The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

  … the representation of these humble cottagers forming a wider circle round their hearth and uniting in the worship of God, is a picture most affecting of any which the rural muse has ever presented to the view. Burns was admirably adapted to this delineation.… The Cotter’s Saturday Night is tender and moral, it is solemn and devotional, and rises at length into a strain of grandeur and sublimity which modern poetry has not surpassed. The noble sentiments of patriotism with which it concludes correspond with the rest of the poem. In no age or country have the pastoral muses breathed such elevated accents, if the ‘Messiah’ of Pope be excepted, which is indeed a pastoral in form only. It is to be regretted that Burns did not employ his genius on other subjects of the same nature which the manners and customs of Scottish peasantry would have amply supplied.51

  Praise, indeed, but praise granted at the price of near complete distortion. Currie’s misreading of the last two stanzas of the poem apart, this post-Burkean account of a peasant world of piety, humility and hence, hierarchical loyalty is used as the criterion by which the rest of Burns’s poetry is not only judged but condemned.

  In his 1808 review of Cromek’s Reliques in The Edinburgh Review Jeffrey also expresses inordinate enthusiasm for this, indeed, exceptional poem: ‘The exquisite description of The Cotter’s Saturday Night affords, perhaps, the finest example of this sort of pathetic. Its whole beauty cannot indeed be discerned but by those whom experience has enabled to judge of the admirable fidelity and completeness of the picture.’ This review of Jeffrey’s is absolutely seminal to an understanding of the image of Burns and his poetry which was to dominate the nineteenth century and, indeed, elements of it still persist into the twenty-first. As well as Jeffrey’s legally fine-honed intellect he was from 1802 to 1829 the editor of The Edinburgh Review. This magazine having freed itself from reviewing as a mere vehicle for the book trade was not only independent but, in terms of payment to contributors, unprecedently wealthy. Ironically, it was a Whig magazine, which was on political issues almost uniformly reformative. Hence its support of Catholic emancipation and its attacks on the sale of army commissions, flogging in the British Navy and Army and the Test and Corporations Act. So exceptional were its fiscal and intellectual powers that, with the subsequent Tory Blackwood’s, it unprecedently, if temporarily, moved the locus of British critical intelligence from London to Edinburgh. It was from such a position of unparalleled authority that Jeffrey, with near total success, decided to contain, if necessary by emasculation and vilification, what he perceived to be the threat of the revolutionary impetus of Burns as man and poet. Jeffrey’s arguments derived from Currie but even, in some instances, exceeding the latter’s account are not to be understood in literary terms without understanding the politics that underlay the aesthetics.52 Like all men of his class, the French terror had bitten into his soul. Evidence real or invented of a common people diligently, culturally, passively loyal was everywhere sought. Burns had consequently to be fitted to the procrustean bed of their political anxieties and phobias. Hence this account of the degree to which Burns and the Scottish peasantry exceed all others in educated, hence, conformist virtue:

  We shall conclude with two general remarks — the one national, the other critical. The first is, that it is impossible to read the productions of Burns, along with his history, without forming a higher idea of the intelligence, taste, and accomplishments of the peasantry, than most of those in the higher ranks are disposed to entertain … it is evident … that the whole family, and many of their associates, who have never emerged from the native obscurity of their condition, possessed talents, and taste, and intelligence, which are little suspected to lurk in those humble retreats. His epistles to brother poets, in the rank of farmers and shopkeepers in the adjoining villages, — the existence of a book-society and debating club among persons of that description, and many other incidental traits in his sketches of his youthful companions, — all contribute to show, that not only good sense, and enlightened morality, but literature and talents for speculation, are far more generally diffused in society than is generally imagined; and that the delights and the benefits of these generous and humanizing pursuits, are by no means confined to those whom leisure and affluence have courted to their enjoyment. That much of this is peculiar to Scotland, and may be properly referred to our excellent institutions for parochial education, and to the natural sobriety and prudence of our nation, may certainly be allowed … It is pleasing to know, that the sources of rational enjoyment are so widely disseminated; and, in a free country, it is comfortable to think, that so great a proportion of the people is able to appreciate the advantages of its condition, and fit to be relied on in all emergencies where steadiness and intelligence is required.53

  As analysis, this is, of course, an inversion of the cultural and political truth. The common readers of the Scottish late eighteenth century, especially key groups like the weavers, were more likely to be reading Tom Paine than anything else. Also, given that Burns’s ‘carnivalesque’ poetry is the quintessence of dissidence against the prevailing church and state, it is not easy to see how it can be squared with the pacific vision of the lower orders. What Jeffrey did was to use his enormous authority to impose a crude binary division on Burns’s poetry so that we have the ‘good’ acceptable poet as opposed to the ‘bad’ rejected one. Among other things this involved him in reinventing the Scottish vernacular tradition with that ‘bletherin’ bitch’s’ unique capacity for reductive, derisory satire, acute psychological insight, and often bitter realism, transformed into a mode suitable for historical and psychological regressive nostalgia. The Kailyard begins here:

  We beg leave too, in passing, to observe, that this Scotch is not to be considered as a provincial dialect, the vehicle only of rustic vulgarity and rude local humour. It is the language of a whole country, — long an independent kingdom, and still separate in laws, character and manners. It is by no means peculiar to the vulgar; but is the common speech of the whole nation in early life, — and with many of its most exalted and accomplished individuals throughout their whole existence; and, if it be true that, in later times, it has been, in some measure, laid aside by the more ambitious and aspiring of the present generation, it is still recollected, even by them, as the familiar language of their childhood, and of those who were the earliest objects of their love and veneration. It is connected, in their imagination, not only with the olden times which is uniformly conceived as more pure, lofty and simple than the present, but also with all the soft and bright colours of remembered childhood and domestic affection. All its phrases conjure up images of childhood innocence and sports, and friendships which have no pattern in succeeding years. Add to all this, that it is the language of a great body of poetry, with which almost all Scotchmen are familiar; and, in particular, of a great multitude of songs, written with more tenderness, nature and feeling, than any other lyric compositions that are extant, and we may perhaps be allowed to say, that the Scotch is, in reality, a highly poetical language; and that it is an ignorant, as well as an illiberal prejudice, which would seek to confound it with the barbarous dialects of Yorkshire or Devon.54

  Opposed to this, was the dissident Burns who had, as man and poet, to be condemned to outer darkness as quickly as possible. While Currie could grant Burns’s satirical poetry some virtue, Jeffrey could conceive of nothing in it but the malign manifestations of the poet’s personality:

  The first is, the undisciplined harshness and acrimony of his invective. The great boast of polished life is the delicacy, and even the generosity of its hostility, —that quality which is still the characteristic as it is that denomination of a gentleman, — that principle which forbids us to attack the defenceless, to strike the fallen, or malign the slain, —and enjoins us, in forging the shafts of satire, to increase the polish exactly as we add to their keenness or their weight … His ingenious and amiable biographer has spoken repeatedly in praise of his talents for satire, —we think, with a most unha
ppy partiality. His epigrams and lampoons appear to us, one and all, unworthy of him; —offensive from their extreme coarseness and violence, —and contemptible from their want of wit or brilliancy. They seem to have been written, not out of playful malice or virtuous indignation, but out of fierce and ungovernable anger. His whole raillery consists in railing; and his satirical vein displays itself chiefly in calling names and in swearing.55

  In fact Jeffrey’s criticism of Burns is overwhelmingly ad hominem. The poet is seen as the great transgressor in terms of his multiple morbid and impolite discontents. He is a threat, not least a sexual threat (‘his complimentary effusions to ladies of the higher rank, is forever straining them to the bosom of her impetuous votary’) to the desired, indeed, necessary order of things. Burns, in fact, is corrupted by the Romantic, revolutionary spirit of the age with its absolute moral dispensation for the self-anointed man of genius:

  But the leading vice in Burns’s character, and the cardinal deformity of all his productions, was his contempt or affectation of contempt for prudence, decency and regularity; and his admiration of thoughtlessness, oddity and vehement sensibility; his belief, in short, in the dispensing power of genius and social feeling, in all matters of morality and common sense. This is the very slang of the worst German plays, and the lowest of our out of town-made novels; nor can anything be more lamentable, than that it should have found a patron in such a man as Burns, and communicated to a great part of his productions a character of immortality, at once contemptible and hateful.56

  Granted the applicability of contempt and hate for his poetry, Jeffrey returns to the fallible, fallacious nature of a man who, having forgotten the ordinary duties of life, loses himself in various forms of self-absorbed licentiousness:

  It requires no habit of deep thinking, nor anything more, indeed, than the information of an honest heart, to perceive that it is cruel and base to spend in vain superfluities, that money which belongs of right to the pale industrious tradesman and his famishing infants; or that it is a vile prostitution of language, to talk of that man’s generosity or goodness of heart, who sits raving about friendship and philanthropy in a tavern, while his wife’s heart is breaking at her cheerless fireside, and his children pining in solitary poverty.57

  This, of course, is derived from the language of The Anti-Jacobin of the previous decade with its insistent connection of exaggerated moral fallibility, especially sexual, with political anarchy. (The Anti-Jacobin of 1797 looked forward to an emergent generation of loyalist Tory poets to emulate and surpass the ‘bards of Freedom’ of the 1790s, with their ‘wood-notes wild’. This latter description was, of course, on Burns’s waxen seal.) Character assassination was and, indeed, is an essential establishment weapon. Jeffrey’s intemperate indulgence in it gave open season to varied lesser talents as that for the first two decades of the nineteenth century memoir writers and biographers of Burns outdid each other in denigrating him. Such personal denigration always carried within it the connection between his varied irresponsible, dissolute behaviour and his revolutionary politics. Here again, Jeffrey provides the model:

  This pitiful cant of careless feeling and eccentric genius, accordingly, has never found much favour in the eyes of English sense and morality. The most signal effect which it ever produced, was on the muddy brains of some German youth, who left college in a body to rob on the highway, because Schiller had represented the captain of a gang as so very noble a creature. But in this country, we believe, a predilection for that honourable profession must have proceeded this admiration of the character. The style we have been speaking of, accordingly, is now the heroics only of the hulks and the house of correction; and has no chance, we suppose, of being greatly admired, except in the farewell speech of a young gentleman preparing for Botany Bay.58

  This brutal allusion to the horrendous events of 1793–4 which manifested the criminal breakdown of the Scottish legal system with Braxfield as front-man for the Dundas clan demonstrates the depths of vindictive fear in Jeffrey’s heart for radicalism. Hence Burns himself is to be spared nothing:

  It is humiliating to think how deeply Burns has fallen into this debasing error. He is perpetually making a parade of his thoughtlessness, inflammability and imprudence, and talking with much complacency and exultation of the offence he has occasioned to the sober and correct part of mankind. The odious slang infects almost all his prose, and a very great proportion of his poetry; and is, we are persuaded, the chief if not only the source of the disgust with which, in spite of his genius, we know that he is regarded by many very competent and liberal judges.59

  Jeffrey then, condescendingly, lets Burns wriggle, if not escape from, the hook on which he has impaled him:

  His apology, too, we are willing to believe, is to be found in the original lowness of his situation, and the slightness of his acquaintance with the world. With his talents and powers of observation, he could not have seen much of the beings who echoed this raving, without feeling for them that distrust and contempt which would have made him blush to think he had ever stretched over them the protecting shield of genius.60

  The alleged naïvety inherent in inferior social status has forever haunted Burns criticism and commentary. Jeffrey’s attempt to detach Burns from radical, Romantic connections was as successful as it was erroneous. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and The Edinburgh Review appeared simultaneously and it was Jeffrey’s intention, from the magazine’s inception, to do as much harm to Wordsworth’s poetic reputation as possible because he saw inherent in it a perverse democratic tendency which really was a manifestation of culturally and politically regressive tendencies. In Jeffrey there is, in fact, contempt and fear of the lower classes as not only threatening political disruption but of dragging civilised achievement backwards. Jeffrey feared that the adult condition which he believed his society had attained might be lost in the childish state inherent in socially inferior persons. One of his most repeated protests against the Romantics, Wordsworth in particular, was that their poetic diction was both an expression of and invitation to such regression. Infantilism was its essential mode of speech and society was thereby threatened. Wordsworth, linguistically, offended the law of literary progress:

  But what we do maintain is, that much of the most popular poetry in the world owes its celebrity chiefly to the beauty of its diction; and no poetry can be long or generally acceptable, the language of which is coarse, inelegant, or infantine.

  … the new poets are just as great borrowers as the old; only that, instead of borrowing from the more popular passages of their illustrious predecessors, they have preferred furnishing themselves from vulgar ballads and plebian nurseries.61

  Given this principle, it was absolutely necessary for Jeffrey to detach Burns from any possibility of his poetry being infected by Wordsworth. It was not really his Europhobic attitude to Schiller’s The Robbers but his attitude to Wordsworth in whom he discerned the dangerous source of aesthetic, psychological and political contagion. Thus he wrote:

  … the followers and patrons of that new school of poetry, against which we have thought it our duty to neglect no opportunity of testifying. Those gentlemen are outrageous for simplicity; and we beg leave to recommend to them the simplicity of Burns. He has copied the spoken language of passion and affection, with infinitely more fidelity than they have ever done … but he has not rejected the help of elevated language and habitual associations, nor debased his composition by an affectation of babyish interjections, and all the puling expletives of an old nursery maid’s vocabulary. They may look long enough among his nervous and manly lines, before they find … any stuff about dancing daffodils and sister Emmelines … with what infinite contempt the powerful mind of Burns would have perused the story of Alice Fell and her duffle coat … Let them contrast their own fantastical personages of hysterical schoolmasters and sententious leech-gatherers, with the authentic rustics of Burns’s ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, and his inimitable songs … Though they
will not be reclaimed from their puny affectations by the example of their learned predecessors, they may, perhaps, submit to be admonished by a self-taught and illiterate poet, who drew from Nature far more directly than they can do, and produced something so much like the admired copies of the masters whom they have abjured.62

  Not the least of the consequences of Jeffrey’s obsessive fear and contempt and what he, initially and derogatorily, named as the Lake School, was a blindness, which this edition supplementing recent modern scholarship seeks to rectify, about the actual relationship of Wordsworth to Burns. As Wordsworth wrote in At the Grave of Burns, 1803: Seven Years After His Death:

  I mourned with thousands, but as one

  More deeply grieved, for He was gone

  Whose light I hailed when first it shone,

  And showed my youth

  How Verse may build a princely throne

  On humble truth.

  What enraged Jeffrey was not simply the belief that the aesthetically highest art should engage with the socially lowest class, it was the radical political commitment behind that poetry. Aesthetically, linguistically to deny any possible connection between the English Wordsworth and the Scottish Burns was to deny a radical Scottish political poetry. In the 1790s Burns (especially in the Kilmarnock Edition) and Wordsworth were creatively preoccupied with precisely the same economic and political issues. Hence Wordsworth’s retrospective account of Guilt And Sorrow, or Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain, is not only, as we shall see, related to Burns’s A Winter’s Night, but could be read as a summary of the Scottish poet’s political sympathies and preoccupations at exactly the same period:

  During the latter part of the summer of 1793, having passed a month in the Isle of Wight, in view of the fleet which was then preparing for sea off Portsmouth at the commencement of the war, I left the place with melancholy forebodings. The American war was still fresh in memory. The struggle which was beginning, and which many thought would be brought to a speedy close by the irresistible arms of Great Britain being added to those of the Allies, I was assured in my own mind would be of a long continuance, and productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation. This conviction was pressed upon me by having been a witness during a long residence in revolutionary France, of the spirit which prevailed in that country. After leaving the Isle of Wight, I spent two days in wandering on foot over Salisbury Plain …