himself as a Friend of the People. He never, so far as can be learned,
actually joined any of the reforming organizations, but it was not in
Burns’s nature to conceal his opinions. From the time when he appeared
in Edinburgh drawing-rooms wearing a waistcoat of Foxite blue and buff,
and inscribed on a window-pane at Stirling verses about the successors
to the Stuarts being ‘an idiot race, to honor lost’, he was marked as
a character who would bear watching. The wonder is not so much that he
came near to losing his job in the Excise as that he ever succeeded in
getting it. If William Corbet and Graham of Fintry had not been the
generous and friendly souls they were, the poet’s service career would
have ended in 1793, and he might even have shared the fate of Muir and
Palmer.
To note some of Burns’s words and deeds during 1791 and 1792, and
realize that for every reckless phrase that reached paper there were
doubtless a score uttered over the punchbowl, is to marvel at the
poet’s escape. His phrase about the House of Hanover, already quoted,
was written in the privacy of Robert Riddell’s library, but it is hard
to believe that he did not say equally sharp things in more public
places. His most intimate friends in Dumfries were avowed sympathizers
with the Revolution. Dr. James Maxwell had witnessed the execution of
the king, cherished the handkerchief he had dipped in the royal blood,
and was well enough known to the authorities to have his revolutionary
connexions violently denounced by Burke on the floor of the House of
Commons. John Lewars was tainted with ‘D-m-cratic heresy’; Syme, after
enrolling, like Burns, in the Dumfries Volunteers, became heartily
disgusted with the whole wretched business; Maria Riddell was a parlour
revolutionist who on her visits to London associated ‘with a very
pleasant set of Sans-culottes’. Throughout 1792 Burns had let slip
few opportunities of proclaiming his own sympathies. In the spring he
bought the _Rosamond’s_ carronades and dispatched them as a present to
the French Convention; in the autumn, when Maria Riddell asked him to
suggest a programme for a benefit night in Dumfries theatre, he chose
from the repertory of the local company Mrs. Centlivre’s _The Wonder:
A Woman Keeps a Secret_ because it contained some platitudinous lines
about British liberty which could be given political significance by
well-timed applause. Either on this occasion or another the crowd
carried the matter further than Burns had anticipated.
When ‘God Save the King’ was called for, a group in the pit which
included some of Burns’s friends shouted for ‘Ça Ira’ instead. The
ensuing clamour came to the verge of a free-for-all fight. In his
defence Burns avowed that he never opened his lips ‘to hiss, or huzza,
that, or any other Political tune whatever’ because he looked on
himself ‘as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a
Riot; at the same time as a character of higher respectability, than
to yell in the howlings of a rabble.’ In other words, by sitting
still and not applauding the national anthem he made himself just
as conspicuous as if he had joined in the call for ‘Ça Ira’. He was
anything but the obscure individual he claimed to be, and it was
apparently his public conduct on this occasion that led to his being
reported to his superiors as a disaffected person.
Seemingly the idea that his opinions might get him into trouble had
never occurred to Burns. The threat of an official investigation threw
him into a humiliating panic, and must also have alarmed his friends
in the higher ranks of the Excise. It is difficult otherwise to
account for Supervisor Corbet’s coming in person to Dumfries to look
into the charges. An accusation brought against a minor officer in
the service was scarcely in ordinary routine a serious enough affair
to call in one of the highest officials; the inference is that Corbet
was rightly fearful of the results if Burns were investigated by an
unfriendly agent. Accordingly the Supervisor examined the poet across
a dinner-table in company with Findlater and Syme, and in that mellow
atmosphere found no ground for the charges ‘save some witty sayings’.
But even so, Corbet, in the name of the Board, had to admonish
Burns--so the poet reported to Erskine of Mar--‘that _my_ business was
to _act_, not to think; & that whatever might be Men or Measures, it
was for me to be silent and obedient.’
The hair-splitting particularity of Burns’s defence of his conduct
is in itself proof of the real basis of the charges against him. He
revered the King, he declared, in his public capacity as ‘the sacred
Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution’, but George’s ‘private worth,
it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate.’ (On
the report of the King’s first admitted insanity in 1788 he had said,
‘I am not sure whether he is not a gainer, by how much a Madman is a
more respectable character than a Fool.’) He had joined no party for
revolution or reform; his contributions to the radical _Edinburgh
Gazetteer_ had been only a couple of non-political verses. But he did
not mention that in subscribing to the _Gazetteer_ he had urged its
editor, William Johnston, to ‘lay bare, with undaunted heart & steady
hand, that horrid mass of corruption called Politics & State-Craft!’
and to ‘dare to draw in their native colours these “Calm, thinking
Villains whom no faith can fix”--whatever be the Shibboleth of their
pretended Party.’ Oddly enough, the _Rosamond’s_ carronades had not
been brought up against him. Hence he naturally did not mention them,
but he took occasion to avow that though he had been an enthusiastic
votary of France at the beginning, he had changed his sentiments since
the Revolution had embarked on a career of bloodshed and military
aggression.
Here Burns was making a Galileo recantation. On the same day on which
he thus denied to Robert Graham that he any longer supported the
Revolution he was using French in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop and adding
that he hoped it was correct, for ‘much would it go against my soul,
to mar anything belonging to that gallant people: though my real
sentiments of them shall be confined alone to my letters to you.’
Despite her repeated warnings to drop the subject, he continued to talk
about his devotion to Liberty, his friendship with Dr. Maxwell, and his
approval of ‘the delivering over a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled
Prostitute to the hands of the hangman’ until the offended lady broke
off the correspondence. Seething, as he had said of his feeling in
1788, with the impotent ‘madness of an enraged Scorpion shut up in a
thumb-phial’, Burns had to express himself to someone. He had lied
about his sentiments, and though the lie was to save his family rather
than himself, its taste was bitter in his mouth. Nor was he helped by
the realization that all Scotland was equally cowed and that if he had
not made his recantation he would have shared the fate of four other
citizens of Dumfries who were imprisoned for drinking seditious toasts.
Once before he had challenged authority in the shape of the temporal
power of the Kirk, and had come off not unscathed but undefeated. Now
he had challenged much less openly the State, and had learned the
difference in strength between a vital institution and a moribund one.
The realization of defeat shook his self-confidence as nothing else
had ever done, and helped to drive him to such unmanly conduct as that
which followed his quarrel with Maria Riddell. He who had refused to
sell his songs for money had sold his independence for bread. That it
was his children’s bread and not his own might salve his conscience,
but it could not heal his pride.
The Man of Feeling had bruised himself against a harsher reality
than anything Harley had found in London or Bedlam; the idealist in
politics had learned the substance of which politicians are made.
Brimming with New Light theories about the Moral Sense, convinced by
primitivists like Rousseau that ‘mankind are by nature benevolent
creatures’ whom mere stress of hunger and poverty makes selfish, Burns
had come naked to battle against the forces of alarmed conservatism
and privilege. Like thousands of others he had taken seriously the
slogans of ‘Liberty’ and ‘the Rights of Man’, and had seen in the
French Revolution the signs that the world’s great age was beginning
anew. His disillusionment went deeper than mere realization of his own
unsafe position as a government employee. He was watching the ancient
forces of selfishness and aggression capture the movement from which he
had hoped so much. His enlistment in the Dumfries Volunteers was not
wholly from dread of further jeopardizing his livelihood by holding
aloof. He still believed in the principles of the Revolution, but that
belief did not commit him to endorsement of its practices, and so, like
many another pacifist, he found himself, still hating war, nevertheless
engaged in supporting it.
Though he dared no longer give direct utterance to revolutionary
sympathies, he could, and did, express his detestation of war in
a song like ‘Logan Braes’, and couple the ideas of his generation
with the patriotic tradition of medieval Scotland. The low estate
of contemporary Scottish liberty threw into more glorious relief
the traditions of Bannockburn and the lost cause of the Stuarts.
His patriotism accepted without question the legend that ‘Hey tutti
taitie’ had been Bruce’s battle-march, as it accepted the romantic
interpretation of Mary Queen of Scots. Burns might call himself an
unprejudiced inquirer and a sceptic, but his nature had no kinship
with the cool remorseless scepticism of a man like David Hume. Hume’s
was the keenest Scottish mind of his century; Burns, at least in the
height of his rebellion against the Kirk, might have been expected to
find the philosopher congenial. But Burns could endure destructive
criticism only of things he hated. Hume did not confine his scepticism
to religion, and when he brought his devastating intellect to bear on
the romantic traditions of his country Burns turned away in anger. He
might endorse Hume’s demolition of the supernatural sanctions of the
church, but he was disquieted by the application of the same scepticism
to the belief in immortality, and infuriated when it was turned upon
Queen Mary. Hume was mentally akin to Voltaire and Samuel Butler; Burns
to Rousseau and Dickens.
In repudiating Hume’s treatment of Mary, Burns was unconsciously
illustrating the force of Johnson’s ruthless dictum, which even the
loyal Sir Walter Scott could not wholly deny, that ‘a Scotchman must be
a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth:
He will always love it better than inquiry; and if falsehood flatters
his vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it.’ Few men have
lived more honest than Burns. He would not willingly lie, nor endorse
a lie; but if offered choice between a romantic story which appealed
to his patriotism and an unromantic one which did not, his choice was
never in doubt. His own followers, in their hostility to anything like
dispassionate investigation of the picturesque legends surrounding
him, continue to illustrate the same attitude. Nor, indeed, have the
Burnsians monopolized this aversion to inquiry. It remained for an
Irishman and an American to set forth the true details of the life of
Allan Ramsay, and for another American to write the only complete and
scholarly study of Henry Mackenzie and his times.
Many Scotsmen besides Burns shared his passionate defence of Queen
Mary; not so many shared his general patriotism. Here Burns, very
Scot of very Scot, belonged to a generation which had passed, though
he prepared the way for one to come. He had much in common with
Claverhouse, Lochiel, or Fletcher of Saltoun; nothing in common with
Bute, Wedderburn, or Henry Dundas. In so far as the patriotism of Sir
John Sinclair sought the improvement of his country by collecting
and tabulating her resources, Burns was with him, but when Sinclair
tried to eradicate the national speech he struck at something Burns
held precious. True, Burns was like his contemporaries in snatching
at everything that seemed like proof that the Scots could equal or
surpass the English at their own games. He applauded the _Mirror_
and the _Lounger_ because they looked like successful rivals of the
_Tatler_ and _Spectator_; he admired Thomson and Beattie and Blair the
more because even the English had to admit that these men wrote well
in the southern tongue. But he deeply resented the willingness of his
countrymen to sink their national identity in the Union.
‘Alas! have I often said to myself,’ he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop in 1790,
‘what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the
union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her Independance,
and even her very name! I often repeat that couplet of my favorite
poet, Goldsmith--
“----States of native liberty possest,
Tho’ very poor, may yet be very blest.”
Nothing can reconcile me to the common terms, “English ambassador,
English court,” &c. And I am out of all patience to see that
equivocal character, Hastings, impeached by “the Commons of England.”
Tell me, my friend, is this weak prejudice?’
Men like Boswell and Sinclair would have answered without hesitation
that it was. The Union had admitted Scotland to as much share as she
could grasp of the wealth of the British Empire; commerce and industry
were increasing year by year; the poor relation was beginning to live
like the prosperous branch of the family. For such profits, the change
of name from ‘Scotland’ to ‘North Britain’ seemed a small price. To
those who shared in the new prosperity, the suggestion of a nationalist
movement would have seemed rank folly or even downright treason. So
long as the prosperity continued, indeed, the ‘practical men’ had the
overwhelming majority of their countrymen with them. The emergence of
Scottish nationalism as a political force to be reckoned with had to
await the collapse of Scottish industry which followed the World War.
With the loss of material prosperity, the Scots have begun to question
the value of the system which transfers to Westminster the control of
their local affairs. Scottish poverty and Scottish pride are seemingly
interdependent. Removal of the one will make the nation more willing to
swallow the other.
Even if Burns had shared the material prosperity resulting from the
Union, instead of helping, as tenant of rack-rented land, to pay for
it, his feelings would have been the same. In every fibre of his
being he shared the spirit of those Scots who, in contradiction of
every proverbial association of pawky caution with their race, have
been among the greatest soldiers, explorers, and idealists of modern
history. Montrose and Livingstone, Admiral Duncan and Mungo Park,
expressed in action the national traits which he expressed in song. His
calling, consciously accepted, was that of national poet; his other
activities merely the ‘sweat, that the base machine might have its
oil’. He refused payment for his songs, because the task of supplying
words to national melodies was a patriotic service, embalming and
treasuring up these relics of his country’s spirit to a life beyond
life.
Without Burns’s share in the work of gathering old Jacobite songs,
for instance, and composing new ones, it may be questioned if such a
halo of romance would have surrounded, in the next generation, the
Rebellions of 1715 and 1745; without that halo, Sir Walter Scott would
have been less readily attracted to them; without Sir Walter, the
romantic vision of Scottish history would never have conquered the
world. No Scottish writer of the eighteenth century, except Burns,
passed on the torch of national pride. Without him, the fact that Hume
and Boswell were Scotsmen, that Thomson was born on Tweed instead of
Thames, would mean no more to the ordinary reader than does the fact
that Swift was born in Ireland or Wordsworth in Cumberland. Without
him, Ramsay and Fergusson would be forgotten minor poets who wrote in
a difficult and obsolete dialect. He gathered together in his own work
all that was vital in the work of his predecessors, infused it with the
fire of his own personality, and sent it out again to keep Scotland
alive.
Burns came at the last moment when a national poet could succeed in
his task. A few decades later, and the vernacular would have sunk too
low for preservation. Even as it was, he could only embalm it and
not renew it as poetic speech. Except for Lady Nairne’s, scarcely
any vernacular poetry written in Scotland since 1800 deserves higher
ranking than the _Barrack-Room Ballads_. As a poetic influence, Burns’s
work was weak. As a national influence, its force is not yet spent. He
revealed the richness and colour of Scottish life, and in revealing it
gave direction and vitality to the long and noble line of novelists
which began with Sir Walter Scott and John Galt, and continued through
Stevenson to John Buchan and the late Neil Munro. Through these men
the Scotland which was no longer, politically, a nation became more
enduring than anything which depends on rulers and boundaries--a
nation of the mind and heart, a home of lost causes, of impossible
loyalties, of high romance and simple faith. It is not Scott’s kings
and ladies and nobles who keep his books alive; it is people like
Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans, Meg Dods, and Dandie Dinmont--in other
words, the characters who are part and parcel of the world which Burns
depicted and glorified. Steenie Steenson, like Thrawn Janet and Tod
Lapraik, carries on the great tradition of Tam o’ Shanter. Without
Burns the Scottish novel as we know it would never have been; without
the Scottish novel, the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries would be as much the poorer as seventeenth-century poetry
would be without the Cavaliers.
In tracing the continuing tradition of sentiment from Henry Mackenzie
through Burns himself to ‘Ian Maclaren’ and Sir James Barrie, Professor
Thompson made perforce a grave omission. The difference between
the dynamic romanticism of England at the beginning of the last
century--the romanticism of the young Wordsworth and of Shelley--and
the insipid prettiness of the same movement in America at the same
time, lies in the invigorating power of the French Revolution. By
giving a fighting edge to romance, the Revolution raised it above mere
fancifulness and sentimentality. His patriotism did the same thing
for the influence of Burns. Without it he might today be only a minor
Man of Feeling. Even as it is, he is neglected and misunderstood. The
strength, the humour, the fighting edge are there, but few people care
to find them.
He saved Scotland; himself he could not save. Five years after
his death a group of admirers in Greenock organized a Burns Club,
and Paisley and Kilmarnock quickly followed suit. The fashion
spread through Scotland, and among Scotsmen in the rest of the
English-speaking world, bringing in its train the erection of more, and
worse, statues and monuments than have been reared to the memory of any
other British individual with the possible exception of Albert, Prince
Consort. Soon the movement acquired the characteristics of a minor
religious cult, complete with ritual meals and a thriving traffic in
relics, genuine or spurious, of its hero.
In itself this establishment as hero of a national cult might be
harmless. After all, if any writer was to fill the role, Burns was
the inevitable candidate, for he alone of the great Scottish writers
was truly a man of the people. Not the existence of the cult, but
the direction it took, is the tragedy of Burns. The sentimentality
which lies, like the soft core of an over-ripe pear, at the heart of
writers like ‘Ian Maclaren’, Sir James Barrie, and A. A. Milne, is
widespread in Scotland. In the Burns cult this softness yearns to the
answering softness of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘To a Mouse’, and
‘To a Mountain Daisy’, extols its hero as the Bard of Humanity and
Democracy, and rejoices in the bathos of Clarinda and Highland Mary.
Meanwhile the ribald magnificence of ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Jolly
Beggars’ is neglected, the homely realism of satires, epistles, and
dramatic monologues goes unread. Worst of all, the splendid treasury of
more than three hundred songs, Burns’s most truly patriotic work, lies
almost untouched on the shelves. Radio and concert stage alike ignore
them. And choice of the few that are known to the public at large runs
true to the same form as with the longer poems. Probably a hundred
people know ‘Sweet Afton’ for one who knows ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ or
‘Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin’.
The flattery of being a national hero would delight Burns. If his
followers were only mealy-mouthed where he was outspoken, they would
merely amuse him. He would not mind if they slobbered over his sins,
for the unco guid were old acquaintance of his. But at the thought of
his worshippers exalting his weakest work and ignoring his best, his
very soul would scunner. The real Burns was not the dropper of tears
over ploughed-under weeds but the man who brought in the neighbours
for a kirn-night and kissed the lasses after every dance; the man who
sat by farmers’ ingles and on ale-house benches listening to the racy
earthy talk of his people and storing his mind with folk sayings and
old songs. He was not ashamed of being a Scottish peasant, the heir
of all the picturesque and frequently bawdy tradition of Scots folk
literature. Neither was the man who wrote, ‘But yet the light that led
astray Was light from Heaven’, ashamed of his human nature. But his
worshippers are ashamed of the best part of his nature and his work.
And nobody else reads him at all.
INDEX
Abbotsford, 227
_Aberdeen Almanac_, 45
Aberfoyle, 47
Adam, Alexander, 119
Addison, Joseph, 40, 234
_Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman, The_, 46
_Adventures of Telemachus_ (Fénelon), 51
‘Ae fond kiss,’ 149, 172, 264
Agriculture in Scotland, 10-16, 188
Agriculture, Professorship of, Edinburgh, 155
Aiken, Robert, 93-96, 98, 142, 144, 147, 193, 194
Ainslie, Robert, 65, 107, 110, 112-115, 144, 150, 151, 167, 168, 170,
173, 186, 214
Albert, Prince Consort, 306
Allen, John, 110, 291
Alloway, 11, 36-41, 48, 279
Alloway Kirk, 36, 266
Almack, William, 30
‘A Man’s a Man,’ 289, 292
American Colonies. _See_ United States
American Revolution, 70, 82, 225, 290
Anderson, Robert, 196, 247
Anne, Queen, 60, 287
‘An’ O for ane-and-twenty, Tam,’ 264
Antigua, 176
Arbroath, 266
Archers, Royal Company of, 108
Argyll, John, Duke of, 5
Armour, James, 77, 94, 139, 142-143, 150, 165, 192
Armour, Mrs. James, 168
Armour, Jean. _See_ Burns, Jean Armour
Army, Burns’s opinions of, 155, 179
Arnot, John, 191
Arran, 47
Athole, Jane Cathcart, Duchess of, 116-117
Athole, John, Duke of, 116-117
Auchencruive, 144
Auld Brig, Ayr, 31
_Auld Farmer’s New Year’s Morning Salutation, The_, 58, 249, 250
_Auld Lang Syne_, 260
Auld, Walter, 120, 228
Auld, William, 173, 279
Austen, Jane, 278
Aylmer, Rose, 250
Ayr, 195, 279
Ayr, Brigs of, 31
Ayr, Presbytery of, 92-93
Baker, --, 127
Ballads, 25-27, 38, 43-44, 246, 252, 259, 269
Ballantine, John, 61, 93-96, 202
Ballenden, Braes of, 256
Balmerino, Arthur Elphinstone, Baron, 229, 287
_Banks of Cree_, 271
Bannockburn, 48, 272, 300
Barncailzie, 125
_Barrack-Room Ballads_, 305
Barrie, Sir James Matthew, 305, 307
Bayard, 28
Beattie, James, 25, 29, 75, 104, 270, 302
Bede, 23
Beethoven, Ludwig von, 275
Begbie, Alison, 69-70, 189
Begg, Isabella Burns, 147
_Bell_, West-Indiaman, 192-193
Benson, Anna Dorothea, 132
Beugo, John, 175
Bible, 23
Black Bull Inn, Glasgow, 166
Blacklock, Thomas, 99, 195
Blair, Athole, 116-117, 207
Blair, Hugh, 29, 97, 104, 118, 155, 195, 244, 302
Blair, Sir James Hunter, 240
Blair, Robert, 259
Blake, William, 243, 278
Bloody Assizes, 293
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 60
_Bonnie Dundee_, 261-262
Border tour, Burns’s, 113, 200, 208, 240, 247, 255
Boston, Thomas, 19, 37, 281
Boswell, Sir Alexander, 274
Boswell, Euphemia, 165
Boswell, James, 11, 29, 60, 91, 103, 107, 111, 129, 278, 302, 304
Boyd, Thomas, 120, 213
Brawne, Fanny, 250
Braxfield, Robert M’Queen, Lord, 102, 108, 129
Bremner, Robert, 242
_Brigs of Ayr, The_, 248
Broadsides, Scottish, 45
Brontë, Emily, 162
Brown, Richard, 80-83, 84, 89, 92, 137-138, 163, 166, 169, 237
Brown, Samuel, 56
Browning, Robert, 250, 251
Brow Well, 133, 184-187
Bruce, King Robert the, 272, 300
Brussels, 32
Buchan, David Stuart Erskine, Earl of, 100-101, 255
Buchan, John, 305
Burke, Edmund, 278, 292, 295
Burn, Robert, 221