It becomes a man of sense to think for himself.
(Letter to Mr Muir)
The annual Burns Supper, held on or around his birthday, 25 January, has become something of a cult in virtually every country in the world where ‘Scottish’ is spoken – and even where it is not. This is an occasion when people gather around a dinner table to give tribute to a Scottish poet who died more than two hundred years ago. It really is an extraordinary phenomenon. That the dead author of a small book of dialect verse, who lived a short life in an obscure corner of a tiny country, should be so remembered by so many is unique to say the least. It is a signal honour for any writer, and one not given to Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Mark Twain or Charles Dickens. Ironically, the least surprised by all this would be Burns himself. Not long before he died, at only 37, he told his wife, Jean, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’ll be mair respeckit a hundred years after I’m dead, than I am at present.’ He underestimated himself.
Two hundred years after, he is even more respected for what he was – a formidable wordsmith, remarkable poet and a lyricist of genius – but it is the man we are drawn to. In his person, and in his own time, he won the hearts of the ordinary people and, at the same time, drew the admiration of the aristocracy and what he termed, somewhat dryly, the ‘polite and learned’. For a brief time at the end of what is called the Age of Enlightenment, that is between 1750 and 1800, he united Scotland, and almost every aspect of it, in himself. William Pitt, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland, and exactly the same age as Burns, was a known admirer, although Burns didn’t always admire him. (Oddly enough, Robert Louis Stevenson was to have the same relationship with Gladstone.) In 1786, however, it was surely extraordinary that a self-educated Scottish farm-boy’s goose-quill scratching in rural Ayrshire should reverberate as far as Westminster.
Even English critics and men of letters like W. E. Henley have been drawn to the works of Burns, and that eminent Victorian edited (with T. F. Henderson) the controversial four-volume Centenary edition of 1896. Henley considered that Burns’s first importance in literature was that he represented the final flowering of a great Scottish vernacular tradition before it succumbed to the 18th-century fashion for Englishness among the Scots literati, yet the irony is that Burns’s grounding in letters was, with only a few exceptions, almost entirely English, as the list of his boyhood reading shows. Professor Tom Crawford of St Andrews properly asserts that Burns imbibed as much of an English literary tradition as he did Scottish and this is what makes him unique among writers of that age. He straddled both schools. This is why he was able to speak in a larger voice than that of a mere provincial rhymer. This fact is at the root of his international standing despite the fact that the vast bulk of his work was in his native tongue.
To my mind, this classlessness and timelessness is most apparent in his songs, which are now considered more and more as his main contribution to letters because of the flawless art works they are. Not all of them of course, but there may be as many as a hundred in the nearly 400 he wrote, re-wrote or discovered as fragments, that can be held to a perfect blending of words and music, indicating a rare mastery of two distinctly disparate arts, and a hitherto little recognised industry on his part as a musicologist and song collector. Given his care and concern in this area, why can’t we then learn the correct words of Auld Lang Syne? And why do the ladies insist on singing Sweet Afton when the penultimate line says – ‘My Mary’s asleep by the murmuring stream…’ and the tenors and baritones go on to complain about how ‘my fause lover staw my rose – but ah! he left the thorn wi’ me’ in The Banks o Doon? Even in our free age, such lines de-genderised are ambiguous to say the least. These lyric pearls don’t deserve to be sold as imitations. They tell of feelings, true feelings between men and women in any age. And at any age. See John Anderson, My Jo.
The deeper one digs in nationalism of any kind, the more international it seems to become. Universality is a truth that will out if it is there in the first place. Commonality is a human condition that far outweighs narrow chauvinism. My country right or wrong hardly applies when the work of that country reaches beyond its borders and touches everyone. All great art goes global, because the kind of response it elicits knows no frontiers. We are indeed all Jock Tamson’s bairns.
Which brings to mind, the late and learned Secretary of the Burns Federation, Jock Thomson, once pointed out to me that, while there were only two or three authentic portraits for which Burns sat, everyone seems to have their own idea of what Burns looked like. The only thing all agree upon is that there must have been something essentially likable about the man for his impression to have fixed itself for so long upon a whole nation. Charm is normally evanescent, people grow out of their attractiveness, but he appears to have grown into the very real affection of an entire people.
His personality was such that stories abound about him. Many of these stories are quite untrue but they are good stories for a’ that, and they pass from one generation to another, gathering further apocryphal moss as they go, and so is a legend made. His readiness to seem all things to all men makes him a natural for dramatic representation and impersonation. He has fascinated performers to this very day, myself included. There have been plays about him, films made of his life and loves and countless radio programmes and recordings on every aspect of his works. All of which testifies to the genuine and continuing magnetism in the man. He really must have had something.
From the time he ‘wore the only tied hair in the parish’ and wrapped his fillemot plaid about his shoulders in his distinctive way, he was rehearsing for his role as a player on a larger stage than that offered by Mauchline belles and Tarbolton bachelors. Every spoken word so carefully considered, every written line even more carefully contrived, even every moment of youthful excess away from the grinding farm, was a plank in the bridge he built to cross the divide of prejudice and custom that kept him and his fellow-peasants immured in their rural station. For him, every hand-written page of verse was to him a further step on the way out and up.
He did so first through a local fame as a rhymer, then national fame as a bard and posthumously an international fame as a poet, which even now shows little prospect of diminishing. His public life was no more than a decade, his travels hardly took him further than a few day’s riding from his birthplace, yet Robert Burns must be seriously considered today as the best-known son of Scotland. After all, was he not declared by the Scots themselves in a public poll the Scot of the Millennium?
It all began with one slim book of rhymes – Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect – published at Kilmarnock on 31 July 1786, one volume octavo, price stitched, three shillings. It caused an immediate sensation in Ayrshire and sold out by subscription in little over a week. The ripples were picked up very soon in Edinburgh and not long after, in far-away London. He burst upon the literary world like a meteor, and just like a meteor, fell to earth, burnt-out and spent. Yet all he had intended in that first printing was to make enough money to emigrate to the West Indies in order to avoid a writ of maintenance from the irate father of a local beauty whom Burns had made pregnant with twins, not once, but twice. At this distance, and bearing in mind all his other protestations around the same time, it is hard to know how much Burns loved Jean Armour, but it is very certain that she loved him.
From their first meeting at a penny-fee dance during Mauchline race week in 1785, till she gave birth to their ninth child on the day of his funeral in 1796, Jean Armour regarded Robert Burns as the only man in her life. Hers was the very object-lesson in female loyalty and forbearance within a relationship and it is telling that her only comment on her husband’s sexual lapses, was – ‘Oor Robin should hae had twa wives.’ That, of course, was her comment for the world. Who knows, however, what she said to him behind closed doors? Poor Jean, she must have suffered greatly in the years they were together but she never ceased to love and care for her man, and in the end I think he must have loved her for it. But by then it was too late.
Burns was the very stuff of which romantic poets are made – handsome, witty, daring and different. And best of all he died young. While he lived, he needed to love in order to write his poetry and inspire his songs. Perhaps Jean, in her womanly wisdom understood this, hence her remarkable tolerance. At any rate, she stood by him and survived Mary Campbell, Nancy McLehose, Maria Riddell, Lesley Baillie, Peggy Chalmers, Anna Park, Jessie Lewars and those countless other women in his life including the nameless ‘very pretty girl, a Lothian farmer’s daughter.’ It is to her, as much as to the rest of his amours (proper and otherwise) that we owe the great legacy of love songs. Songs like Afton Water, Ae Fond Kiss, Wee Thing, Banks o Doon, Comin’ Thro the Rye, Mary Morison, The Rigs o Barley, Green Grow the Rashes O, Ca’ the Yowes, A Red, Red Rose and so many others. Songs the whole world knows.
There is also his wonderful collection of racy, witty adaptations of old Scots songs, and I don’t mean the bawdry, but those robust lyrics like Last Night a Braw Wooer, which he realised, even as he penned them, might never be sung in every withdrawing room. They are still, nonetheless, part of his great opus and demand to be remembered. Taking all in all, surely this an artistic output worth a few kisses here and there, and only three births on the wrong side of the blanket? Without the girls we would not have had the songs.
Then out into the world, my course I did determine.
Though to be rich was not my wish,
Yet to be great was charming…
The 1787–88 Edinburgh experience was both the making and the breaking of him. He entered on the capital with nothing to lose and in the end he got more than he bargained for. Ironically, it was not rakery or drink or any kind of debauchery that brought him to an early end, it was celebrity – or the effects of it. From the time he was lionised in Edinburgh and took his ‘leisurely progress through Caledonia’ with the proceeds of his second edition until he arrived in Dumfries, as arguably the most famous man in Scotland at the time, he was a changed man. It was not that he was indolent, but he never wrote again with the same fervour. He remained as charming and well-liked as ever by both men and women but he appeared to crave fame for fame’s sake in a way that he had never done before. He unashamedly used contacts and well-placed friends whenever he had to, all in the pretext of gaining time to write, but it looked suspiciously like place-serving with more than a hint of sycophancy in many of those well-phrased letters. But who can blame him?
He always had to win his way out of some awkward situation, for the most part of his own making, but not always so. Like so many before him, and since, he found that his novelty in society soon wore off (as he said it would). In the end, he was left with little but his wits to help him survive. In desperation, he had often to take, by his standards, desperate measures. He had only pretended to be the ‘heaven-sent ploughman’. He knew only too well the work that had gone into making him a writer. He never however, pretended that he was other than the self-taught peasant he was. He was too honest
to claim otherwise.
Unfortunately, his natural aristocracy of mind made him ready enemies from the start among the gentry and they waited their time, knowing it was on their side, not his. They knew better than he, that for all his dazzling talk and dashing airs, he was not one of them. No matter how superbly equipped, mentally and physically, he still did not belong, and he was made very aware of this. Notwithstanding, he had taken on the Establishment but they had taken him in only to spit him out when they had tasted him sufficiently. There was no doubt that for a time, he strode Scotland like a colossus, but in the end he was brought down to size – ordinary size. Thus reduced to appropriate provincial obscurity, he was allowed to slip, virtually unnoticed, into Parnassus.
If Burns was a man’s man he was a thinking man. When he had first come to Edinburgh in November 1786, had been to seek for a second edition of his poems but it was also to look for a new, and more amenable way of life that would allow him time to write. This is why he responded to the idea of entering the Excise Service, but he was looking for a sinecure not a punishing daily regimen on the road. He might as well have emigrated to the Indies as he had first intended. After all, wasn’t that what the book was to pay for in the first place? All he knew was that he didn’t want to farm. He had seen enough of farming since he was seven years old.
He would aim for a safe job and write in his spare time. As it happened, he got his safe job but it was one that would near-kill him by its physical demands – like forcing him to ride two hundred miles a week in all weathers. He did try another farm but it was just as unlucky for him as the others had been for his father, and he walked away from it, ostensibly, a ruined man. In all this time, he had kept writing although he only managed one piece of completed verse, but since that was Tam o Shanter in 1790, his acknowledged masterpiece, it was perhaps worth its exclusivity. From then on till his death six years later, he gave himself almost entirely to songs. But then, what songs they were.
It would be left to a more understanding posterity to restore his stature as a man, and generations of critical analysis to affirm his world status as a literary giant, recognised universally – if only as the author of Auld Lang Syne. But Robert Burns is more than that to all Scots – he is also a national hero, an icon, a legend and as a result, the man himself has been obscured by what can only be called a genuine Scotch myth. In the meantime, ‘facts are chiels that winna ding’ and the most important fact about Robert Burns was the publication of the Kilmarnock Edition in 1786. It was the watershed in his life. Everything led up to this one event and everything thereafter undeniably led away from it.
Whatever his supposed moral and social defects, and no matter any weaknesses of temperament, he must be seen a unique man by any standards and an extraordinary figure in his time. Almost single-handedly, even as he was dying, he rescued a whole body of Scottish song and, in the best of his poetry, bursting out in a flood as it did between 1785 and 1786, he gave voice to an old Scotland that was rapidly disappearing in the then fashionable Anglophilia. Burns’s life-span was was almost exactly that of the Scottish Enlightenment but his Scotland was not yet the North Britain that Stevenson so rightly deplored. The Dying Words of Old Mailie, as the young Burns phrased them, were also the epitaph for an ancient tradition that stretched back to Dunbar and Henryson and the other Makars. He was, as Henley rightly put it – ultimus Scotorum, the last expression of the old Scots world.
He had an uncanny instinct for what was right in the older tradition, especially in its minstrelsy, and he preserved it. He had the true poet’s instinct for what was apt. This allowed him to keep the best of what had been begun by older, often anonymous writers and by adding to it his own lyric genius, he virtually created new songs which still live today as his own. He was, at root level, the ‘satirist and singer of the parish’ telling of ordinary things in unordinary ways so that a mouse, a daisy, a louse become metaphors for a larger world and offer a unique insight remarkable in such a young man. This is the first thing about his genius that is remarkable; he did his finest work so young. Yet he could speak with all the wisdom of the ages, with shrewd insight into men and their manners, and above all with encompassing compassion for every living thing, albeit with a country man’s realistic attitude to animals and all growing things. It was rather that these themes also served his poetic purpose.
In a way, one is almost glad he received no greater patronage or came under any fashionable pressures. He would have lost his special voice. Had he written entirely in English to ingratiate himself with possible patrons, he would have been quite forgotten today. Thankfully, he held to his own muse, which was anything but untutored, and so he survives. Like all geniuses, he knew he was good. He needed that certainty to do what he had to do. This is what gave him the legs to walk straight off the rigs, as it were, and stride across a carpet. He had something to say and he was going to say it.
In a sense, he was a watershed in himself – on the one hand, the culminating expression of the past, and on the other, a pointer towards the new romanticism and the ideas of personal freedom and equality. This Janus-like quality of being able to look forward and backward at the same time is what typifies the artistic greats. They can find the universal in the particular, the timeless in the ephemeral, the meaningful in the absurd and Burns showed this in almost every line he wrote. Which is why we still need the genius of all poets as seers and chroniclers of our human situation. As mere mortals, we are in constant need of reassurance. Some mortals, such as Robert Burns, have been able, in some measure, by their works, to provide this from generation to generation. It is this that keeps them in our memory and thus makes them immortal.
And for more than Scots. The first Russian translation was less than a decade after his death but the Frenchman, Auguste Angellier, with his Etude sur la Vie et les Oeuvres de Robert Burns in 1893 was the first substantial foreign appreciation. This growing interest beyond Scotland was underlined by the publication in Glasgow of Burns in Other Tongues by William Jacks in 1896. Out-of-Scotland interest has been maintained in our own day by two Canadians, Professors Ross Roy and Robert Carnie, working out of universities in South Carolina and Calgary respectively. North Americans would know better than anyone that everybody has his or her 15 minutes of fame or hour in the sun, or whatever. Some even survive to become a nine-day wonder, but only a special few outlive their lifetimes, and Burns has certainly done that – as he himself foresaw.
However, it is what he has left us in the works that really matters. Only what he set down counts in the end. What he said in his writing is the stuff that lasts, not the anecdotes or apocrypha that abound about what he said in his time, although he did this strikingly enough. He has continuing relevance. This is yet another reason why he is so vividly remembered, and it is this on-going vivacity that makes his memory immortal to most Scots.
To understand this, and measure the true proportions of the Burns presence in the world today one must first appreciate the impact of the original book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. As has been mentioned, the first edition sold out in weeks across the country. People scrambled for copies in the way that teenagers today would clamour for the latest pop record. Robert Heron, a contemporary, and the first to write about Burns, said about the publication:
With his poems, old and young, grave and gay, learned and ignorant, were alike transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, and I can well remember how even plough-boys and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned the most hardly… if they might procure the works of Burns.
This was testimony indeed, for in 1786, it would have taken a maidservant a week to earn the price of the book. The Edinburgh edition in the following year was even more successful, and it put money in the poet’s pocket as well. Enough to allow him to travel around Scotland like a gentleman, taking his applause like an actor, but the experience unsettled him completely for the ten years he had left of his life. He had, by his own efforts, risen from local rhymer to national Bard of Scotland, duly proclaimed and sanctioned. From then on it was only a matter of the rest of the world.
Since the first nine guests assembled for the very first ‘Burns Supper’ in 1801, there have been countless ‘Immortal Memories’ of Scotland’s Bard delivered by every kind of speaker to all sorts of audiences in most of the English-speaking world – and even where English is not spoken. The guid Scots tongue is by no means mandatory and Burns is still Burns even if it is rendered in Japanese, Urdu or in Esperanto. What may be lost in translation gains, one hopes, in immediacy. Over the years, the original intimate, informal suppers have become veritable banquets at some centres and many more than the original nine often struggle to obtain expensive tickets. The cottage industry has become a factory process and now has attained mass production proportions.
However, this hasn’t prevented some great minds saying splendid things about our man at such functions. Nor has it stopped the laughter genuinely raised from the matter in hand and not from the mere recitation of a stock joke. Good Immortal Memories are performances, and the best are great ones, trenchant, moving and telling us something about Burns we hadn’t known or thought of until then. We have all been privileged at some time to be present when a first-rate speaker has developed a pertinent theme, cogently and winningly, so that we are given yet another light on a many-
sided genius.
What is also astonishing is that so many people have such different ideas about Burns, and hold these views passionately. This is what makes him so fascinating – that he is so many men in one young man. He is, in his own words, ‘formed of various parts, the various man’. Any good Immortal Memory should try to catch at least a facet of this prismatic Burns in the Toast. Unfortunately not every speaker is a Cicero. Toasts can vary, not only in standard of oration but in content and where two or more views are gathered together, there you have dissension and controversy. But you can also have interest and the value of the alternative point of view. Such compensation also serves to fill out the subject, taking in all the extremes and contradictions that make up any mortal’s frame. But we are dealing with an Immortal here, and it is this aspect of him that we observe in our Memory each year.
Hopefully, we are also entertained in the process, and edified by hearing a good thought well put. This is the Immortal Memory as it should be, and it was to make a record of such memorable orations that I undertook to oversee this compilation of Immortal Memories from all sources. It also nicely marks the 200 years since the first speech at Alloway. Gathered here are some of the best, and even, some might say, some of the more eccentric, Immortal Memories ever delivered, in a survey of speeches never before attempted in print, at least on this scale. In selecting the various insights and attitudes to Burns revealed in such utterances and packaging them in such a manner, these thoughts will now be available to all Burns lovers, in this and future generations.
It is interesting to note that because the inaugural Memory was given in verse, speakers at early suppers throughout much of the 19th-century did likewise and consequently were referred to as ‘laureates’. We have several laureates in this collection, because theirs was once a very special place in club proceedings. At Burns Suppers, for instance, their contribution was the only spoken part of the evening. Would that were so today. We are now offered such a proliferation of toasts at the modern supper, that the Immortal Memory, which is, after all, the keynote address and the main reason for the gathering, is often lost in the welter of often irrelevant words surrounding it. The real wood can’t be seen for the trivial trees.
Essentially, the Burns Supper should consist of a good meal among friends culminating in the toast drunk to our absent friend, Robert Burns. Time should be given for someone to propose this soberly and seriously, but not dully or at undue length. The speaker should be introduced and thanked, which is only polite after all, and after that there should be recitation if required (and not always Holy Willie’s Prayer or Tam o Shanter either) followed by general singing of Burns songs by the whole company concluding with Auld Lang Syne before dispersal. It is a very simple format. It always was and should be allowed to be so again. It should not be reduced to the level of a variety bill by extraneous toasts that turn out to be no more than that – mere ‘turns’.
At the core of the Supper is the Immortal Memory, all else is extra. Burns is at the heart of the whole evening and his work serves him better than any ‘act’, however expertly presented. I stress the importance of the central toast because that’s what I want to highlight in this book, and by using as examples the Immortal Memories found from all available records, historical accounts, published reports and anecdotal reference, the Memory itself is brought sharply into deserved focus as the highlight of the whole proceedings. My hope is that this volume will not be just another book about Burns to be added to the three thousand or so already written but that it might give a special international acknowledgement to our national poet of Scotland in that what it says comes from every kind of voice and every kind of country.
Yet it is to Scotland that he is inextricably bound as it is to him. This point was underscored by Hans Hecht in his study of Burns, simply entitled Robert Burns. This German Burns scholar, speaking of Burns the poet, said that he
reached out to the universal. By combining the finite with the infinite, he left behind him a legacy of unequalled magnificence…
Incidentally, this book, translated into English by Jane Lymburn in 1936, was the first book about Burns I ever owned, only because it was given to me as a Christmas present in 1959. I bought the next one, Maurice Lindsay’s Burns Encyclopedia, with my own money and on these twin piers, my own bridge to Burns was built. Despite the seemingly forlorn circumstances of Burns’s early end, Herr Hecht concluded
He has been granted the happiest lot that can fall to any poet: he is enshrined forever in the hearts of his countrymen, and has become such a part of their spiritual possessions that it is impossible to imagine Scotland without Robert Burns. He has remained a living force in the nation. The sun that rose over the grave by the churchyard wall in Dumfries was the sun of immortality.
Which is why the speakers featured here, whether at a simple supper or sumptuous banquet, whether from the past and present, or from far and wide, and no matter their language or oratorical skills, are all saying the same thing in the end as they raise a glass in the famous toast – ‘To the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.’