense, were attainable goals for
mankind at large, and could be trusted to solve problems of morals and
economics alike. And this English influence in the field of theology
and philosophy was typical of the entire range of literary expression
in Scotland. The national inferiority complex showed itself most
plainly of all in the realm of words.
Historically the Scottish language is to English what Provençal is
to French and Catalan to Spanish--an ancient and independent local
dialect which had developed its own literature at least as early as had
the more central region which afterwards took the lead. The speech of
Lowland Scotland was the direct descendant of that Northumbrian dialect
of Old English which Bede and Caedmon spoke. Throughout the Middle Ages
and the early Renaissance Scotland maintained amid her poverty as rich
a literary tradition as England did. In fact, from the death of Chaucer
until the beginning of the Elizabethan era the student of British
literature must look north of the Tweed to find, in the writings of
King James I, Robert Henryson, Gawain Douglas and William Dunbar,
anything worthy the name of poetry. The decay of Scots as a literary
language was started by the Reformation and finished by the Union. By
introducing the Geneva version of the English Bible the Reformation
made Southern English the language of the church, in idiom if not in
pronunciation. The accession of James VI to the English throne made
Southern English also the language of the court. King James himself
wrote in Scots; his subject, William Drummond of Hawthornden, wrote in
English. Drummond’s example was followed by all the prose writers and
most of the poets of Scotland from his day to ours. After the Union
even the poets who used Scots did so consciously and not because such
expression was wholly spontaneous.
Of these poets, Allan Ramsay, whose productive period covers roughly
the three decades from 1711 to 1740, was the most popular. And Scots
poetry, as practised by Ramsay and by his friend and contemporary
William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, tended more and more to what
Samuel Johnson would have described as the easy and vulgar, and
therefore the disgusting. Their work exhibits humour, and something
of the conversational quality of the familiar essay, but dignity
and deep poetic emotion are notably absent. Moreover, the dialect
in which they wrote tended more and more to become a synthetic and
standardized language, embodying words and idioms common to a large
section of southern Scotland but without firm roots in any one region.
The Aberdeenshire dialect used by Alexander Ross in his _Helenore_
is almost the last fresh transcription of the speech of a definite
section of the country. Written Scots was rapidly becoming what
nineteenth-century English and American authors made other dialects--a
semi-literary vernacular employed for humorous effect or for an
affectation of colloquial ease. Even Burns himself at times gave
artificial Scottish flavour to his verse by using English idioms in
Scottish spelling. Since the end of the eighteenth century no writer
of Scots verse has succeeded in introducing any new elements. At its
best, such writing sounds like imitations of Burns; at its worst, like
imitations of his imitators.
But when Burns came before the public even this conventionalized
literary Scots seemed on the point of extinction. Though Ramsay’s
_Tea-Table Miscellany_--which included many purely English verses--was
still popular as a song-book, the rest of his work was neglected.
Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s recension of Blind Harry’s _History of
Sir William Wallace_ was no more than a story-book for children. The
unhappy Robert Fergusson, starved and neglected, had ended his life
in a madhouse, and fashionable Edinburgh, glancing askance at his
satirical verses, said it served him right. Ramsay was a crude homespun
figure of the generation in which Thomson by writing _The Seasons_
had given his countrymen a poem which they could show to Englishmen
without blushing; ‘The Daft Days’ and the rest of Fergusson’s work was
little better than a national disgrace when set beside the beauties
of James Beattie’s _Minstrel_. Nevertheless there still underlay the
new fashions a literary tradition which most of the anglicizing gentry
scorned or ignored. An oral Scottish literature was still alive,
though it was soon to perish when its lovers smothered it by writing
it down. Percy’s _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_, which first
gave highbrow sanction to the popular ballads of Scotland and northern
England, were not published until Burns was six years old, and even
Percy only scratched the surface of this rich deposit. Throughout the
century scores of ballads still circulated by oral tradition which had
never been recorded in writing, and in these the genuine spirit of the
Scottish language flourished without concession to fashionable English.
Even more important than the ballads for the training of a poet like
Burns were the folk-songs. The Scots had always been a musical people,
and despite the opposition of the stricter clergy traditional songs
or airs for almost every human occasion were known to everyone, high
or low. The tradition, moreover, was still very much alive. Scottish
song gave the nation its revenge for the military humiliations of the
’45. The taunting lilt of ‘Hey, Johnie Cope, are ye waukin yet?’ could
be relied on to remind English garrisons of the inglorious conduct of
their fellow soldiers at Prestonpans, and all Scotland’s contempt for
the Hanoverian kings and their mistresses went into the ribaldry of
‘The Sow’s Tail to Geordie’. Even so, only a fraction of the popular
songs had any political bearing. More of them were convivial; many more
of them erotic. Every phase of sexual love from the crudest bawdry
to idyllic beauty found some expression in verse--the latter, it
must be confessed, more rarely and less effectively than the former.
Yet these crude songs, interesting mainly for the surprising variety
and ingenuity of their erotic symbolism, were the raw material--raw
in more than one sense--from which Burns wrought such lyrics as ‘My
Love is like a red red rose’, ‘John Anderson’, and ‘Coming thro’ the
rye’. While Burns was still a lad, David Herd, a retiring antiquary
in Edinburgh, began the systematic collection of this folk poetry on
so large a scale and with such a complete absence of prudery that it
was not until the twentieth century that the whole of his manuscript
collection was printed. He had himself published in 1776 two volumes of
what he considered the best work. At the same time musicians like James
Oswald and Neil Gow were collecting the airs of Highlands and Lowlands
alike. The singing of the old songs, with or without instrumental
accompaniment, was a favourite pastime in Scottish drawing rooms, and
even unliterary folk would frequently feel moved to compose new words
to some well-liked melody.
Alongside this honest love of native things, whether expressed in a
girl’s singing at her harpsichord or in David Herd’s careful recording
of old words, another literature was growing up of imitation, forgery,
and ‘improvement’. It had become a literary convention for every
composer of an imitation ballad to offer it to the public as a copy
from an ancient manuscript. Though a few of these imitations, like the
‘Hardyknute’ of Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, were close enough to the spirit
of folk literature to deceive even experts, the mass of them were so
mawkish and verbose as to bring the term ‘Scottish poetry’ to the verge
of contempt. Primacy in these qualities, as in popularity, belonged to
James Macpherson’s alleged translations of the poems of Ossian--a work
passionately defended by the Scots because it depicted their savage
ancestors as a trifle more chivalrous and vastly more sentimental than
Bayard or Sidney, admired on the Continent because it supported the
current delusion about the nobility of man in a state of nature, and
cherished by Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the simple pleasures which
appeal to the enterprising burglar in his hours of relaxation.
But the harm done to traditional literature by imitations and forgeries
was trivial compared with that inflicted by some of those people who
professed to admire it. In the latter part of the eighteenth century
the teaching of music in Edinburgh had passed largely into the hands
of foreigners. Names like Domenico Corri, Pietro Urbani, and Theodor
Schetki are as prevalent on title-pages as their owners were on the
concert stage, and under this Italianate influence many traditional
melodies were ‘harmonized’ and ‘improved’ until all their native vigour
was lost in empty flourishes. And as with the music, so with the
words. ‘Correct’ and sentimentalized lyrics were substituted for the
sturdy old words, remained in use long enough to push the latter into
oblivion, and then, their novelty gone, themselves sank into disuse and
dragged the music with them.
This effort to refine the national heritage of music was merely one
phase of the whole sense of provincial inferiority which afflicted
Scotland. Italian music and English literature, speech, and manners,
were the ideals towards which genteel Scots strained. National pride
in James Thomson and John Home exulted more in the fact that they
wrote English acceptable in England than in their use of Scottish
materials. Even the devastating scepticism of David Hume was forgiven
him because he had almost purified his language of Scotticisms. When
Johnson ridiculed Hume’s English Boswell writhed in agony, and was
correspondingly elated when the dictator praised Blair’s sermons and
was moved to tears by Beattie’s _Minstrel_.
When Thomas Sheridan came to Edinburgh in 1761 to give a course of
lectures on elocution, ‘he was patronized by the professors in the
College, by several of the clergy, by the most eminent among the
gentlemen at the bar, by the judges of the Court of Session, and by all
who at that time were the leaders of public taste’.
Thenceforward, ‘correct pronunciation and elegant reading’ were
reckoned ‘indispensable acquirements for people of fashion and for
public speakers’. In other words, these people of fashion, like Francis
Jeffrey on his return from Oxford, gave up the broad Scots in return
for the narrow English. In the very year of the Kilmarnock _Poems_, Sir
John Sinclair of Ulbster, one of the most public-spirited Scots of his
generation, brought out a two-hundred-page volume of _Observations on
the Scottish Dialect_. His purpose was not to preserve but to destroy
his native speech. His book is a comprehensive index expurgatorius
of all the words, phrases, and idioms a Scotsman must avoid--many
of them today a part of the standard speech of the United States,
and even of England. Thus, ‘best man’ is a Scotticism for ‘bride’s
man’; ‘hairdresser’ is to be preferred to ‘barber’; ‘sore eyes’ is
a vulgarism; ‘whisky’ should be called ‘usquebae’ or ‘aquavitae’.
‘Heather’ and ‘peat’ and ‘bracken’ are condemned along with ‘mittens’
and ‘kindling’; it betrays provincial origin to ask if a friend is in,
or if he has gone out walking. ‘It is, indeed, astonishing,’ says Sir
John, ‘how uncouth, and often how unintelligible, Scotch words and
phrases are to an inhabitant of London, and how much it exposes such
as make use of them, to the derision of those with whom they happen to
have any communication or intercourse.’ However, he adds, a Scot should
choose carefully even from the speech of London. ‘Cockney phrases a
Scotchman is very apt to get into when he makes his first appearance
in London. And when he can easily and fluently bring out, _this here
thing_, and _that there thing_, for _this_ or _that thing_; _I knode_,
for _I knew_; _on it_, for _of it_, as, _I heard on it_; _grass_, for
_asparagus_; _your’n_ and _his’n_, for _yours_ and _his_, he fancies
himself a complete Englishman.’
The anglicizing mania extended even to people’s names. David Malloch,
when he crossed the Border, changed his name to Mallet; John Murray
the publisher was originally M’Murray, as his predecessor, Millan,
had been Macmillan; William Almack, the proprietor of the famous
assembly-rooms in London, had started life as M’Caul. One of Burns’s
own friends, James M’Candlish, dropped the prefix when he entered
Glasgow University, and became simply Candlish. Even today, in spite
of Burns, the anglicizing process continues: the visitor in Ayr, for
instance, will find the street-signs pointing him to the ‘New Bridge’
and the ‘Old Bridge’.
By 1780 Scotland could afford to smile at Johnson’s dictum that her
northern lights were only farthing candles. In literature at least
she could face English competition on equal terms. James Thomson had
become a classic; Adam Smith and Hume and Robertson had demonstrated
that the north could more than hold its own with the south in history
and philosophy; Mackenzie’s lachrymose _Man of Feeling_ disputed with
_The Vicar of Wakefield_ the claim to be the most popular short novel
of the century. In Edinburgh a _Scots Magazine_ was emulating the
methods and materials of the English _Gentleman’s Magazine_, though
when Mackenzie and his friends tried, first in _The Mirror_ and later
in _The Lounger_, to produce a Scottish _Spectator_ they found the
city not metropolitan enough to support such an enterprise. Many
people took anything sharp in the way of satire as a personal attack,
but namby-pamby was not read, and so between poverty of material and
poverty of support the journals’ straw-fire flickered and went out.
But while the poor relations of England were thus looking forward
hopefully to the day when their speech and writing should no longer
betray their provincial origin, the social life of the country changed
more slowly. The gentry added silks and laces to their clothing, and
tea and other luxuries to their tables, but felt no special urgency for
greater cleanliness. George Dempster, fresh from a visit to Brussels
in 1756, was shocked to find that a baronet’s son of his acquaintance
had been calling on a lady of title ‘in a valet de chamber’s frock
and an unpowdered brown greezy head’. Even at the beginning of the
nineteenth century the inhabitants of a Highland mansion, though they
had got beyond the point where they were satisfied to give themselves
‘a “good wash” on Sundays, and make that do for the week’, found
their domestic routine upset by a guest who not only insisted on a
daily bath but refused to go to the river to take it. Servants in the
better houses were provided with shoes and stockings, but the general
standards of neatness were still so low as to make the cleanliness of
Holland a constant source of wonder to the visiting Scot.
But the aping of English manners had not yet undermined the traditional
Scottish democracy of intercourse. Though the barriers which divided
gentleman from commoner were fully as strong in Scotland as they were
in England, they were not so visible. If many of the gentry lacked
wealth, they did not lack pedigree, and a plebeian could rarely hope
to cross the boundary that excluded him from social equality. Nobles
married with nobles, and lairds with lairds. Yet until the end of
the century the sons of nobles, lairds, and ploughmen commonly began
their education together in the village school, where boy-fashion they
took each other at face-value without regard to rank. The result was
an almost total absence among the lower classes of that servility
which was bred into their compeers in England. Only as more and more
of the sons of gentlemen were sent to English public schools did the
old system decay, and some of the gentry begin to compensate for the
inferiority they had been made to feel in the presence of the English
by assuming a haughty air with their humbler countrymen.
In short, all that had distinguished Scotland as a nation was on the
way to oblivion. Literature, language, manners, and institutions
were being anglicized as fast as a people roused to uneasy
self-consciousness could manage it. In 1786 it seemed evident that
when the former things passed away it would be into the darkness in
which men and nations prefer to bury the ruder and more discreditable
features of their early days. That the memory of the discarded heritage
should be embalmed as a precious possession, and that the old world
should be forever surrounded by the romantic glory of a golden sunset
was due more to Robert Burns than to any other person. He made the
Scots conscious of the richness of their national tradition. He could
not restore it to life, but he taught his people to cherish its ruins.
II
EDUCATION
Robert Burns was nearly nine years old before anything revealing
his personality impressed his family enough to make them remember
it. Unreliable tradition has it that he was a puny infant; slightly
better evidence shows him as a nervous and temperamental child,
alternating between wild high spirits and moody sullenness. Once, it
is said, Robert hid in a cupboard when he and his schoolmates were
frolicking. The master in restoring order struck the door a resounding
blow with his tawse, and the nervous shock threw the child into such
uncontrollable hysterical sobs that he had to be sent home. But the
most devout worshipper would have trouble in discerning a future poet
in so undifferentiated an episode. It is easier to do so in Gilbert
Burns’s story of what happened at Mount Oliphant one evening in 1768.
John Murdoch the schoolmaster had got a better post, and was paying
a farewell visit to the parents of two of his promising pupils. As a
parting gift, he brought a copy of _Titus Andronicus_. Beginning to
read the play aloud, he soon came to the scene where her ravishers
taunt the mutilated Lavinia. The children, in an agony of tears,
implored him to read no more; whereupon their father dryly remarked
that in that case there was no use in Murdoch’s leaving the book.
Robert exclaimed fiercely that if it was left, he would burn it.
Murdoch warded off the father’s rebuke by commending the display of so
much sensibility, though he failed, then or later, to explain why he
considered _Titus Andronicus_ suitable reading for children. _The Man
of Feeling_ was not yet written, but ‘sensibility’ was already a word
of power, and Robert Burns was already displaying the stormy emotions
which were his to the grave.
Murdoch’s farewell marked the end of Burns’s elementary schooling, but
the education of a boy reared as he was cannot be appraised in terms
of mere schooling. If it could, the whole story might be told in a few
paragraphs. Burns’s real education came from his family, from what the
world taught him, and from what he taught himself. His schooling was
incidental.
The poet once had the curiosity to visit the Herald’s Office in
Edinburgh, only to discover that ‘Gules, Purpure, Argent, &c., quite
disowned’ him--no man of his name had ever borne coat armour. The
nearest he could come to it was ‘Burn’. Inquiry into his ancestry is
fruitless, because nothing in his ancestry explains Burns, any more
than the dull line of squires into which he was born can explain
Shelley, or a London livery-stable Keats. Burns’s family produced no
genius before him; it produced none after him. It is enough to record
that William Burnes, the poet’s father, came of peasant stock from the
eastern Lowlands of Scotland. The poet cherished the belief that some
of his forebears had been out in the ’Fifteen in the train of George
Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, but documentary proof is lacking. The
poet’s grandfather, Robert Burnes, farmed, apparently with indifferent
success, in Kincardineshire, first on the farm of Kinmonth, in
Glenbervie, and later at Clochnahill, Dunnottar. Robert Burnes’s second
farming venture having failed in 1747, his son William (born 1721) set
out in the following year with his younger brother, Robert, to seek
work.
William Burnes had had some training as a gardener, and found his
first employment in Edinburgh. By 1750, however, he was in Ayrshire,
where, after brief service on two other estates, he finally entered
the service of Provost William Fergusson, laird of Doonholm in Alloway
parish. These frequent moves were not wholly the result of unsettled
labour conditions. Pride and self-assertiveness handicap the man doomed
to subordination, and these traits William Burnes possessed in full
measure. ‘Stubborn, ungainly Integrity’, said Burns of his father, ‘and
headlong, ungovernable Irascibility are disqualifying circumstances’.
William Burnes needed to be his own master, and in 1757 managed to
‘feu’ (lease in perpetuity) seven acres of land a few hundred yards
north of the ruined old Kirk of Alloway.
Besides longing for a farm of his own, William Burnes wanted a wife
and a home. Seven acres of market-garden, supplemented by continued
part-time employment at Doonholm, made marriage possible. With his
own hands he raised the rammed-clay walls of a cottage on his land--a
cottage which his younger son declared, with more emphasis than the
timid Gilbert usually permitted himself, to be ‘such as no family of
the same rank, in the present improved style of living, would think
themselves ill lodged in’. From without, the whitewashed walls and
thatched roof of the ‘clay biggin’ were picturesque enough; within, it
was damp, dark, and narrow, and smelly withal, for the byre and stable
were under the same roof of rat-infested thatch. But such rural Scots
as lived to grow up in those days were inured to dampness, smells, and
vermin, and it was probably with unmixed pride that William Burnes and
his wife set up housekeeping in December, 1757.
The bridegroom was ‘advanced in life’; he was in fact almost as old
when he married as his famous son was when he died. His red-haired
bride, twelve years his junior, was Agnes Broun of Kirkoswald. The
daughter of a small farmer, she had been accustomed from childhood
to the life of toil which marriage intensified. Her girlhood as
housekeeper for her widowed father and manager of his younger children
had given plenty of domestic training, but formal education was too
great a luxury for girls; the mother of Scotland’s greatest poet was
never able to write her own name. She had, however, a sort of literary
education more valuable for her son than savouring at first hand the
dullness of Boston’s _Fourfold State_ could have been. Blessed with
a sense of humour, a retentive memory, and a keen ear, the girl had
stored her mind with a wealth of ballads, folk-songs, and country
sayings which later became an integral part of her son’s thought and
art. The seeds of the poet’s imagination and wit were his mother’s;
William Burnes’s most conspicuous contribution to his son’s character
was his fierce and prickly pride.