immortalized him was Burns a Scot of the Scots. He was equally so in
his religion, his politics, and, above all, his patriotism. Only in
this last was he untypical of his generation. Yet such statements are
misleadingly simple. All they can safely mean is that Burns, like
all men in all ages, was influenced in thought and conduct by the
environment in which he lived. Nevertheless, in a nation so small and
self-contained as Scotland in the eighteenth century the pressure
of environment was felt to a degree unrealized in larger and more
cosmopolitan communities. In England during Burns’s manhood the social
and literary worlds of Burke and Sheridan and Horace Walpole, of
Cowper, of John Wesley, of Godwin, of Blake, touched each other only
lightly and tangentially; in the rising generation of Wordsworth, Jane
Austen, Lamb, and Byron the separations would be even wider. Scotland
by comparison was all of a piece. Even her greatest philosophers, Adam
Smith and David Hume, even the much-travelled and Anglophile Boswell,
retained their national stamp.
Though in their final form Burns’s religious ideas differed little,
if at all, from the sentimental ‘common sense’ deism of England and
France, the process by which he reached them was Scottish. The rigidity
of the doctrines to which he was subjected in his youth determined the
vigour of his reaction from them. As David Hume would scarcely have
been so militantly sceptical if he had been reared in a milder faith,
so Burns might have been less sentimental. His earliest teachings, it
is true, did not stress the more rigorous themes in Scottish Calvinism.
The preaching of Dr. William Dalrymple of Ayr, whose church the Burnes
family attended during the years at Alloway and Mount Oliphant, was
notably mild and gentle; William Burnes’s own little ‘Manual of
Religious Belief’, though it gave a reasonably orthodox definition of
the Fall of Man, was silent on such doctrinal points as predestination
and the Four-Fold State. Undoubtedly, therefore, the Old Light tenets
of Daddy Auld of Mauchline made a deeper impression on Burns’s
eighteen-year-old mind than they would have done had he been exposed
to them from infancy. Yet Burns had encountered _The Man of Feeling_
before he left Mount Oliphant; the doctrines of sentiment and deism
were in the air he breathed; his emotional nature would have brought
him to them sooner or later, regardless of other stimuli. The most that
can be attributed to Auld is a little hastening and intensifying of the
process of revolt.
Despite his constant citing of Young’s exhortation, ‘On Reason build
Resolve’, Burns’s approach to life and ideas was always emotional
and not intellectual. When he described himself in 1786 as having
little of divinity ‘except a pretty large portion of honour and an
enthusiastic, incoherent Benevolence,’ his self-analysis had his
customary accuracy. To him, as to the New England Unitarians and to a
man like Mark Twain, escape from the orthodoxy of his youth had come as
a relief and not as a loss. Calvinism had erected a system of thought
as rigidly deductive as the science of geometry. Starting from certain
‘self-evident’ axioms like the omnipotence and omniscience of God,
the fall of man, and the literal authority of the Scriptures, it had
created a religious philosophy from which all emotion except fear had
been removed. Through the sin of Adam all men had earned damnation, but
the inscrutable mercy or caprice of God would choose a remnant minority
for salvation--for His merit, not theirs. Human faith and human
righteousness were filthy rags.
This cold determinism outraged Burns’s sense of fairness and justice,
as it outraged Channing’s and Emerson’s and Holmes’s. It seemed to him
that the New Lights were ‘squaring Religion by the rules of Common
Sense, and attempting to give a decent character to Almighty God and
a rational account of his proceedings with the Sons of Men.’ But in
investing their deity with human benevolence and loving-kindness, the
New Lights were also, again like the New England Unitarians, more or
less unwittingly surrendering the supernatural sanctions of religion
and assimilating their ideas to those of the Deists. God was the
‘Great First Cause, least understood’; Christ tended to sink from
Godhead to merely an inspired human teacher; personal immortality
became a pious hope instead of a divine promise. If man were indeed
immortal, the surest passport to salvation was righteous living rather
than adherence to a particular creed. And the guide to righteous living
was the still small voice of conscience, the Moral Sense which Francis
Hutcheson had taught was an innate human faculty.
In his attitude towards these doctrines, Burns was a man of his century
and a Scot of his century. The rigidity of the Kirk, so unlike the
comfortable looseness of Anglican theology, left him no place within
its pale, even though he never openly severed his connexion. As a
youth he had, along with most of his countrymen, read popular works
of divinity like Boston’s _Four-Fold State_, Fisher’s _Marrow of
Modern Divinity_, and Cole _On God’s Sovereignty_. In 1791, when his
rural neighbours of the Monkland Friendly Society insisted on adding
these and other books to their co-operative library, Burns obediently
ordered them from Peter Hill, and lumped them all together as ‘damned
trash’. Though he told James Candlish in 1787 that after having ‘in
the pride of despising old women’s stories, ventured in “the daring
path Spinoza trod”; ... experience of the weakness, not the strength,
of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion,’ it was
not the revelation of the Kirk. Not even his infatuation for Clarinda,
though it made him momentarily qualify his admiration for Milton’s
Satan, could compel him to bow the knee to Calvin. ‘Mine’, he told her
when she undertook to preach orthodoxy to him, ‘is the Religion of the
bosom.--I hate the very idea of controversial divinity; as I firmly
believe, that every honest, upright man, of whatever sect, will be
accepted of the Deity.--If your verses, as you seem to hint, contain
censure, except you want an occasion to break with me, don’t send
them.... “Reverence thyself” is a sacred maxim, and I wish to cherish
it.’
His fullest statement approximating to orthodoxy was written to Mrs.
Dunlop in 1789:
‘I have just heard Mr Kirkpatrick preach a sermon. He is a man
famous for his benevolence, and I revere him; but from such ideas of
my Creator, good Lord, deliver me! Religion ... is surely a simple
business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the
poor and the rich. That there is an incomprehensible Great Being, to
whom I owe my existence; and that He must be intimately acquainted
with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and
consequent outward deportment, of this creature which He has made;
these are, I think self-evident propositions. That there is a real
and eternal distinction between virtue and vice, and, consequently,
that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of
the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay,
positive injustice, in the administration of affairs both in the
natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of
justice beyond the grave; must, I think, be allowed by every one who
will give himself a moment’s reflection. I will go farther, and
affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of His
doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and
learning of many preceding ages, though, _to appearance_, He Himself
was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species--therefore Jesus
Christ was from God....’
Another time he told the same lady, ‘We can no more live without
Religion, than we can live without air; but give me the Religion of
Sentiment & Reason.--You know John Hildebroad’s famous epitaph--
“Here lies poor old John Hildebroad,
Have mercy on his soul, Lord God,
As he would do, were he Lord God,
And thou wert poor John Hildebroad.”--
This speaks more to my heart, & has more of the genuine spirit of
Religion in it, than is to be found in whole wagon-loads of Divinity.’
This was the same mood in which he had told Clarinda, ‘My creed is
pretty nearly expressed in the last clause of Jamie Deans’s grace, an
honest weaver in Ayrshire; “Lord, grant that we may lead a gude life!
for a gude life maks a gude end; at least it helps weel!”’ Reason and
Sentiment, but with the sentiment much more powerful than the reason,
these were the dominant forces in Burns’s religious attitude.
Nevertheless Burns was more courageous than many of his contemporaries
in accepting the logical consequences of belief in universal
benevolence. No man knew more clearly the warfare between flesh and
spirit, but he was convinced that both were the gifts of God. The lines
which so shocked Wordsworth,
‘But yet the light that led astray
Was light from Heaven’,
are his frankest summary of his experience. Whatever sufferings his
passions had brought upon him, the passions in themselves were noble.
Asceticism had no appeal for him. He took life as God made it, and saw
that it was good.
Taken by themselves, his utterances to Clarinda and Mrs. Dunlop might
not be above suspicion. Burns had every motive for wishing favourably
to impress both women, and might have feigned an interest which he did
not feel, or at least have overstated his belief and understated his
doubts. But here, as in his feelings towards his children, what he
said when he may have been on dress-parade is confirmed by his letters
to his intimates. In 1788 he wrote to Robert Muir, then dying of
tuberculosis:
‘... An honest man has nothing to fear.--If we lie down in the grave,
the whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods
of the valley--be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care,
woes and wants: if that part of us called Mind, does survive the
apparent destruction of the man--away with old-wife prejudices and
tales!... A man, conscious of having acted an honest part among his
fellow-creatures; even granting that he may have been the sport, at
times, of passions and instincts; he goes to a great unknown Being
who could have no other end in giving him existence but to make him
happy; who gave him those passions and instincts, and well knows
their force.’
In the same tone he said six years later to Alexander Cunningham that
the two great pillars which bear us up, ‘amid the wreck of misfortune
and misery’, are the ‘certain noble, stubborn something ... known by
the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity’ and ‘those feelings and
sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them or the enthusiast
disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts
of the human soul; those _senses of the mind_ ... which connect us
with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities--an all-powerful
and equally beneficient God, and a world to come, beyond death and the
grave.’
The countryman of Francis Hutcheson could scarcely have indicated more
clearly his obligations to the Glasgow philosopher. Burns’s ‘senses of
the mind’ are merely Hutcheson’s Moral Sense a little expanded. Like
Channing and Emerson, having rejected the authority of the church, and
with it the supernatural sanctions of Christian doctrine, Burns fell
back on the authority of intuition to support concepts which he was
unwilling to abandon. The idea of the deity, and His relations with
mankind, which is embodied in these passages, he never deviated from;
what seemed to many of his readers shocking irreverence was aimed at
intolerance and hypocrisy, and not at religion. But he was not able in
all moods to convince himself of personal immortality.
At times he tried to argue himself into belief:
‘The most cordial believers in a Future State have ever been the
Unfortunate.--This of itself; if God is Good, which is, I think, the
most intuitive truth in Nature, ... is a very strong proof of the
reality of its existence....’
and he went on to reason that since the ideas of ‘OUGHT, and OUGHT NOT’
are ‘first principles or component parts of the Human Mind’ and are
synonymous in our thinking with virtue and vice, the soul _must_ be
immortal because, ‘except our Existence _here_, have a reference to an
Existence _hereafter_, Virtue & Vice are words without meaning.’ Thus
he argued to Mrs. Dunlop, who had just told him that her daughter, Mrs.
Henri, was widowed after a few months of marriage. But not long before
he had said to Cunningham,
‘All my fears & cares are of this world: if there is another, an
honest man has nothing to fear from it.--I hate a man that wishes to
be a Deist, but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced Enquirer must in
some degree be a Sceptic.--It is not that there are any very
staggering arguments against the Immortality of Man; but, that like
Electricity, Phlogiston, &c. the subject is so involved in darkness
that we want Data to go upon.--One thing frightens me much: that we
are to live forever, seems too good news to be true....’
An emotional man deprived of any authority except emotion on which he
could rely, Burns’s religious views are of a piece with his politics
and his patriotism. To get at the underlying emotions is to explain
what appear to be glaring contradictions in thought. John Ramsay of
Ochtertyre found Burns’s politics ‘abundantly motley’, for the poet
managed to combine strong sympathy for the exiled House of Stuart with
liberal if not republican views on contemporary affairs. To Ramsay
this seemed like being simultaneously Catholic and Protestant, whereas
it was only putting into words the unexpressed philosophy that had
swayed the popular mind of Scotland for close on a century. Burns
admired Lord Balmerino, noblest of the victims of the ’45; he also
admired John Wilkes. Between a devoted Jacobite like Balmerino and a
radical Whig like Wilkes, there was only one point in common: both were
anti-Hanoverian. That one point reconciles Burns’s divergent opinions.
The Stuarts embodied the ideal of Scotland as an independent nation;
even though from the accession of James to the death of Anne they had
governed Scotland from London they still commanded the loyalty of
their old kingdom. But the Georges were, as Burns said, ‘an obscure,
beef-witted, insolent race of foreigners whom a mere conjuncture
of circumstances kickt up into prominence and power.’ His phrase
summarizes in vigorous prose the spirit of the ribald satirical songs
by which Scotland had avenged herself for the humiliations following
the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Burns was far from maintaining
that the Stuarts were perfect, or that the Revolution of 1688 lacked
justification; what he did maintain was that the Hanoverian system was
not perfect either.
On the Fifth of November, 1788, Burns attended a special service
of thanksgiving held at Dunscore Kirk to celebrate the centenary
of the Revolution. The Rev. Mr. Kirkpatrick’s remarks about ‘the
bloody and tyrannical House of Stuart’ sent the poet home to write
an open letter to his friend David Ramsay, editor of the Edinburgh
_Evening Courant_, in which he mingled unveiled satire with a sense
of historical perspective hardly to be looked for in an ‘unlettered
ploughman’. He went to church, he said, to give thanks for ‘the
consequent blessings of the Glorious Revolution. To that auspicious
event we owe no less than our liberties religious and civil--to it we
are likewise indebted for the present Royal Family, the ruling features
of whose administration have ever been, mildness to the subject, and
tenderness of his rights.’ But, he continues, cannot we give thanks for
our present blessings ‘without, at the same time, cursing a few ruined
powerless exiles, who only harboured ideas, and made attempts, that
most of us would have done, had we been in their situation?’ ‘Were the
royal contemporaries of the Stuarts more mildly attentive to the rights
of man? Might not the epithets of “bloody and tyrannical” be with at
least equal justice, applied to the house of Tudor, of York, or any
other of their predecessors?’ In short, the Stuarts were only fighting
for prerogatives which former monarchs of England and contemporary
monarchs of France enjoyed unchallenged, and the poet disclaims ability
to determine whether their overthrow ‘was owing to the wisdom of
leading individuals, or to the justling of party.’ And then comes the
sting:
‘Man, Mr. Printer, is a strange, weak inconsistent being.--Who
would believe, Sir, that in this our Augustan age of liberality and
refinement, ... a certain people, under our national protection,
should complain, not against a Monarch and a few favourite advisers,
but against our whole legislative body, of the very same imposition
and oppression, the Romish religion not excepted, and almost in the
very same terms as our forefathers did against the family of Stuart!
I will not, I cannot, enter into the merits of the cause; but I dare
say, the American Congress, in 1776, will be allowed to have been as
able and enlightened, and, a whole empire will say, as honest, as the
English Convention in 1688; and that the fourth of July will be as
sacred to their posterity as the fifth of November is to us.’
The concluding sentence of that peroration is paraphrased from a speech
John Wilkes had delivered in the House of Commons ten years before.
Manifestly Burns followed, closely and sympathetically, the utterances
of the English radicals and reformers; it is well known that ‘A Man’s a
Man’ is ‘two or three pretty good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme’
from the writings of a former Excise officer named Thomas Paine. Like
most European liberals, Burns admired the leaders of the American
Revolution--one of the toasts which gave offence in Dumfries is said
to have been his proposal of the health of George Washington as ‘a
better man’ than William Pitt--and his admiration would be intensified
by obvious parallels between the grievances of the Americans and the
Scots. His Jacobite sympathies were wholly emotional, and in part
conditioned by the fact that the Jacobites had written all the good
songs. One suspects that he would just as readily have taken the
Catholic view of the Reformation if Scottish Catholics had embalmed
their lost cause in poetry. When he looked at current affairs, his
reason backed his feelings. Politically, Scotland had almost as much
to complain of as the American colonies had had. In some respects,
indeed, she had more. American towns had been free to manage their
local affairs by a system of representative government; in Scotland the
municipalities, like the country’s representation in Parliament, were
self-perpetuating oligarchies. Burns, in common with thousands of men
of higher rank, had no vote even in the government of his own burgh.
Yet his dislike of the system and his contempt for most of its leaders
would probably have expressed itself only in occasional satires had it
not been for the outbreak of the French Revolution.
A movement for reform of both burgh and parliamentary government
was under way in Scotland. George Dempster, one of the few men of
independent mind among the Scottish representatives at Westminster,
advocated such measures of reform as would allow ‘the industrious
farmer and manufacturer [to] share at least in a privilege now
engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener
baillie.’ Country gentlemen of unimpeachable character took up the
agitation, and Burns’s letters to men like William Robertson of Lude,
John Francis Erskine of Mar, and Richard Oswald of Auchencruive, show
that he looked to such leadership as the hope of the country. When his
conduct was under inquiry Burns declared that he had, as a government
employee, taken no active part, either personally or as an author, in
the movement for reform, but that as a man he ‘would say that there
existed a system of corruption between the Executive Power & the
Representative part of the Legislature, which boded no good to our
glorious Constitution; & which every patriotic Briton must wish to see
amended.’
The early stages of the French Revolution roused the enthusiasm of
the more liberal-minded men of all classes in Scotland. A dinner in
Edinburgh to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the
Bastille was attended by a group of university students which included
John Allen, stepson of the poet’s friend Robert Cleghorn, by numerous
country gentlemen like his friend Robert Riddell and his acquaintance
Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch, and by Lord Daer. It seemed to men
like Craigdarroch and Daer that the popular interest in the principles
of the Revolution might be harnessed for the benefit of Scotland in
speeding measures for burgh and parliamentary reform. Actually the
brief alliance with French sympathizers delayed reform for forty years.
All the vested interests of Great Britain rallied to support Burke’s
condemnation of the revolutionary principles, and the counter-attack
swept away every attempt to alter in the slightest degree the existing
scheme of things.
The full weight of the counter-attack was not felt at once. Indeed,
it was a Scotsman, James Mackintosh, who published the fullest and
best-reasoned of the numerous replies to Burke. Besides seeking to
confute Burke, Mackintosh tried to rally his countrymen to the cause
of reform by citing their medieval reputation as lovers of liberty who
would die rather than surrender their freedom. Certain passages in
Mackintosh were probably as directly responsible for the composition of
‘Scots wha hae’ as _The Rights of Man_ was for ‘A Man’s a Man’. But as
the Revolution swept on with increasing bloodshed to the execution of
Louis XVI and as mobs in various parts of Scotland, including Edinburgh
itself, celebrated King George’s birthday by burning Henry Dundas in
effigy, the authorities became panicky. Scotland felt the heaviest
force of their fright. Long latent memories of the ’45 revived at
Whitehall, and to the dread of Scotland as a focal point for rebellion
was added the practical detail that repressive measures could be better
organized there than in England. England had a few constituencies,
like London and Westminster, in which enough people were enfranchised
to give a really popular vote, and a few members of Parliament whom
neither fear nor bribes could silence. Scotland had neither. Hence
the counter-revolutionary reign of terror struck first and hardest at
Scotland.
Early in 1793 several leaders of the Friends of the People, a society
organized to agitate for parliamentary reform, were arrested on
charges of treason. Lord Daer was a member of the society, too, but
the authorities, doubtless afraid that not even a packed jury could be
trusted to convict the son of a popular earl, made no move to seize
him. They contented themselves with lesser, but still conspicuous,
victims, and before the series of trials--conducted with such disregard
of justice as in Henry Cockburn’s opinion had not been seen in Britain
since Jeffreys’s Bloody Assizes--was over Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer,
and several other reform leaders had been condemned to long terms of
penal transportation. All opposition was crushed in Scotland for a
generation. Henry Erskine, the one man who dared to raise his voice in
defence of justice and common sense, paid for his temerity by being
voted out of his office as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. One of
the last of Burns’s satirical ballads commemorates the event, in which
a young man just admitted to the bar, Walter Scott by name, voted
with the majority to punish Erskine for having the courage of his
convictions.