by Robert Burns
Such assertions of confusion are grounded on ignorance of the radical tradition within which Burns was operating. A coherent tradition dating from the Civil War, British radical thought in the latter stages of the eighteenth century combined Scottish and English elements in alternating proportions. Burns is not to be understood as some sort of barely rational political oddity. With Blake, he is a central poet of a long established revolutionary vision. Consciously or otherwise, the vast bulk of Burns criticism has detached him from his proper intellectual, cultural and political context so that, an isolated figure, his politics can be seen as subjective, whimsical, even eccentric. In proper context, he is wholly different. Much of this, of course, smacks of a bourgeois condescension to not only Burns’s class status but also the actual power of poetry itself. Poetry is not, for such minds, ‘hard’ knowledge. Burns himself constantly stresses the ‘bedlamite’ tendencies of the poetic personality but he never confused the turmoil and travails of the process of poetic productivity with the absolute perfection of the formal and linguistic nature of the poetic product. Also what we see constantly in his letters is a polemical and dialectical skill based on a wholly coherent grasp of the key intellectual issues of his age. Maria Riddell was not alone in thinking him an even greater conversationalist than poet. Never granted a public stage, his extraordinary prose suggests he would have been among the greatest in that arguably greatest of rhetorical ages.
Painful reality taught Burns economics, but he was not only aware of Adam Smith’s sentimental theories but his economic ones. As he wrote of his current reading to Robert Graham in 1789:
By and by the excise-instructions you mentioned were not in the bundle.— But ’tis no matter; Marshall in his Yorkshire, & particularly that extraordinary man, Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, find my leisure employment enough.— I could not have given any mere man credit for half the intelligence Mr Smith discovers in the book. I would covet much to have his ideas respecting the present state of some quarters of the world that are or have been the scenes of considerable revolutions since his book was written.
Central to the ‘considerable revolutions’ that had taken place was Burns’s chastened experience that the manifest increase in wealth in the latter part of the century was not accompanied by any growth in equitable distribution. All boats were certainly not rising on this flood tide of new wealth. As David Cannadine has cogently pointed out there was throughout Burns’s adult life an intense massification of wealth among the aristocracy both by carefully calculated pan-British marriages and their capacity to insert themselves in the burgeoning civil and military offices of a state expanding to meet its ultimate conflict with France.9 Nor did the initially reformist middle-class, the ‘stately stupidity of self-sufficient Squires or the luxuriant insolence of upstart “Nabobs”’, offer the people political and financial hope. Thus in The Heron Ballads, Burns lifts a stone on Scottish provincial life to reveal a bourgeois world replete with sexual but mainly fiscal chicanery. His vision of the entrepreneurial personality is significantly close to John Galt. Indeed, his vision of crime and Edinburgh makes him a precursor of R.L. Stevenson. Indeed, even Stevenson never wrote anything quite of this order about his loved and loathed Edinburgh —the letter is to Peter Hill, the Edinburgh bookseller, a correspondent who always evoked his most extraordinary rhetorical salvoes:
I will make no excuses my dear Bibliopolus, (God forgive me for murdering language) that I have sat down to write to you on this vile paper, stained with the sanguinary scores of ‘thae curst horse leeches o’ th’ Excise’. —It is economy, Sir; it is that cardinal virtue, Prudence; so I beg you will sit down & either compose or borrow a panegyric (if you are going to borrow, apply to our friend, Ramsay, for the assistance of the author of those pretty little buttering paragraphs of eulogiums on your thrice-honored & never-enough-to-be-praised MAGIS-TRACY —how they hunt down a [Shop (deleted)] house-breaker with the sanguinary perseverance of a bloodhound —how they outdo a terrier in a badger-hole, in unearthing a resettor of stolen goods —how they steal on a thoughtless troop of Night-nymphs as a spaniel winds the unsuspecting Covey— or how they riot o’er a ravaged B—dy house as a cat does o’er a plundered Mouse-nest —how they new-vamp old Churches, aiming at appearances of Piety —plan Squares and Colledges, to pass for men of taste and learning, &c. &c. &c. —while old Edinburgh, like [a (deleted)] the doting Mother of a parcel a rakehelly Prodigals, may sing ‘Hooly & fairly,’ or cry, ‘Wae’s me that e’er I saw ye,’ but still must put her hand in her pocket & pay whatever scores the young dogs think proper to contract) —I was going to say, but this damn’d Parenthesis has put me out of breath, that you should get the manufacturer of the tinselled crockery of magistratial reputations, who makes so distinguished & distinguishing a figure in the Ev: Courant, to compose or rather to compound something very clever on my remarkable frugality; that I write to one of my most esteemed friends on this wretched paper, which was originally intended for the venal fist of some drunken Exciseman, to take dirty notes in a miserable vault of an Ale-cellar.
Burns’s political thought, then, is created by his perception of political, institutional degeneration driven by individual economic rapacity and how this might be countered by alternative forms of justice-creating communality. The immediate question arising from this is, of course, the question of Burns’s fidelity to the British State of which he was not only a subject but a paid civil-servant who, as Tom Paine had also been, was bound to it by an all-encompassing oath, which cast a shadow over the rest of his life. The Excise oath is deeply revealing of the pressure the British State exerted:
I, …….., do swear that I do, from my Heart, Abhor, Detest, and Abjure, as impious and heretical, that damnable Doctrine and Position, that Princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope, or any Authority of the See of Rome, may be deposed or murdered by their Subjects, or any other whatsoever. And I do declare, that no foreign Prince, Person, Prelate, State or Potentate hath, or ought to have, any Jurisdiction, Power, Superiority, Pre-eminence or Authority, Ecclesiastical or Spiritual, within the Realm: so help me God.10
In part, Burns’s protestations of fidelity to that state were wrung out of him as his masters in the Excise grew ever more worried about his revolutionary tendencies. In protesting fidelity, however, to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Burns was not simply being hypocritically skin saving. That revolution had been acceptable, certainly as a stage to further democratic progress. What he and his fellow radicals believed, however, was that the trajectory of the British State with its Hanoverian monarchy was degenerately downwards. As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop in 1788:
What you mention of the thanksgiving day is inspirational from above. —Is it not remarkable, odiously remarkable, that tho’ manners are more civilised & the rights of mankind better understood, by an Augustan Century’s improvement, yet in this very reign of heavenly Hanoverianism, & almost in this very year, an empire beyond the Atlantic has had its REVO-LUTION too, & for the same maladministration & legislative misdemeanours in the illustrious & sapientipetent Family of H [anover] as was complained in the tyrannical & bloody house of STUART.—
The ‘Empire beyond the Atlantic’ was for Burns, as Blake, a benchmark for his ideal of Republican, democratic virtue. It was the revolution that presaged the desired revolutions to come. As he wrote in The Tree of Liberty:
My blessings ay attend the chiel,
Wha pitied Gallia’s slaves, man
And staw a branch, spite o’ the Deil
Frae ’yont the western waves, man!
The demonic forces of reaction were for Burns, however, usually more successful in hindering and, indeed, destroying the transmission of the forces of liberty. Worse, Britain which had been because of its history the initiator and prime mover in the cause of liberty was now become the chief oppressor. In poetic terms this dialectic between a self-betraying England and a self-creating democratic America achieves its most complete expression in his Ode for General Was
hington’s Birthday. This is a poem of extraordinary importance in terms of Burns’s political ideas but one which his conservative commentators have almost wholly ignored by conveniently drawing attention to their sense of its linguistic and formal inadequacies caused by the poet’s use of the Pindaric Ode. For Burns himself, however, the subject of the poem was ‘Liberty: you know my honoured friend, how dear the theme is to me.’ For Burns and his fellow radicals the cause of liberty was a pan-European phenomenon, nations were tested by the degree by which they had gone beyond absolutism towards democracy. Most of them, as he testifies in that brilliantly satiric tour de force and tour of Europe, To a Gentleman who had sent a Newspaper, failed the test miserably. It was, however, particularly painful to see England fallen from her pre-eminent position. As he wrote in the ‘Washington’ poem:
Alfred, on thy starry throne,
Surrounded by the tuneful choir,
The Bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre,
And roused 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 honor braving,
England in thunder calls— ‘The Tyrant’s cause is mine!’
That hour accurst, how did the fiends rejoice,
And hell thro’ all her confines raise the exulting voice,
That hour which saw the generous the English name
Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!
For Burns an England so fallen, inevitably dragged Scotland down with her. On occasion he could be defiantly nationalistic:
You know my national prejudices. —I have often read & admired the Spectator, Adventurer, Rambler, & World, but still with certain regret that they were so thoroughly and entirely English.— Alas! Have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from a certain Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, & even her very Name! …
Unlike many of his educated compatriots, the Anglo-British empire did not look to Burns a good deal for Scotland. He saw Scots sucked into the deadly wars of empire. He also saw the degeneration of Scottish leadership with Scots as sycophantic Westminster politicians and bullies back home among their countrymen with Henry Dundas, the quintessence of these vices, as his enemy incarnate. At his bleakest, as in Ode on General Washington’s Birthday, Burns’s perceived Scotland, despite her heroic history of asserting her freedom, lost beyond resurrection:
Thee, Caledonia, thy wild heaths among,
Famed 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 the hallowed 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 her rock, resistless as her storm?
Shew me that eye which shot immortal hate,
Blasting the Despot’s proudest bearing:
Shew me that arm which, nerved with thundering fate,
Braved Usurpation’s boldest daring!
Dark-quenched as yonder sinking star,
No more that glance lightens afar;
That palsied arm no more whirls on the waste of war.
Opposed to such national pessimism, he also perceived a resurrected not morbid Scotland with himself as National Bard writing, a sort of Yeatsian precursor, a historically derived national mytho-poetry. As he wrote to Alex Cunningham in March 1791: ‘—When political combustion ceases to be the object of Princes & Patriots, it then, you know becomes the lawful prey of Historians and Poets.—’ He knew the explosively, for him, liberating forces locked up in Scottish history. Sir Walter Scott knew them, too, and was terrified of them. Burns, however, proceeded to create poetic time-bombs as in Scots Wha Hae, where the subtext is an attack on the Pittite policies of oppression against Scottish radicals in the Scots vernacular and the words of the French Revolutionaries, making the Tennis Court Oath to do or die, come from the mouths of fourteenth-century Scottish soldiers. It may be questionable history but its purpose is to detect semi-mythical antecedents in the Scottish past as precursors for the reintegrated, resurrected nation. William Wallace and, to a lesser extent, Robert Bruce were the obvious candidates:
What a poor, blighted, rickety breed and the virtues & charities when they take their birth from geometrical hypothesis & mathematical demonstration? And what a vigorous Offspring are they when they owe their origin to, and are nursed with the vital blood of a heart glowing with the noble enthusiasm of generosity, benevolence and Greatness of soul? The first may do very well for those philosophers who look on the world of man as one vast ocean and each individual as a little vortex in it whose sole business and merit is to absorb as much as it can in its own center (sic); but the last is absolutely and essentially necessary when you would make a Leonidas, a Hannibal, an Alfred, or a WALLACE.—
What Burns was attempting was a Scottish variant of the manner in which his English radical contemporaries were retrieving the English past. As Stephen C. Behrendt has remarked, ‘Oppositional Radical rhetoric frequently sought to politicise the masses by linking their interests with ancient British (Saxon) traditions of individual and collective liberty ostensibly preserved in the House of Commons but increasingly imperilled by self-serving initiatives of the aristocracy and the monarchy.’11 In an age whose rapacious entrepreneurial activities increasingly atomised society, Wallace, then, was the heroic selfless embodiment of the spirit of Scottish community. This looking to the past for virtuous political models and heroic embodiment of these models is, of course, characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century republican imagination with, of course, the virtuous pantheon to be derived from the classic republics of Greece and Rome. Like Shakespeare, with little Latin and less Greek, Burns certainly knew that central Real Whig text, Addison’s Cato and he did also draw witty parallels between the reformist Scots of his own era and their classical predecessors:
Erskine, a spunkie Norland billie;
True Campbells, Frederick and Illay;
An’ Livinstone, the bauld Sir Willie;
An’ monie ithers,
Whom auld Demosthenes or Tully
Might own for brithers.
In this discussion of republican tendencies, an immediate difficulty presents itself regarding Burns’s Jacobinism. As Hugh Miller remarked in the nineteenth century: ‘The Jacobite of one year who addressed verses to the reverend defenders of the beauteous Stuart and composed the Chevalier’s Lament had become in the next the uncompromising Jacobin who wrote A Man’s a Man for a’ That.’ In actual fact there is no chronological transition in Burns from Jacobite to Jacobin; these themes intermingle throughout. Nor are they essentially contradictory. Miller’s problem arises, as so many misunderstandings of Burns, from his belief that what he is dealing with is confusion unique to Burns. While Burns’s personal life pursued a self-aware, sometimes chaotic, zigzag course, his political ideation was not similarly eccentric. Miller, however, does not understand how radical culture as a whole integrated the apparently opposing element of Jacobitism into itself. As Fintan O’Toole has cogently remarked in dealing with a similar apparent self-contradiction in the Irish dramatist and Whig politician, R.B. Sheridan:
At first sight, there may seem to be a contradiction between the Jacobite tinge of Sheridan’s political ancestry and the radical Whiggism to which he was now attaching himself. But by the time Sheridan became conscious of public life, the vestiges of Jacobitism had become, paradoxically, a few stray threads in t
he banners of the radical Whigs. Rather paradoxically, Tory blue became the colour of Wilkes’s supporters. The Public Advertiser which published the Junius Letters also published Jacobite propaganda. Later, a number of prominent former Jacobites, including Sir Thomas Gasgoigne, Frances Plowden and Joseph Ritson, became adherents of the radical Whig, Charles James Fox. Sir Frances Burndett’s family had come out for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45. The apparent conservatism of Jacobitism, its hankering after an increasingly mythic utopia in the past, was not really out of tune with the language and sentiments of the radicals. As Paul Kleber Monod puts it ‘the illusion that a “golden age” might have existed at some time in the past fascinated radicals …’ The old promises of unity and moral regeneration continued to appeal to the imagination of the English radicals even after the Stuart cause collapsed.12
Against Hanoverian triumphalism, misfortune, then, made strange political bedfellows. Also, like Sheridan, Burns’s sense of Jacobitism was familial. His family were not rooted in Ayrshire; his father had come from the North-East Jacobite redoubt. Indeed, Burns claimed that in 1715 they had been ‘out’. As he wrote in 1789 to Lady Winifred Maxwell Constable:
… with your ladyship I have the honor to be connected by one of the strongest and most endearing ties in the whole Moral world —Common Sufferers in a cause where even to be unfortunate is glorious, the cause of Heroic Loyalty! Though my Fathers had not illustrious Honours and vast properties to hazard in the contest; though they left their humble cottages only to add so many units to the unnoted croud that followed their leaders; yet what they could they did, and what they had they lost; with unshaken firmness and unconcealed Political Attachments, they shook hands with Ruin for what they esteemed the cause of their King and their Country.—