Through busiest street and loneliest glen are felt the flashes of his pen…
Deep in the general heart of men his power survives.
(William Wordsworth)
In the early summer of 1858, workers at the Glasgow Daily Bulletin (the first Penny newspaper in Great Britain) were given a day’s outing by their employers to the Brig o’ Doon Hotel in Ayrshire. The proprietor of the paper, Colin Rae-Brown, as croupier for the dinner that evening, was given the duty of proposing a toast to ‘The Memory of Burns’. While walking over the old brig to the hotel, he was puzzling over what he might say about the poet that was not hackneyed and had not been said before, when he realised that the following January would be exactly a hundred years from Burns’s birth. And with that thought, came his great idea and the theme for his speech a few hours later. As he said, he would call for ‘a national celebration of the glorious 25th in 1859 throughout the kingdom – and even beyond – wherever Scotsmen are congregated, throughout the world’.
The idea was taken up with enthusiasm at the Bulletin dinner and before long a committee was set up in Glasgow and Rae-Brown was appointed Honorary Secretary, authorised to circularise from his office at 119 St Vincent Street news of the proposed Memorial Celebration. The Circular sent out stated:
To Scotsmen and Scotswomen everywhere – and to their posterity in the generations to come – this Centenary will, if universal, prove not only a source of the greatest delight, but a lasting bond of union between the inhabitants of Caledonia, and those of every country and clime who sincerely adopt as their creed – A MAN’S A MAN FOR A’ THAT.
The reaction, not only nation-wide, but world-wide, was astonishing. Rae-Brown’s idea had touched a nerve and Scots people everywhere were energised to immediate action. The extent of the celebrations can be seen in a glance at the statistics. According to James Ballantine of Edinburgh, there were 676 recorded Burns events in Scotland, 76 in England, 61 in the United States, 48 in what was then termed ‘the Colonies’, 10 in Ireland and a solitary dinner in Copenhagen.
These figures say much for the state of our poet’s name and fame a hundred years after his birth but they hardly convey the passion that caused every kind of Scotland that existed in the world to suddenly assert itself in the name of Burns. In all sorts of situation, in every range of climate, fur-coated or sun-hatted, men convened in small groups, modest dinners and in spontaneous gatherings to remember Robert Burns. In short, wherever two or more hands could be found to cross in a chorus of Auld Lang Syne, there was the spirit of Burns in the midst of them.
There had been a similar sort of commemoration for a poet before when the Stratford Jubilee of 1769 honoured the memory of Shakespeare but it turned out to be more of homage to the actor, David Garrick, than to the English Bard. In any case, it was strictly confined to Stratford but in 1859 Burns went international. Not that England did not do its bit for the centenary, and once again an actor was involved. Samuel Phelps was a famous Shakespearean in his day and he was chosen to recite the winning entry in a country-wide poetry competition organised by the National Magazine in conjunction with the directors of the Crystal Palace to celebrate a hundred years of Robert Burns. There were 621 entries and the winner of the prize of 50 guineas was a Miss Isa Craig who submitted three poems. Her prizewinner was declaimed by Mr Phelps ‘in that grave and weighty style for which he is notorious’, as The Times put it, before 15,000 people who had paid as much as half-a-crown a head to hear him. The opening lines were:
A Poet peasant born
Who more of Fame’s immortal dower
Unto her country brings
Than all the Kings…
Punch described the event in its own idiosyncratic style:
Truly, as writers remark, whose lines are well guerdoned by pennies,
The scene which arrested the eye was little way short of imposing.
Full in the midst was a bust which the vulgar described as a buster;
Burns, with a gold wreath on his brow, size the colossal, by Marshall.
Round him, but smaller, the bards of the soul-stirring days when he flourished.
Near him, was drawn, like a bow, a shrine of tasteful description,
Wherein, secured by plate-glass, (for collectors are thundering priggers)
Lay, in their niches, Burns relics, autographs, snuff-boxes, letters,
Hair of the poet himself, hair of his loved Highland Mary,
The portrait by Nasmyth, undoubted, likewise the portrait by Taylor
Which folks have accepted as Robert but which I believe to be Gilbert;
There too, the worm-eaten desk on which was composed Tam O’Shanter,
Brown as the limbs of the hags who danced in that Scotch Walpurgis…
At St Martin’s Hall, A Nicht Wi’ Burns was held in which Mr Arthur Young appeared as Shakespeare and recited from The Merchant of Venice. At Liverpool they danced till six in the morning and in Edinburgh, the shops were closed and Mr Walter Glover, who once had been given a drink by Burns, was led to the platform to recite Tam o Shanter. The Times reported all these and the many other various events over seven columns although it thundered against the Crystal Palace Burns Festival:
In what way the centenary celebrations of the Scottish poet’s birth could possibly concern the Crystal Palace, and why Englishman, who had never thought of celebrating Shakespeare or Milton with similar pomp, should suddenly get up an extraordinary display in honour of Burns, or would possibly have been thought the questions worth considering…
What it goes on to consider very pointedly was that 15,000 people paid half-a-crown a head on the day. Even Charles Dickens was moved to protest. In an article entitled ‘Burns as a Hat-Peg’, he saw a great poet reduced to a hat-peg on which promoters of all kinds could hang their hats, and where even the children of Elizabeth Thompson of Pollokshaws (his daughter by Anna Park), were among the exhibits in the Glasgow Exhibition.
Ballantine devoted no less than 606 closely typed pages to his account of the year. Each event, complete with comprehensive guest list, no doubt in strict pecking order, offered complete texts without comment and the sheer weight of words in itself was praiseworthy, if daunting. Victorian speakers, in that age of the public lecturer, would never use one word where ten would do, and their peroration went to the very limit of their hearer’s indulgence. Length was measure of importance to them. The gentry, of course, were out in force. Everybody loves a lord, and no one better than the man trying to arrange a public dinner. Lords abounded in Burns’s name during 1859, especially in the capital, Edinburgh.
Edina! Scotia’s darling seat! All hail your palaces and towers…
Lord Ardmillan, for instance, himself an Ayrshire man, presided at the banquet held in the Music Hall, Edinburgh, for which ‘tables were laid for 700 persons’. Great interest was shown in the event, and on the day, shopkeepers began to close their shutters from early in the afternoon. Despite a snell wind, crowds began to gather in George St to watch the notables arrive in their cabs and carriages, much as they do today for the Oscars in Hollywood. The difference here was that the star of the evening was dead. Of course, The Star o Robbie Burns would never lose its gleam, and this lends a particular poignancy to Lord Ardmillan’s reference in the ‘hearty, manly eloquence’ of his toast to the Immortal Memory, to the new-fangled phenomenon of electric light. At the conclusion of his speech, which reports say was delivered ‘with great power and fervour’, his Lordship said:
Let us rather deal with the power of Burns’ name as science has dealt with the electric element. Science has not stood afar off, scared by each flash, mourning each shivered tower; science has caught and purified the power, and chained it to the car of commerce and the chariot of beneficence, and applied it to the noble purpose of consolidating humanity – uniting all the world by the interchange of thought and feeling. On this day Burns is to us, not the memory of a departed, but the presence of a living power – (enthusiastic cheering) – the electric chain which knits the hearts of Scotchmen in every part of the world, stirring us not only to admiration of the poet’s genius, but to the love of country, of liberty, and of home, and of all things beautiful and good. Therefore, I call on you to pledge me, not to solemn silence, but with our heartiest honours to ‘The Immortal Robert Burns’.
The Music Hall celebrations went on for another four hours then the whole company, standing, hand in hand, sang Auld Langsyne [sic] and departed in the early hours in their cabs and carriages, but this time with no gaping crowd to watch them go.
There were four other Burns Banquets that night in four of the largest halls in Edinburgh, and at the Corn Exchange, the event was hosted by the Total Abstinence Society. One wonders how Burns himself would have enjoyed this one, even though report had it that it had ‘come off with great eclat’. The Chairman, in his extended remarks, made reference to their more sober approach to the occasion, acknowledging in his opening remarks that they were gathered to do honour to a man who ‘was not an immaculate character’.
No doubt, ladies and gentlemen, many things could be pointed out which are deserving of severe criticism; but, when we consider the character of the man, we must consider it in reference to the times in which he lived. We must not measure a man like Burns by the gauge of the customs and sentiments of the present day alone. For example, if in the days of Burns, some great meeting had been called to celebrate the heroes whom he idolized and almost worshipped – I mean Wallace and Bruce – had a meeting been called for such a purpose when Burns lived and was in the zenith of his fame, I ask you, would it have been possible to have called 2,500 persons together in a hall like this, where they had nothing stronger to drink than tea and water?
Despite this tepid approval, one can be sure that ‘frae Maidenkirk to Johnie Groats’ that night a stronger beverage was preferred in other places. The Trades Delegates offered a fruit soiree in the Queen Street Hall, beginning at six o’clock, and Professor George Wilson, who held the Chair of Industrial Science, nevertheless claimed that:
We are all poets in some degree. The child who thinks it can climb the rainbow, who believes that the moon can be clipped into stars, or who looks into its pillow, and sees wondrous things there, is a poet; every child who reads the Arabian Nights, who believes in Aladdin’s lamp, or who goes to a pantomime, is a poet. And in later years we are all poets – love makes us poets. Every man lover is a poet; every gentle sweetheart is a poet; every mother bending over her suckling child is a poet; every son comforting his old mother is a poet. There is a poetry in all our lives, if we can feel it; and if we cannot, no Burns or any one can teach us it. But we want some one to sing it for us, and this Burns did; and how did he do it? He so sang that we not only enter intensely and sympathisingly into all his feelings, but he sang in the very way that we ourselves would have sung had we had the power. Think of this – that he has sung our native land into greater glory in the earth because it is the birth-land of Burns. There is not anywhere over the civilized world where men are able to appreciate genius, or worth, or reality, a nation which does not say that Scotland, in producing a ploughman like Burns, who did not pretend to speak more than the feelings of his own countrymen, but spoke them with the poet’s power, must be a grand land. And he sang our Scottish tongue into a repute that it never had before, and secured for it a longevity that otherwise it never would have had, so that he would be a bold man who would predict the time when that mother speech will die, since Englishmen learn it for nothing but to read the songs of Burns. Such is his power over the language of our hearts and the language of our country, Scotsmen scattered over every part of the world are on this day assembled as we are now; and I have just learned that, at this very moment, my dear brother will be presiding at a meeting like this in far-distant Toronto.
A Mr Gorrie, speaking at the same meeting, must have spoken for many when he said, ‘I feel as if I were trying to speak where a thousand voices already filled the air.’ How true. And no doubt, a thousand different Robert Burns rose from their lips. All they would have in common was an uncomfortable mid-Victorian public attitude to his sex life and his reputed drinking, but at the ‘Working Man’s Festival’ at the Dunedin Hall, emphasis was placed on his egalitarianism. Donald Ronald Macgregor presided and took the chance to recount an anecdote. It seems that Burns was walking in Leith Walk with a modish friend when they came upon a disreputable character, poorly dressed, whom Burns recognised as an old friend from Ayrshire. Burns immediately stopped and greeted the man warmly. When he had finished his crack and continued on his way, the Edinburgh dandy wondered why he had acknowledged such a shabby fellow. ‘Sir’, replied Burns, ‘do you think it was the man’s coat I was talking to? Or his hat or waistcoat? I was talking to the man within the clothes. A man, I may say, of more sense and worth that many of my fine, city friends.’ The speaker also wished that some of these ‘fine, city friends’ might have helped Burns more than they did. Especially at the end of his short life, a time when the poet needed friends of any kind. It is ironic that most of the men gracing these public platforms in 1859 in Edinburgh could still be described as ‘fine, city friends’ to Burns.
Yet James Burn at the Globe Hotel in Hill Place made the point that ‘no man in the present day, with anything like Burns’s talents, could long go unrewarded; and we have good proof of what his countrymen would have done for him, if they had known the living man as well as they have known the poet.’ I wonder. Burns had the knack of discomfiting many of his influential acquaintances just as much as he intrigued them. Or maybe he just frightened people off by his very intensity? Like many gifted people he was often his own worst enemy. His weak points were just as much a part of him as his strong. One must take the whole man or nothing. And the man they were all considering was not an Edinburgh man:
Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw, I dearly like the west…
In Glasgow, the capital city of the West, Sir Archibald Alison neatly dealt with the fact of Burns’s frailties by quoting Bolinbroke’s retort when reminded of the faults of his great political antagonist, Marlborough: ‘Yes, I know he had faults; but he was so great a man I have forgot what they were.’ He also added, to cheers, ‘Let him that is without sin among you, throw the first stone.’ Sir Archibald was speaking in the City Hall where the Immortal Memory was given ‘with all the honours’ rather than in the solemn silence that attends a toast to the dead, given that, as the speaker said, ‘the Burns spirit lives on and will never die’. There were further great cheers at this. The toast was drunk with the whole company standing, with both the gentlemen and the ladies waving their handkerchiefs and ‘making every demonstration of enthusiasm’.
The next to rise was no less than Colonel James Glencairn Burns, the fourth son of the poet. Colonel Burns, then aged 65, was no orator, and did not speak long. But who else, however spell-binding, could have made the effect this reserved man made when he said,
As a leal and true Scot, and a warm admirer of the genius of the Bard, I have joined in doing honour to his memory. As his son, permit me to return to you my most sincere thanks for the same.
No one could follow that except an Englishman, and it was as such that the author of Memories of Many Scenes, Mr Monkton Milnes was introduced and received with great applause by the Glaswegians. He won them over at once by identifying the Scots as a people ‘who read by turns, the Songs of David and the Poems by Burns’. While striving as a man, Burns had stirred the heart of a nation and ‘… something of a sacred halo now surrounds him.’ Toasts started to come from right and left and on almost any heading. Colonel Burns found himself unexpectedly on his feet again when he had to reply to ‘The Existing Relatives of the Poet’. The risk of being at the top table is that one must be ready to rise at any moment. As the night goes on, this becomes more difficult. However, the good colonel was again received with great applause.
I have to thank my friend Trotter very heartily for the way in which he has introduced the toast, and you for the hearty manner in which you have responded to the toast of ‘The Sons and Relatives of the Bard’. I may as well here enumerate them, as far as my knowledge extends. There is my brother William Nichol and myself; my two daughters, Mrs Hutchinson, with her two children, in Australia, and Annie Burns, now in Edinburgh; and my late brother Robert’s daughter, Mrs Everett, with her daughter, in Belfast. These are the direct descendants. My uncle Gilbert left a large family, of whom survive one daughter (Ann) and three sons (William, Thomas and Gilbert). The three brothers have many olive branches. For the survivors of my late dear aunt, Mrs Begg, I leave my cousin Robert to thank you himself. (Applause)
Mr Robert Burns Begg, nephew of the poet, also responded to the toast, and said:
I did not expect to be called upon to speak just now. I am unaccustomed to public speaking, and I cannot let my voice reach this immense assembly. All I can say is, that I have met with many kindnesses in the world, and I believe they are all owing to my connection with Burns. I owe the honour of being here as a guest tonight solely to that, and I believe to an acquaintance many years ago with the late Sheriff Steele. I may, however, be allowed to say that I should like very much to live another hundred years to see such a sight as this… I thank you kindly.
Mr William Burns, no relation, was not nearly so complimentary or placatory.
When, not long ago, a few humble admirers of the poet and lovers of the man, met together for the express purpose of concerting a festival celebration in Glasgow on the occasion of the centenary of Burns, I must confess they had no conception of the result that was to follow from the labours. They were ignorant at that time of the deep fountain that was to be opened in the heart of the public. Their idea on the subject was that a great meeting might be held in Glasgow, as convenient locality, as had been done some years before on the banks of the Doon, towards which the worshippers of the poet – men eminent in literature both in Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere, might congregate. Under the impression, they proposed to give the celebration in the City Hall, Glasgow, the designation of national, a designation which, it may be observed, it still retains. Probably that designation is not now absolutely correct. Still, it may not be thought altogether inappropriate, considering the magnitude of the meeting itself, and keeping in view that, whether national or not, it has been the mother of such a large project. Strange as it may appear now, when we see the dimensions to which this movement has attained, it was stated that the people of Edinburgh would look on the movement with a certain degree
of disfavour.
(Signs of impatience)
But these speculations were dissolved by a process over which no individuals or set of individuals had any control, because a chord had been struck in the heart of the people which very soon vibrated, not only throughout Scotland, but through England and Ireland, and far away over the ocean, wherever the name or songs of Burns were known.
(Renewed interruptions)
Very soon, in place of the people of Edinburgh meeting the movement with opposition, they entered into it with the utmost enthusiasm.
(Continued signs of impatience)
Their example was followed by every town and village in the country. (Interruptions and hisses)
I may mention one circumstance which has been made known to me since I entered the hall, and it is that the idea of a centenary celebration was first ventilated and brought under notice on the very spot where the poet himself was born.
(More signs of impatience)
I shall at once propose the toast, which I am glad to see you are all so anxious to drink.
(The toast was drunk with enthusiasm)
This element of discord provoked by the mention of Edinburgh would come as no surprise to a Glasgow man, nor would it surprise him if a fight broke out. After all we were in Glasgow. Nevertheless, however noisily they were received, the toasts went on, column by column, page by page, hour by hour. So did the cat-calls and the cheers, the boos and the hisses, the hurrahs and the ‘Hear-Hears’, not to mention all the songs between. This went on until nearly midnight when people began to leave. Those who remained were, in the words of the press report, ‘rather confused in their jollity’. No wonder. They had been there since five o’clock in the afternoon.
Things were calmer in the Merchants’ Hall and Mr Thomas N. Brown was given the best of order when he rose to speak. He began by quoting a Burns letter:
For my own affairs, I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John Bunyan; and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin’s and Aberdeen Almanacs along with the black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge…
John Bunyan and Thomas a Kempis are indeed great names in their respective fields but do they really compare in terms of world recognition to the Ayrshire ploughman? And when was the Battle of Bothwell Bridge last commemorated? 1679? Even the almanacs he mentioned have long gone, but Burns’s own eminence continues. This point, or something corresponding to it, was further taken up by Mr Brown.
To single out from among the mass of men all living for their generation, and all destined to die with their generation, the one man of whom it may be truthfully predicted this man is not for an age, but for all time, is a task to which few are equal. The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and often genius alone knoweth its own greatness. In that seemingly random selection of names by which to illustrate his future celebrity, Burns very exactly foreshadowed the character of his renown. Thomas a Kempis and John Bunyan, the mystic of the middle ages and the marvellous dreamer of Elstow, are found alike in the mansion of the noble and the shielding of the peasant, but as the people’s prophets are they specially honoured. The songs of Burns resound in castle and in hall, but as the poet of the people the memory of the bard is encircled with a wreath that shall be green forever… Fame so universal can receive but little expansion. Indeed all now left to even the most enthusiastic admirers of our national bard is simply to cast a few insignificant pebbles on the mighty cairn already towering to his glory from out the rock of humanity. But though the memory of the poet cannot possibly profit, we may profit much by this centenary. If the homage this night offered to his shade were not a hollow mockery, it is impossible it should fail to exert at once a potent and salutary influence upon modern society. The sincerity of that homage will be best discovered by interrogating ourselves whether it is simply a fashionable idol we follow the multitude to honour, or Robert Burns as he lived, laboured, loved, sung and suffered, to whom the incense of our admiration spontaneously arises…
He then took the opportunity to mention a contemporary Burns controversy.
During the last few weeks some things have been said and some things have been written of our national bard which indicated that malice with its mask, and venom with its dart, are not yet wearied with assailing his reputation. The tirade of one of the most self-complacent of the clergy of the Scottish metropolis – a report of which I presume most of those I am now speaking to have seen in the newspapers – is worthy of no serious answer. It would be doing the Church of Scotland the grossest injustice to suppose that reverend gentleman any representative of her sentiments respecting this centenary. What motive prompted his outburst of impotent spleen, it would be difficult to determine. But in presence of such an ebullition of rage these words of the wise man flow to our lips, and commend themselves to our judgement, ‘Answer not a fool according to his folly.’
(Cheers)
What superlative fascination lies in Burns, that honours Milton, Dante, Goethe had never received, are so profusely lavished on his memory? A genial English litterateur shall answer. The philosophy of the universal love of Burns is thus beautifully expounded by Leigh Hunt in this week’s Spectator. ‘What’ he asks, ‘is the reason of this difference between the fond love of the memory of such a man as Burns and the no love at all for those other great men, Shakespeare himself not excepted? For personal regard mixes little with our astonishment at Shakespeare genius – perhaps because of the very amount of the astonishment, and because we know little personally about him. The reason is, that Burns we do know; that we are astonished at him, but not enough to be oppressed with the astonishment; and that he fulfils all the other conditions necessary to universal regard. He is allied to the greatest minds by his genius, to the gravest by his grave thoughts, to the gayest by his gay ones, to the manliest by his independence, to the frail by his frailties, to the conscientious by his regrets, to the humblest ranks by his birth, to the poorest among them by his struggles with necessity; above all, to the social by his companionship, and to the whole world by his being emphatically a human creature, ‘Relishing all sharply, passioned as they’.
Mr Brown concluded:
Give praise to the man! a nation stood
Beside his coffin with wet eyes,
Her brave, her beautiful, her good,
As when a loved one dies
There was great cheering as the speaker resumed his seat. George Troup of the Glasgow Bulletin had the unenviable job of following, but after spreading the Burns net internationally, and a timely mention of Burns’s father, he ended with the obvious.
I shall never speak again at a centenary of Robert Burns’ birth. We can never meet more for the purpose we have met tonight. It will be celebrated next time by our grandchildren and our great grandchildren, and we shall all be forgotten on the earth. But we can go out now again to our several duties in the world, with a warmer love to the land he loved dearly; and, in our hearts, a warmer wish for its prosperity and its social improvement and progress. On our different ways we can have no better guide than the poet’s prayer:
‘Stranger, go, Heaven be thy guide,
Quo’ the bedesman of Nithside.’
At the Royal Hotel, some forty or fifty gentlemen sat down to a sumptuous Scotch dinner at the end of which, James Hedderwick, editor of the Glasgow Citizen, and no mean writer himself, made a more material approach to the Bard’s memory, but one which would have a greater relevance as time went by. This was the first foretaste of Burnsomania.
Ten thousand people thronged to his funeral. Every scrap of his burly handwriting became a treasure. The public sorrow took visible shape in stone and marble. Not in favourite haunt of his but became immediately and forever classic. Why, the very stool on which he had sat while correcting his proof sheets in Edinburgh was elevated into an object of respect! I suppose it has long since been broken up into snuff boxes…
When, in the doom which overtakes all things human, his household good came to be scattered, how marvellously had their value risen! An old fender on which he had been accustomed to toast his toes, while crooning, it might be, his immortal ‘Vision’ in the flickering hearthlight, brought twentyfold its original cost. The top of a superannuated shower bath, which had been employed to drench away a poetic rheumatism, was run up to a fabulous sum. A dilapidated coffee pot, a pair of bellows sorely afflicted with asthma, and other such lumber, commanded prices which, had there only been more of them – and they might easily have been multiplied – might have supplied funds sufficient to pension all his relations for life.
But perhaps the piece of household furniture which excited most attention was an eight day clock. As that article was neither made in London nor in Paris, I should not like myself to put a price upon it… Perhaps a liberal valuator might have been inclined to appraise it at say thirty shillings. But that clock had been often wound up by the hand which penned The Jolly Beggars, Tam O’Shanter, The Cottar’s Saturday Night, Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled!, My Nannie O, and Auld Lang Syne. I will not say, too, that it had not many a queer story to tell about ‘The wee short hour ayont the twal!’ At all events, it was ultimately knocked down, not at thirty shillings, but at thirty five pounds, the purchaser considering himself fortunate, as the limit he had fixed was sixty! From that time to this the Burns furore has certainly not abated.
And certainly not in Burns’s home town.
Auld Ayr, whom ne’er a toon surpasses…
Flags were flying from early morning and the bands were playing around the town from noon. Several hundred of the brethren of the ‘mystic tie’ assembled in Academy Square and marched in colourful procession up the High St to the Old Church where Brother Francis Rae of Wallacetown Church led the service. After which, they re-formed to process to the Monument via the Cottage – ‘uncovering as they passed’. In the Monument grounds, they stood ‘uncovered’ for a long address on Burns by the Rev William Buchanan. That afternoon, most of the same men met for a banquet at the County Hall, where the chair was taken by Sir James Fergusson of Kilkerran, supported by Professor Aytoun as Croupier, to whom Sir James might have been referring when he said:
I know that I speak in the presence of the living poet of Scotland – whose glorious lines cause every cheek to glow with pride and pleasure of him who has drunk deep at the fountain whence Burns derived his inspiration who has restored to us so many of those noble old Scottish lays from the perusal of which Burns imbibed no little of his genius. I speak also to many upon whose ears must linger the burning words of the panegyrics of Eglinton, of Wilson, and of Aytoun, delivered on the banks of the Doon at the first great celebration in honour of the poet’s memory, and whose hearts must have been struck in their tenderest chord by the written praises of Wilson, of Jeffrey, of Carlyle, of Wordsworth, and of Montgomery. I know, however, that the memory of Burns is not the property of poets or of men of literature alone, his name is a heritage of all the natives of the country which gave him birth. Uncultivated as I am in the study of poetry, and coming here simply as a country gentleman, to join in the celebration in which my countrymen take so much interest, I know that the few sentences plain and prosaic perhaps, yet sincere and earnest, in which I shall mark our grateful task of today, will find a response which they have not excited, because it will be the offspring of that undying gratitude which is laid up for the name of Burns to all generations.
At the Assembly Rooms, men of the cloth met under the chairmanship of Rev William Buchanan. The evening was unusual in that the Rev Robert Pollock, who had travelled down from Kingston Church in Glasgow, remembered certain Burns characters from his youth, like Holy Willie Fisher and Jean Armour. He said of Jean:
I have seen and conversed with Mrs Burns, formerly Jean Armour, when on a visit to her relations in Mauchline. I have talked and ‘blethered’ with the noisy polemic Jamie Humphrey, I have discussed religion and politics and joked with Adam Armour, Jean’s brother, and I have seen the man reputed to be Holy Willie, and I attached no importance to these incidents at the time. They were merely the passing events of my thoughtless youth; but now, when every scrap of an old letter that has any connexion with Burns or his posterity is printed and circulated through the wide world, I am beginning to feel myself a man of some importance; important to you and important in the eyes of a kind Providence who has connected such events with my early history. I think as far as my memory serves me it would be in the summer of the year 1817, Mrs Burns was on a visit to Mauchline and called at Haughholm, where I was residing then. She was then a stoutish, gausie woman, of darkish complexion, affable and easy in manners and although Burns’ fertile and enamoured fancy has arrayed her in all the charms of the singular beauties of the West, it did not appear that she would ever have had such charms for me…
The soiree of the Ayr Working Men’s Reform Association took place in the Theatre, with Colonel Shaw, of the Queen’s Indian Army, in the chair. In beginning his address, the Chairman requested the audience to note the fact that his name appeared upon the bills as the ‘President of the Ayr Reform Association.’
This circumstance gives you the point and pith of this commemorative effort; it is as the Reformers of Ayr that we have met together tonight. We have not come together for the purpose of doing homage to Burns’ private character, no, nor even to his genius; we have assembled for the purpose of doing justice to the reformer who, more than seventy years ago, went for ‘manhood suffrage’ – singing ‘a mans’ a man for a’ that.’ Permit me, at the hazard of seeming somewhat tedious, yet, in justice to myself and to the noble-minded, virtuous, and honourable working men with whom I stand associated, to be distinctly clear and very unmistakable upon this point. I say, was Burns a Mormon, or was he an angel of purity? We have nothing to do with these questions. Was he a sybarite of intemperance, or was he a model of sobriety? We have nothing to do with these questions. Did he abase – not to say profane – his God-given genius, or were his poems, every one of them, the effusions of a seraph? I repeat it, we have nothing earthly to do with these questions; we are commemorating the great Reformer who, more than seventy years ago, went for ‘manhood suffrage’ – singing ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’.
In Burns’ day the times were dismally dark. Social, politically, and morally speaking, our country was at that time in a low and very melancholy condition. Why, it was then thought the only real and right hospitality to make a guest dead-drunk; and no one with the least pretension to the name of gentlemen ever went to bed sober. The song of the poet – inexpressibly sweet and beautiful when, like the bird in the morning, it soared towards heaven – became steeped in the predominant rage. But we may not enter on this topic; I repeat it once more; we are assembled to do justice to the mighty genius who, in so dark an age, sang the glorious song, A man’s a man for a’ that; and as it will now be sung. The whole of the proceedings were of a character to show that, if others are offering an idolatrous homage to the shade of departed genius, the sons of toil are able to enter upon the subject in a spirit of high moral discrimination. There is no danger to any country where-in such is the case.
It must be said that this was a minority view, especially in the town that Burns last knew. One remembers the Bread Riots there and the bayonets at his funeral.
However, Dumfries on this great day declared a public holiday. There were the usual procession of bands and town dignitaries, tradesmen and children waving flags, and in addition a body of carters attended on horseback. The difference here was that they all marched through arches made by Mr Mein, the local joiner, which led them from the Academy to Burns’s House in Bank St, as the street was then called. The tea-time banquet took place in the Assembly Rooms, and it has to be noted that they followed the example of the very first Burns Supper at Alloway by having haggis and sheep’s head on the menu. On this occasion Colonel William Burns replied briefly ‘under much emotion’ to the Immortal Memory proposed by Dr W. A. F. Browne, one of Her Majesty’s Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland. He then left to join a deputation to a similar meeting at the Nithsdale Mills. Colonel Burns was being made to work for his many suppers. He left with the Chairman’s injunction ringing in his ears – ‘May you and your brother live to see another centenary!’
Arriving at the Mills, Colonel Burns made his usual short response, still ‘full of emotion’ but this time he found a formula to serve by saying that ‘he could only utter a few words of thanks, his heart being too full to permit him to say anything more’. It was certainly one way out. Incidentally, it was in Dumfries that one of the last links to the living Burns was severed. In May 1875, John Brodie died, who remembered as a boy ‘running messages for the poet Burns’.
Well, that Burns message was ringing out all through 1859, for in Ballantine’s meticulously verbatim record of the year in Scotland, there were reports of gatherings from Aberdeen to Wigtown but neither space nor time allows this present writer to follow in Mr Ballantine’s painstaking footsteps. Instead, notice will only be taken of those events which took place in locations already familiar to readers of the Robert Burns Story – Mauchline, Greenock, Paisley, Montrose, and, of course, Kilmarnock, where one might say his story really started.
This was the first place to refer to him officially as a poet in 1786 and one would have thought this title sufficient to deflect them from the need in 1859 to comment on his sex life and drinking habits. But Archibald Finnie of Springfield, who was in the chair at the Burns Dinner in the George Hall would not be deterred.
We are not here to contend that his conduct was at all times worthy of himself, or that his character should go down to posterity as more than mortal. We are, on the contrary, free to admit that his faults and failings were great; but had they been otherwise they could not have been Burns’! All about him was great, and so were his failings. When the atmosphere of that mighty mind became disturbed by the intensity of its own mysterious workings, the thunder and the lightning were of no ordinary character; but the clouds cleared away, there stood revealed the native majesty and serenity of his soul, and there broke forth those brilliant beams which shall irradiate and gladden the great heart of humanity till the end of time.
(Cheering)
But, gentlemen, where is that name on the long scroll of fame against which nothing unworthy was ever made known? And are a hundred years not to suffice to have buried in eternal oblivion all that was mortal of that noble spirit, whose breathings shall ever brood over the hills and the valleys of our dear native land? The glorious sun has his spots, and the silver moon her exhausted volcanoes; but are these always to be remembered when we enjoy the splendours of the one, or the melancholy radiance of the other?
The verdict of posterity is before you – and this day the name and genius of Ayrshire’s Bard are being celebrated as far as waters roll, or winds can waft them. And, gentlemen, well does it become Auld Kilmarnock to rejoice on this great occasion. He was one of ourselves- he looked down our fertile valley from the heights of Mossgiel – he attended our fairs and our markets – he brightened the society of many kindred spirits in the days of our forefathers, whose names and characters he has justly honoured; and our printing press had the privilege of first giving forth those heart-stirring strains, which now encircle the globe. All honour then “To the Immortal memory of Robert Burns” ’
(The toast was drunk mid thundering and prolonged cheers)
Messrs Bicket’s, Barclay’s and Paxton’s employees met in their respective workplaces in the evening to enjoy a Burns Dinner and Entertainment provided by their employers. All three events were accounted a great success and each adjourned happily ‘some wee, short hour ayont the twal’. This kind of happening would surely have been to Burns’s own taste. Ordinary, plain men enjoying ordinary, plain fare and making a night of it. The Abstainers’ Union had a Social Tea in Robertson’s Coffee-house. Several ‘negro songs’ were sung and the meeting broke up at a seasonable hour. The Shoemakers and the Bonnet-Makers also celebrated the Centenary although the latter made a point of breaking up at an early hour.
A great crowd of people assembled at the Cross of Mauchline at two o’clock in the afternoon and began the walk up to Mossgiel, much in the way the poet himself might have done as a young man, except that he didn’t walk behind a rustic cart decorated with a bust of himself surrounded by laurels. The Mauchline Belles of 1859 came next behind their flag, which was the silk scarf Jean Armour had worn when she had last visited Mauchline. Andrew Smith addressed some 2,000 people as they gathered in the courtyard at Mossgiel and all around the famous farm. When he had finished speaking he handed over the bust to be left at Mossgiel with the injunction that the wreath of holly which had been added by Miss Agnes Smith be not removed for another hundred years – when it should be replaced by a new one. Was it, one wonders?
The unique aspect of the Mauchline celebrations was the presence in the town of five men who had actually seen Burns. Matthew Lerrie was a serving boy at Gavin Hamilton’s when Burns used to call there to see Mary Campbell. James Hamilton, as a boy, once delivered a letter from Burns to Jean Armour. William Patrick had been a servant at Mossgiel in Burns’s time there and had many stories to tell of him. Unfortunately, he told none at the dinner in The Institution. The two other Burns contemporaries, George Patrick and John Lambie, were too frail to attend. What stories they might have been able to tell. Among the inanimate relics on display were a candlestick owned by the poet and a knife and fork set said to have been used at his christening. And, of course, Jean’s scarf. After all, she was a Mauchline girl.
It was appropriate that the then President of the first Burns Club, Mr James MacFarlan should be chosen to propose the Immortal Memory at the port of Greenock. He was nothing if not direct.
To call Burns a peasant poet is absurd. Great as was Lord Byron he was not so noble. Burns was a ploughman and an exciseman, but even in this respect he was a teacher, as every true poet is, and must be. He showed us that the discharge of ordinary homely duties does not detract from a man’s dignity, or from the greatness of his mind. He is not a great man who neglects the most ordinary duties that come to his door as it were to be discharged. Through hard trials he never cringed; he took care of his own house, did not deny the faith, and battled like the most ordinarily endowed man – this I take to be a grand feature in his character.
In writing to his friend, Mr Dalrymple, he used this strange and pointed simile – I don’t pretend to give the words but merely the expression as illustrative of how he battled in the discharge of his ordinary duties, and to show how much he valued the proper discharge of these; He said ‘I can’t say I am altogether at my ease when I see anywhere in my path that meagre, squalid, famine-faced, spectre poverty, attended, as he always is, by iron-fisted oppression and leering contempt, but I have sturdily withstood his buffeting many a hard laboured day already, and still my motto is I dare.’ This was the man, gentlemen, who, born in a cottage, felt and acted throughout life as if he had been born in a castle. That was an accident that happens frequently, for great Scotchmen are as often born in cottages as in castles.
Paisley, the little town ‘where Cart rins rowing to the sea’, celebrated in the Exchange Rooms. A hundred ladies came in to occupy the gallery at the conclusion of the dinner enjoyed by the hundred husbands, fathers and brothers of the St Mirren and the Renfrew County Kilwinning Lodges. The chairman, Robert Brown, Provost of Paisley, actually knew Alexander Wark, now dead, who told him that he (Wark) had been looking out of his window in Paisley when he saw a man whom he thought looked like the portrait of Burns riding by in the street below. Hurrying out, he chased after the rider and asked him if he were indeed the poet Burns? Burns laughed and said that he was. Alexander then asked if he might shake his hand. Burns offered it at once and rode on. Alexander Wark was left standing in the street looking at the hand that shook the hand of Robert Burns.
The bells rang in Montrose, where Burns had family ties, and the ships in the harbour showed their colours to mark the day. Two horses dragging a plough held by a man in Burns’s costume led the procession from the Links, and the shops all being closed, the people gathered in the streets determined to enjoy the holiday in the clear and dry weather. Arriving at the Town Buildings, the crowd was addressed by Adam Burnes. They then gave three cheers in memory of the National Bard before dispersing. The same Burnes, who shared the same family name as William Burnes, the poet’s father, and his cousins, the Montrose writers and lawyers, also addressed the company that afternoon in the Guild Hall, and, in the course of his remarks, said.
Burns taught, in fact, that to be a man was the grand distinction, and that all other distinctions were but the clothes that wrap the figure, while the figure itself was the real thing. That without the man these were nothing, had no value, could have no existence. That without that solid, central, and sentient monarch, man, titles are but as air; gay clothes but the furniture of a Jew’s shop; great houses but empty, useless shelves; carriages no better than wheelbarrows. This Burns held to be the grand principle.
‘The poor Indian whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind,’
might imagine some superiority attached to his feathered chief; but it was well to impress on the world that an enlightened people should look upon rank and title in its true aspect. It was well to let the noble understand that they were not to presume, and to let the masses understand that their feet were set on the firm rock of eternal truth. The man who breathes the soul of rational dignity into the minds of the people is the greatest of public patriots, and the words – ‘A mans’ a man for a’ that’ engraved in your hearts in letters more enduring than adamant – while they ring in our own age, will reverberate for ages to come, at each period shaking from its foundation the insolence of tyranny and oppression, and putting to the blush the meanness of subserviency. It has been said that every man of genius feels within himself a consciousness of his great ability and of the influence he possesses over the minds of his fellow men; and a remarkable prediction by Burns himself appears in one of his own letters, sufficient to startle us now. When warned to act and not to think, he said – ‘Burns was a poor man from birth, but the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase…’
(The toast was rapturously received and was drunk with great enthusiasm)
This enthusiasm was lifted and carried from town to town throughout the land and it drifted through much of the route Burns himself had travelled in his Highland and West Highland tours and through the same Border country, where in 1787, he touched a toe into England. He never got further than Newcastle in the North-east of England and Carlisle in its North-west and 72 years later, his name was being remembered in both centres.
When Burns was in the latter town he had his horse, Jenny Geddes, impounded for grazing it on the mayor’s land. It would be the equivalent of a parking fine today, but in 1859 the Carlisle mayor was one Robert Ferguson, a scholar and poet himself, so possibly he might have been more lenient. His brother, also a poet, John Clarke Ferguson, presided over the Burns function at the Coffee-House Assembly Room which was ‘numerously attended’. There is no record of any poetical effusion from either brother to mark the occasion. However, Philip Henry Howard of Corby Castle, ‘than whom no man, from his refined taste and literary research, is more capable of appreciating the lives and works of great men’, was Chairman and proposed the toast to Burns at the Lion and the Lamb Tavern. While doing so, he took the opportunity to take up a collection on behalf of Mrs Isabella Burns Begg’s daughters who had been left in straitened circumstances after their mother’s death only a month before. Mr Howard concluded:
One great peculiarity of Burns’s writings is their intense nationality; and no wonder for Scotland can boast almost solely of being the only country that did not bow the neck to foreign invasion. When the southern portion of the country was overrun successively by Romans, Danes, Saxons, and others, all that even the conquering Romans could attempt was to bar them out by that gigantic wall which has been contemplated with wonder by both countries for centuries, and which in July will no doubt be the occasion of great interest both to us and many strangers from a distance. Now, gentlemen, I may safely leave the toast in your hands, to honour it as it deserves, but before resuming my seat I may mention that I have received from Mr Walter Buchanan, of Ayr, a recommendation that you will not forget the nieces of the poet – the daughters of Mrs Begg, who paid the debt of nature only in December last. I hope that some time, at an hour better adapted to business than just now, your names will be put down for contributions that will show that you wish to render a living and lasting tribute to the memory of the great poet…
Gentlemen, I now call upon you to drink to the Memory of Burns, and I feel sure that at another time you will not forget the necessities of his nieces who survive him.
It might be said to be ‘Ladies Night’ at the Lion and the Lamb, for the next toast of the evening was ‘To the Poet’s Wife, Jean Armour’ which was gallantly proposed by the Vice-Chairman, Mr Robert Dixon. It was good to see Jean given her place.
The Carlisle report ended:
There were other minor festivities which are noticed elsewhere. Altogether the Border city has no reason to be ashamed of the effort made to commemorate the birth of the greatest genius the sister country has ever produced.
Newcastle had equal reason to be proud, as the centenary of Robert Burns was celebrated there ‘with extraordinary enthusiasm’. The Town Hall Festival began at five o’clock before a company of 400 gentlemen. After dinner, the ladies were invited to the gallery. The cloth having been withdrawn, the Chairman (Sir John Fife) rose to make the main toast, which, after a lively exposition on Burns and Highlanders, felicitously linked his listeners to similar gatherings elsewhere:
While I feel in my own heart that brotherhood towards the admirers of Burns, let me wish a happy evening to those other societies under different roofs in this town who are now with us celebrating his memory, and let us, with your consent and that of the ladies, send at this moment a telegraph to Edinburgh, to Lord Ardmillan, who is the chairman of the Burns’s festival there, and let us assure him, as we assure our townsmen under different roofs, that we fraternise with them most sincerely – that we join with them most heartily in the large hearted, liberal spirit which Burns himself possessed, in celebrating this great day… I give you, ladies and gentlemen, ‘To the Immortal Memory of the poet Burns’.
It is fitting that all these hundreds of Tuesday evenings in 1859 (in Europe at least) should return us to that honest man from Ayr, Lord Ardmillan, and keep the focus fixed on Ayrshire and its epicentre at Alloway. The reverberations from that 1759 event were felt on every atoll or mountainside, forest clearing or city street – wherever the Caledonian diaspora had extended. The speeches here were all very much of the same thing as in Britain, only more so. It would appear that the further a Scotsman is from Scotland, the more Scottish he becomes – and therefore, the more Burnsian. But it was not only the Scots who responded. The native speakers, in whatever country, rose up in all their rhetorical splendour before their respective expatriates. In the United States, for instance, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, in a lengthy but eloquent address enthralled 3,000 listeners at the Cooper Institute in New York:
The nation which read Burns in the nursery could never have tyrants in the Parliament House. The men who drink at Burns’s spring will be too sturdy for oppression, too contagious for power to tamper with, and with too much self-respect for blandishment and bribes.
Yet didn’t Burns say:
What force or guile could not subdue through many warlike ages
Is wrought now by a coward few for hireling traitor’s wages.
For English steel we could disdain secure in valour’s station;
But English gold has been our bane-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.’
And the rogues he referred to were Scots themselves who proved very bribable.
The Rev Beecher went on:
Burns had pre-eminently this love for man in all his moods, weaknesses, sorrows, joys, hopes, and fears for life, and for eternal life. He is universal in his sympathy. He loves the very shoe-latches of the poor Scotch peasant. He loves the very daisy his shoe trod upon. Terrible often with rage that sounds as thunder in the mountains, yet it is love both personal and general that marks the poems of Burns, and that gives them their wondrous vitality, and will never let them die so long as a soul yearns, or hearts desire to be tenderly cheered.
Finally, tonight let us give to the memory of Burns something of that food of love and praise which his own should have hungered for his life long, and never had. If he has faults, let us, like them of old, walking backward with reverence and affection, cast a mantle upon them. If every man within these twenty-four hours the world around who shall speak the name of Burns with fond admiration were registered as his subjects, no king on earth would have such a realm.
At Boston there was a posse of poets out to capture Burns. One who did was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called himself ‘the worst Scotchman of all’ but rose to give a wonderful speech, which has been deservedly much-printed since.
Not Latimer, not Luther, struck more telling blows against false theology than did this brave singer. The ‘Confession of Augsburg’, ‘The Declaration of Independence’, ‘The Rights of Man’, The French ‘La Marseillaise’ are not more weighty documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through the air. He is so substantially a reformer that I find his grand plain sense in close chain with the greatest masters – Rabelais, Shakespeare in comedy, Cervantes, Butler and Burns.
Despite the surprising inclusion of Samuel Butler among the ‘greatest masters’, this is the real perspective on Burns and it takes the self-confessed ‘worst Scotchman of all’ to see it.
He is an exceptional genius. The people who care nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns. It was indifferent – they thought who saw him – whether he wrote a verse or not: he could have done anything else as well. Yet how true a poet he is! And the poet, too, of poor men, of gray hodden and the Guernsey coat and the blouse. He has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farmhouse and cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man’s wine; hardship; the fear of debt; the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thoughts. What a love of Nature, and, shall I say it? Of middle class Nature. Not like Goethe, in the stars, or like Byron, in the ocean, or Moore, in the luxurious East, but in the homely landscape which the poor see around them, – bleak leagues of pasture and stubble, ice and sleet and rain and snow-choked brooks; birds, hares, field mice, thistles and heather, which he daily knew. How many ‘Bonny Doons’ and ‘John Anderson my jo’s’ and ‘Auld Lang Synes’ all around the earth have his verses been applied to! And his love songs still woo and melt the youths and maids; the farmworkers, the country holiday, the fishing cobble are still his debtors today.
And this poet concluded on a poet:
And as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made the Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man. But more than this. He had that secret of genius to draw from the bottom of society the strength of its speech, and astonish the ears of the polite with these artless words, better than art, and filtered of all offence through his beauty. It seemed odious to Luther that the devil should have all the best tunes; he would bring them into the churches; and Burns knew how to take from friars and gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the speech of the market and street, and clothe it with melody… the memory of Burns, every man’s, every boy’s and girl’s head carried snatches of his songs, and they say them by heart, and, what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them, nay, the music boxes at Geneva are framed and toothed to play them; the hand organs of the Savoyard in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them is the spires. They are the property and the solace of mankind.
Thus it was, through places as contrasting as the mansion of Nowrozjee Arrdaseer Davur in Bombay and the Commercial Hotel, Dunedin, New Zealand, the ribbon of words wreathed its way around the world as emigre Scots came ‘from every airt and pairt’ to listen, laugh, drink and sing about their Poet and share, if only for the night, a jovial commonality. Dunedin stoutly continues its Scottish connection to this day.
Considering that Burns’s own nephew Thomas Burns settled there as a clergyman before the middle of 19th-century, it’s hardly surprising that the Burns connection there is also sound. The Burns Club is one of the most active organisations in the town and celebrated its centenary in February 1991. Their principal guest on that occasion was the tenor, Kenneth McKeller, who delivered a pawky Immortal Memory to a rather senior audience, who, one feels, would rather have had him sing. The lady who hosted the garden party next day was one of the Rev Burns’s descendants, but Ken still didn’t sing. Needless to say, his concerts that night and the following night were both sold out, and a great time was had by all.
Which was more than could be said for the final item in this review of that other centenary in 1859. This was the solitary celebration in Copenhagen, where, on the evening of 25 January, a few expatriates plus some Scandinavians and Icelanders met at the University and paid one shilling each to hear Professor Stephens read 450 lines of his own poem – The Rescue of Robert Burns, February 1759. The proceeds were given towards the building of an English Episcopal Church in the city.
Then each took off his several way
Resolved to meet some ither day.
(The Twa Dogs)