The Canongate Burns

by Robert Burns

Conscious the bounteous meed they well deserve,

  They only wonder ‘some folks’ do not starve.

  The grave sage hern thus easy picks his frog,

  65 And thinks the mallard a sad worthless dog.

  When Disappointment snaps the clue of hope,

  And thro’ disastrous night they darkling grope,

  With deaf endurance sluggishly they bear,

  And just conclude that ‘fools are fortune’s care.’

  70 So, heavy, passive to the tempest’s shocks,

  Strong on the sign-post stands the stupid ox.

  Not so the idle Muses’ mad-cap train,

  Nor such the workings of their moon-struck brain;

  In equanimity they never dwell,

  75 By turns in soaring heaven, or vaulted hell.

  I dread thee, Fate, relentless and severe,

  With all a Poet’s, husband’s, father’s fear!

  Already one strong hold of hope is lost,

  Glencairn, the truly noble, lies in dust;

  80 (Fled, like the sun eclips’d as noon appears,

  And left us darkling in a world of tears:)

  O hear my ardent, grateful, selfish pray’r! —

  Fintry, my other stay, long bless and spare!

  Thro’ a long life his hopes and wishes crown,

  85 And bright in cloudless skies his sun go down!

  May bliss domestic smooth his private path;

  Give energy to life; and soothe his latest breath,

  With many a filial tear circling the bed of death!

  Robert Graham (1749–1815) was the 12th Laird of Fintry, although he was forced to sell most of his estate in 1780. Burns met him during his Highland tour at Athole House, August 31st, 1787. In the same year, Fintry was made a Commissioner on the Board of Excise in Scotland. In terms of poetry, the consequence of this relationship was four poems over a three-year period: To Robert Graham of Fintry Esq., with a request for an Excise Division (1788); To Mr Graham of Fintry, On being appointed to my Excise Division (1789); Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry on the Election for the Dumfries string of Boroughs (1790) and To Robert Graham of Fintry, Esq. (1791). The third poem, as we shall see, is a somewhat risky political satire. The other three all are preoccupied with patronage. The second is deeply sycophantic; a sort of inversion of all Burns’s many assertions in his prose and poetry of creative independence at all costs. The other two are fragments of a bigger, incomplete project on the nature of the poet and poetry arising from a mixture of personal observation as found in his earlier vernacular epistles and his reading of, ironically, the dark Tory pessimistic prescriptions of the fate of the poet in society found in Dr Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Pope’s Moral Epistles and, not least, Swift’s great poem On Poetry: A Rapsody. The mixture is further leavened by his awareness, from the latter part of the eighteenth century, of the degree of psychological and economic incompatibility of the poetic personality (Fergusson, Gray, Cowper, Churchill, for example) with the world. Burns chose to publish only this, the last and best of the four ‘Fintry’ poems. Prior to the poetry, Burns wrote to Fintry within a few months of meeting him at Athole House regarding an entry to the Excise:

  When I had the honour of being introduced to you at Athole House, I did not think so soon of asking a favour from you. When Lear, in Shakespeare asked old Kent why he wished to be in his service, he answered ‘Because you have that in your face that I would fain call master!’ For, some such reason, sir, do I now solicit your patronage (Letter 172).

  Given Burns’s use of King Lear in A Winter’s Night, this might seem the most sycophantic betrayal of his normal attitude to social dependency. On the other hand, Burns’s soul did yearn, as with Glencairn and Lord Daer, for aristocrats of benevolent integrity. It is possible, too, traumatised by the loss of Glencairn that, on the rebound, he partly subconsciously projected onto Fintry’s personality what he had experienced with the former patron. He was also in severe fiscal straits, with all the consequent anxieties of that situation.

  As well as his direct approaches to Fintry regarding the limited security an Excise post would offer him, the first and fourth poems are a method of educating Fintry in the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of poetic existence. Obliquely, therefore, the poems insinuate the necessity of Fintry’s support. Also, the money worries ran unstoppably on. This poem was written at a time of particular pecuniary stress. As well as his own family, he had another illegitimate child to provide for. The £400 for the Edinburgh edition had been swallowed up in a loan to Gilbert for Mossgiel where the older brother maintained their mother and sisters. The rest had gone into the bottomless pit of stocking Ellisland. His simultaneously injured leg must have been the last straw. Thus he wrote to Fintry on October 6th, 1791:

  — Along with two other Pieces, I inclose you a sheetful of groans, wrung from me in my elbow chair, with one unlucky leg on a stool before me.— I will make no apology for addressing it to you: I have no longer a choice of Patrons: the noble Glencairn is no more!

  … I thought to have mentioned some Excise ideas that your late goodness has put in my head, but it so like the sorning impudence of a sturdy beggar, that I cannot do it.— It was something in the way of an Officiating job.—With the most ardent wish that you may be rewarded by HIM who can do it, for your generous patronage to a man, who, tho’ feelingly sensible of it, is quite unable to repay it …

  Victorian commentators tended to accept Fintry’s benevolence at the value Burns here places on it. Thus Scott Douglas (p. 342) quoting Professor Wilson (‘Christopher North’):

  Of all Burns’s friends the most efficient was Graham of Fintry. To him he owed exciseman’s diploma—settlement as a gauger in a district of ten parishes, when he was a gudeman at Ellisland —translation as a gauger to Dumfries—support against insidious foes, despicable, yet not to be despised, with rumour at their head—vindication at the Excise Board—a temporary supervisorship—and, though he knew not of it, security from dreaded degradation on his death bed.

  Wilson, because he was so aware of the savage social discontents of the nineteenth century, was only too eager to represent the Burns/ Fintry relationship in the most positive light. Despite his fiscal needs and functional abilities as an Exciseman, Burns was never promoted. Nor, as Wilson suggests, was it unfounded political rumour that Fintry was benevolently dealing with. Fintry was no neutral. From our recent archival research Fintry did, in fact, receive payments from the government’s secret service fund for activities against individuals in the radical movement from 1793 to 1796. (See Laing Ms. collection, II, folio 500, pp. 404–5, Edinburgh University Library.) For example, the payment of £26.6 shillings is dated April, 1793, itemised for Graham of Fintry and paid out of the ‘account of Secret Service’: payments were made initially to John Pringle, Sherriff Depute of the County of Edinburgh, from the administrator of spies in London, Mr John Spottiswood, a Scot with a Scottish estate, who worked directly for Henry Dundas. There are also in the archive several letters from Fintry, to inter-alia, Robert Dundas on curbing radical activity and placing these loyal to the government in public posts and sinecures. From this it is possible to speculate that, rather than looking after Burns, Fintry was keeping him dependent and cornered in Dumfries. Burns himself, of course, was desperate to have the Excise move him to the more radically sympathetic West of Scotland.

  Nor does Wilson’s meliorism begin to explain the known course of events. The general tenor of the fifteen extant letters of Burns to Fintry is friendly, sometimes even frank. However, the pattern is totally disrupted in December, 1792 in Burns’s near hysterical response to reports that he was about to be investigated for alleged sedition/treason due to both his writing and public behaviour. On the very last day of that year, he wrote to Fintry thus:

  I have been surprised, confounded & distracted by Mr Mitchel, the Collector, telling me just now, that he has received an order from your Honble Board to enquire into my political conduct, & blaming me a
s a person disaffected to Government.—Sir, you are a Husband—& a father—you know what you would feel, to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, & your helpless, prattling little ones, turned adrift into the word, degraded & disgraced from a situation in which they had been respectable and respected, & left [without (deleted)] almost without the necessary support of a miserable existence.—Alas, Sir! must I think that such, soon, will be my lot! And from the damned, dark insinuations of hellish, groundless Envy too!—I believe, Sir, I may aver it, & in the sight of Omnipotence, that I would not tell a deliberate Falsehood, no, not though even worse horrors, if worse can be, than those I have mentioned, hung over my head; & I say, that the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a LIE! To the British Constitution, on Revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached!—

  You, Sir, have been much & generously my Friend—Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, how gratefully I have thanked you.—Fortune, Sir, has made you powerful, & me impotent; has given you patronage, & me dependance.—I would not for my single Self call on your Humanity; were such my insular, unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my eye—I could brave Misfortune, I could face Ruin: for at the worst, ‘Death’s thousand doors stand open;’ but, Good God! the tender concerns that I have mentioned, the claims & ties that I, at this moment, see & feel around me, how they ennerve Courage, & wither Resolution! To your patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim; & your esteem, as an honest Man, I know is my due: to these, Sir, permit me to appeal; & by these may I adjure you to save me from that misery which threatens to overwhelm me, & which, with my latest breath I will say it, I have not deserved.—

  Pardon this confused scrawl.—Indeed I know not well what I have written.— (Letter 528)

  This is not so out of control as it seems. As well as alluding ‘death’s thousand doors’ from Blair’s The Grave, his reference to ‘the British Constitution, on Revolution principles next after my God’, is an escape clause since the establishment Tories and Whig radicals interpreted the constitutional settlement of the Glorious Revolution wholly differently. The former group saw it as perfectly formed and finished. The latter saw it as the embryo for indefinite reformative change. This first letter to Fintry was followed on 5th January by a more considered point by point rebuttal of the charges against him. He repeats his defence of the British Constitution. He denies his involvement in a Dumfries theatrical disturbance where the singing of the national anthem was overwhelmed by the provocative French revolutionary song, Ça ira. He claims to have weaned himself of his French affiliations after an imperial France’s annexation of Savoy and an invasion of Holland’s rights. What is, however, most relevant to his subsequent anonymous radical poetry is his disclaimer of all knowledge of Captain Johnston, the publisher of the dissenting Edinburgh Gazetteer.

  Of Johnston, the publisher of the Edinr. Gazetteer, I know nothing.—One evening in company with four or five friends, we met with his prospectus which we thought manly and independant; & I wrote to him, ordering his paper for us.— If you think that I act improperly in allowing his Paper to come addressed to me, I shall immediately countermand it.—I never so judge me, God wrote a line of prose for the Gazetteer in my life.

  The key word here, of course, is prose. It is also a defence based on the letter not the spirit of his previous communication with Captain Johnston. As he wrote to Johnston on 13th November, 1792, describing the magazine as ‘the first Composition of the kind in Europe’:

  Go on, Sir! Lay bare, with undaunted heart & steady hand, that horrid mass of corruption called Politics & State-Craft. Dare to draw in their native colors these

  ‘Calm, thinking VILLAINS who no faith can fix’

  whatever be the shiboleth (sic) of their pretended Party (Quotation from Pope’s The Temple of Fame, l. 410).

  As to the poem itself, its genesis can be dated from a letter to Mrs Dunlop written three years before the poem was sent to Fintry:

  I began a Work lately, but what that work may be, I am totally ignorant.—As Young says, ‘ ’Tis nonsense destined to be future sense.’—I sent you a fragment of it by my last: take the following rough Sketch of the intended beginning, & let me know your opinion of the lines— The Poet’s Progress, An embryotic Poem in the womb of futurity (ll. 9–55, quoted).

  Thus far only have I proceeded, & perhaps I may never again resume the subject.—I must mention one caution to you, Madam, with respect to these verses; I have a remote idea that I may one day use them as instruments of vengeance, & consequently I will hide them like a Conspirator’s dagger (Letter 281).

  Burns, indeed, as political poet is the archetypal smiler with a knife. This poem, however, has no specific targets but is a general analysis of the multi-displaced poetic personality. Kinsley was innately hostile to Burns’s incursions into such Augustan linguistically and thematically derived terrain. The poem, then, has never had the attention it deserves. This is literally true, as Hogg discovered that ll. 17–36 of Burns’s poem were compressed by Coleridge into a twelve-line verse and sent in a letter to Josiah Wade at Bristol circa February 10, 1796. These lines appear in the Oxford Coleridge under the title Habent Sunt Fata Poetae and are wrongly defined as a sonnet by Molly Lefebre in her Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (London: 1977), p. 175. Here is Coleridge’s compressed version:

  The Fox, and Statesman subtile wiles ensure,

  The Cit, and Polecat stink and are secure:

  Toads with their venom, Doctors with their drug,

  The Priest, the Hedgehog, in their robes are snug!

  5 Oh, Nature! cruel step-mother, and hard,

  To thy poor, naked, fenceless child the Bard!

  No Horns but those by luckless Hymen worn,

  And those, (alas! alas!) not Plenty’s Horn!

  With naked feelings, and with aching pride,

  10 He bears th’ unbroken blast on every side!

  Vampire Booksellers drain him to the heart,

  And Scorpion Critics cureless venom dart!

  The problem of plagiarism in Coleridge is notorious though in this case, a private letter, he was not obviously trying to pass the Burns lines off as his own. What it does demonstrate, however, is not only the relevance Coleridge felt Burns’s perceptions had for his own awareness of his situation as poet but the degree to which Burns was self-consciously, creatively aware of the chronic social, political, critical and economic dilemma of poetry since the early part of the eighteenth century. Carol McGuirk, always eruditely atuned to the resonances of canonical English poetry in Burns, notes with regard to this poem that ‘among the sources for ll. 56–71, with their imagery of blissful folly and triumphant Dulness are Pope’s Dunciad and Swift’s … Tale of a Tub.’ It is problematic as to how much of Swift Burns knew. Both were peculiarly displaced men: Burns by reason of class and Swift more by ethnicity. The psychological traumas of this were creatively compensated for in the terms of the manner in which their consequent detached, disguised personas could, with varied laughter, undermine the madness of institutionalised power especially in both its monarchical and Presbyterian states. It also seems from the textual evidence highly probable that this Burns poem is partly based on a reading of what Swift himself considered his greatest poem, On Poetry: A Rapsody. Here is the opening of Swift:

  All Human Race wou’d fain be Wits

  And Millions miss, for one that hits

  Young’s universal Passion, Pride,

  Was never known to spread so wide.

  5 Say Britain, cou’d you ever boast,—

  Three Poets in an Age at most?

  Our chilling Climate hardly bears

  A Sprig of Bays in Fifty Years:

  While ev’ry Fool his Claim alledges,

  10 As if it grew in common Hedges.

  What Reason can there be assign’d

  For this Perverseness in the Mind?

  Brutes find out where their Talents lie:
<
br />   A Bear will not attempt to fly:

  15 A founder’d Horse will oft debate,

  Before he tries a five-barr’d Gate:

  A Dog by Instinct turns aside,

  Who sees the Ditch too deep and wide.

  But Man we find the only Creature,

  20 Who, led by Folly, fights with Nature;

  Who, when she loudly cries, Forbear,

  With Obstinacy fixes there;

  And, where his Genius least inclines,

  Absurdly bends his whole Designs.

  25 Not Empire to the Rising-Sun

  By Valour, Conduct, Fortune won;

  Nor highest Wisdom in Debates

  For framing Laws to govern States;

  Nor Skill in Sciences profound,

  30 So large to grasp the Circle round;

  Such heavenly Influence require,

  As how to strike the Muses Lyre.

  Not Beggar’s Brat, on Bulk begot;

  Nor Bastard of a Pedlar Scot;

  35 Nor Boy brought up to cleaning Shoes,

  The Spawn of Bridewell, or the Stews;

  Nor Infants dropt, the spurious Pledges

  Of Gipsies littering under Hedges,

  Are so disqualified by Fate

  40 To rise in Church, or Law, or State,

  As he, whom Phebus in his Ire

  Hath blasted with poetick Fire.

  What hope of Custom in the Fair,

  While not a soul demands your Ware?

  45 Where you have nothing to produce

  For private Life, or publick Use?

  Court, City, Country want you not;

  You cannot bribe, betray, or plot.

  For Poets, Law makes no Provision:

  50 The Wealthy have you in Derision.

  Of State-Affairs you cannot smatter,

  Are awkward when you try to flatter.

  Both poems are obsessed with the dysfunctional role of the poet in a world where everything else is functionally placed. While Burns is more inclined to place the problem in the innate character of the poet, he is wholly complicit with Swift’s analysis of a creative environment warped by the decline of aristocratic patronage, the corrupting effects of the new commercial, book-selling world and the institutionalisation of a rule-bound, pretentious criticism. Burns was a political radical but he is also as hierarchical and é litist as Tory Swift or Pope in his notion that the waters of the Helicon were increasingly polluted by usurping pseudo-poets. As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop: ‘Besides, my success has encouraged such a shoal of ill-spawned monsters to crawl into public notice under the title of Scots Poets, that the very term, Scots poetry, borders on the burlesque’. Nor does he, despite Kinsley, suffer in the depth of the quality of his analysis with Swift.