Poor Burns! I have always deplored his hard fate. He has always been a favorite of mine. The child of genius and of misfortune, he is read everywhere and by all classes throughout the extent of our country and his natural pathos has reached all hearts.
(James Buchanan, President of the United States 1857–61)
The events of 1896 had been so momentous in a Burnsian sense, that it was inevitable that a reaction would be felt in the immediate years that followed to close the 19th-century. The Toast, of course, went on but they were pistol shots compared to the loud cannon of the year before. Nevertheless, even if they aimed lower, they hit their mark. Take, for example, Dr Kerr, whose address was given before the Edinburgh Burns Club on 25 January 1897:
I have had little experience, less skill, and, if possible, still less liking for speech-making, and I very earnestly ask your kind indulgence for my attempt to add one small stone to the ever-increasing cairn of Burns. Though the subject is inexhaustible, I cannot hope to say anything new – anything that has not been said as well or better before.
It is, however, a subject of ever fresh interest, and awakes a responsive echo in every Scottish breast, and I indulge the hope that the enthusiasm, admiration, reverence, and love you all feel for Coila’s bard will more than make up for my defective treatment of so lofty a theme as his immortal memory. The salient features in the life and works of unquestionably the greatest of Scottish poets are known to you all. His humour, his pathos, his marvellous tenderness, his patriotism, his sympathy with all that is noblest in human nature, have been lovingly descanted on for a century by men of every rank and profession, and the cry is ‘Still they come.’ The secret of a popularity which has no parallel in any age or country is that there is no aspect of life in this workaday world, whether of joy or sorrow, which he has not flooded with the light of his genius; no nobility of action which he has not invested with a dignity which makes it an example to be followed; no meanness or hypocrisy which he has not denounced with scathing indignation; no weakness against which he has not set up a warning beacon; no shades of feeling which make up the complicated network of our emotional nature which he has not touched with a tenderness and truth entirely his own. We can name scores of men of genius whom we admire and reverence, but there are none whom we love so much as Burns, because he is incomparably the most human and sympathetic. In spite of his God-sent genius we still feel that he is one of ourselves. His words reach our hearts because they came warm and straight from his own… Nothing truer or more beautiful has been said of him than that he had ‘a true poet soul, for it needs but to be struck and the sound it yields will be music.’… No one can believe that the whole breadth and depth of Burns was fully developed during the few years of his mature life. What might not the man who in these few short years sounded all the depths and shoals of human feeling, and left an undying record behind him – what might he not have done had it been his fate to live out the allotted span?
It is, however, in his songs that Burns shows unique power. While all poetry, whether epic or lyrical, implies highly intellectual power, the element of sentiment, the mainspring of which is the heart rather than the head, plays the most important part in song-writing. Songs are emotional rather than intellectual. Songs are the language of passion – passion in its widest sense, whether it be like the tender and amorous cooing of the turtle dove, the manly fidelity of friendship, the jovial invitation to good cheer, or the trumpet blare that nerves the arm for battle. In this field Burns was peculiarly fitted to shine.
As to his prose, considerations of time and your patience prevent me from saying more than that I thoroughly agree with eminent critics who think it is as remarkable as his poetry for terseness, vigour, and grip, and that we know Burns imperfectly if we judge him only by his poetry. In estimating the man as separate from his writings, all his contemporaries declare that in overmastering personality he was far greater than his works. His greatness as a poet was simply a part of that colossal personality.
We must also remember that through his transparent openness of character in making known his own faults and failings, through the unwise zeal of his friends and the hatred of his enemies, everything he said, or wrote, or did, is known to the world. Before that world his great soul stood, and stands, unveiled. Is there a man in this room who would not shrink from such a microscopic examination of all his words and actions? Is there one of us who could pass through such an ordeal unscathed? In the name, then, of all that is – I do not say charitable, but fair, manly, and which obeys the golden rule of doing as we would be done by – in the name of all this, let there be an end of this contemptible garbage-loving, unchristian search after blemishes – a crew of pigmies girding at a giant. Let us decide once for all whether Burns was a gain or a loss to the world. Let us say, if we dare, that it would have been better if he had never seen the light. Let us admit, as we must do, that we have never looked, and probably never shall look, upon his like again, and, having done so, let us relegate to the limbo of oblivion errors inseparable from weak human nature; errors that sprang from that high strung sensibility which often accompanies and always gives living force to poetic fervour; errors that were bitterly repented of with many tears, and atoned for by terrible retribution. He has tooled his assize; let him have
his acquittal…
Well said, sir.
And on the same night, on the other side of the country, schoolmaster T. R. Stuart, MA, addressed the Ayr Burns Club.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum – ‘Let the dead bury its dead.’
He is far away from all praise or blame now, and in loving trust let us leave him to the God who endowed him with all his marvellous powers, who alone could understand his complex nature, and who cared for him more than he cared for himself. On an occasion like this it seems to me more fitting for us to think not so much of Burns the man, as of Burns the poet – a living and active force in our midst today, exerting by the power of his genius a wider and a mightier influence than the vast majority of the men who are alive and working around us. The poet still lives. He breathes still in his works, and through these we come within the circle of his charm, the halo of his inspiration. The quintessence of poetry is the lyric; the quintessence of lyric poetry is distilled in the poems of Robert Burns. True, the grandest moments of human thought, preserved in poetic form, are the stately epics, the lofty dramas of some giant – a Homer, a Virgil, a Milton, a Shakespeare; but in each of these we have more than a poet. We have an historian, a psychologist, a philosopher. In these productions we have history, psychology, philosophy, and poetry. But in the exact, elastic sonnet, in the slender, sturdy, stirring song, we have poetry; and we have poetry pure and simple. The loftiest flights of the imagination, the deepest feelings of the heart, the vividest images of the fleeting thought, are arrested at their very best and bound captive in the velvet chains of the short lyric. Are not such themes, in their simplicity, the true quintessence of poesy, and is not such poesy ‘the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life?’ Is not this especially the case with the poems of Burns? It has been sympathetically said of the man that he ‘died of being Robert Burns.’ Might it not be said with equal truth of the poet that he lives by being Robert Burns?
‘The Immortal Memory’ of Burns is, then, the immortal memory of his lyric poetry, and that immortality is only limited – pardon the ‘bull’ – by whatever limitation there may be to the immortality of Nature. For Burns is a true son of Nature – no artificial, made-up fop, and his songs are actual, integral parts of Nature; that is, of course, the best of his songs. The poets of the age immediately preceding Burns had been sagely discoursing about Nature, unnaturally, though perhaps prettily, writing about it in their prim studies, and with the backs of their chairs to the window. They had also studied men and women – ‘over the tea cups.’ Burns had no prim study. He went out into the fields and lanes, and was on nodding, even speaking terms with field mice and daisies. He went up the glen, and over the hill, and along by the brook, and here he met real men and real women with whom he was on even more familiar terms of nodding and speaking. When he sings of these people and these scenes, we listen to human voices, to human laughter, to human sobbing. And so with his magic wand of sympathy Burns touches every passing phase of Nature.
One of the deepest, the most enduring qualities of Burns is his humour, for he is never more genuine than when he is humorous. It is amazing how his powerful, trenchant statement of plain fact turns to laughter. Just recall the first stanza of Holy Willie’s Prayer. And in a kindlier vein consider the riotous fun of Tam o Shanter, or that powerful masterpiece of the ludicrous – there is none greater in literature – The Jolly Beggars. In his best work he sees life with them exactly as it is, and putting it down so, sets every table in a roar – ay, and makes even the solitary reader shout with delighted laughter. From merciless satire this humour ranges through every grade to the gentle smile of archness, never distorted, always true.
But, great though Burns’s pre-eminence is in the various forms of lyric poetry, it is in his love songs that he specially excels. Sappho, Horace, Beranger, Ben Jonson, Moore, have all left behind them love sonnets which are among the gems of literature; but in this branch of lyric art, even these masters must yield the palm to Robert Burns. Here he is unsurpassed. Here we have the music of the heart ‘breathed by love in beauty’s ear – thoughts that breathe and words that burn,’ and in ‘that wedded verse and music you feel that love is heaven and heaven is love.’ The grand secret of Burns’s power in those songs is that they were composed in honour of no mere phantom of a poet’s fancy, but were the outpourings of a man’s devotion to the then reigning divinity of his heart. His songs came from the heart, and they appeal straight to the heart.
The heart! Ay, ‘there’s the rub,’ gentlemen; therein lies the secret of Burns’s popularity with his fellow countrymen; there the irresistible charm which pervades his poetry. ‘Touch the heart,’ did I say? Yes, in very deed, he has touched it, more deeply than, in his most sanguine moments, he ever dreamt he could have done; touched the heart of a nation till its tenderest chords have vibrated at ‘the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.’ To your feet, then, gentlemen, and with pride and joy let us pledge ‘The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.’
And the Rev Hugh MacMillan was doing likewise at Greenock.
We are reminded by this remarkable anniversary that the character of the season in which great personages are born is very often found to correspond with their own character and destiny. Our national poet himself noticed the strange harmony between the character of the month in which he was ushered into the world and his own nature and life. We cannot imagine him a child of summer or autumn, with their settled sunshine and mellow fruition. The opening month of the year – looking, as its name implies, before and after, with the desolation of the past winter and the promise of the coming spring – seems to us to be analogous with his mixed nature and storm-tossed life; full of sorrowful memories and bright hopes, of desolations of passion and beautiful realisations of a nobler ideal. The wailing winds and the lowering clouds, and the clear afternoons that shed a mystic gleam of sunshine on bare pastures, and the lengthening eves with wistful sadness, that marked his natal month, seemed to repeat themselves in his own human experience.
And the gifts of life, the beginnings of bird life and flower life which January shakes out of its grasp into the storm, and keeps warm by breathing upon them between its hands, were emblematic of the gifts of song cast into the tempest of his fortunes, and nurtured into beauty by the warm breath of his genius. The earth was a wintry landscape to him, and his life a January day. He came early into the world, and went away early out of it, ere he had time to warm both hands at the fire of life. His intellectual life, too, may be said to have been born in a January season in the history of our literature, when it returned from the decay and barrenness of a highly conventional style to the simplicity of Nature. On a great scale the world was beginning at the time to awaken to all the qualities of a vigorous and beautiful youthhood.
There are prosaic souls that wonder why, year after year, we meet to honour the birthday of our national poet in the same unchanging fashion. They feel as if we ought, like themselves, to get tired of it and give it up. But I am sure that those who take part in this annual celebration do not experience any weariness or monotony in it. Each new occasion comes with fresh interest and zest. We do not grow tired of our own birthday; and the birthday of our immortal bard may well be a significant time to thousands who owe the first dawning of their intellectual life to the inspiration of his poetry…
It is well to have such commemorations as this, if only to keep in remembrance our nationality. At one time, not so long ago, Scottish names connected with the Scottish capital were at the head of our English literature, and Edinburgh was in truth the Modern Athens. England, by the attraction of its superior wealth and political importance, is gradually assimilating our country to its own likeness. In such circumstances, we are called upon to maintain and assert our individuality as a nation and country with greater zeal and resoluteness than ever. And the best way of doing so is, not by echoing the parrot-cry of ‘Justice to Scotland’ in regard to its political interests, but by such commemorations as this, which fan the fire of our patriotism through our homage to our great national poet. Scotsmen are cosmopolitan, and Scottish blood everywhere has a peculiarly cohesive property; and in every country under heaven our kinsmen tonight meet together, and while they speak with rapture of what Robert Burns has done for their native land.
What Scottish song was before his advent it is difficult for us to imagine. At an earlier period the ballad poetry of Scotland embodied all the romantic life of the land with a genuine pathos and passion, and imaginative power, and humour, and directness of expression which thrill our hearts even at this distance of time. These ballads were comparatively pure, and lived on the lips and in the memories of several generations, as they were sung over the land at fairs and feasts, and at the fireside by the wandering beggar, who paid in this manner his lawing for his supper and couch of straw. But after these ballads succeeded a period which can never come back again, when the exquisite music of many of our best known songs was associated with foul and bacchanalian words, giving them a false charm like that of the iridescence that shines on the surface of a polluted pool.
Such songs could not be sung without spreading an infectious evil atmosphere around them; and that they were popular at all showed how low was the state of morals. From this unholy alliance Burns divorced the lovely music, and married it anew to words that were worthy of it – words and music forming, as our own Hamish MacCunn has so beautifully shown, a harmony most pure and perfect. Those familiar songs that form part of the emotional inheritance of every Scottish man, woman, and child, and that raise a lump of yearning tenderness in our throats when we hear them sung in foreign lands, have all had this origin. Had Burns done no other service for his country than this elevation of our national song, he would be deserving of everlasting remembrance.
‘He died of himself,’ as some one has graphically said, in his thirty-seventh year. He had no autumn of reflection. It was all wind-born spring of growth and a summer of passion. And on his grave fell many of the blossoms of his genius, from which no fruit to quench the thirst of the soul could ever be grown… And the earnest wish of us all is, that this and all similar commemorations of Burns may do what Burns himself did for our Scottish song – elevate our minds and prove to us a source of the purest social pleasure. I ask you to join with me, in most respectful silence, in the toast of the evening – ‘The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.’
Finally, in the specimen year of 1897 with typical Addresses as the core of its Burn Night commemorations, we have Mr Walter Black at the Kelso Burns Club. His speech was reported and a brief extract is given as follows:
Mr Black, in submitting ‘The Immortal Memory,’ said:
Our monarch’s hindmost year but ane
Was five and twenty days begun,
’Twas then a blast o’Janwar’ win’
Blew hansel in on Robin.
And surely Mother Nature never gave a more boisterous welcome to any man destined to play so great a part in the drama of life. His words to the mountain, daisy are applicable to his own birth:
Cauld blew the bitter biting north
Upon thy early humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm.
For out of trouble and distress, out of misery and despair, out of the storm and tempest of his chequered life, Burns rises high and clear, until today he stands on the highest pinnacle on the temple of fame. Tonight, not only in our own land, not only across the Border, but all over the world, wherever ‘Scotchmen gather,’ admirers and lovers of our national bard are accepting his own invitation – an invitation which is still given, and will be given, to all those who choose to accept it, as long as the works of Burns occupy a place in the hearts and lives of men:
A’ ye whom social pleasure charms,
Whose heart the tide o’ kindness warms,
Wha hold your being on the terms,
‘Each aid the others,’
Come to my bowl, come to my arms,
My friends, my brothers!
Much has been said about the circumstances of the life of Burns; but we must not forget that those very circumstances have given to us this precious wealth of poetry and song. His loves, his joys, his hopes, his disappointments breathe in and through almost every line he has written. Out of the fullness of his heart the poet speaketh; and his was a large and a full heart. But there was no room in it for the tyrant and the oppressor. He loathes and curses the ‘wretch of humankind’; he detests the haughty lordling who spurns the poor petition of the o’erlaboured wight; but he sings in praise of the ‘simple rustic hind,’ the ‘buirdly chiels and clever hizzies,’ and the ‘social, friendly, honest man,’ and tells us ‘ ’tis he fulfils great Nature’s plan, and none but he.’ Burns estimated man according to his worth – ‘The honest man, though e’er so poor, is king o’ men for a’ that’ – and points out the goal of social perfection, for further we cannot go:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
It’s comin’ yet for a’ that
That man to man the warld o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.
The 20th century was only half a year old when the population of Barre, Vermont turned out en masse on the occasion of the unveiling of Burns’s likeness in dark, Barre stone by J. Massey-Rhind. The Hon. Wendell Phillips Stafford of St Johnsbury, in the main speech, made a clever plea for Scottish-Americanism in Burns. He was fully reported in the local paper.
Hon Wendell Phillips Stafford of St Johnsbury, the orator of the day, is a native of Barre and of Scottish descent, and his selection was owing to those facts, in addition to his known brilliancy as a speaker. We give the following extracts from his speech:–
Most of Burns’s poetry was only another form of his conversation. It dealt with the same topics and was addressed to the same persons. His brightest and pithiest words are often to be found in those rhyming epistles he sent his friends. One year he made his tax inventory in verse. It offers still a half humorous, half sorrowful picture of his poverty. Some of the poems – and some of the best, too – bristle all over with the names of his neighbours. So it is, for instance, in The Twa Herds. It was never printed while Burns lived. It was handed about and laughed over among the unregenerate for the slaps of wit and stings of sarcasm, all unhappily too well deserved. It was exactly as if a great genius should drop down here in our midst, take a hand in all our quarrels, ridicule our weaknesses, avenge himself upon us for our slights, and draw with merciless fidelity the characters we meet day by day upon the street.
Macaulay said truly that no man ever wrote an immortal work in any language except the one he heard about his cradle. These are the words in which thought kindles into flame. It is in moments of tremendous excitement that the finest poetic expressions have birth, and in those moments the soul always speaks in the tongue of its childhood – all other language is forgotten. You may give a Scotchman all the culture of the school, until his ordinary conversation shall not betray his race. But the first excitement will betray him. Let him get angry and, if he swears, he’ll swear in Scotch. If he falls in love, he’ll woo in Scotch. When he tells a thrilling story he’ll tell it in Scotch. And if he gets ‘fou and unco happy,’ he’ll sing in Scotch.
Now Burns could have received no education that would have given him a mightier command of this tongue – to him at once a harp and a sword. Perfect knowledge of his subject, perfect sympathy with his audience, perfect mastery of his instrument – and for not one of these gifts or acquirements was he indebted to any school or university. But let us not make the common and silly mistake of calling him uneducated. He was well educated, thoroughly educated, for the great place he was to fill. No other training would have answered. The mills have been running at Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge for centuries. Why haven’t they produced a few Burnses? They have given us many a man of learning, they have polished and adorned many a man of genius, but they have never given us a single poet of the people. There is only one school that can produce him, and that is the school of hardship, privation, and daily toil, that Burns attended.
He had one gift, generally considered to be rare among poets, but of priceless value anywhere. I mean great, rugged common sense. With all his fooling, bantering and dreaming, he never overstepped this bound. You can point out many things that are coarse, that ought never to have been written; but you cannot lay your finger on a single line and say it is silly. There is that substratum of good sense under everything he wrote. This cannot be said of all poets, nor, indeed, of all great poets. Wordswoth wrote much that is good, and a little that can never die. Many who judge wisely in such matters rank him third in English poets – Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth; but Wordsworth cannot bear this test. When he was proposed for Poet Laureate, a member of Parliament recited some of the weakest of his writings, and then asked, amid the jeers and sneers of the House, whether a man who could be guilty of such stuff as that was fit to be the Laureate of England! He could never have done that with Burns. We may laugh with Burns; we never laugh at him. You may strip him of all his poetic gifts, and still have left the man of ability and brains.
He had likewise the gift of leadership, of magnetism, of eloquence. Women loved him at sight; children hung about his knees; and men followed him like children. When it was known that he was at the tavern farmers forsook the fields, work in the village was laid aside, and if he would talk, the crowd would hang upon his lips until morning. And it was not the peasantry alone who admired him. Men and women of the best birth and breeding in Edinburgh testified that his conversation was even more wonderful than his poetry. This awkward ploughman was transformed in the presence of beauty. He could greet a lady with the grace of a knight. ‘Sic an e’e in his head!’ was a common exclamation among those who saw him. His countenance beamed with intelligence, and his smile was as winning as a child’s. who wonders that women loved him? Over his rugged and manly strength was thrown the charm of wit, the grace of speech, and that indefinable suggestion of greatness. Here was that rare blending of sweetness and strength which captivates the heart and leads men where it will.
But over and above all this he bore the rare, mysterious, magnificent endowment of poetic genius. This was his crown. Here aspiring nature burst into flame. The rarest and most splendid gift God ever bestows upon the world is a great poet.
We see now that it was Nature’s purpose to make a poet, and that she took the surest means. She took the best blood of Scotland, peasant blood pure and undefiled, that had flowed for hundreds of years close to the kindly earth – gave him a father of nature and hardened manhood, a young mother with a glad, warm heart – a father of rigid virtue, ardent piety, but independent spirit and almost ungovernable temper – a mother of poetic soul, responsible to every appeal of beauty, and so smitten with the love of song that she went about her work crooning the old Scotch airs day after day while bearing her baby in the womb. ‘When a man is born,’ said Emerson, ‘the gate of gifts is shut behind him.’ Why, Nature had made sure that Burns should be a poet before ever he was born.
If somewhere in the other world, that spirit-land, which may be nearer than we think, this great shroud is looking down upon our doings here today, believe me, nothing in them has touched him more than that his form was wrapt about with the stars and stripes – the glorious ensign of that young republic he saluted from across the sea! You, men of his race, who cherish his fame, and out of the love and sacrifice of loyal heart have reared this monument to his memory – you shall be better Americans for being true Scotchmen. You have cast in your lot with us, in a land dedicated to the very principle for which Burns sang his earnest song. We have a great task before us still, and you must help us. We must see that the sublime idea of our fathers is realised better, year by year, in a wide and wider spread of these blessings which they intended to secure for themselves and their posterity. The stream of your natural life must be the richer for your coming. Bring us of your thrift, your energy, your loyalty. We need them all. But bring us your finer gift, bring us your poet, too. He is too great for Scotland – he belongs to the world at large.
Queen Victoria died in January 1901 and the Edwardian era finally began. That summer, the Burns Federation held its Annual Meeting that summer in Dunfermline. Mr Andrew Carnegie of that town and a self-confessed Burnsian sent a note of apology. He was unable to attend because he was entertaining the Principals of the Scottish Universities at Skibo Castle. The meeting, nonetheless, conferred an Honorary Presidency on the millionaire. Also absent was Dr William Wallace, whose idea of a University Chair of Scottish History and Literature was foundering due to lack of funds. Professor Lawson of St Andrew’s University made a plea for more support from the Clubs who had so far contributed one-tenth of the amount required. The meeting responded by making Dr Wallace an Honorary Vice-President.
And so the idylic Edwardian sundown continued in its unruffled, complacent way. The annual voices were raised at Burns Suppers but in this 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth, no one thought to get very excited, except perhaps Mr Rae-Brown who showed all his old enthusiasm for anniversaries but, compared to the explosions of 1859 and 1896, hardly a ripple was heard. Typical perhaps was the quiet, reasoned voice of a Scottish clergyman who spoke at the annual supper of the Glasgow Ayrshire Society. It was January 1913 and theirs was a kind of world that was, in the following year, to disappear for ever. In that lull before the storm, there was still time to pause, reflect and reason, and the Reverend David Dickie did just that for his fellow-Ayrshire men in Glasgow and for that other man o’ Ayr.
In endeavouring to interpret the oracle of Burns, necessity is laid upon us to obtain an honest medium – a veritable life-likeness. Before his personality can possess us, our imagination must capture the stamp of man he was, as well as his attendant atmosphere. In other words, if we are to come within the full sphere of his influence we must secure a view-point with nothing to obstruct. Too many of the prints and paintings, the marble busts and sculpture monuments, are but misleading commentaries. In the main they are too Parisian – too suggestive of a dandy and a foreigner – and altogether outwith the traditions of time and place.
Happily, in the artistic creations of these later days, we are getting back to nature first hand – back to plain and simple truth – looking fact in the face. So that while Burns is still set before us as a figure to fill the eye, he is no longer presented after the fashion and modes of indoor life – the broad jaw, the high cheek bones, the strong head, the sturdy upstanding frame speak to us of a man true to type – a man like the world – the world of farmer folks. With such a human likeness we can all stand in, and start communion, and the ground on which we meet is not less holy because it is common ground. Standing at his shrine as we are this evening, most essential it is at the outset that we lay down his life-work on legitimate lines. On no account must we regard his development as an exhibition, solitary and apart. No mere ‘sport’ of human kind was he, nor intellectual accident. His genius was genuinely related to the dwellers round about – was but the high water mark of the spiritual spring-tide of his native country.
One other natural factor in his composition we must not overlook. We must not forget ‘the rock out of which he was hewn’. Poverty, his bedfellow all through, was not his only patrimony. In more ways than one his father was a man of might. In his economy, the elemental forces of genius were pent up and imprisoned. The power that burst forth as
poetry in the son, slumbered as piety in the sire. So truly was he the high priest in his home, that the bard held him in awe even in his wildest moments. As you note the father’s grave, puritanic pride, you can easily discern whence Burns drew his manly independence and native dignity. And in the old man’s fine respect for Deity, you can trace the subtle religious influence that ever stood like a good angel between the poet and his works.
Happily in our appreciation of Burns the historic sense obtains. We have passed from the period when the real man could not be discerned in the heat and dust of the day. The whole kindly economy of life has laboured to resurrect him as he was in heart and principle. So that what outstands today is Burns at his best – Burns the Immortal. After a century and more the sheer sincerity of the man has saved him. In spite of everything else his innate native ‘rightness’ has come through and won its way to the front. One cannot help contrasting time’s tender treatment of Burns with its rough handling of men of a different stamp – men never done affecting the pious pose – whose life-labour it is to keep their own goodness in evidence, and if possible under the lime light. In most wondrous and unreckoned ways life’s interaction works off their veneer – discovers the joints in their harness, quite quietly brings the real man out of his guard – searches him through and through, as with a lighted candle, and shows him up – not a man, but only the phantasm and wrappings of a man. It may be in this same city you have seen under wintry conditions ‘the bird of Paradise’ in the moult.
If, like many another prophet, Burns received but scant honour in his own day and from his own folk, history has handsomely righted the wrong. From being a mere popular rhymer, he has been lifted into the front rank of Scottish Reformers – our acknowledged national liberator. Underneath all his writing runs one continuous emancipation act – not for a class, but for humanity, bringing freedom not into one department of duty, but into the whole domain of life. Hard-mouthed purists hold it rank heresy to reckon Burns a religious reformer, yet assuredly that was his peculiar ordinance. Out and out and through and through, his life-work made for betterment in conduct as in creed. In this respect he served his kirk and country, as neither kirk nor country realised. Had the preachers of the day but known it, he was ministering with high distinction at the same altar with themselves. His lyrics have simply transfigured the whole spiritual outlook and economy of humankind.
In the most ordinary mortal this Scottish seer discerned a very heaven of human interest and charm – unroofing the plough-man and the milk-maid, he surprised situations surpassingly idyllic – revealing a wealth of sentiment that carried further than mere emotional response – sentiment not merely winsome and clean, but empathetically redemptive, simply incalculable in its moral uplift, ennobling the whole tone of life’s relationships. Into the natural commerce of the swain and his sweetheart he glinted a new light from above, lifting it out of the level of sense, and transmuting the challenge of sex into ‘the sacred lowe o’ weel placed love.’ Pecksniff & Co. have made a mighty ado about his side stepping, but at its worst, it was not a feather weight over against the lift his lyrics gave to sex relationships, and the best interests of morality.
Not less in the world of thought than in the world of feeling was his unique power advertised. More perhaps than any scientific theologian, Burns banished distorted notions of Deity, recovered and established the standards of truth. There are those who assert that only a burning desire to clear scores, made him lash out at the dogmatists of his day, whereas
we all know that it was his antagonists’ contradictions that called him forth. There before him was an order of teachers, genial and human-hearted, even jovial, but who, the moment they adventured into theology pulled down the blinds, and threw life into shadow. No wonder it maddened him to see men – lay and cleric alike – the very soul of good company, when they came to appreciate the Divine management, go straight back on their own personal enjoyments, right in the teeth of daily experience, and altogether against the grain of human nature.
Those blasphemous caricaturists Burns did not condescend to combat, he simply laughed them out of court. Like the breath of spring on the stubble, his scathing satire and resistless humour withered the undergrowth of mock piety in Scotland. First and last an earnest truth-seeker, he could not sway with men in a sacred office who only peeped and muttered, and no quarter did he give them, and no quarter did they deserve. To his eternal honour be it testified that his was the supreme genius that undermined the fabric of superstition and brought the house of lies down, and Scottish theologians ever since have been but helping to remove the rubbish.
Only those familiar with the literature of the 18th-century will rightly appreciate his services to poesy – how he redeemed our lowland lyrics from coarseness and obscurity, sweetening and purifying the whole atmosphere of song. His patriotism still makes men’s blood run fire – vibrant yet the ring he gave to the ‘rights of man.’ Never another mortal preached the gospel to the poor with such homely vision. His sheer humanness makes him kin to every life in distress, concerning itself even with ‘the sorrows of Satan’. Time would fail me to review the long procession of his ministries, and I humbly venture to think that at a meeting like this, better work can be done for our hero. The pledge is laid on every member of a Burns Club to put the poet right with the world, and to turn his memory round and round till the true light – the light of life – falls upon it.
Far be it from us to throw a halo of glory round what is wrong, or dress up evil in the garb of holiness merely because a genius did it. Such is not our intention, nor is such our painful necessity. The tears of time have long since blotted out the stains on his memory. Affection’s offices have healed the wounds, and covered over the scars in his character. The instinct of justice in human nature has firmly put its hand on the mouth of the defamer. For all the follies that laid him low, atonement has been made a thousandfold. But even in his life-time, Burns wrought out his own redemption. In spite of all the dark passages and tragic breaks, his character had an integrity of its own. Spiritual deliverance came along its own private path – along the line of his hard, unhappy life. Religion with him was not an attainment of rounded corners and completed achievements. All the while the divine purpose seemed thwarted and turned aside, the fierce fires of penitence were burning within, cleansing his soul, and keeping his conscience hard at work. Behind no plausible subterfuge did he ever conceal himself from Deity. Out into the open he came, confessing his errors with the frankness and candour of a little child. And what more could mortal do, bound as he was by past infirmity!
I confess, to me he has always seemed greatest when the world turned its back on him – greatest when his life lay sunken in the shadow of a terrible eclipse. Where another and shabbier soul would have lain down and grovelled, begging the public pity, Burns stood up to his disgrace, meeting the sneers of the crowd with the full might of his manhood – sending back scorn for scorn. Not lowering his mien for a moment – but carrying himself in his own grand way – peerless in the region round about – a king in his own right. Why the convention has obtained to honour this sentiment in solemn silence, I fail to understand. We are assembled to celebrate a nativity. Why, then, should we strike a wrong note by turning the festive occasion into the scene of a funeral service? Why should solemn silence black border rejoicing? We are not come to bury Burns, but to praise him. I give you – with all the honours – ‘The Immortal Memory’.
There is such calm, good sense here that it is a pleasure to put it whole on the page. One can not only understand Burns the better but one gets a glimpse of the balanced man the Reverend Dickie must have been. This is the kind of unshowy Memory that shows up the essential Burns best, but then in 1914 the insanity and absurdity of war broke out like a sore and spread like a cancer all over Europe. All memories gave way to the nightmares of Mons, Ypres and Cambrai and every kind of young man was sunk in mud and blood for four hideous years in the obscenity of out-dated trench warfare saved only by the arrival of tanks and the Americans.
With the end of the war the countries involved only took time to recover from their wounds before beginning their preparations for its continuation in the Second World War just 20 years later. ‘Between the Wars’ the period is called and it comprised those two decades known broadly as the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the ‘Hungry Thirties’. Man was still a long way from Burns’s ideal of brotherly love, and in many cases it was more like Buddy, can you spare a dime? This was an American popular song of the Depression years and it was in America that the focus turned for new thoughts and new writing on Burns.
James Buchanan wasn’t the only American President who knew his Burns. According to Milton Hay, President Lincoln could recite the whole of Tam o Shanter and President Roosevelt was known to have enjoyed Ray Noble’s sweet-swing version of Auld Lang Syne broadcast every Hogmanay from the Rockefeller Centre, New York. The very first president, George Washington, would have known Burns as the first American edition of his poems was published in Philadelphia in 1788, and ever since then his popularity, surprisingly, has grown in the United States to a degree even greater, or at least, more widely-spread than in the United Kingdom.
We have acknowledged the tributes paid to him by poets like John Greenleaf Whittier and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it was the scholars of America who advanced him most in the 20th century. The study of the letters of Burns in 1931 and the legend of Burns in 1932 by J. DeLancey Ferguson were important additions to Burns scholarship and the Life by Franlyn B. Snyder in 1932 was rightly regarded as monumental. Oliver Wendall Holmes put it succinctly when he said:
Burns ought to have passed ten years of his life in America, for those words of his: ‘A man’s a ma for a’ that’ show
that true American feeling belonged to him as much as if he had been born in sight of the hill before me as I write – Bunker Hill.
This American accent is still heard today in Burns scholarship in the work of such as the already-mentioned Professor George Ross Roy at the University of South Carolina, although his native voice is Canadian. In this context, it is worth quoting at length the final few paragraphs of the late Donald Low’s excellent edition of Robert Burns – The Critical Heritage (1974). Here, Dr Low concluded:
Scotch blood explains only a little of the American regard for Burns. In this country he receives a profounder and sincerer homage than any that springs from the sentimental claims of race and nationality – a homage that is rendered, not by reason, but in spite of much that is intrinsic in the poet’s character and work; a homage that takes us beyond the limited range of Burns’s patriotism, and reveals the true horizon of the poet’s greatness. Notwithstanding his excessive Scotchness Burns has struck home to the American heart as no other outside writer has done before or since, and won from a practical, but essentially non-poetic, people an appreciative homage which is the most eloquent tribute yet accorded to his genius…
The literary, like the political revolution of the 18th-century, consisted chiefly in the assertion and establishment of the dignity of individual man; it lay also in a return to the healing powers of nature, and in both of these respects the Napoleon of this revolution was Robert Burns. Nature was his high priestess in song; and when equality and fraternity were being branded with blood and fire on the face of Europe, Burns gathered as into a burning focus the whole human sentiment of the revolution in ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’. This was a voice straight from the democracy, speaking for the democracy with an unexampled directness and dignity – the voice of one who stood on his own rock of independence, and esteeming every man at his mere intrinsic worth, proclaimed the new creed and gospel of humanity.
In this Burns is more in sympathy with American than with Scottish life. The principle of individual worth and the spirit of independence which are to us in this country commonplaces of our daily lives are not so familiar in Scotland of today, and in the days of Burns they were startling in their novelty. It is true that Burns seemed to have failed miserably, that he was silently crushed out and down by the allied respectabilities of social caste, whose extinction he so proudly heralded. But despite his apparent failure there is in the life and poetry of this herald of the dawn an immortal record of the true majesty of manhood. Therein lies the great ethic of his work, therein lies his just claim to sit among the great and beneficent spirits of the human race.
There is also a transatlantic connection in one of the first voices raised for Burns soon after his death, and in a woman’s voice at that. Interestingly enough, she also had a relation with the only part of the Americas Burns might actually have visited had his book not sold – the West Indies. Maria Banks Woodley was the daughter of the Governor and Captain-General of the Leeward Islands and in 1788 she accompanied him to the West Indies. She met there the doltish Walter Riddell and returned with him to England in 1792. They had earlier visited Robert Riddell at Friar’s Carse and there she met Burns. They were mutually attracted at once but various unfortunate events caused a quarrel which was not made up until the last few months of his life. Before this, however, with Burns’s encouragement she had written Voyages to the Madeira and Leeward and Caribee Islands and when he died, Maria wrote a memoir of the poet which W. E. Henley thought ‘so admirable in tone, and withal so discerning and impartial in understanding, that it remains the best thing written of him by a contemporary critic’. However, since the concentration in this book is on the oral or verbal evocation of Burns in oration, we must pass it over.
Maria Riddell’s ‘pen-portrait’ brings to mind at this point the matter of the portraits of Burns and how he was seen by painters in his own day. Unfortunately, none was a great painter in the classical sense, although Sir Henry Raeburn, one of the few genuine Scottish masters, was reputed to have made a likeness at one time even if it was only a copy of Nasmyth’s portrait rather than an original. Raeburn was in Rome when Burns first came to Edinburgh and although they might have met during the later visits, they did not. This is to be regretted as Sir Henry, from his Edinburgh studio in York Place, painted many of the leading figures of the golden age of the Scottish Enlightenment and might have, had the opportunity arisen, given us the real Burns in oils instead of a copy of a copy, even if it is by his own hand. Letters, dated 14 November 1803 and 22 February 1804, from him to the publishers, Cadell and Davies, in London, state:
I have finished a copy of Burns the Poet from the original portrait painted by Mr Nasmyth. I have shown it to Mr Cunningham who thinks it very like him…
and
Nothing can be more gratifying to me than the approbation you expressed of the copy I made for you of Robert Burns.
George Thomson, according to his biographer, J. Cuthbert Hadden, in 1898, considered the painting he (Thomson) had of Burns by Raeburn ‘was the best extant…’ [and]
who, on my solicitation, did me the great favour of revising and retouching the face in my own presence, and gave much to that lustre in the eyes which I well remember in the living man, and upon which I could not help gazing during the only day I ever had the pleasure of dining in his delightful company…
He then went on to say:
The charms of Burns’s conversation may well make us regret that he was not, like Johnson, attended by a Boswell…
This has been a regret felt by many, including the present writer who, in a volume dealing with the spoken word on Burns, would have dearly liked to have included the spoken word of Burns himself. However, enough exists in anecdote to give us the flavour of this exceptional man, and for that we must be content.
What became known as the Auchendrane replica of this same portrait was bought by Lord Rosebery but the basic portrait was the work of Alexander Nasmyth and it was executed while Burns was in Edinburgh during 1787. The result is what amounts to the passport portrait of Robert Burns. It is the one everybody knows – the wispy hair plastered over a high forehead, long sideburns, dark, lustrous eyes and almost womanly lips. This is the ubiquitous Burns, Burns as icon, and it is the brand-image that represents Burns to the world today. Various engravings were made from this original by such artists as Neagle and W. F. Fry but did Burns really look like this?
Apparently not. The family considered that the portrait done by James Tannock, a Kilmarnock-born, London-trained painter who was apprenticed to Nasmyth in 1803, was ‘the best likeness in existence’. According to Gilbert Burns – ‘To make the poet mini-mou’d will not do.’ Illustrators seem determined to give him prissy lips and a weak chin. Perhaps they considered this the poetic look. The family very much resented this. His sister, Isabella (Mrs Begg) was typically explicit – ‘He was far bigger and tougher than his portraits. They make him look like a gentleman which he never was.’ Sir Walter Scott says much the same thing – ‘His person was strong and robust… his countenance is more massive than it looks in any of the portraits…’ For Scott, it was the face of a ‘douce, guid man, who held his own plough.’ John Beugo may have got something of this in his engraving and the John Meirs silhouette suggests a fuller face. Peter Taylor and Alexander Reid in their works suggest the artisan rather than the artist, as does the Tassie medallion of 1801 but, generally speaking, most portraits, including the admirable copy of the Nasmyth made by Archibald Skirving in red chalk, and another in oils by John Faed, give us a ‘pretty’, highly idealised Burns who is portrayed as less than he was in life.
Modern opinion was well illustrated by an essay on Burns in Latitudes (1924) by the Orcadian, Edwin Muir. Muir, as one of Scotland’s leading poets in the 20th-century, claimed that the only contemporary verdict on Burns free from ‘a touch of cant… something morally or socially superior’ was that of Allan Cunningham’s father, who said:
Few men had so much of the poet about them, and few poets so much of the man: the man was probably less pure than he ought to have been, but the poet was purer than he ought to have been, and the poet was pure and bright to the end.
That is Burns in a nutshell.
Despite having lost a whole generation of members to the Great War, the Burns Clubs resumed their activities soon after the Armistice in 1918, and with them the annual January supper. These might be best be typified by the programme offered by the Bridgeton Burns Club of Glasgow in its 58th anniversary dinner at the Grosvenor Banqueting Hall on Wednesday 25 January 1926 at 6-30pm for 7. The Chairman for the evening was the Club president, Dr David McKail, and the Croupiers attending him were the Vice-President, Mr Templeton, with the club office-bearers, Messrs Shaw, Stobo, McDonald, Whyte and Cowper. The traditional Scottish ‘Bill o’ Fare’ was offered as follows:
Caller Eysters
Cockie Leekie an’ Baps
Fush: Fried Filleted Sole an’ Ballochmyle Sauce
Haggis wi a’ the Honours
(This would mean it was piped in and served with a dram)
Roastit Chicken an’ Ayrshire Bacon
Mauchline Puddin’ an’ Droukit Sauce
Cauld Cream
Dessairt
Coffee
After an appropriate interval there followed what was termed The Nicht’s Ongauns. This really meant the Toasts of the evening interspersed with Burns readings and songs as well as, in this case, a collection for the Schools Burns Competition Prize Fund. The Chairman proposed the first toast, which is always to the reigning sovereign, in this case, King George V. This was followed by the National Anthem given by the company who then rendered the Scottish anthem (Scots Wha Hae) after which the cigars came out with the relevant speerits.
To honour him, we’ve met aince mair,
Come fill your glass and rise from your chair.
Professor Bowman then gave the toast to the Immortal Memory on this occasion and, as was the custom at this club, the toast was followed by:
ONE MINUTE SILENCE
as announced in the programme in bold type. This was strictly observed and no doubt was in effective contrast to all that had gone before – and what was yet to come. The chief toast is always, or should be, the watershed of the evening. Things rise towards it and then fall away from it. This is why the minute’s silence is so effective a bridge. The solemnities had been properly observed and now the fun can start. The toasts are lighter and are wholly at the discretion of the club. In this instance, the subsequent toasts were ‘To the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Town Council of Glasgow’, ‘To Oor Guests’ and finally, ‘To Our Chairman and Croupiers’ before the company joined Auld Lang Syne and repaired to the respective trams, trains and taxis.
It is worth quoting this programme in detail for not only is it typical of its day it is very much the format still offered at the formal dinners known as Burns Suppers all over the world. Particulars may vary and superficial rites may be added appropriate to the club and its locality or tradition, but in the main, the meal serves to prepare the company for the toasts, the chief of which is, of course, the Immortal Memory. This purpose should never be lost sight of, whatever the circumstances or the standard of the Supper or the status or rank of the chosen speaker or even the price of the ticket. Robert Burns is the alpha and omega of whatever is organised in his famous name.
This was still true no matter what language was used in the ceremonies. Translations of Burns continued and, by this time, had been translated into all the main tongues. Norwegian and Rumanian were added in 1923 and 1925 respectively, but, as has been previously mentioned, 1926 saw a version of the works appear in Esperanto. Henryk Mink dealt with this at some length in the 1996 Bicentenary edition of the Burns Chronicle and the following remarks are taken from that article. He first of all acknowledges the work done by William Jacks in 1896 which has already been referred to, but he differed from that compiler in that he (Mink) insisted that the translator be fluent in both in Scots and the language into which it is being translated. This was asking a lot of even a polymath like Mr Jacks. Mr Mink, for his part, was fluent in Esperanto and used Scots who knew their Burns and who were also familiar with that artificial language.
Esperanto was a language communication invented by Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof, a Polish Jew who practised as an oculist in Warsaw and became known as ‘Doktoro Esperanto’ after his new language was adopted in other countries and Esperanto Associations set up. It is based on an international root-word vocabulary adapted to a simplified 16-rule grammar. It was intended as a kind of lingua franca between nations and to break down the barriers of difference in line with the Burns precept of international brotherhood, but today English has become the international language of commerce and culture even where it has been reduced to the jargon of information technology or cell-phone text. Doktoro Esperanto deserved better. But for those who enjoy the challenge, Afton Water can be sung as:
Fluadu Altono lau verda kampar, Fluadu trankville al vasta la mar…
Or Bonie Wee Thing, Cannie wee thing as:
Bela eta estajo, afabla eta estajo…
All the translations of Burns into Esperanto were of his songs. As Henryk Minc says, the main purpose of the translators was to:
make available to Esperantists some of the most beautiful songs ever written. The translators have endeavoured to produce lyrics for these songs that fit the original tunes and render Burns’s lyrics as faithfully as they could. These translations were meant to be sung and enjoyed at Esperantist gatherings and not to be studied in minute detail.
Yet the article mentioned went into considerable detail. However, his point is taken.
Mention has already been made of the fact that the first Immortal Memory was given in verse and many speakers since have followed that example as will be seen in these pages. However, no one yet has attempted to describe a whole Burns Supper in verse but this is exactly what the heroic anonymous rhymer of 1927 did in describing the events of the evening at the Chryston Burns Supper before he capitulated to the call of Nature. No apology is made for including it here in slightly re-ordered form because this unknown pen gives us a real a picture of a West of Scotland Burns night as acute as any report in the Herald or Bulletin of the day might have done.
Ae nicht, a lang while back since,
Foregetherin’ at Davie Jackson’s,
We a’ sat roun’ the ingle crackin’
The time the supper was a- makin’,
An’ aye the crack took random turns
Till Davie spak o’ Rabbie Burns.
The mair he spak’, the mair I lis’ened,
And Davie’s e’en wi’ ardour glis’ened,
Sae weel his language he direcked
That a’ that heard him were infecked,
An’ I, afore I left for hame,
For Chryston Burns Club gi’ed my name.
In consequence o’ whilk deceesion,
Ae Janwar’ nicht, wi’ much precision,
I dressed mysel, an’, carefu’ happit,
Aff tae the Burns Club Supper stappit;
I cared na’ though the roads were slippy,
Or frost had made the air gey nippy.
I reached the Ha’, the door unsteekit,
And ben intae the lobby keekit;
There, seein’ mony weel-kent faces,
My shyness kicked oot-owre the traces;
Sae ben I gae’ed, an’ ane an’ a’
A welcome gi’ed me tae the Ha’.
The sicht I saw- I’ll ne’er forget it;
Four tables braw, wi’ flo’ers deckit,
An’ roun’ them sittin’, jokin’, laughin’,
The wale o’ men frae Chryston Clachan;
Douce Davie owre the scene presides,
An’ carefu’ he the meetin’ guides.
His audience he wi’ pith addresses
An’ on us as a study presses
The life an’ works o’ oor Scotch Robbie
An’ a’ through life tae mak’ a hobby
O’ speakin’ in the auld Scots tongue
In which oor poet proodly sung.
Ere he sits doon, his gless he raises,
‘The King,’ quo’ he, ‘he needs nae praises,’
An’ we like loyal Scottish people
Sang till we rocked the auld kirk steeple
‘God save the King’; lang may oor race
Gi’e this gran’ toast its honoured place.
The echoes o’ that anthem glorious
Had haurdly de’ed when loud, uproarious,
We hid the widden rafters ringin’
Wi’ whit’s noo ca’ed communal singin’,
An’ rendered in the auld Scots style,
‘There was a lad was born in Kyle.’
But I maun pause to ca’ attention
Tae twa-three chiel weel worth the mention,
Chiels we were glad tae ha’e amang us,
Led by the geniel Geordie Angus;
Gran’ waiters a’, alert when summoned,
Were Wallace, Beattie, Bell and Drummond.
Ye’ve heard o’ Glesca’s waiters,
Compared wi’ oors, they puir bit craturs
Were hirplin wrecks, wan, feckless dreevils,
But Geordie’s men were loupin’ deevils;
Ere empty gless had left your mou’
Yer jug wi’ reamin’ swats was fou’.
Nae mair my time on waiters wastin’,
Through the lang programme I maun hasten;
Sae young Philip wi’ the yill stops flirtin’
Whan Davie bids him tak tae liltin’;
Bauld Philip gi’es us a pawky smile
And starts ‘The Lass o’ Ballochmyle.’
The chorus o’ that sang subsidin’,
The lichtnin’ waiters sprang frae hidin’
In ante-rooms, an’, souple-j’inted,
Each gallops tae his place app’inted,
An’ splash! afore ye’d coont up four
Your gless wi’ usquebagh rins owre.
Then hark! Upon my ears comes dirlin’
The music o’ the bagpipes dirlin’
An’ heid erec’ an’ pipin’ brawly
In steps oor piper, young McAulay,
An’ close ahint him, short but bulky,
Comes marchin ben’ oor ain Jock Wulkie.
Jock tae the haggis tray is yokit,
His Tam o’ Shanter’s deftly cockit,
An’ prood as Lucifer he’s smilin’
Tae cairry in the haggis b’ilin’;
His fingers wi’ the the hot tray burnin’,
But fient a hair is Jockey turnin’.
Still – wi’ regard for burnin’ fingers –
Nae meenit on the road John lingers,
But aye his dignity maintainin’
An’ pride his manly heart sustainin’;
The Chairman’s table sune he faces,
An’ doun the haggis tray he places.
An’ I maun e’en say, ‘Weel dune, Jockey,
Ye’ve played ye’re pairt, pert an’ cocky,’
An’ whan I feel douncast or sulky,
The memory o’ wee Jock Wulkie
As he cam’ smilin’ doun the Ha’
‘I’ll drive my sulky mood awa’.’
Noo, Jim McFaurlin tak’s position,
An’ his nae learned disquisition,
But word for word, as Burns indited,
‘The Haggis Ode’ bauld Jim recited;
F’eth, Jamie lad, an’ Burns had seen ye
A hearty cheer he wad ha’e gi’en ye.
When Jamie’s recitation finished,
An’ cheers an’ noise had a’ diminished,
The lichtnin’ waiters, pechin’, sweatin’,
Set doun a meal weel worth the eatin’;
Wi’ reverent voice an’ solemn face
Douce Davie said the Selkirk Grace.
I lookit roun’ the gleesome getherin’.
An’ some were gorgin’, ithers bletherin’,
But whether daein’ ane or ither,
Each felt his neebo’r was his brither,
The bonds o’ fellowship were strengthened,
New frien’ships made an’ auld anes lengthened.
The supper’s owre – an’ fu’ each bag is
Wi’ tatties, whisky, beer an’ haggis.
Oor Chairman gi’es us a’ a warnin’
Aboor the sair heids i’ the mornin,
‘But noo,’ says he, ‘the time is fleein’
I tae the programme maun be seein’.’
He intimates the next event is
A sang by oor guid cronie, Prentice,
Wha lilts tae us sae sweet an’ canny
The poet’s love for winsome Nannie;
Sae earnestly he sings an’ well
Ye’d think he lo’ed the lass himsel’.
The Chairman frae his seat noo bounces,
An’ tae the gatherin’ announces
That the Address on this occasion,
Combinin’ baith Toast and Oration,
Was due tae come frae Johnny Broun,
The best-kenned man in a’ oor toon.
‘Mid loud applause, but nae whit worrit,
John tae the platform stappit forrit;
He clears his throat, adjusts his glesses
An’ th’expectant thrang addresses.
In simple words, yet-weel-turned phrases,
The genius o’ oor bard he praises.
Tae gi’e again John’s dissertation
I’ve neither time nor inclination,
But I’ll say this, nae critic fearin’,
That his discourse was weel worth hearin’,
An’ for it I’ll remain his debtor
Nor ever wish tae hear a better.
Ere his address the speaker closes
‘The Immortal Memory’ he proposes;
Nae word is spoken-nae gless clinkin’,
But each the toast in silence drinkin’
Wi’ reverent thochts an’ tribute mental,
We drink tae genius transcendental.
The solemn silence noo is broken,
The Chairman aince again has spoken:
The program lang he puts his haun’ on
An’ asks Muirhead tae be upstaun’in’
An’ sing that sang nae Scotsman spurns,
Kenned as ‘The Star o’ Rabbie Burns.’
Then Davie, withoot hesitation,
Ca’s for Jock Wulkie’s recitation;
Jock shoves aside a toom decanter,
An’ risin’ gi’es us ‘Tam o’ Shanter’,
He reels it aff withoot a flaw,
Hoo he can min’ it beats us a’.
An’ sae on wings the nicht quick passes
Wi’ story, sang, an’ clinkin’ glesses;
Lang Murchie tells some pawky stories
An’ young Philip’s sangs ha’e rousin’ chorus;
His cultured voice an’ tunefu’ ear
Mak singin’ a delicht tae hear.
Wull Broon an’ Jamie Hunter singing’
Frae a’ that hear them cheers are bringin’,
But Davie sune subdues the clatter,
An Archie Orr sings ‘Afton Water’;
Expression sae his sweet notes saften,
Ye a’most heard the murmurin’ Afton.
An’ noo oor men o’ elocution,
On Burns warks mak’ execution;
Wull Bell lays aff a lang epistle,
Verse efter verse as clean’s a whistle;
McFaurlin’s ‘Man was made to Mourn’
Shewed Jimmy was an actor born.
Rab Wilson next recites ‘The Vision’;
He’s studied it wi’ sic precision
That through it he gangs glibly skelpin’
Withoot a single word o’ helpin’;
Hoo he can dae it gars me won’er
I couldna dae it in years a hunner.
Tim Gray upon him tak’s the duty
Tae tell o’ Hornbook an’ Auld Clootie;
Weel he relates the eerie story
Hoo Auld Mahoun, wi’ scythe a’ gory,
Vows that the doctor’s pride he’ll end,
An’ swears tae nick him in the end.
O’ speeches, tae, we had fu’ measure,
Whilk tae repeat I ha’na leisure,
But Gibson, Broun and Willie Duncan
Withoot the slightest sign o’ funkin’,
Gie’d speeches that set hearts a-steerin’,
An’ prood were we tae gie them hearin’.
An’ here, my frien’s, I had tae leave
Though I maun say, sair did I grieve,
For ere I frae the Ha’ departed
Young Jamie Broun ‘The Twa Dogs’ started,
And sae, again’ my inclination,
I had tae miss his recitation-’
Any one who has attended such a Burns Supper will know exactly how the anonymous bard felt, and would sincerely hope that he made it.
As the Twenties moved into the Thirties, the world wide depression bit deeper, but by 1934 the Brigton Burnsians were again at the Grosvenor for their 65th Supper and this time the principal speaker was Sir John C. Watson, KC, Sheriff Principal of Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, who said that a mass production in economics was a lesser danger than mass production in thought, and it was the mass production mind that labelled Burns the sinner. ‘Burns, however, never pretended to be a saint,’ he said. ‘And in Auld Lang Syne he had written a litany for the English speaking people of the world.’ 1934 also saw the Glasgow Herald publish a review of Burns Suppers in the city around that time. This is a random selection from some of the speeches made.
If ever there was a poet who sympathised with man’s laughter and tears, his hopes, labours, and failures, that poet was Burns.
This tribute to Burns’s qualities was put forward by the Rev J. Russell Miller of Kilsyth, who proposed The Immortal Memory at the dinner of the Glasgow Haggis Club in January 1934. He went on:
Burns not only expressed the soul of Scotland as few others had done, he expressed it in songs that none other had equalled. He lived and died little above the line of poverty, but he left a rich inheritance behind him…
Never had man paid such a ribute to womankind as did Robert Burns in his love songs. He was the love poet of the world of man. We sang what he wrote, we felt what he felt, but he only could express it. Those songs were so many and
so beautiful that it was almost an impertinence to select from them.
It was another minister called Miller, this time the Rev James, who was a last-minute replacement at the Sandyford Burns Club dinner and ball in the Ca’doro, Glasgow. The Earl of Elgin was to have proposed the principal toast, but because of illness, unable to attend, and the duty was undertaken by Mr Miller, who was chaplain of the club. In proposing The Immortal Memory he made the following comment:
Twelve thousand men of all ranks and persuasions attended the funeral of Robert Burns. Was that the life or passing of a debauchee, the record of a wasted mortal span?
‘Poetry was only a small part of the man,’ said Colonel A. D. MacInnes Shaw, who proposed The Immortal Memory at the jubilee dinner of Rosebery Burns Club, held in the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross, Glasgow. He also said:
The evidence proved that the man was far more remarkable than his work. They had the testimony of an accomplished lady of his day that none ever outshone Burns in the charm and fascination of conversation, the spontaneous eloquence of social argument, or in brilliant repartee. ‘No man’s conversation ever took me so completely off my feet,’ said the Duchess of Gordon, then the queen of Scottish Society.
‘I have the right to be protected against certain Peeping Toms, Spying Sallies, gutter scrapers, and dunghill rakers,’ stated Mr A. M. Williams when proposing the toast of The Immortal Memory at the anniversary dinner of the Glasgow Ayrshire Society in Glasgow. He was speaking of Robert Burns, of course. Mr Williams went on:
This might, in view of recent books, be part of the declaration of Burns were he to return to earth today…In approaching the life of an eminent man, poet, politician, or author, there were two aspects from which his life might be considered, the public and the private… In recent times there had been a tendency to seize upon a reputation and examine it for the purpose of unearthing scandal. There was a body of literary resurrectionists who sought a diseased side in any reputation in order to show it to the public… It was common still to talk of that Ploughman Poet. It was quite true that Burns was not a University man but neither was Shakespeare…Burns sang as the birds sang – because they must. His songs flowed from his pen like liquid gold, and time, the great thief, plucked no laurels from his brow.
‘He was the multitude articulate’ declared Mr Donald M’Kay Kerr, PPGSW of Burns when giving The Immortal Memory at the annual dinner of the Glasgow Masonic Burns Club in the Trades House Restaurant. Burns, he said, used everyday words in his writings but with a magic sweep of his pen he produced a phrase which swept the imagination and enthralled the mind. Thus he made us wonder at the beauty of our own language. Burns portrayed the feelings of the masses in the language of the masses. He was, in fact, the multitude articulate, and, because of the simplicity of his themes, the directness of his message, and the beauty of his writings, Robert Burns became not only the National Bard of Scotland, but the bard of humanity.’
The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns was proposed by Dr Catherine Graham Dow at an all woman Burns Supper held in the Grand Hotel by the Glasgow branch of the Women’s Educational Union. True to the tradition of the Union, the haggis was borne in by a woman chef and piped in by a woman piper in full Highland dress. In her oration Dr Dow said that Burns was Scotland’s magnificent challenge to England in the realm of poetry, and the greatest folk poet of the whole world. He was a pioneer in the message of liberty, declaiming the ideal that laws and conventions could and must be overthrown before a new world could be built; his was the challenge of the unconventional man, the liberator. Dr Dow concluded by saying that the poet’s biographers were too apt to ignore his collected letters, in which he emerged as a man of strong masculine judgement, whose social beliefs helped to build the Scotland of his day.
The Herald report also touched on gatherings outside the city, especially that hosted by the Mother of all Burns Clubs, Club No 1 at Greenock where, at the Tontine Hotel, the 133rd dinner of the club was held. The Immortal Memory here was proposed by Professor J. L. Morison, Durham University, a nephew of the late Mr J. B. Morison of Greenock. The good professor said, in the course of his oration:
Recently I have been trying to fathom the shallow but troubled depths of modern Scottish nationalism in letters, and through comparison with the sane and fundamental ‘Scotchness’ of Robert Burns to define what are the true qualities of rational Scottish nationality. It is rather startling to be asked by Mr Grieve to believe that ‘apart from the Scottish renaissance group the rest of the people in Scotland today are not Scottish to any real sense of the term’…For Mr Grieve the Union is, of course, the culminating disaster; but when he writes of ‘the cultural poverty of post Union Scotland,’ I thought of that great period from Burns’s birthday onwards, the age, in imaginative literature, of Fergusson, Burns and Scott; in philosophy, of Hume, Reid and Dugald Stewart; during which Boswell wrote the greatest of biographies, and Adam Smith the most authoritative of treatises in political economy; when Principal Robertson was publishing histories which we still consult, and Raeburn was doing his best to rival Sir Joshua Reynolds. If this, I thought, be cultural poverty, we could do with more of it today.
The Herald noted that special features marked the celebration of the Burns anniversary in Dumfries. In addition to the usual ceremony of laying wreaths from representative bodies on the tomb in St Michael’s Churchyard, there was a special ceremony in the reopening, after renovation, of the house in which Burns died. The house had recently come under the direct management of the directors of the Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, who are the trustees of the property under the will of the poet’s son, Colonel William Nicol Burns, and they have carried out its renovation and improvement while still preserving its character as at the time of the poet’s death… At yesterday’s ceremony, which was broadcast by the BBC, the chairman of the Infirmary, ex-Provost Brodie, presided, and there was a large gathering of representatives of the Town Council, the various Burns clubs in the town and district, and other bodies to see Miss Jean Armour Burns Brown, great-grand daughter of the poet, formally open the door of the house.
Still with the women, a rather novel approach to Burns in this period was shown by Miss Winifred McQuilkan in far-away New Zealand. As a student at Otago University in Dunedin she was well acquainted with Burns through that city’s links with the poet’s nephew, Thomas, and with the long tradition of Scottishness in that part of New Zealand. In 1935, Miss McQuillan was awarded the University’s triennial MacMillan-Brown Prize for ‘Excellence in English Composition’ for her verse monologue entitled An then she made the lasses-O which appeared in the Otago Times for Wednesday 22 May 1935. The writer had James Boswell report on happenings in Hell, and of course every writer who was anybody was there – including Burns. It is he who provokes Dr Johnson to a tirade against women and the action deals with how the other famous names respond to this. Naturally, Burns wins out in the end, with the help of the wives of those speaking most against women, but possibly this is one of the most effective – and longest – Toast to the Lassies ever set down. Regrettably, space precludes the insertion of all this very original work here but the following passages will give its distinctive flavour. Boswell is speaking:
I just had noted down Johnson’s fierce condemnation
Of Burns, so was ready and free to supply the quotation
I altered a little the swing of the verses
A word here and there – which not for the worse is:
‘When Nature, our parent, beloved and benign
First attempted the creatures of earth to design
Inexperienced to fashion our sex she essayed
And then, gaining skill, she created the maid:
So nature, the ’prentice, unused to her tools,
Produced us, my friends – callow bumpkins and fools
While the elegant female, supreme in her pride
Shows what Nature, with practice could do when she tried.
I think, Mr Burns, that is how you express it?’
‘The meaning is there – if you pause to undress it,’
Said he with a laugh which I could not explain
In any case Johnson was speaking again:
‘I knew, Mr Burns, you were lacking in sense!
Dame Nature with tools: an incongruous pretence!
A poet should not be prevailed on to prate
But Gray was the same – he bade rivers orate
In trumpery ballads what follies can lurk!
Then you say that our sex is a ’prentice’s work
While the female, for sooth, is the polished creation!
I attribute such nonsense to inebriation
The place held by women need not be disputed
She is lower than man; and that can’t be refuted
Only think to what heights of caprice she can reach!
Why, some of the sex even hanker to preach!
I hear by the radio now of a person
Who actually does – Aimee Semple McPherson
And this is the sex that you laud to the skies
You’ll have to retract, Mr Burns, to be wise.’
Said Chesterfield then, ‘but we must recollect
The context to which the expression belongs
Remember that Burns is a writer of songs
In those merry trifles, why, what does it matter
To quibble a little in order to flatter
Especially for women for whom as we know
No flattery is ever too high or too low
Of course, we are always superior in fact
To flaunt our supremacy, though, is it tact?
Mr Burns has said this from his true perspicacity
What cause then have we then to impune his veracity?’
‘That’s cant sir!’ cried Johnson ‘whatever we write
Must be honestly meant and not merely polite
I know as a man I am very genteel
But yet I have never disguised what I feel
And it’s easy to find what this Scotch fellow means
When he glorifies women, his Marys and Jeans
He must understand such a view is absurd
If you’ve any defence, sir, then let it be heard.’
He turned to the poet expecting to floor him
But Burns remained lounging in silence before him
A good humoured smile as his only reply…
Finally, and only slightly more seriously, in this survey of pre-war Burns-related happenings, the Herald reported that the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable James Ramsay Macdonald, was proposing an Immortal Memory in Swindon. Macdonald, the orphan boy from Lossiemouth who became Britain’s first Labour Premier, was then uneasily leading the then National coalition of Labour and Conservative parties which was to bring him down in 1935. Nevertheless, he took time to pay eloquent tribute to Burns at the dinner, where he claimed that:
Burns’s place among the immortals was indisputable…
By 19 September 1937, however, he was no longer Prime Minister but Lord President of the Privy Council. Even so, his words still had an eloquence that had nothing to do with office but came from the heart of the man.
If our children, if our young men and women today, read more of their Burns, felt more of the manliness of the man, felt in themselves more of that tremendous power of human capacity and human idealism, – the prospects of the next generation would be better than they are…Why is it that Burns lives? It is because Burns was a simple, natural man. He was like a harp, across whose strings the emotions of life had passed and made music…
But the music heard was the wail of the air raid sirens as they announced, on Sunday 3 September 1939, the start of World War 2. It wasn’t ‘Haughty Gaul’ which threatened invasion this time, but haughty Herr Hitler and his Nazi Germany. Like everyone else, the Burns Club members took to their air raid shelters taking with them their gas masks and only their most prized possession – family photos, insurance policies, the family Bible and the Works of Burns. It would be five years before ‘normal service could be resumed’. Meantime, in the windows of bombed-out shops and houses framed photos of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth could be seen through the dust and rubble swinging defiantly on what was left of the walls…
The wretch that would a tyrant own,
And the wretch, his true-sworn brother,
Who would set the mob above the throne
May they be damn’d together!
Wha will not sing ‘God save the King’
Shall hang as high’s the steeple;
But while we sing ‘God Save the King’
We’ll ne’er forget the people!
(Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?)