by Robert Burns
Burns’s reverence for real manhood, a basic principle of true democratic spirit, is shown in the closing verse of his ‘Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson’:
Go to your sculptured tombs, ye Great,
In a’ the tinsel trash o’ state!
But by thy honest turf I’ll wait,
Thou man of worth!
And weep the ae best fellow’s fate
E’er lay in earth.
To John Francis Erskine he wrote, 1793: ‘Burns was a poor man from birth and an exciseman from necessity; but — I will say it — the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase, and his independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not subdue.... Can I look tamely on and see any machination to wrest from them the birthright of my boys — the little, independent Britons, in whose veins runs my own blood?... Does any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation? I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence. The uninformed Mob may swell a Nation’s bulk, and the titled, tinsel, courtly throng may be its feathered ornament; but the number of those who are elevated enough in life to reason and reflect, yet low enough to keep clear of the venal contagion of a court — these are a nation’s strength.’
He wrote the letter, from which this is an extract, because some super-loyalists were trying to undermine his reputation on account of his independence of spirit and his democratic principles, with a view to having him removed from the paltry position he held as an Excise officer.
He was proudly, sensitively independent. He inherited his temperamental characteristics from his mother. He was happier defending others than working for himself. Writing to the Earl of Eglintoun, he said: ‘Mercenary servility, I trust, I shall ever have as much honest pride as to detest.’
Writing to Mr Francis Grose, F.S.A., in 1790, about Professor Dugald Stewart, he said: ‘Mr Stewart’s principal characteristic is your favourite feature — that sterling independence of mind which, though every man’s right, so few men have the courage to claim, and fewer still the magnanimity to support.’
In 1795, the year before his death, he wrote three poems favourable to the election of Mr Heron, the Whig candidate. In the first poem he said:
The independent commoner
Shall be the man for a’ that.
Mrs Riddell, writing of Burns after his death, said: ‘His features were stamped with the hardy character of independence.’
He was a democrat whose democracy was based on the rock of independence and a character that ‘preserved the dignity of man with soul erect.’
Burns saw both sides of the ideal of freedom. He hated tyrants, and he despised those who tamely submitted to tyranny. The inscription on the Altar to Independence, erected by Mr Heron at Kerroughtree, written by Burns, reads:
Thou of an independent mind,
With soul resolv’d, with soul resign’d;
Prepar’d Power’s proudest frown to brave,
Who wilt not be, nor have a slave;
Virtue alone who dost revere,
Thy own reproach alone dost fear —
Approach this shrine, and worship here.
The man of whom Burns approved was ‘one who wilt not be nor have a slave.’
In ‘Lines Inscribed in a Lady’s Pocket Almanac’ he says:
Deal Freedom’s sacred treasures free as air,
Till Slave and Despot be but things that were.
In the ‘Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory’ he wrote:
Be Anarchy cursed, and be Tyranny damned; condemned
And who would to Liberty e’er be disloyal
May his son be a hangman — and he his first trial.
Burns was a philosopher whose mind had been trained to look at both sides of a question, and estimate truly their relationships to each other. Even in one of his beautiful poems to his wife, written after he was married, ‘I Hae a Wife o’ My Ain,’ he wrote:
I am naebody’s lord,
I’ll be slave to naebody.
While Burns was an intense lover of freedom, he had no sympathy with those who would overturn constituted authority. He wished to achieve the freedom of the people, but to achieve it by constitutional means. He was a national volunteer in Dumfries, and he composed a fine patriotic song for the corps to sing. He revealed his balanced mind in the following lines in that song:
The wretch that would a tyrant own,
And the wretch, his true-born brother,
Who would set the mob aboon the throne, above
May they be damned together.
Burns had as little respect for a king who was a tyrant, as he had for a tyrant in any other situation in life; but he clearly saw the wicked folly of allowing mob-rule to be substituted for constitutional authority.
In the Prologue written to be spoken by an actor on his benefit night, Burns wrote:
No hundred-headed Riot here we meet
With decency and law beneath his feet;
Nor Insolence assumes fair Freedom’s name.
Here, again, he records the dominant ideal of his mind through life; but at the same time he utters a warning against ignorant and wild theorists, who, in their madness, would overthrow civilisation.
He overflows again on his favourite theme in the ‘Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory,’ when he was proposing toasts:
The next in succession I’ll give you’s the King!
Whoe’er would betray him, on high may he swing!
And here’s the grand fabric, the free Constitution,
As built on the base of our great Revolution.
The love of liberty grew stronger in his heart and in his mind as he grew older. In his songs, and in his letters, he frequently moralised on independence of character and the value of liberty. In a letter to the Morning Chronicle he said, 1795: ‘I am a Briton, and must be interested in the cause of liberty.’
To Patrick Miller he sent a copy of his poems in 1793, accompanied by a letter expressing gratitude for his kindness and appreciation of him ‘as a patriot who in a venal, sliding age stands forth the champion of the liberties of my country.’
In his love-song, ‘Their Groves o’ Sweet Myrtle,’ he compares the boasted glories of tropical lands with the beauty of his beloved Scotland, and boasts in pride of the charms of the
Lone glen o’ green breckan, ferns
Wi’ the burn stealing under the lang yellow broom,
and of the sweetness of
Yon humble broom bowers,
Where the blue-bell and gowan lurk, lowly, unseen.
He cannot close the song, however, without claiming that beautiful as are the ‘sweet-scented woodlands’ of these foreign countries, they are, after all, ‘the haunt of the tyrant and slave,’ and that
The slave’s spicy forests, and gold-bubbling fountains,
The brave Caledonian views wi’ disdain;
He wanders as free as the winds of his mountains.
Burns celebrated the success of the French Revolution in a poem entitled ‘The Tree of Liberty.’ His heart bled for the peasantry of France, whom the aristocrats had treated so contemptuously, and with such lack of consideration, and cruelty. He rejoiced in the overthrow of their oppressors, and the establishment of a republican form of government. In this poem he gives credit to Lafayette, the great Frenchman who had gone to assist the people of the United States in their brave struggle to get free. He asks blessings on the head of the noble man, Lafayette, in the verse:
My blessings aye attend the chiel
Wha pitied Gallia’s slaves, man,
And staw a branch, spite o’ the deil, stole
Frae yont the western waves, man.
Fair Virtue watered it wi’ care,
And now she sees wi’ pride, man,
How weel it buds and blossoms there,
Its branch
es spreading wide, man.
······
A wicked crew syne, on a time,
Did tak a solemn aith, man, oath
It ne’er should flourish to its prime,
I wat they pledged their faith, man.
Awa they gaed, wi’ mock parade,
Like beagles hunting game, man,
But soon grew weary o’ the trade,
And wished they’d stayed at hame, man.
Fair Freedom, standing by the tree,
Her sons did loudly ca’, man;
She sang a song o’ liberty, Marseillaise
Which pleased them ane and a’, man.
By her inspired, the new-born race
Soon drew the avenging steel, man;
The hirelings ran — her friends gied chase
And banged the despot weel, man.
······
Wi’ plenty o’ sic trees, I trow,
The warld would live at peace, man;
The sword would help to mak’ a plough;
The din o’ war wad cease, man.
The greatest poem Burns wrote to rejoice at the victorious progress of humanity towards freedom was his ‘Ode to Liberty,’ written to express his supreme gratification at the success of the people of the United States in their struggle for independence from England. He wrote it, as he wrote most of his poems during his life in Dumfries, in the moonlight in Lincluden Abbey ruins, on the Nith River, just outside of Dumfries. He introduces the ode in a poem named ‘A Vision.’
He tells that, at midnight, while in the ruins, he saw in the roofless tower of the abbey, a vision:
By heedless chance I turned my eyes,
And, by the moonbeam, shook to see
A stern and stalwart ghaist arise, ghost
Attired as minstrels wont to be.
Had I a statue been o’ stane,
His daring look had daunted me;
And on his bonnet graved was plain,
The sacred posy, ‘Libertie.’
And frae his harp sic strains did flow
Might rouse the slumbering dead to hear;
But oh! it was a tale of woe,
As ever met a Briton’s ear!
The ghost tells the story of the tyranny England exercised over the people of the United States, and of the breaking of the tyrant’s chains. Burns had no more respect for despotism by an English king than he had for the despotism of a tyrant in any other land. He knew the people of the American colonies were right. England’s greatest statesman, Pitt, had said so, when the colonists, driven to desperation, rebelled; so the ghost’s revelation should be to a liberty-loving Briton’s ear ‘a tale of woe.’
The ode begins:
No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,
No lyre Æolian I awake;
‘Tis liberty’s bold note I swell;
Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!
See gathering thousands, while I sing,
A broken chain exultant bring,
And dash it in the tyrant’s face,
And dare him to his very beard,
And tell him he no more is feared —
No more the despot of Columbia’s race!
A tyrant’s proudest insults braved,
They shout — a People freed! They hail an Empire saved.
······
But come, ye sons of Liberty,
Columbia’s offspring, brave and free.
In danger’s hour still flaming in the van,
Ye know and dare maintain ‘the Royalty of Man.’
So the poem proceeds, till he appeals to King Alfred, and finally to Caledonia:
Alfred! on thy starry throne,
Surrounded by the tuneful choir,
The bards that erst have struck the patriotic lyre,
And rous’d the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire,
No more thy England own!
Dare injured nations form the great design,
To make detested tyrants bleed?
Thy England execrates the glorious deed!
Beneath her hostile banners waving,
Every pang of honour braving,
England, in thunder calls, ‘The tyrant’s cause is mine!’
That hour accurst how did the fiends rejoice,
And hell, through all her confines, raise the exulting voice!
That hour which saw the generous English name
Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!
Thee, Caledonia! thy wild heaths among,
Fam’d for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,
To thee I turn with swimming eyes;
Where is that soul of Freedom fled?
Immingled with the mighty dead,
Beneath that hallow’d turf where Wallace lies!
Hear it not, Wallace! in thy bed of death.
Ye babbling winds! in silence sweep,
Disturb not ye the hero’s sleep,
Nor give the coward secret breath.
Is this the ancient Caledonian form,
Firm as the rock, resistless as the storm?
He loved to stir the liberty-loving spirit of his beloved Caledonia, so to her sons he makes the final appeal in his great ode. He wrote in a similar strain in the Prologue written for his friend Woods, the actor:
O Thou dread Power! whose empire-giving hand
Has oft been stretched to shield the honoured land!
Strong may she glow with all her ancient fire!
May every son be worthy of his sire!
Firm may she rise with generous disdain
At Tyranny’s, or direr Pleasure’s, chain;
Still self-dependent in her native shore,
Bold may she brave grim Danger’s loudest roar,
Till fate the curtain drop on worlds to be no more.
He reached the highest degree of patriotic fervour, and his clearest call, not only to Scotsmen, but to all true men, to be ready to do their duty for justice and liberty, in ‘Bruce’s Address at Bannockburn.’
In a letter to the Earl of Buchan, 1794, enclosing a copy of this poem, he wrote: ‘Independent of my enthusiasm as a Scotsman, I have rarely met with anything in history which interests my feelings as a man equal with the story of Bannockburn. On the one hand a cruel, but able, usurper, leading on the finest army in Europe, to extinguish the last spark of freedom among a greatly daring and greatly injured people; on the other hand, the desperate relics of a gallant nation, devoting themselves to rescue their bleeding country or perish with her. Liberty! thou art a prize truly and indeed invaluable, for never canst thou be too dearly bought.’
Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to Victorie!
Now’s the day and now’s the hour;
See the front o’ battle lour!
See approach proud Edward’s power —
Chains and slaverie!
Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee!
Wha for Scotland’s King and Law,
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Free-Man stand, or Free-Man fa’?
Let him follow me!
By Oppression’s woes and pains!
By your Sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud Usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Let us Do — or Die.
‘So may God ever defend the cause of Truth and Liberty as he did that day.
‘Robert Burns.’
Because he was so outspoken in regard to democracy, some men assumed he was not a loyal man. The truth is, that he always loved his country, but he ardently desired to improve the conditions of the great body of his countrymen. Complaints were made
about his disloyalty to the Excise commissioners under whom he worked. These complaints were investigated, and Burns was found to be a loyal man.
When the call came from the Government for volunteers, Burns joined the Dumfries Volunteers. In his great song composed for these volunteers he strongly expresses his loyalty, both to his country and to his king, in the following quotations:
We’ll ne’er permit a foreign foe
On British ground to rally.
Be Britain still to Britain true,
Amang oursels united;
For never but by British hands
Maun British wrangs be righted. must
Who will not sing ‘God save the King,’
Shall hang as high’s the steeple!
But while we sing ‘God save the King,’
We’ll ne’er forget the people.
To Robert Graham of Fintry, 1792, he wrote: ‘To the British Constitution on revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached.’
Again, a month later, he wrote to Mr Graham: ‘I never uttered any invectives against the King. His private worth it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate; but in his public capacity I always revered, and always will, with the soundest loyalty, revere the Monarch of Great Britain as (to speak in Masonic) the sacred Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution. As to reform principles, I look upon the British Constitution, as settled at the Revolution, to be the most glorious Constitution on earth, or that perhaps the wit of man can frame.
········
‘I never dictated to, corresponded with, or had the least connection with, any political association whatever — except that when the magistrates and principal inhabitants of Dumfries met to declare their attachment to the Constitution, and their abhorrence of riot.’
He had strong desires to effect many reforms in public life, but he was an intelligent believer in the British Constitution, and had no faith in any method of achieving reforms in the Empire except by constitutional measures. He was a radical reformer with a grand mental balance-wheel; and such reformers make the best type of citizens, ardent reformers with cool heads and unselfish hearts.