by Robert Burns
Dr James Mackay’s 1993 edition, endorsed by the Burns Federation, parasitically plunders Kinsley’s volume III annotations (often presenting them as his own, without acknowledgement) and, to make matters worse, reproduces the worst Burns text available, that of the corrupted Henley–Henderson edition. Mackay enlarges the Burns canon to around 650 works, without explanation. He does not number each poem, so the increase is not noticeable. He includes works omitted by Kinsley and excludes work Kinsley accepted. In the appendix he asserts that Kinsley ‘attempted to define the canon for all time, listing 632 poems and songs which were incontrovertibly the work of Burns’. He then states that all of the poems in Kinsley’s Dubia section are shown not to be from Burns, although most of these are printed by Mackay as genuine. The net effect is to leave the Burns canon confused.
The essential purpose of this edition, therefore, has been to update Burns, by recontextualising him into the 1790s where he was a central creative Scottish figure. As our commentaries try to show, he was also a central figure in British radical consciousness and widely admired in that circle. His poetry and rhetoric is only properly understood as an inspired Scottish variant amid the creative language of that period for he shared the sense that generation had of being in a sort of historical cyclotron where, accelerating to breaking point, their initial Utopian hopes were eventually reduced to ‘dark despair’ by the tyranny and fear inspired by Pitt’s government. In a recent article ‘Beware of Reverence: Writing and Radicalism in the 1790s’, Paul O’Flinn refers to the:
… extraordinary explosion of radical writing from the early 1790s, a period probably unmatched in British history for its intellectual daring and its moral courage. The conventional and surely correct explanation for this phenomenon is that it represents the cultural articulation of a unique conjuncture in Western history, the years that saw the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789 and, in Britain, the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution.5
The real ‘onslaught’ was more the British elite’s hysterical reaction to the effects of the French Revolution. This was a war between democratic reformist forces and conservatism which the latter overwhelmingly won. The effect was to pervert the development of the Industrial Revolution, displace and effectively destroy the Scottish Enlightenment, silence and crush the voice of dissent, for at least a generation.
This was largely achieved through the tyrannical spy network overseen in Scotland by Robert Dundas and in London by Henry Dundas and key Home Office personnel, including a Mr John Spottiswood, a London based Scottish lawyer. Spottiswood dispensed the Secret Service funds from London to John Pringle, Sheriff Depute of Edinburgh on a regular basis from December 1792 onwards. A bill for £1000 was paid on 8 February, 1793 and during the first quarter of the year £975 had been spent on secrect service ‘spying’ activities. Out of this total the poet’s apparent loyal patron, Robert Graham of Fintry, as we commented in the Introduction, was paid £26.6s.0d.6 Burns’s fear of persecution at the close of 1792 is no isolated case. The cases of Tytler and Muir are already mentioned, but less known is the case of Professor Richard-son of Glasgow University, who had a personal letter intercepted by the government. He wrote, ‘I tread on dangerous ground. Many things may be said which cannot be written … there is not a literary man in Glasgow with whom I can speak freely on the topic of the times’7 Even the poet’s friend William Dunbar, the ‘Colonel’ of the Crochallan Fencibles, was suspected of being a radical Jacobin. In a letter to a friend, Alexander Brodie, Dunbar pleaded for his job and pledged his allegiance to the crown, constitution and personal loyalty to the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas.8 We have tried to integrate as much as possible of this political material into our poetic commentary.
Thus, the structure of this edition, rather than chronological, represents not simply the sequence in which Burns’s poetry came into the public domain, but, initially, the way he chose creatively to reveal himself in the work published in his lifetime under his own name. Hence, the Kilmarnock is followed by the two Edinburgh editions. The first Edinburgh edition added 15 new poems and 8 new songs to the canon. The 1793 edition added several more, including Tam o’Shanter which, given that William Creech had purchased the poet’s copyright, earned Burns merely a few ‘presentation copies’ of his own works. The 1793 edition was re-printed in 1794 without addition.
Our next section, the songs published in the poet’s lifetime, mostly in James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, include many Jacobite songs that were printed anonymously. The importance of Scottish traditional music, particularly fiddle-based slow airs, to Burns’s lyrics, cannot be overestimated, given his extraordinary debt to musicians and music collectors of the period. However, Burns’s debt to traditional song is also extensive as our notes reveal and it is in this section, particularly songs merely improved by Burns, where the genre of traditional song and the Burns canon tend to blur and overlap. Like a grand mural tapestry, traditional Scottish folk song from the eighteenth century was effectively rewoven by Burns with a mixture of his own and older lyrics.
We then move to the Anonymous and Pseudonymous section, where, like almost all the radical writers of that darkening decade, he had deliberately to disguise his identity. We hope we have shown, with painstaking archival research and detailed textual analyses, the way in which poems, especially those recovered from The Edinburgh Gazetteer, stylistically, linguistically and thematically match his other known ones. Ten of the poems printed here derive from Patrick Scott Hogg’s Robert Burns: The Lost Poems (1997) and other new work, found since then, has been included for readers to examine. Despite the over-heated, largely media-driven debate on the appearance of that book, it has stood up extremely well to proper academic scrutiny. Only two of Scott Hogg’s discoveries have been found to be certainly not by Burns. These poems we now know came from the pen of the extraordinary Dr Alexander Geddes, a radical Roman Catholic priest (Burns knew and adored his uncle, John Geddes, Roman Catholic Bishop of Dunkeld). Geddes is at the top of the list of radical Scots to be retrieved from the abyss of the 1790s into which they vanished from the national memory. Geddes was a polymath. He was at the cutting edge of the new German inspired Higher Biblical Criticism. He was an intimate of Coleridge and, arguably, an influence on Blake’s Biblical views. He was co-editor of the radical house-journal of the period, The Analytical Review. He not only went to France but read a celebratory ode written in Latin to the National Assembly.
The two Geddes poems identified by our then colleague at the University of Strathclyde, Gerard Carruthers, are Exhortatory Ode to the Prince of Wales on Entering his 34th Year and Ode for the Birthday of C.J. Fox. The Burns/Geddes connection will be dealt with in detail with regard to particular, relevant poems in the following commentary. What should be stressed is that the retrieval of Geddes will be an enormously strong element in supporting this edition’s argument for a pervasive literary and radical Scottish political culture at the end of the eighteenth century.
Scott Hogg’s initial case and that of this edition has also been enormously strengthened by the discovery of Professor Lucyle Werkmeister’s magisterial work on the radical press in the 1790s and, in particular, her two articles on the politically necessary complex but extensive relations between Burns and the London press. Why her work was ignored is problematic. Certainly it stems in part from a sort of Scottish psychological and political conservatism that has led to Burns being detached from his radical peers. We have tried in our poetic commentary to renew these connections with Burns and the English Romantics. He is not understandable without an awareness of advanced Romantic scholarship as is recently discoverable in such books as E.P. Thompson’s The Romantics: England in Revolutionary Age (London: Merlin Press, 1998) or Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth (London: Norton, 1998).
In the Posthumous section, virtually half of this volume, we have tried to pinpoint the incalculable degree to which, after his death, Burns’s work was hidden away, destroyed or even burned
. The fact that such an enormous number of poems, many of the highest quality and importance, only surfaced after his death and that destruction of texts carried on for such a long period of time, is overwhelming proof of the enormous censorship he had, in life and death, to endure. For example the page torn from volume three of the Interleaved Scots Musical Museum with the song title The Lucubrations of Henry Dundass, May 1792, probably revealed Burns’s satirical treatment of Dundas’s clumsy and authoritarian action to cripple Borough reform, which resulted in street riots in Edinburgh and burning effigies of Dundas being paraded around the city. That such censorship has carried over into the twenty-first century is clear from a recent discovery of a private collection of transcripts to Burns’s letters to Robert Ainslie which remain unpublished.
The final section The Merry Muses of Caledonia presents those bawdy songs known to have been written or improved by Burns, which, for so long, were the private amusement of smoking-room ‘gentlemen’ who sought to protect the general public from this earthy trait of the vital Burns. The volume closes with an appendix of as-yet undetermined and rejected works.
Andrew Noble
Patrick Scott Hogg
NOTES
1 Catherine Carswell, Letters, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, MS 53.
2 Prof. J. De Lancey Ferguson, ‘They Censored Burns’, in Scotland’s Magazine, Vol. 51, January 1955, pp. 29–30.
3 David Norbrook, Writing The English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660, Cambridge, 1999.
4 James Kinsley, Warton Lecture to the British Academy, 23 January 1974, printed by the British Academy, 1985.
5 Paul O’Flinn, in Writing and Radicalism, ed. Lucas (London: Longman), 1996, pp. 84–101.
6 See Laing MS. 500, ff.404–5. Additional letters Fintry to Robert Dundas, exist in Laing II, 500/f.734, f.747, f.751, ff.753–7, f.1076, f.1084.
7 RH 2/4/65f.84–5.
8 Laing II, 500, f.544.
PART ONE
The Kilmarnock Edition
1786
APRIL 14th, 1786
PROPOSALS,
FOR PUBLISHING BY SUBSCRIPTION,
SCOTCH POEMS,
BY ROBERT BURNS.
The work to be elegantly Printed in One
Volume, Octavo, Price, stitched Three Shillings.
As the Author has not the most distant
Mercenary view in Publishing, as soon as so many Subscribers appear as will defray the necessary Expense, the Work will be sent to the Press.
‘Set out the brunt side o’ your shin,
For pride in Poets is nae sin;
Glory’s the Prize for which they rin,
And Fame’s their jo;
And wha blaws best the Horn shall win:
And wharefare no?’
RAMSAY.
The following trifles are not the production of the Poet, who, with all the advantages of learned art, and perhaps amid the elegancies and idleness of upper life, looks down for a rural theme, with an eye to Theocrites or Virgil. To the Author of this, these and other celebrated names their countrymen are, in their original languages, ‘A fountain shut up’ and, a ‘book sealed’. Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing Poet by Rule, he sings the sentiments and manners, he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and their native language. Though a Rhymer from his earliest years, at least from the earliest impulses of the softer passions, it was not till very lately, that the applause, perhaps the partiality, of Friendship, wakened his vanity so far as to make him think any thing of his was worth showing; and none of the following works were ever composed with a view to the press. To amuse himself with the little creations of his own fancy, amid the toils and fatigues of a laborious life; to transcribe the various feelings, the loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, in his own breast; to find some kind of counterpoise to the struggles of a world, always an alien scene, a task uncouth to the Poetical mind; these were his motives for courting the Muses, and in these he found Poetry to be its own reward.
Now that he appears in the public character of an Author, he does it with fear and trembling. So dear is fame to the Rhyming tribe, that even he, an obscure, nameless Bard, shrinks aghast, at the thought of being branded as ‘an impertinent blockhead, obtruding his nonsense on the world; and because he can make a shift to jingle a few doggerel, Scotch rhymes together, looks upon himself as a Poet of no small consequence forsooth’.
It is an observation of that celebrated Poet [Shenstone], whose divine Elegies do honour to our language, our nation, and our species, that ‘Humility has depressed many a genius to a hermit, but never raised one to fame’. If any Critic catches at the word genius, the Author tells him, once for all, that he certainly looks upon himself as possest of some poetic abilities, otherwise his publishing in the manner he has done, would be a manoeuvre below the worst character, which, he hopes, his worst enemy will ever give him: but to the genius of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawning of the poor, unfortunate Ferguson, he with equal unaffected sincerity, declares, that, even in his highest pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions. These two justly admired Scotch Poets he has often had in his eye in the following pieces; but rather with a view to kindle at their flame, than for servile imitation.
To his Subscribers, the Author returns his most sincere thanks. Not the mercenary bow over a counter, but the heart-throbbing gratitude of the Bard, conscious how much he is indebted to Benevolence and Friendship, for gratifying him, if he deserves it, in that dearest wish of every poetic bosom – to be distinguished. He begs his readers, particularly the Learned and the Polite, who may honour him with a perusal, that they will make every allowance for Education and Circumstances of Life: but, if after a fair, candid, and impartial criticism, he shall stand convicted of Dulness and Nonsense, let him be done by, as he would in that case do by others – let him be condemned, without mercy, to oblivion.
R.B.
Nature’s Bard
First published on the front page of the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
The Simple Bard, unbroke by rules of Art,
He pours the wild effusions of the heart:
And if inspir’d, ’tis Nature’s pow’rs inspire;
Her’s all the melting thrill, and her’s the kindling fire.
Anonymous.
The Kilmarnock edition begins with four lines supposedly from an anonymous poet, wholly appropriate to the image Burns wished to project to his readers. They are, in all probability, his own composition. In his Preface, Burns coyly suggests that he does not have ‘all the advantages of learned art’ in poetry – when, in fact, he is a master craftsman in poetic form and metre. He goes on to explain that his poetry is the product of Nature’s influence on him. This projected persona is captured perfectly in the quatrain. The possibility that Burns wrote these lines was first suggested by the highly distinguished American scholar, Professor Carol McGuirk, in her excellent Robert Burns: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1993). A search of known anonymous poetry for the 18th century did not trace a potential author other than Burns. The lines are a hand-in-glove portrayal of Burns’s self-projection of himself as a poet.
The Twa Dogs: A Tale
First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.
’Twas in that place o’ Scotland’s isle
That bears the name of auld King COIL, old, Kyle
Upon a bonie day in June, bonny
When wearing thro’ the afternoon,
5 Twa Dogs, that were na thrang at hame, two, not busy, home
Forgather’d ance upon a time. met by chance, once
The first I’ll name, they ca’d him Caesar, called
Was keepet for his Honor’s pleasure: kept
His hair, his size, his mouth, his lugs, ears
10 Shew’d he was nane o’ Scotland’s dogs; none
But whalpet some place far abroad, pupped
Whare sailors gang to fish for Cod. where, go
His locked, letter�
�d, braw brass-collar
Shew’d him the gentleman an’ scholar;
15 But tho’ he was o’ high degree,
The fient a pride na pride had he; fiend, no
But wad hae spent an hour caressan, would have
Ev’n wi’ a Tinkler-gipsey’s messan; mongrel
At Kirk or Market, Mill or Smiddie, smithy
20 Nae tawtied tyke, tho’ e’er sae duddie, matted cur, so ragged
But he wad stan’t, as glad to see him, would have stood
An’ stroan’t on stanes an’ hillocks wi’ him. pissed, stones
The tither was a ploughman’s collie,
A rhyming, ranting, raving billie, fellow/character
25 Wha for his friend an’ comrade had him, who
And in his freaks had Luath ca’d him,
After some dog in Highland Sang,1
Was made lang syne, Lord knows how lang. long ago
He was a gash an’ faithfu’ tyke, wise, dog
30 As ever lap a sheugh or dyke! leapt, ditch, stone wall
His honest, sonsie, baws’nt face friendly, white marks
Ay gat him friends in ilka place; always got, every
His breast was white, his touzie back shaggy
Weel clad wi’ coat o’ glossy black; well covered