by Robert Burns
… it remains unfortunate that Burns’s run-ins with the kirk have obscured the extent to which his own political philosophy is grounded in his religious inheritance. His politics are shaped by two complimentary strands of Presbyterian thought: on the one hand, the New Light, with its subjection of all forms of authority to the tribunal of individual reason: on the other, the traditional contractarian political theory long associated with Presbyterianism. These influences are evident in Burns’s repeated avowal of ‘revolution’ principles in his support for the American Revolution and, above all, in his satirical attacks on political corruption. The whole framework of assumption on which Burns’s political satires rest recalls the contractarian principles of Presbyterian thought: that authority ascends from below; that government is a contract, and political power a trust; and that even the humblest members of society are competent to censure their governors. That Burns deplored certain aspects of Calvinism —its harsh soteriology, its emphasis on faith over works— should not blind us to his sincere identification with the Presbyterian political inheritance:
The Solemn league and Covenant
Now brings a smile, now brings a tear.
But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs;
If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.22
Burns, of course, was not the only Scotsman to embrace such radical ideals. We cannot properly understand his life and much of his poetry if we do not understand the degree to which his personal relationships and affiliations were directed towards and driven by seeking out similarly politically sympathetic groups and individuals. It was the Lodge friends and patrons who eased his path towards Edinburgh; that so politically riven city which was to prove so disastrous to him in both life and death. Without, as all his generation, fully understanding the political causes of what happened in the capital, the ever astute Edwin Muir put his finger on the events of his sensational first extended visit to the capital as the cause of Burns’s subsequent accelerating decline:
It was after his first trip to Edinburgh that his nature, strongly built and normal, disintegrated. He had hoped, in meeting the first shock of his astonishing triumph in the capital, that an escape was at last possible from the life of hardly maintained poverty which as a boy he had foreseen and feared. He left Edinburgh recognising that there was no reprieve, that hardship must sit at his elbow to the end of his days. Fame had lifted him on the point of an immediate pinnacle; now the structure had melted away and, astonished, he found himself once more in his native county, an Ayrshire peasant. Some fairy had set him for a little in the centre of a rich and foreign society; then calmly and finally, she had taken it from under his feet. There is hardly another incident in literary history to parallel this brief rise and setting of social favour, and hardly one showing the remorselessness of fortune in the world. The shock told deeply on Burns, working more for evil than the taste for dissipation which he was said to have acquired from the Edinburgh aristocracy.23
Given Muir’s lack of knowledge of the covert political forces operating on Burns, this is well said. It does, however, under-estimate the extraordinary degree to which Burns, in the midst of his Edinburgh triumph, was conscious not only of its transience but the darkness to follow. As he wrote to Robert Ainslie on 16th December 1786:
You will very probably think, my honoured friend, that a hint about the mischievous nature of intoxicated vanity may not be unreasonable, but, alas! You are wide of the mark. Various concurring circumstances have raised my fame as a poet to a height which I am absolutely certain I have not merits to support; and I look down on the future as I would into the bottomless pit.
He realised that his Edinburgh fame was largely based on the temporary social novelty of a ploughman writing poetry. He also probably realised that his Preface to the Kilmarnock Poems was, as we shall see, a brilliant confidence trick on a willingly gullible genteel Scottish audience, for which a price had to be paid. In the same month he wrote, even more particularly and precisely, to Rev William Greenfield about the consequences of Edinburgh:
Never did Saul’s armour sit so heavily on David when going to encounter Goliath, as does the encumbering robe of public notice with which the friendship and patronage of some ‘names dear to fame’ have invested me. I do not say this in the ridiculous idea of seeming self-abasement, and affected modesty. I have long studied myself and I think I know pretty exactly what ground I occupy, both as a man, & a poet; and however the world or a friend may sometimes differ from me in that particular, I stand for it, in silent resolve with all the tenaciousness of Property. I am willing to believe that my abilities deserved a better fate than the veriest shades of life; but to be dragged forth, with all my imperfections on my head, to the full glare of learned and polite observation, is what, I am afraid, I shall have bitter reason to repent I mention this to you, once for all, merely, in the Confessor style, to disburthen my conscience, and that ‘When proud Fortune’s ebbing tide recedes’ you may hear me witness, when my bubble of fame was at its highest, I stood unintoxicated, with the inebriating cup in my hand. Looking forward, with rueful resolve, to the hastening time when the stroke of envious Calumny, with all the eagerness of vengeful triumph, should dash it to the ground.
Mozarts seem inevitably to have their Salieris. The treachery that Burns so accurately predicted for himself was also to be understood as not only psychologically motivated resentment of genuine creativity, but also essentially driven by political ideology. As the 1793–4 Sedition Trials revealed, Edinburgh was a politically schismatic society. This was not so apparent in 1789 and Burns’s contacts with two utterly contrasting groups has never been fully understood in terms of the consequent conflicting politics or the terrible personal consequences for the poet of this division.
Initially, Burns was lauded by two utterly contrasting groups. He was a member of the boozy, boisterous, in many instances brilliant, radical, reformist club, The Crochallan Fencibles. He was also taken up, mildly patronised, by the aesthetically, politically and religiously conformist pro-Hanoverian group led by Henry Mackenzie and Hugh Blair. What has never been understood is not only how partisan to their own causes both groups were but, indeed, the degree to which, as the political scene darkened in the 1790s, they were sucked into active participation either towards not simply reform but insurrection on the radical side and covert anti-revolutionary activity on the government side. Of such undeclared civil war, Burns was among the chief victims.
Despite some excellent work by John Brims and Elaine MacFar-land we still fall considerably short of understanding the fraught complexity of the extent and intensity of radical protest in Scotland in the 1790s. One consequence of this, of course, has been the contextually impoverished state of Burns criticism. Most of it has been written with the political dimension quite absent. Nor does space here allow anything like the necessary explication of the complex nature of that political culture. What can be said, however, is that most Scottish history seriously underestimates certainly the quantity and, arguably, the quality of radical opposition prevalent in Scotland which became genuinely divisive due to the American War of Independence.
It was that war which created that group so essential to understanding both Burns’s political affiliations and what happened to him, The Crochallan Fencibles. The name was a deliberate parody of the loyalist militia groups springing up in opposition to the American cause. What the American war engendered in the radical, reformist side of Edinburgh can be gauged by the invited open letter of Dr Richard Price in 1784, ‘To the Secretary of the Committee of Citizens of Edinburgh’:
God grant that this spirit might increase till it has abolished all despotic governments and exterminated the slavery which debased mankind. This spirit first rose in America (it soon reached Ireland) it has diffused itself in some foreign countries, and your letter informs me that it is now animating Scotland.24
Ingenuously, late eighteenth-century radicals had a kind of millennial vision of history as an American initiated d
omino game of collapsing crowns. For a time the reform of a particularly undemocratic Scotland seemed a distinct possibility. The bumpers, bawdy songs and personal badinage which Burns enlisted for with the Fencibles in their howff in Anchor Close was part of what must have seemed the initial stages of an ill-disguised victory celebration. The Fencibles were of course typically a heavy drinking culture. It was not, however, the most erotically inflamed of Scotland’s men’s clubs. Public masturbation was not on the agenda. Certainly, as camouflage, it was this side of the club’s activities to which Burns confessed. He did not always publicly make the connection between libidinal energy and radical politics. Thus he wrote to Mrs Dunlop:
You may guess that the convivial hours of men have their mysteries of wit and mirth, and I hold it a piece of contemptible baseness to detail the sallies of thoughtless merriment, or the orgies of accidental intoxication to the ear of cool sobriety or female delicacy.
Or, as he wrote in conclusion to a brilliant extended parody of The Revelation of St John the Divine in a letter to William Chalmers in December, 1786, that he had never seen ‘as many wild beasts as I have seen since I came to Edinburgh.’ Burns’s own stressing of the social wildness of the Fencibles may have been a deliberate camouflage for the actual reality of their political beliefs and activities. Intellectually, they were an astonishing bunch. William Smellie, commissioned as ‘Hangman’, not only edited the first Encyclopaedia Britannica but had written much of it. Of all Burns’s lost letters, those to Smellie would possibly have been of the most profound political importance. They were destroyed by Smellie’s biographer, Robert Kerr, with an insouciance that we chillingly recognise as seminal for the manner in which Burns’s texts were to be treated not only in the hyper-respectable nineteenth century: ‘Many letters of Burns to Mr. Smellie which remained being totally unfit for publication, and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable people still in life, have been burnt.’ Smellie was also the author of a Philosophy of Natural History which postulated that the most highly refined, developed human consciousness was incompatible with the world. James ‘Balloon’ Tytler was an even more extraordinary polymath. As Burns wrote in November 1788 to Mrs Dunlop:
Those marked T, are the work of an obscure, tippling but extraordinary body of the name of Tytler: a mortal, who though he drudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a sky-lighted hat, & knee buckles as unlike as George-by-the-grace-of-God, & Solomon-the-son-of-David, yet that same unknown drunken Mortal is author and compiler of three-fourths of Elliot’s pompous Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
Poet, song-writer, polymath, Scotland’s first balloonist and eventually so politically active that he fled Scotland in 1793 to Belfast and then volunteered to return to Scotland to promote insurrection:
… he was to traverse Scotland as a Highland Piper. He learned the tongue and was to have gone from town to town to organise a General Insurrection, from there to the South of Ireland (Cork), hence to Paris to enlist the French.25
To Tytler’s extreme irritation, this mission did not take place. Like many others of his creed and generation, his journey was to be westwards to American safety. An almost equally irascible, restless spirit was Dr Gilbert Stuart who had so upset genteel Edinburgh with his writings in Smellie’s Edinburgh Magazine and Review that he had to seek employment in London thus initiating the long tradition of Scots radicals forced South. Obviously extremely important in the Fencibles was the legal profession. Of a considerable number of lawyers, the most prominent was Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and brother of the even greater radical lawyer Thomas. It was Henry Erskine’s fall at the hands of the Robert Dundas faction in the election for Dean of Faculty in 1795 that Burns turned into, in January 1796, a bitterly witty song about the loss of the men of merit and worth to the reactionary loyalists.
In your heretic sins may live and die,
Ye heretic Eight and thirty
But accept, ye Sublime Majority,
My congratulations hearty.
With your Honors and a certain King,
In your servants this is striking—
The more incapacity they bring,
The more they’re to your liking.
This, then, was the intimate company Burns was keeping. Nor did he only wholly share their politics but was an active participant not only in terms of his contributions to the radical press, but in actually attempting to send carronades, captured from the smuggling brig Rosamund as part of his excise duties, to the French revolutionaries. It is little wonder that even during his first Edinburgh visit his relationships with genteel, conformist, pro-Hanoverian society were strained. How strained we can see, for example, in the fury of his riposte to Mrs McLehose when a Mrs Stewart had checked him over his seditious anti-Hanoverian lines on the Stirling window:
I have almost given up the excise idea —I have just been now to wait on a great person, Miss N—’s friend, Mrs. Stewart. — Why will great people not only deafen us with the din of their equipage, and dazzle us with their fastidious pomp, but they must also be so very dictatorially wise? I have been questioned like a child about my matters, and blamed and schooled for my Inscription on Stirling window. Come, Clarinda— ‘Come, curse me Jacob; come, defy me Israel!’
Yet he needed his enemy’s patronage. He did join the Excise. Blair and Mackenzie, with their mixture of lachrymose and evangelical values, expressed a faith not so much of a suffering Christ as a quiescently accepting Christ as exemplar to a politically similarly quiescent, hence an apolitical, common people. As Blake wrote: ‘Pity would be no more, if we did not make someone poor.’ They were, however, able to open doors to publishing connections and offer mainly ill-received poetic advice. In the name of rules and decency, they were always trying to get Burns to tidy up his, to them, unruly act. This had almost no effect other than to irritate the Bard. As he wrote to Greenfield:
… I stumbled on two Songs which I here enclose you as a kind of curiosity to a Professor of the Belle lettres de la Nature: which allow me to say, I look upon as an additional merit of yours: a kind of bye Professorship, not always to be found among the systematic Fathers and Brothers of scientific Criticism.
These tensions were also not confined to matters aesthetic and linguistic. Unlike Heathcliff, Burns was not the brute, sub-literate, threat, that dark erotic stranger, which haunted the bourgeois imagination of the period. They were faced with someone hyper-literate, fecundly allusive to a degree far beyond their powers in canonical literary and biblical tradition, who could not only talk their pants off but, it was feared, those of their wives and daughters too. Command of language was directly related to a fixed hierarchical social order; Burns threatened social anarchy by the very nature of his poetic, rhetorical potency. It offered them some security to classify him as a class-bound ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ rather than great poet.
REPUTATION: CRITICS, BIOGRAPHERS AND BOWDLERISERS Even more than Henry Dundas, Henry Mackenzie was probably the most sustained, malign influence on Burns’s reputation. He may initially have genuinely wanted to help the poet. He also almost certainly sensed a bandwagon that his self-importance would not allow him not to join. As Donald Low has remarked, however, the nature of Mackenzie’s praise was to be in the long term confining and destructive:
… his was a disastrously inaccurate essay in criticism which gave rise to endless distortion of Burns’s poetry. The whole tendency of Mackenzie’s encomium was to emasculate Poems. He paid lip-service to humour and satire, but found them too embarrassing to discuss: introduced a comparison with Shakespeare, only to withdraw it at once: repeatedly shrank from Burns’s characteristic self-expression and fell back on general-isations. He apologised for the language in which the poet did his best work, and concentrated on the poems of sentiment in English. This was to sacrifice truth, and therefore also Burns’s long-term interests as a poet, for instant acclaim.26
From the beginning Mackenzie’s deeply influential
aesthetic strictures were socially and politically motivated. Hence Burns is turned into a safe sentimentalist rather than, like Pope or Swift, a turbulent, dissenting satirist of the established, corrupt order. He is a naïve exception rather than, in terms of both poetry and politics, the most knowing of men. Burns was as formally naïve in poetic tradition as Mozart was in musical tradition. They were both examples of creative pieces of ground, as Blake suggests, born spaded and seeded. It was socially unacceptable for Mackenzie to grant Burns such potency. As an extension of this, he had to define Burns as a naïve innocent, coming from peasant origins. Mackenzie also down-grades the actual vernacular language of that world with its elements which bespoke the raw pleasures, pains and, indeed, turbulent discontents of the common people. If there was genuine ambivalence in Mackenzie’s attitude to Burns at the beginning of their relationship, it did not survive the poet’s death. In his résumé of the careers of Scotland three great eighteenth-century poets, Ramsay,
Fergusson and Burns, the first is praised for his achievement of prudent respectability. The latter two are not: Fergusson, dissipated and drunken, died in early life, after having produced poems faithfully and humorously describing scenes of Edinburgh and somewhat of blackguardism. Burns originally virtuous, was seduced by dissipated companions, and after he got into the Excise addicted himself to drunkenness, tho’ the rays of his genius sometimes broke through the mist of his dissipation: but the habit had got too much power over him to be overcome and it brought him, with a few lucid intervals, to an early grave. He unfortunately during the greatest part of his life had called and thought dissipation spirit, sobriety and discretion a want of it, virtues too shabby for a man of genius. His great admiration of Fergusson showed his propensity to coarse dissipation.