by Robert Burns
The notion that the priapic Burns, the only rooster in the barn-yard, would have any affiliation to women’s rights seems not credible. He was, however, more complex than that. His friendship with Maria Riddell was based on a common radicalism. Part of the extreme tension within that relationship derived from the fact that, because of her social position, she was able to articulate political ideas about which he had to keep his mouth shut. Through the Riddell connection, however, he met another young, apparently radically inclined Welshwoman, Deborah Duff Davies. Writing to her on April 6th, 1793, less than a year after the Dumfries performance we get this tormented letter written in the wake of the Sedition Trials as Burns rages at the impotence not only of his own radical values but the cost to this for even more depressed and suppressed women. Catherine Carswell, politically empathetic to Burns, believed that he was, because of his non-appearance in Edinburgh among The Scottish Friends of the People, guilt-driven as well as manifestly confined by his office and his alert enemies. Thus he writes:
Good God, why this disparity between our wishes & our powers!— … I know that your hearts have been wounded by the scorn of the Proud whom accident has placed above you, or worse still, in whose hands, perhaps, are placed many of the comforts of your life: but, there! ascend that rock of Independance, & look, justly, down on their littleness of soul.—Make the Worthless tremble under your indignation, & the Foolish sink before your contempt; & largely impart that happiness to others which I am certain will give yourselves so much pleasure to bestow!
… Why, amid my generous enthusiasm, must I find myself a poor, powerless devil, incapable of wiping one tear from the eye of Misery, or of adding one comfort to the Friend I love!— Out upon the world! say I; that its affairs are administered so ill!—They talk of REFORM—My God! what a reform would I make among the Sons, & even the Daughters of men!
Down, immediately, should go FOOLS from the high places where misbegotten CHANCE has perked them up, & through life should they sculk, ever haunted by their native insignificance, as the body marches accompanied by its shadow.—As for a much more formidable class, the knaves, I am at a loss what to do with them.—Had I a world, there should not be a knave in it: & on the other hand, Hell as our Theologians paint it, particularly an eternal Hell, is a deeper damnation than I could bear to see the veriest scoundrel in earth plunged into.— But the hand that could give, I would liberally fill: & I would pour delight on the heart that could kindly forgive, & generously love.—
Still, the inequalities of life are, among MEN, comparatively tolerable: but there is a DELICACY, a TENDERNESS, accompanying every view in which one can place lovely WO-MAN, that are grated & shocked at the rude, capricious distinctions of Fortune.— Woman is the BLOOD-ROYAL of life: let there be slight degrees of precedency among them, but let them be all sacred.—
Whether this last sentiment be right, or wrong, I am not accountable: it is an original, component feature of my mind.— I remember, & ’tis almost the earliest thing I do remember, when I was quite a boy, one day at church, being enraged at seeing a young creature, one of the maids of his house, rise from the mouth of the pew to give way to a bloated son of Wealth & Dullness, who waddled surlily past her.— Indeed the girl was very pretty; & he was an ugly, stupid, purse-proud, money-loving, old monster, as you can imagine (Letter 556A).
This is marked by the trauma of failure of revolutionary anticipations, reiterated cries of despair found in the late Burns comparable in quality and intensity to those prevailing in William Hazlitt’s prose. In 1792 all still seemed possible so that the actual performance of The Rights of Woman in the agitated Dumfries theatre, as reported by Scott Douglas, seems quite probable:
At the Dumfries Theatre, under the management of Mr. Sutherland, a pretty young actress—Miss Fontenelle—formed one of the company during the winter of 1792, and also of the year following. The local newspapers announced her benefit-night for 26th November, 1792, and that after the play—The Country Girl—she would ‘deliver an occasional address, written by Mr. Robert Burns, called The Rights of Woman.’ At that period the government of this country was in great alarm regarding the spread of what were termed liberal or revolutionary opinions. Paine had produced his ‘Rights of Man,’ and Mary Wollstoncroft was advocating the ‘Rights of Woman,’ and many thought that the line, ‘Truce with kings, and truce with constitutions’— the fourth from the end in this Address, was by far too bold, and that the finishing-stroke, ça ira! was intolerable.
Chambers records, that a lady with whom he once conversed, ‘remembered being present in the theatre of Dumfries, during the heat of the Revolution, when Burns entered the pit somewhat affected by liquor. On God save the King being struck up by the band, the audience rose as usual—all except the intem-perate poet, who cried for ça ira! A tumult was the consequence, and Burns was compelled to leave the house.’ (Vol. II, p. 156)
Burns’s denial that the words of the great, inflammatory song of the Revolution (‘Ça ira,/La liberté s’établira,/Malgré les tyrans tout ré ussira’) ever exclusively left his lips in his letter to Fintry is a mini-masterpiece of self-defensive comic irony:
I was in the playhouse one night, when Ça ira was called for.—I was in the middle of the pit, & from the Pit the clamour arose.— One or two individuals with whom I occasionally associate were of the party, but I neither knew of the Plot, nor joined in the Plot; nor ever opened my lips to hiss, or huzza, that, or any other Political tune whatever.—I looked on myself as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a Riot; at the same time, as a character of higher respectability, than to yell in the howlings of a rabble.—This was the conduct of all the first Characters in this place; & these Characters know, & will avow, that such was my conduct (Letter 530).
He repeats this denial to Mrs Dunlop with another variation of what happened in the theatre with the audience divided over the English national anthem and the French song of revolution but implies his poem was not that night’s cause of disturbance:
We, in this country, here have many alarms of the reform, or rather the Republican spirit, of your part of the kingdom.— Indeed, we are a good deal in commotion ourselves, & in our Theatre here, ‘God save the king’ has met with some groans and hisses, while Ça ira has been repeatedly called for.—For me, I am a Placeman, you know; a very humble one indeed, Heaven knows, but still so much so as to gag me from joining in the cry.—What my private sentiments are, you will find out without an Interpreter.—In the mean time, I have taken up the subject in another view, and the other day, for a pretty Actress’s benefit-night, I wrote an Address, which I will give on the other page, called The Rights of Woman (Letter 525).
Even if Burns believed that Mrs Dunlop lived in a ‘republican’ Ayrshire, it is extraordinary that he could, given she had sons fighting the French, have so misjudged her political sympathies as to believe she would continue to act as his political confidante. In fact, she broke off all connection with him till just before his death as a consequence of his revealed revolutionary sentiments to her. This reaches its climax in his extraordinary letter to her of December 31st of 1792 of which two three-quarter-page sections have been cut away as part of the largely unsystematic but catastrophic destruction of political evidence that has been such a curse for subsequent understanding, scholarly and otherwise. This is the real situation about both his beliefs and the tormentingly hostile environment in which he held them:
—I have corresponded with Commissr. Graham, for the Board had made me the subject of their animadversions; & now I have the pleasure of informing that all is set to rights in that quarter.—Now, as to these inquisitorial Informers, Spies, Persecutors, &c. may the d-vil & his angels be let loose to— but hold! I was praying most fervently in my last sheet, & I must not so soon fall accursing in this.—
Alas! how little do the wickedly, or wantonly, or idly, officious, think what mischief they do by their malicious insinuations, indiscreet impertinence, or thoughtless blabbings.�
�� What a difference there is, in intrinsic worth; Candour, Bene-volence, Generosity, Kindness—in all the Charities & all the Virtues; between one class of human beings & another!—[three words deleted] For instance, the amiable circle I so lately mixed with in the hospitable hall of Dunlop,—their gentle, generous hearts; their uncontaminated, dignified minds; their informed& polished understandings what a contrast, when compared—if such comparing were not downright sacrilege—with the prostituted soul of the miscreant wretch, who can deliberately & diabolically plot the destruction of an honest man who never offended him; & with a hellish grin of satisfaction can see the unfortunate man, his faithful wife, & prattling innocents, turned over to Beggary & Ruin.—Can such things be? Oui! telles choses se font! Je viens d’en faire une épreuve maudite.—(By the way, I don’t know whether this is French; & much would it go against my soul, to mar anything belonging to that gallant people: though my real sentiments of them shall be confined alone to my [letters (deleted)] correspondence with you.) (Letter 529)
On the Commemoration
of Rodney’s Victory
King’s Arms, Dumfries, 12th April, 1793
First printed in The Edinburgh Advertiser, issue 16th–19th April, 1793.
Friday last, being the Anniversary of the late Admiral Rodney’s glorious victory, a party of gentlemen desirous to commemorate the day, dined together in the King’s Arms, Dumfries. Many loyal and suitable toasts were drunk on the occasion, and several naval songs were sung: the following EXTEMPORE by BURNS, when it was his turn to sing, ought not to be omitted:
Instead of a song, boys! I’ll give you a toast;
Here’s the Mem’ry of those on the twelfth that we lost!
We lost! did I say? no, by Heav’n, that we found!
For their fame it shall live while the world goes round.
5 The next in succession I’ll give you the KING.
And who would betray him, on high may he swing!
And here’s the grand fabric, OUR FREE CONSTITUTION
As built on the base of THE GREAT REVOLUTION!
And, longer with Politics not to be cramm’d —
10 Be Anarchy curs’d — and be Tyranny d [amn]’d;
And who would to Liberty e’er prove disloyal,
May his son be a hangman, and he his first trial!!
Admiral George Brydges Rodney (1718–92) won a victory over the French navy at Dominica on 12th April, 1782, securing British control of the Atlantic. It was a major naval engagement, the ‘Battle of the Saints’, where 36 British engaged 34 French ships.
The headnote is taken from The Edinburgh Advertiser where the verse was first printed. Given that there is no extant manuscript, this newspaper entry is the only evidence of the poet’s authorship. Despite J.W. Egerer’s dismissal of the poem as ‘doggerel’ Burns did not write (See Kinsley, Vol. III, p. 1425), it is obviously authentic. Kinsley accepts it into the canon, recording that it appears in the Advertiser, although he does not specify which Advertiser and clearly did not check the original source. The use of italics and capitals, not given in most editions, is vividly that of Burns in the newspaper copy, as printed above. The poem is not printed in the usual poetry section of the newspaper but presented as a news item.
Burns had a very good reason for seeing it printed in The Edinburgh Advertiser, Scotland’s most loyal, governmental newspaper. He had been instructed formally by the Excise to keep out of radical politics. So, the introduction to the fragment suggests it was sent to the newspaper by someone other than Burns. The habitual stylistic stressing of the poem in the newspaper version could only have been copied from a manuscript. A manuscript could only have come from Burns himself, or someone to whom he gave a copy. If Burns acted with complicity in seeing the poem deliberately printed in a pro-government newspaper, then we are probably looking at a precursor to The Dumfries Volunteers, where Burns’s verse appears in public to present him as a loyal subject of the King. If this is a correct assumption, it was intended to delight critics of the poet’s radical politics who probably thought he had changed his views. While Burns might have set out deliberately to appease his Edinburgh Excise masters who would certainly have seen this song, it is apparent from his emphatic use of capitals that the Great Revolution, the Constitution and particularly Liberty (for radicals this meant reform) were still uppermost in his mind. The irony here is that most of the loyalist government supporters were avowed enemies of ‘Liberty’, seen at this time as the key principle of French Republicanism. Hence, in these few lines the politically chastened Burns disarms his critics by toasting the King, then drinks a toast to Liberty, declaring that those who would betray ‘Liberty’ should be hung by their own offspring. Admiral Rodney’s victory was a convenient opportunity to do so. Indeed, it may have been sent to the loyalist newspaper to parry further accusations of being the author of works such as The Dagger. If questioned or accused of writing further radical work Burns could refer his employers to this ‘loyal’ song in The Edinburgh Advertiser. Werkmeister preceded us in identifying the ‘decoy’ strategy.
Kinsley’s view that the lines were given in 1793 at a meeting of the Dumfries Volunteers is incorrect for the simple reason that the Volunteers were not yet established. Kinsley guesses that differences in printed texts suggest that a manuscript must have been seen by some editors, but he was unaware that Scott Douglas meddled with the text. The original was probably lost among the papers of The Edinburgh Advertiser.
The Dagger
First printed in The Edinburgh Gazetteer, 16th May, 1793.
When a’ the people thick an’ thrang crowded
Disclose their minds sae fully, so
Permit me here to sing a sang song
Of Paddy and his gully; knife/dagger
5 (For Paddy’s e’en a dainty chiel; fellow
Glib gabbed an’ auld farran; smooth-tongued, old-fashioned
An’ can busk up a tale as weel well
As onie Lord or Baron) any
I trow this day. pledge
10 Had ye but seen him in his glee,
When he drew out his gully, dagger
Ye maist wad swear that he should be, most would
The House o’ Commons bully:
For when he’s warmed in argument,
15 An’ wants to be a bragger,
He handles weel the instrument — well
The all-convincing DAGGER,
On onie day. any
The DAGGER mode that’s been brought in
20 By this Hibernian shaver, Irish joker
Has rais’d indeed an unco din, lots of noise
And muckle clishmaclaver, great gossip
An’ been a topic o’ discourse
To ilka lass and laddie; every
25 While mony jokes are pass’d in course;
But fient a hair cares Paddy not a
For that this day.
For tho’ wi’ aspect like a Turk,
Demosthenes or Tully
30 Had tried an argument wi’ Burke,
An’ gi’en him but his gully; given, dagger
In spite o’ a’ their eloquence,
Their rhetoric and logic,
Their Lettres Belle and Common Sense,
35 ’Twad been a fruitless project.
For them this day.
For tho’ a man can speak wi’ grace,
That matters na a spittle — not a drop
Can onie man haud up his face, any, hold
40 An’ argue wi’ a whittle? knife
An’ Paddy, should the DAGGER fail,
Before he will knock under,
Can neist apply (to back his tale) next
A twa and forty pounder, two (cannon)
45 Wi’ birr some day. vigour
But trouth I fear the Parliament
Its ancient splendour fully,
When chiels man back an argument fellows must
By waving o’ a gully: dagger
50 Yet some there are, wi’ honest heart,
(Whose courage never swaggers)
Will ne’er the public cause desert,
For cannons or for daggers,
By night or day.
55 Now Paddy be nae langer rude, no longer
But lay aside your storming;
And shew the ‘Swinish Multitude’
The folly o’ reforming.
Convince them that their cause is wrang, wrong
60 An’ tell how sair they grieve ye; sore
But swine are ay sae damned headstrang, always so, headstrong