His works bear impressed upon them, beyond the
possibility of mistake,the stamp of genius.’
(William Ewart Gladstone)
Unlike the first hostilities in 1914, the 1939 outbreak did not cause a complete cessation of Burns activities in Britain. The Chronicle came out in 1940, almost as usual, during what was called the ‘Phoney War’ and token conferences were held in Glasgow from 1941 and throughout the war, thanks to the initiative of its Lord Provost, Sir Patrick Dolan. The only continuing annoyance was how the clubs dealt with Entertainment Tax levies on all fees paid to speakers and singers engaged for the annual Burns Suppers. Considering they were meeting to honour a former Customs and Excise Officer it seemed ironic that they were now being harried by his 20th-century equivalents.
However, it was in 1941, to mark the Golden Jubilee of the Burns Chronicle, that James Ewing, its editor, summed up its aims and intentions and his report is worth repeating here for the clear light it throws on the periodical and its work for Burns and Burnsians since 1885. Mr Ewing wrote:
During its life the Chronicle has altered to some extent in appearance and content, but its original purpose has retained its vitality through times of immense change and upheaval. It is broadly speaking, the voice of the Burns Federation and of people interested in Burns everywhere. It puts on record all aspects of the Federation’s aim to disabuse the memory of the poet, to excite admiration for his works and honour for his name. More especially, it acts as a repository of facts relating to Burns and his writings. It likes to leave the facts to speak for themselves as far as possible, to narrate rather than explain, to put forward authenticated evidence and not wage ghostly wars among theories. Some of its material is specially directed to future writers upon, and critics of, Burns. In other items old ground is sometimes resurveyed, to clear away confusion and error. Numerous inaccuracies in biographies of the poet have been corrected by articles in the Chronicle. Innumerable conjectures and mis-statements have been investigated.
In justification of this purpose, it is a fact that nearly every book on the subject of Burns published in the course of the last generation has been indebted for much of its information to articles in the Burns Chronicle. The function of being a comprehensive clearing house for Burnsiana for all sorts has, indeed, proved a substantial part of the Chronicle’s achievement, and one of which it is uniquely equipped.
On the other hand the Chronicle has also devoted much of its attention to serving in all the ways open to it the more social and personal side of the Burns cult which finds its outlets in annual suppers and dinners and in meetings and lectures. These are recorded, outstanding orations and lectures are published, and notable personalities and events centring round the cult have attention given them.
The Burns Chronicle has gathered its material from far and wide during its lifetime, and it may be claimed that it would be hard to find any other possible repository for so much discovery, inquiry and opinion than this tenacious publication, kept alive by nothing more or less – than affection and reverence for the memory of one humble Scotsman whose short span drew to its obscure close more than a century before the Burns Chronicle was even contemplated.
James Ewing retired in 1948 after steering through 23 issues. Wartime paper restrictions had prevented any enlargement of the circulation but they didn’t stop a record printing of more than 3,000 copies of the 1947 edition. The Third Series began in 1952 and ran to 24 volumes under James Veitch but by 1974 it was losing money and something had to be done to save it. Veitch’s sudden death in January 1975 did not help and Arthur Daw was brought in from the Scots Magazine in Dundee. He was not a Burns man but he was a newspaper man as indeed was the founder, Colin Rae-Brown, and he kept the ship afloat until James Mackay took over in 1977 and steered it into its modern harbour.
The Registered Office for the Federation is now at the Dower House, Dean Castle, Kilmarnock Country Park and approximately 400 clubs around the world that form the Federation today are still the kind of enthusiasts that Rae-Brown, Mackay and Sneddon would recognise. There is still an annual Burns Supper. There are still meetings to attend, rules to fuss over, traditions to uphold, quarrels to be made up. There is still a President to be elected each year. At the time of writing that office is held by Mike Duguid of Kirkcudbright who follows in that long line from Provost Sturrock. The average membership age today may be older than it once was, and getting older by the year, but what does age matter when one is dealing with something immortal?
The Robert Burns World Federation now looks out in baronial splendour from an administration complex in Kilmarnock’s Dean Castle Country Park. It is now a limited company with a Chief Executive (Sam Judge) and an e-mail address that says it all – robertburnsfederation@kilmarnock26.freeserve.co.uk. The old Federation had been finally dragged into the 21st-century recognising that Robert Burns doesn’t belong to Scotland but to the world. It is a long way to have come in 200 years – from the Victorian Thames Embankment to cyber space and www.worldburnsclub.com. But some things never change. As long as the Burns focus is maintained its essential message will remain – that hope expressed by the man himself, and by almost every proposer of an Immortal Memory ever since, the Brotherhood of Man. Sadly more than a little ironic in August 1945 when atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war was over in Europe at least. At the end of the year the Federation announced that 228 clubs were fully paid up and federated and an amnesty would be granted for clubs not paid up. This brought 18 clubs back into the fold, allowing 246 clubs to be represented at the last austerity Conference held at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow in 1946, the 150th anniversary of the death of Burns.
The importance of Glasgow’s Mitchell Library to the Burns scene cannot be overstated. Over the years, thanks to careful purchasing and extensive donations, it has built up the largest collection of Burns material in the world, amounting to more than 4,000 items. There are no less than 900 editions of the Works, including the famous Kilmarnock Edition of 1786, the Edinburgh and London printings of 1787 and that of Philadelphia in the following year. There are ten original manuscripts by Burns including his only letter in Scots and a full set of the Burns Chronicles dating from 1892. If one adds to this examples of translations into more than 30 languages, plus recordings and videos, it can be seen that there is not much about Robert Burns that the Mitchell Library does not know. On Level 4, the Arts Department organises regular exhibitions and lectures relating to the Bard, and from day to day deals with every kind of query about him from every sort of quarter. The present writer, for one, is glad to acknowledge a great debt to this source.
The highlight of the 1946 conference at the library was the speech made by Sir Patrick Dolan. Dr Jim Mackay reported it extensively in his highly-readable 1987 history of the Burns Federation, and part of it is reproduced here with his kind permission. Sir Patrick’s motion was:
This Conference welcomes the formation of the United Nations Organisation. It has been constituted to give effect to the basic principles of the teaching of Robert Burns, namely, the Brotherhood of Man. We recommend that federated Clubs and their members give wholehearted support to this movement. The success of UNO would realise world peace and security, to the furthering of which Robert Burns dedicated his life’s work.
Dolan attended the conference as a very sick man, and was not allowed to stand and move this resolution himself. John S Clarke, the Federation’s president for that year, spoke for Sir Patrick and rose to speak to the motion in terms that were as meaningful in 1946 as they are today.
Today it was not so much the greed that came after the last war that was making the people so angry at these conferences. It was fear. Russia was scared of something. America was scared of something. Russia was possibly scared of the atomic bomb which happened to be in the hands of America. It was a great pity that the last secret of Nature had to be used in such a sinister fashion. It was a pity these bombs were ever dropped, because mankind now knew that certain people had the power of destroying not only humanity and civilisation but the very planet we lived on. It behoved every Burnsian not to say anything that was going to cause enmity between the nations…
Something of a stir was caused when Alexander Emslie, seconded by William B. Harkness, unexpectedly moved as an amendment:
That, while in full sympathy with the idea of the brotherhood of man, the Conference pass to the next business, as the resolution is not within the scope of the Constitution of the Burns Federation.
The report continues:
This was too much for Sir Patrick who, against all medical advice, struggled to his feet to reply. He was astounded that in a meeting of the Burns Federation there should be any opposition to this statement of principle which he had always regarded as fundamental to the Federation. He came to the conclusion some years ago that if world peace was to be established it would have to be by means of an organisation that held men of all parties, all creeds, all nations and all colours, and the only organisation he knew, outside of religious or semi-political bodies, that did that was the Burns Federation. In his opinion this was not a Scottish organisation, but an international organisation founded in Scotland for the purpose of making its message accepted internationally … if they in that organisation, with affiliations in twelve different countries, were not going to give a lead in the endeavour to build a temple of peace and make security possible, and emancipate the world from the dread and horror of atomic warfare, then he thought they were losing one of the best opportunities they ever had. Not surprisingly, Sir Patrick’s resolution was carried by an overwhelming majority.
Although the war was over, war-time restrictions still applied in what was left of the Forties. Lord Woolton ruled at the Ministry of Food. Ration books were still in force and hospitality at dinners and receptions was seriously affected. This did not prevent everyone having a great time at Dunoon where the Federation hosted a dinner-dance at the Pavilion Ballroom – with spam in place of the haggis no doubt. Fortunately, the Burns Clubs of Australia got together to create a ‘Britain Fund’ which sent food parcels to their hungry brother clubs, and these helped achieve a reasonable ‘bill o’ fare’ when required. The roll of clubs at the time numbered 679, of which two-thirds were active, so there were a few mouths to feed. It was in this time of restraint and restriction that Edwin Muir took time to take a fresh look at the image of Burns in the post-war world. In The Burns Myth (1947), he wrote:
For a Scotsman to see Burns simply as a poet is well-nigh an impossibility. Burns is so deeply imbedded in Scottish life that he cannot be detached from it, from what is best in it and what is worst in it, and regarded as we regard Dunbar or James Hogg or Walter Scott. He is more a personage to us than a poet, more a figurehead than a personage, and more a myth than a figurehead… here is a poet for everybody, a poet who has such an insight into ordinary thoughts and feelings that he can catch them and give them poetic shape, as those who merely think or feel them cannot. This was Burns’s supreme art. It seems to be simple. People are inclined to believe that it is easier to express ordinary thoughts and feelings in verse than complex and unusual ones. The problem is an artificial one, for in the end a poet does what he has a supreme gift for doing. Burns’s gift lay here; it made him a myth; it predestined him to become the Rabbie of Burns Nights. When we consider Burns we must therefore include the Burns Nights with him, and the Burns cult in all its forms: if we sneer at them we sneer at Burns. They are his reward, or punishment (whichever the fastidious reader may prefer to call it) for having had the temerity to express the ordinary feelings of his people, and having become a part
of their life. What the Burns Nights ignore is the perfection of Burns’ art, which makes him one of the great poets. But there is so much more involved that this, his real greatness, can be assumed and taken for granted.
This was a cool, dispassionate voice but it wasn’t heard by the great majority of Scots who only wanted to put the war behind them and pretend that it had never happened. While the feeling in the country did not equate to the hysteria of 1920, the end of the Forties was a time for trying to pick up the pieces again. The burning topic of debate at the 1948 Conference at Stirling was the projection of a Robert Burns Memorial Theatre or as some delegates saw it, a National Theatre for Scotland. Other delegates, however, had a deep-seated Presbyterian horror of all things theatrical, and saw the hand of Satan behind all the machinations of the stage. This attitude had much to do with the Federation’s reaction to an offer made to them by Sir Billy Butlin, the holiday-camp millionaire. Again, resort is made to Dr Mackay’s account:
In September 1947 Billy Butlin, the holiday camp proprietor and entrepreneur, approached John S. Clarke, Past-President of the Federation, and said that he was prepared to donate a site, together with the sum of £10,000 towards the building costs, for a Burns Memorial Theatre. The proposed site, within the complex of the Butlin camp at Heads of Ayr, was subsequently inspected by members of the Executive and a plan approved in principle. Consequently Butlin handed over a cheque for £10,000. Presenting his first annual report, at the Stirling Conference in 1948, however, William Black merely added laconically: ‘In the interval, the Executive, after full and earnest consideration, have advised Mr Butlin that they cannot commit the Federation to the project envisaged in his offer.’
The President later added, by the way of explanation, that the site offered by Billy Butlin, though very attractive, was too remote from the town of Ayr for the theatre to be a success outside the holiday season. The Federation soon discovered that a theatre such as they had envisaged would actually have cost about £10,000 to build, while the necessary permit to erect it was not likely to be forthcoming for several years anyway. They had hoped that Mr Butlin would allow them to keep the £10,000 until conditions were more favourable, but Butlin believed that the theatre could be built immediately and nagged them into proceeding with the work. They told him that they were not prepared to go ahead at that time and suggested various alternative ways of using the money.
One suggestion was a museum of Scottish folklore to be built on the site. No such museum existed at that time and it was felt that something of the sort, showing country life in the time of Burns, would be an admirable project. The second alternative was to use the money to build ten cottages for old people. Sir Patrick Dollan, the President of the Federation, thought that this would have been the most beautiful way of spending the money. Thirdly, it could have been used by the Federation for educational purposes, or fourthly, devoted to literary schemes in which the Federation and other Scottish organisations were interested. None of these ideas appealed to Mr Butlin. That being so, ‘they felt that the only course, in keeping with the dignity of the Federation, which they could take, was to return the £10,000, thanking Mr Butlin for his offer and wishing him well in any scheme he might undertake. If a theatre, to be called a Burns Memorial Theatre, was to be provided they hoped that the plays and the programmes to be presented in it would be in keeping with what they regarded as the dignity and the philosophy of the man whose memory they honoured’.
Reading between the lines, we can perhaps afford a wry smile at the contrast between the Federation, trying to maintain pre-war values and standards which must have seemed old fashioned and outmoded to some, and the whizz kid of the holiday camp world, bristling with gimmicks and bustling to try them out. While it is a matter for regret that no way could be found of bridging the cultural gap, in hindsight there is absolutely no doubt that the Federation took the only honourable course open to them.
As a theatre man myself, I can only regret that the chance to build a Robert Burns Memorial Theatre was so simply lost. This is not to deny the highly-charitable alternatives that were put forward. They were worthy, certainly, but they were dull. Small wonder that Sir Billy turned them down. But then there were few visionaries in the Federation at that time. They were all worthy men, but it needed just one with panache, with daring – another Rae-Brown perhaps. Jock Thomson unfettered. Sam Gaw? Certainly, one with faith and trust in Burns himself to realise that a theatre in Burns’s name built as early as this would now be just as established as that other Memorial Theatre at Stratford which is a cultural centre in its own right and a continuing Mecca for tourists world-wide.
One remembers that Burns himself attracted tourists in his own day. While he was ‘enjoying the fruits of his retirement at Ellisland’, according to the London newspapers, the Glasgow coach would often stop at the road end to set down West Country passengers who:
trusting in the accessibility of the bard, made their way to his door… Such visitations – from which no man of genius is free – consumed his time and wasted his substance, for hungry friends could not be entertained on air.
A Robert Burns Theatre might have been the same kind of magnet and not all the Theme Parks, Information Centres, museums, libraries and wee shoppes in all their sum make up for the impact a successful theatre might have had on the local community and on the nation generally.
With this building as a locus, we would have had by this time new Burns plays and musicals, concerts, recitals, seminars, talks and illustrated lectures, parties and the whole pan-jamboree of Burns events and all in one recognised centre in Ayr. We might even have had that long-awaited Burns opera. It would be now the focus for all things Burnsian and the world would have flocked to it. The lost opportunities hardly bear thinking about, but a gathering of grey hairs, no doubt highly suspicious of anything ‘theatrical’ – it was so UN-Scottish – decided in their collective wisdom to spurn a generous offer and it was one that would not be repeated. But then few at Stirling were entrepeneurs. They can hardly be blamed for refusing to think outside the parameters of their experience which for the most part were small business practices and the respectable professions. They followed the normal reaction of all committees: ‘When in doubt – do nowt’.
Yet it did not prevent this same company of gentlemen acting as artistic censor in the name of Burns. When Robert McLellan’s play ‘Rab Mossgiel’ was belatedly televised on 22 September, it gave a view of the poet which upset many Burnsians, despite an excellent cast, which included Bryden Murdoch as Burns, Gwyneth Guthrie as Mary Campbell, Eileen McCallum as Jean Armour and Rona Anderson as Clarinda. An anonymous review in the 1960 Chronicle, stated:
The playwright’s conception of Burns was of a depressed, distraught, skulking, two-faced sex ridden lout…it is characteristic of some Scots to disparage greatness. If one of their own kind is larger than life, it is their mission to cut him down to size. No matter how the rest of the world regards him, they must dwell upon his failings and his weaknesses.
A young actor-singer, Robin Hall, not yet paired with partner, Jimmy MacGregor, also drew criticism of a long playing record launched by Collector Records as a bicentenary tribute. The Chronicle took him to task for his rendition of A Man’s a Man – ‘he himself was at fault, his Doric being suspect’. When Iain Hamilton’s Burns Sinfonia for Two Orchestras was performed at the 1959 Edinburgh Festival it provoked the ire of that year’s conference. To be fair, the first performance also had rather a mixed reception from the music critics. Christopher Grier, in the Scotsman, pointed out that:
There are not many in Edinburgh, even in mid Festival, who are sufficiently versed in this musical language to deliver a judgement of much weight. But of the imagination, seriousness of purpose and skill that went into its making there is no doubt whatever.
David Harper in the Daily Mail, however, voiced the more popular reaction:
Burns must have revolved rapidly in his grave. Tolerant though he was, he could not have been expected to bear with the unpoetic sounds created by modern dodecaphonic composers.
In more recent years, however, the Federation, to its credit, has been more aware of the practical value of cultural events in relation to Burns and has become more involved in the Burns festivals and symposia which have been held in all the Burns centres – Ayr, Kilmarnock, Edinburgh and Dumfries. However, it was in none of these centres, but Bristol in England that the Annual Burns Conference, postponed from 1939, took place in 1950.
As soon as the decade turned, all Burnsian minds were directed to the prospect of the Bicentenary of the birth of Burns in 1959 and these thoughts focussed entirely on the demand for a Burns stamp in time for that great celebration, especially as at that time, Russia’s Postmaster General had already issued a Burns stamp. This was a matter of great pride to them but it caused some consternation among Burnsians in Britain.
I have three Russian books in my Burns collection, that is three books of Burns in Russian, each of them given me by Russians in Moscow. I mention this because around this time, an inspiring speaker and teacher was the leading Burns scholar of the age and the best-known translator of Burns into the Russian language, for which he was suitably honoured by the Burns Federation. This was the famous Samuil Marshak. One of my books on Burns was by this same man and was given to me by his son Immanuel Marshak. However, not even Professor Marshak’s prestigious presence could procure the promise of a British stamp for Burns, despite the heroic efforts of British MP Emrys Hughes in Moscow. Mr Hughes was then the MP for South Ayrshire and even made the point of learning Russian so that he could speak the language when he went to Moscow in 1959. We anticipate the next chapter here, but it is all germane to Burns and Russia.
Emrys Hughes had begun battling for a 1959 Burns stamp since 1953 and in 1958 he was part of a Scottish deputation which met with the then Prime Minister, and part-Scot from the Isle of Arran, Harold Macmillan. The urbane Macmillan said he would ‘consider the matter carefully’ which meant he would pass it on to the then Postmaster General, Ernest Marples, who was not a noted Scot, and who of course rejected the idea completely. However, Hughes obtained a kind of revenge on Macmillan when they were both in Moscow in 1959. The Prime Minister was there on Government business and Hughes was there to speak on Burns in the Tchaikovsky Hall in reply to Samuil Marshak. It was here that the Russian Postmaster General handed Hughes a letter with the Russian Burn stamp affixed. As the MP said, ‘It was a moment of humiliation for me’. The next night, both Hughes and Marshak were invited to a reception in the British Embassy hosted by Macmillan. Marshak presented the Premier with his translation of Burns, and was given in exchange a first edition of a Dickens. Hughes took the chance to slip the Russian letter with the Burns stamp to Macmillan who asked, ‘What’s this?’
‘Send it to Marples,’ said Hughes.
Government wheels began to turn from that time.
Meantime Scottish enthusiasts made their own preparations for the great mailing day. Things were hurriedly arranged to get a special Alloway postmark out on the actual birthday and, even though it was a Sunday, thousands of people availed themselves of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So much so that extra offices were opened in Dumfries, Edinburgh and Glasgow to deal with the rush. Despite this obvious popular demand, London remained unimpressed. The whole of Scotland then seemed to take up the cause but the Civil Service mind was tightly closed and took cover behind the rubber-stamped parapets of its own regulations. There would be no stamp that year. It was the Burns Federation that had been licked. London still ruled. ‘That great city’ as Burns had termed it remained quite indifferent to Burns, to Scotland and to Scots. Never mind, the Scots knew that the stamp of greatness on the high Burns brow was still there and that no amount of London indifference or civil service apathy could efface it.
It made no difference to officialdom that Russia had issued not one, but two Burns stamps and had linked Burns with its own Pushkin as twin-poets of all the Russias, Aleksandr Sergeyvich Pushkin. The Robert Burns-Alexander Pushkin Friendship Club still exists in Moscow and its list of honorary members includes such names as Bertrand Russell, John Steinbeck and Emrys Hughes of course. In 1964, this club, with the help of Professor Peter Henry, then head of Slavonic Studies at Glasgow University, would produce a bilingual booklet, The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns. Interestingly, Pushkin himself, although Russian, was a black man or at least a half-caste. This prompts the thought that Burns, in the course of his short life never met a coloured man of any kind, even in Edinburgh. A man’s a man and all that, and it certainly would not have bothered him, but it might have intrigued him.
There is no record of his ever coming face to face with an Asiatic or any kind of brown skin in Edinburgh, despite the fashion in high society then for Moorish pages and attendants from the Indies and Burns did write later of going to the Indies himself as a ‘negro-driver’. During the Border tour with Ainslie Captain Rutherford at Jedburgh captivated him with his tale of being captured by the Chippawah Indians during the War of Independence. This was all very exotic stuff for a young Ayrshire farmer and worlds away from his experience. But we digress.
In 1957, the Glasgow Ayrshire Society invited Dr Ronald Mavor, that well-known man about Scottish letters, drama critic, director, playwright, painter, pianist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Surgeons, to propose the Immortal Memory at their annual Burns Dinner. ‘Bingo’ Mavor is also the son of the late Osborne Mavor, otherwise, James Bridie, the playwright who was also a doctor, and who, in 1943, founded the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre. Bingo has grown up with a literary and theatrical as well as medical background, so it was no surprise when he opened his Burns speech with Gertrude Stein. It appears that she, on her death-bed, kept asking: ‘What is the answer, what is the answer?’ A friend, sitting by the bed, hurried to reassure Miss Stein, by saying, ‘There is no answer, Gertrude, there is no answer.’ To which Gertrude Stein replied ‘If there is no answer, what then, what is the question?’ Bingo then went on:
A distinguished anthropologist was studying the problem of telepathy in South America. It seems that it is still the custom of some tribes to communicate telepathically. The wife will go out and speak to a tree, saying that she wants her husband to come back early from the town and he will come back early. This anthropologist was most interested in the phenomenon and asked one of the women of the village – ‘Why do you go and speak to a tree when you wish to send a message to your husband?’ Her reply was immediate. ‘Because we are poor,’ she said. ‘If we were rich we would have the telephone.’
As I rise to my feet this evening it is borne in upon me, as it was upon Miss Stein, that there is no answer. But if there is no answer, as she rightly said. what, then, is the question? You will perhaps forgive me if I do not start at the beginning with ‘what is the chief end of man?’ Nowadays we ask different questions like ‘Should I let my daughter go to a Rock n Roll concert? Or ‘Would I have a better opportunity in Canada?’ If we are going to do more than take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne this evening, it is among such questions that we must find our questions and it is in such a world that we must seek for our answers. To be sure, there is something rich and strange in sending one’s messages echoing through the ether from the wind- borne branches of an ancient oak but let us, as they say, let us face it, the telephone is more reliable. Our world of today contains not only the lark on the wing and the snail on the thorn but the Archers on the Light, and the Groves on the Tele. Have we room for the poet Burns?
I have had the pleasure of attending a fair number of Burns Nights one way and another and under the most variable of auspices. At all of them I have been impressed by the constancy with which the orator projects his personality onto the life history of the poet. I was at a Communist dinner in which Burns was held up as a looking glass to Lenin. A jovial fellow saw him as the most jovial of fellows, a wild man as the king of bawdry, an underdog as the daringest snapper at the heels of the mighty. Catherine Carswell saw him as a heroic D. H. Lawrence-like figure rising from the good earth to smite the Philistine. Maurice Lindsay as a Lallans poet – which, of course, he was…So it is with a full consciousness of my own foolhardiness that I venture to turn your thoughts to the life of Robert Burns. But I will not shirk my commission. I am aware that I am celebrating a rite. At this point in the ritual I must lay out before you – as an oriental dealer his carpet – the pattern of that short life.
In the play The Lark by Jean Anouilh – which is about Joan of Arc – there is a noble scene at the end when the stake has been prepared and the fire is about to be lit. The Dauphin comes right out of the play and across the centuries and says, ’No, it mustn’t end like this. It wasn’t a sad story at all.
We have been playing the happy story of Joan of Arc.’
And the faggots are torn down and the banners are brought in and we are back at the crowning of the King of France at the Cathedral of Rheims. So this will be the happy story of Robert Burns.
Certainly there were hard times. It was hard times that drove William Burnes of the Mearns down to Edinburgh and out west to Alloway village. Even in that hard winter of the middle of the eighteenth century in Scotland may he not have felt in Edinburgh the rising of the sap that was to bring the new spring in less than fifty years and make Edinburgh the cultural capital of the world? Times were hard at Mount Oliphant and little better, or only for a time at Lochlie with the father growing prematurely old and the boys doing all the work. But when William Burnes died and the farm was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy the brothers found a good friend in Gavin Hamilton to lease them Mossgiel and let them start again. It was a hard life but the Burnes family were used to hardness. It was neither squalid nor soul-destroying.The young Burns (as he came to call himself) was frustrated, displeased and dissatisfied with his lot. The social stratification of Ayrshire society offended him – ‘proud man’. ‘The great misfortune of my life,’ he said, ‘was not to have an aim – I had felt early some stirrings of Ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer’s Cyclops round the walls of his cave.’
Is this state of mind surprising? Is this out of date? Are not our present day aspiring men of letters still so? Colin Wilson is termed an ‘Outsider’, John Osborne is the ‘Angry Young Man’, wasn’t Burns both? Suddenly, it seems to me, he comes into focus at this point – as we gaze back through those hundred and seventy years. Here is Rab Mossgiel, age twenty five, farmer. He has a local reputation as a rhymester and rustic bard. A good man at a party but always a bit of a rebel. As I said, an angry young man. Proud and outspoken on many subjects, notably the Auld Lichts of the Kirk with whom he has crossed a sword or two. For some years his friends have recommended him to send some of his poems to the reviews. This is in Mauchline, in Ayrshire, in 1784 and 1785. And then suddenly it all changes.
In relating history one must be careful to avoid false emphasis and giving false impression by changing the sequence of events.
Anyway, in the first half of 1786 Jean Armour, the daughter of a neighbouring and wealthier, farmer became pregnant to Robert Burns. He proposed her marriage, her father opposed the marriage and she rejected him. The fact that old Armour preferred a bastard grandson to himself as a son in law was a severe blow to Burns’ hypersensitive pride. He decided to go to Jamaica. Where before he had idly thought of publishing his poems, it now became an urgent compulsion – a last gesture. He would show Scotland what sort of man she had driven out to the Indies as a ‘negro-driver’.
Events followed thick upon the other – old Armour sued him for the upkeep of the child. His fated affair with Mary Campbell was at its perihelion. The Reverend Mr Auld summoned him to the penitent’s stool. And then, out of the blue – or rather, on the 31 July 1786 the Kilmarnock Edition appeared – and everything changed for Robert Burns. He was suddenly the hero of the day. The Sheriff’s Officers daren’t touch him. Armour withdrew his writ – and his daughter – and Burns found that he was famous. At least locally.
Two months later Burns set off for Edinburgh for his first taste of the high life and, like many another since, became a less angry young man and less of an outsider. He did a few grand tours through Scotland of which he was now the crowned bard and arranged for the second edition of his poems. More importantly he met James Johnson, an engraver and music publisher and was begun on his life-work of saving songs. I am not an Auld Licht. I do not believe in predestination. Therefore I believe that Burns had a choice; three choices. But perhaps we only think we choose; and we are so made that at such a point in the weaving of our lives we can follow the thread only one way.
Burns was the Golden Boy of the Edinburgh literati. The Man of Feeling had clutched him to his breast, praising to the sky all the poems that today we blush for. Could he not have become a literary gent contributing to the weeklies, odes and verses on the lines of ‘Edina, Scotia’s darling seat’ and ‘Something like moisture conglobes in my eye?’ Could he not have further wrought his considerable skill in producing literary poetry in the styles of Montgomerie, Dunbar and Fergusson and have become a Scottish Masefield, a Scottish Tennyson, a Scottish T. S. Eliot? In fact it is virtually only in Tam o Shanter that this brilliant ‘academic’ skill is deployed again.
As I mentioned, the Edinburgh meeting with Johnson set Burns off writing and collecting songs for Johnson’s Musical Museum. With an industry, with an absorption and with a genius probably never equalled, he gathered, edited, adapted, and frequently wrote what is to all intents and purposes our whole heritage of song in the Scots language. He would accept no money. He would not acknowledge the extent to which a published song was collected, adapted or written by himself. It was an astonishing work for a man who had still financial difficulties in his new farm at Ellisland and who had recently had the most remarkable publishing success in Scottish history – soon however, to be somewhat outdone by the Waverley Novels.
David Daiches has suggested that Burns’ total absorption in the work of the Musical Museum and the later Select Scottish Airs proved the one way in which he could escape from his split personality – ‘from the basic conflict between Rab Mossgiel and Robin Burnes, between the son of William Burnes and the Caledonian Hunt’s delight, between the lover of Jean Armour and the correspondent of Clarinda, between the peasant and the man of letters.’ That is well said. Perhaps he could no other…
This is an unromantic age. It is not an age to speak of ‘heaven-sent ploughmen’. Every second new novel is by Angus Wilson or some heaven-sent boot-and-shoe operative, or heaven-sent British Museum librarian or even heaven-sent secretary to James Joyce. Nor with Sam Beckett or with the third thousand of Hungarian refugees on our doorstep are we to bemoan the barren soil of Mount Oliphant too much. The shade of John Knox now thunders silently at the thousands who crowd the Assembly Hall for the music and dancing of Cedric Thorpe Davie and Edinburgh, occupied with its Festival, heeds him not. The Auld Lichts have moved to the southern suburbs of Aberdeen or to Sunday morning television. George the Third is dead. America is free. The French Revolution is over. Freedom is so much in the air
that we have stopped asking for it in this country and
have had to start giving it away in places like Africa. Even Canada is fighting for it – although they do it in French. Or a kind of French.
So shall we just roll up this life again for another three hundred and sixty five days? I think not.
I have suggested that the pattern of this life was of honest toil coupled with ill-defined ambition and aspiration. That there came a moment when something in that life seemed to catch fire and blaze up and shine, in a moment, across the world. In that moment of incandescence, Burns saw and clutched at and held to the one thread in design – the one path that his true spirit could follow. That the songs of Robert Burns – the songs of Scotland – are the result of that choice.
Here in the middle of Glasgow with the river gently flowing down to the Ayrshire coast and out into the Atlantic with the subway rushing like an old mole up to the Cowcaddens and down and across to Govan with Argyle street not a hundred yards away and with, above the lights and the buildings, the same old sky…the sky he once saw, and in it yet, however old it has become his star still shines.
Which is why. here in Glasgow in 1957, I give you with honour and with gratitude – and with no cant – the Memory of Robert Burns.
Dr Mavor went on to greater prominence, becoming the Director of the Scottish Arts Council and a Dean of Dramatic Studies in Saskatchewan, Canada, but he never bettered the eloquence he showed on behalf of Burns to the men of Ayrshire gathered that night in Glasgow.
Meantime, the Burns stamp business continued to bother the Burnsians. It occurs to me that one good idea might have been to send the Russian Post-master general a Burns stamped letter from that other Moscow in Ayrshire. Had they done so, however, they would have to have waited until 1 February 1966, when that ex-aristocrat become Socialist, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn announced in the House of Commons that a stamp commemorating Robert Burns would be issued officially. What is a surprise is that he did not call for the singing of the Internationale when he did so.
The only time I have heard this anthem sung at a Burns supper was years later, in 2000, when I was the non-speaking guest of the Milngavie Labour Club and the Immortal Memory was proposed by Danny McCafferty. He spoke that night having just had a serious heart operation, but there was no doubt his heart was still in the right place.
After 204 years of speechifying about the Bard, there is little to be said, which has not been said or written a thousand times over. Having stated that, you’re going to hear it again, and I hope again and again, for many years to come.
Robert Burns, was not what we may call nowadays, politically correct, so if you are of that inclination…forget it. It would be a disservice to attempt to sanitize or rehabilitate Rabbie after 204 years…and I will not insult his memory by doing so.
There is however a matter of accuracy. Burns did not drink himself to an early grave. Nor did he die of tuberculosis exacerbated by wild nights and loose living. His genius and clarity of thought remained until his last breath. He died of endocarditis, a form of heart disease brought on and worsened by years of excessive labouring in the field. The reputation of Robert Burns, as a decadent drunkard who consorted with whores and suffered from venereal disease is a reputation created largely by his first biographer, Dr James Currie, a Liverpool physician… moralist and strict teetotaller who to his shame, deliberately chose to present the poet not only as a genius, but also in such a light as to promote Currie’s own morality and ‘tea-total’ values. He used the fame of Burns to propagate the message that loose living and hard drinking can ultimately bring only doom.
(stop here for sip of whisky).
In short, Dr Currie was an eejit!!
Robert Burns enjoyed a laugh but he also had a melancholic, almost depressive side. On the opposite extreme he had a carefree spirit and an abundance of optimism. He was deeply religious, but no respecter of hypocrisy or cant. ‘I am a sincere believer in the Bible, but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not by the halter of an ass.’ Burns bowed to the Church in penitence for his sins and went out to commit as many again… he was a fervent and passionate patriot of Scotland but found no difficulty in swearing allegiance to the Crown as a member of the Excise or on joining with the Dumfries Volunteers, a local militia. He had no great regard for Lords and Ladies, Earls and Dukes, yet he moved freely in their company like a latter day Billy Connolly. Speaking of the aristocracy, Prince Charles was once invited to a Burns Supper and turned up wearing a hat made of fox fur. His hosts, naturally curious, could resist no longer. ‘May I ask you why you are wearing that hat Your Highness?’ inquired one of the guests. ‘Well’, says Charles ‘I was just about to leave the Palace when my pater, the Duke of Edinburgh, you know, asked where I was going.’
‘To a Burns Supper in Glenshoogly,’ I said, to which my pater distinctly said ‘Wear a fox hat.’
Burns was not a Royalist but he was a Unionist, a Nationalist, a Republican and an Internationalist. Not all things to all people but a part of all people. He was not an unsung hero of his times, but widely acknowledged and acclaimed as a living genius as testified by the estimated 12,000 mourners of all ranks, classes and title at his funeral.
Discretion was no friend of Burns. When at a function the health of William Pitt was proposed, Robert was asked to leave on proposing the ‘health of a greater and better man, George Washington’. He was subsequently accused of being a Democrat!! Despite that incident, Pitt himself later paid tribute, saying of Burns’s poetry – ‘I can think of no verse since Shakespeare that has so much the appearance of coming sweetly from nature.’ [He] was a member of no political club or society, and when voices from such quarters were raised in revolutionary rhetoric his was not among them. Opinions, he most certainly had ‘May your success in this war be equal to the justice of its cause.’
A lover of liberty, a lover of people, but tied to no one political ideology above any other… Burns deserves his Immortal Memory for his love of life, love of humanity and the gifts he has bestowed upon us all. All peoples. Not just in Scotland. But all over the world. That’s what makes him international. Internationalism to many people is about football matches increasingly so at club level. So much so, that the cries now abound at games between Rangers and Celtic in a multilingual fashion. No longer Orange and Green, but a rainbow coalition of noise no longer sectarian, but internationalist. Sweary words in every language. In a funny sort of way it has its merits. There are those who bemoan the influx of foreign players into the Scottish game as a bad thing for home grown talent, because our young players can’t compete at the same skills level. On the other hand it provides a perspective on the world, rather than the narrow constraints of nationalist vision which says home grown is always best. In its own way it helps to broaden outlooks. We inhabit a world and not just a country…
There can be no more appropriate subject, other than internationalism, that can be added to the annual celebration of the life and works of Scotland’s other Burns. Very few figures in literary history have captured the imagination of world’s population as did Scotland’s most famous poet, Robert Burns. He did so through his blunt honesty, his subtle charm, his warmth and passion, his optimism and vision, as well as his despair and vulnerability. He was a genius, yet with a simplicity about him. He is claimed as a nationalist, a unionist, a socialist, a republican and a royalist. He was a man blessed with supreme talent and yet so insecure. He was no hypocrite despite these contradictory characteristics. He was human, a man of the people, all of the people, with no one, narrow section able to lay claim to him as theirs and theirs alone. Therein, I believe lies the international appeal of Robert Burns. A man who practised social inclusion before politicians got their hands on it. A man who believed in equality and social justice as being more than simply words. A man who viewed poverty as a condition not a requirement.
Burns is not only remembered by the international community, he did much to bring it closer together though a philosophical and ideological vision, ‘that man to man the world o’er will brithers be for a’ that’. I am sure he was a creature of his times as well as ours and meant no disrespect to our sisters when he wrote it. It equally applies in its sentiments of unity and comradeship towards women in our modern world.
Some people choose to practise international humanitarism through voluntary or charitable means sometimes physically assisting at the direct point of need, more often through financial contributions. Some are determined to bring about social and political change within suppressed or underdeveloped countries. Some campaign for peace to bring about change. Some go to war. If the underpinning ideology of international relations is that of social justice, healing, caring, sharing, loving and understanding then the world is the better. If it is a philosophy built on greed, division domination and exploitation then it must be opposed. Burns has contributed to the former philosophy through his poetry and music. He has not been alone. Other artists have made a great contribution too. But tonight belongs to Burns…
The great surge of international solidarity in our time such as the American Civil Rights Movement, Cuba, Vietnam War, Solidarity with Chile Campaign and the Anti Apartheid struggles coupled with the international dimension to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament helped shaped philosophies and outlook in life for any here tonight, myself included. Each generation is influenced by international events and actions. Burns was similarly affected by the American War of Independence and the French Revolution.
Internationalism draws the young and captures imaginations more than domestic politics. It is something which, as a labour movement, bemoaning the lack of interest of youth in modern politics that we have failed to recognise and channel. It perhaps says something about our own failings, ceasing to involve ourselves in the international dimension as we grow older, more comfortable and more complacent but we will not harness the spirit, energies and talents of young people without a global vision of socialism. And you have to remember that Robert Burns was always young.
Communication is at the heart of drawing people together in a common global cause. In the 21st-century communication technology, especially in respect of visual media, has made the world a smaller place than it may have seemed before. There is no hiding place for injustice, no excuse of turning away from what we know to be wrong. Chechnya, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Palestine, are no longer remote but on our doorstep and in our living rooms.
One hundred years ago, workers in far flung corners of the globe would read in trade union newspapers about strikes halfway around the planet. Sometimes they would dig deep into their pockets and send much needed financial support. The struggle may have been crushed before it arrived. Now there is instant access to the world’s population. We are in the information age where knowledge is not only power but can create movements. The European wide campaign on fuel, the tactics used and the way in which physical forces could be mobilised points to a new dimension in how to harness the internet to bring about social change. Such change can be for the better or worse and we ignore the political potential at our risk… We are all fellow travellers on the same uncertain road, we have to learn to trust in each other.
Robert Burns had no time for humbug or hypocrisy, only for people, and not just the people of Scotland as can be seen in his support for the French Revolution, the birthplace of modern internationalism. He had time for the people of the world. In return, the people of the world have taken him to their hearts.
I ask you to stand with me for a toast to the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns and to couple it with it a toast to all the people of the world in his name.
The Internationale was then sung lustily by all assembled.
Arise you pris’ners of starvation,
Arise, you wretched of the earth;
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world’s in birth.
No more tradition’s chains shall bind us,
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall,
The earth shall rise on new foundations,
We have been naught, we shall be all.
’Tis the final conflict, let each stand in his place,
The Internationale shall be the human race,
’Tis the final conflict, let each stand in his place,
The Internationale shall be the human race.
It is not the kind of song you hear often in douce Milngavie – even at a Burns Supper.
As the Fifties drew to a close, minds were already turning to the Bicentenary of the birth but Burnsians still had to get there by the usual route with regular stops for refreshments every 25th of January. And nowhere more so than in the United States where the anniversary flourished to a much greater extent than in Scotland, but then, even if Scots won’t admit it, The United States are much bigger than Scotland. Never mind, there are plenty of Scots throughout America and Burns Clubs abound. One very enterprising example is in St Louis, Missouri where the members not only observe the Burns civilities on their due day or thereabouts but print copies in hardback of the proceedings and the following is taken from their printed account of several such suppers between 1955 and 1964 edited by their very capable secretary, Irvin Mattick. On 25 January 1956, the speaker was Michael Gerard and his theme for the Immortal Memory that night was ‘The Education of Robert Burns’.
My only connection with the Scottish nation was one year which I spent as a member of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders… During that year, and later with the 15th Scottish Division, I learnt to admire the supremacy of the Scotsman in two things: fighting a battle and singing a song, and it seems to me now that that is no bad qualification for discussing Robert Burns. In fact, what is most necessary is just a mind that is quick to respond to laughter and song sparked by a certain frankness and devilry. The only disqualification is squeamishness. One of the dullest and most unsympathetic accounts of Burns was written by a fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the reason for his failure may be found in the confession, – ‘I made a kind of chronological table of his various loves and lusts, and have been comparatively speechless ever since.’ Finding that I have survived the impact rather better, and am still comparatively articulate, I shall proceed to my subject. The formula I have found for Burns is that of the poet fighting to be free of the world, of the prisonhouse, and my theory is that poetry comes when the world has been put in its place, and what puts the world in its place is education.
Similarly, it is true that a good deal of verse and some poetry came from Burns right from the beginning. There is no time when philosophy ends and poetry begins. There is no time when education ends and life begins. Still, it is true that much of the earlier verse is derivative, much of it – and that the most interesting – satirical; and satire is poetry meant to put the world in its place, not poetry for the sake of the thing itself. In a letter to Peter Hill he wrote, ‘We are placed here amid so much nakedness and hunger, and poverty and want that we are under a damning necessity of studying selfishness, caution, and prudence.’ He opposed all the genial warmth which society, love and poetry inspired in him. Never vicious, but always susceptible, he wrote for himself when he said, ‘To the sons and daughters of labour and poverty, the ardent hope, the stolen interview, the tender farewell, are the greatest and most delicious parts of their enjoyment.’ And love led to composition: ‘My passions when once they were lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme.’
In the account written to Dr Moore he dwells less on the details of his family’s poverty and his own ruin, than on the details of his initiation into Love and Poesy, and equally with these the details of his reading. From The Vision of Mirza and a hymn of Addison’s, through school books, farming manuals, and religious works, to poetry and novels, they are recorded. In later letters we find him reading Dryden’s Virgil, and Pope’s Homer, and a whole list of 17th and 18th-century dramatists. At the surveying school at Kirkoswald, he says, ‘I had met with a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Anne’s reign, and I pored over them most devoutly. I engaged several of my schoolfellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me,’ and ‘literary correspondence’ remained a great solace and delight to him the rest of his life. Social life was the sovereign remedy for Burns’ ills, and in that, too, he knew that it was his ‘reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good sense, (that) made (him) generally a welcome guest.’ He was also in the habit of writing, for the imaginary company every man keeps when alone, in a series of Commonplace books, to which he would confide, for example, the ‘uneasiness and chagrin’ with which he compared the reception of a poor genius (like himself) with that of a rich dullard ‘decorated with the trappings and futile distinctions of Fortune.’ By these means Burns educated himself to meet poverty without rage or frustration. When he expressed himself on the subject in verse, always more concentrated and final than prose, as in An Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet, he began,
I tent less, and want less
their roomy fireside;
But hanker and canker
To see their cursed pride.
It’s hardly in a body’s power
To keep at times from being sour
To see how things are shared,
But concluded,
Misfortunes ‘gie the wit of age to youth;
They let us ken oursel;
They mak’us see the naked truth,
The real guid and ill.’
Thus the fight against poverty was won.
‘In this country,’ he wrote to John Beugo, ‘the only things that are to be found in any degree of perfection are stupidity and canting. Prose they know only in graces, prayers, etc, and the value of these they estimate – by the ell!’ just how uncharitable the church was, just how far its petty tyranny could go, none knew better than Burns. His own father never forgave him for attending a Country Dancing Class. He came under fire for his drinking and wild talk. And when finally Jean Armour bore his illegitimate child, he had to listen to the minister rebuke him before the congregation with the words, ‘like the dog to his vomit, or like the sow that is washed to her wallowing in the mire.’
Again his reading came to the rescue. He had fed his mind on Stackhouse’s History of the Bible, and Taylor’s Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin. A year or so later, while still on his father’s farm, he was active in founding a Bachelor’s Debating Club. It would be worth much more than all our discussions and speculation to hear Burns with his ‘wild logical talent’ armed with the arguments of John Taylor, holding forth before the bachelors of Tarbolton. He had long been, he tells us, so active in polemical divinity, and used to ‘puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion’ that (he) raised a hue and cry of heresy against (himself)… At the end of this period he wrote to William Nicol, ‘I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about with me in order to study the sentiments – the dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid, unyielding independence, the desperate daring and noble defiance of hardship – in that great personage, Satan.’ But Burns was never ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ Later, when he had turned from satire to song, he made it abundantly clear that his education, in arming him for this fight also, had not delivered him over to any violent extreme.
In 1789 he confided to Mrs Dunlop that he still remembered his childhood reading of The Vision of Mirza, Addison’s allegory of the dangerous bridge of life over the tide of eternity, and that he still felt on certain days ‘an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of Devotion and Poetry.’ The letter is of course one of his literary compositions, in which he played for membership of polite, rational 18th-century Society, but that need not mean that he is insincere. Certainly we believe him when he ends, ‘I am a very sincere believer in the Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not the halter of an ass.’ And there, Gentleman, I shall end…
And why not? In the following year (1957) St Louis was treated to the theme of ‘Scotland in the Time of Burns’ by Thomas S. Duncan:
It seems appropriate to preface this sketch with a sentence taken from F. Fraser Darling’s little book, The Story of Scotland. The members of the club will have reached the point in their celebrations where the mood is genial and they are not inclined to take offence at what may be only a partial judgment. Darling says, a propos of Burns as one of the leaders in the Scottish renaissance, ‘Burns, 1759–96, was a poor Ayrshire cottar’s son, a child of the soil and a lover of nature. He has suffered in reputation from his too perfervid admirers, usually exiled Scots who have formed societies in his name wherein they may indulge their nostalgia, their convivial proclivities and their capacity of adulation of their own race.’ When one considers how difficult it was for the Scots to have any important part in government affairs after the union, the following facts afford some satisfaction. In 1758, Horace Walpole said of them, ‘The Scots are the most accomplished nation in Europe.’
Two of the men who did most to shape the age’s mind shaped theirs in Scots classrooms and round Scots dinner tables. They were David Hume (1711–76) and Adam Smith (1723–90). Professor Sorley said of them, ‘There is no third person writing in the English language during the same period who has had so much influence on the opinions of mankind.’ Leslie Stephen considered Hume to be ‘the acutest thinker in Great Britain of the eighteenth century, and the most qualified interpreter of its intellectual tendencies.’ Hume’s famous Treatise of Human Nature and had a great influence on his friend, Adam Smith’s Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It is noteworthy that John Buchan on Edinburgh, which, of course, was the centre of the new Scottish life, says ‘Edinburgh was a true capital, a clearinghouse for the world’s culture and a jealous repertory of Scots tradition. Below the comely surface there were new forces working of which even the illuminate Whigs knew little; but the surface was all cheerfulness, good fellowship and a modest pride – an agreeable cosmopolitanism – but the scene was idiomatically Scottish.’
In this brief sketch we have indulged a good earl in ‘the adulation of our own race’ as the critic mentioned at the beginning accused us of doing, but it is to be noted that our adulation has consisted chiefly in the statement of facts and not in the claim of qualities possessed by the Scot. But should anyone apologise for adulation where the subject is the great Scot who, while proud of race, included all in his broad sympathy, and could think of nothing better than the coming of a time when he might call all men brothers?
Quite so.
And finally, in this triumvirate of views from St Louis, we have a discourse dealing with ‘Robert Burns – From Alloway to Lochlea’ given on 25 January 1957:
One hundred ninety eight years ago the ‘banks and braes’ of Doon bloomed as fresh and fair as today. Long before, Roman legions fought their way through its valley, and memories of strange deeds, some brave, some bad, clung round the walls of the castles by its banks. Doon was then unknown to fame. The fortress on Loch Doon is now a neglected ruin, overgrown with weeds, the haunt of hawk and heron. The very site of many an ancient keep has been forgotten, yet an ‘auld clay biggin’ has become a shrine to which pilgrims come in thousands year by year. An ‘auld Kirk,’ scarcely even picturesque, is protected with jealous care. An ‘auld brig,’ no longer fit for traffic, is more famous than the greatest triumph of engineering skill, and ‘bonnie Doon’ is known wherever men speak the English tongue.
To the banks of this stream in Ayrshire, William Burnes, who had labored for some years in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh as a gardener, found his way in 1752 to become gardener to Mr Crawford of Doonside. He was a frugal man, and industrious. He was deeply religious and disliked bigotry in any form. He best loved plants, animals, small children and his own dignity. William Burnes rented a piece of ground in Alloway, and while continuing his service with Mr Crawford, he planted a market garden and built with his own hands a humble clay cottage. It was a simple ‘but and ben,’ with byre and barn adjoining, all roofed with thatch. So it can be seen today, and no stately Holyrood, no Scott’s ‘romance of stone and lime,’ not any other place, or cot, or castle in all Scotland, is held in deeper reverence than this clay cottage by the Doon. Here in 1757, William Burnes and Agnes Brown began their wedded life. It was a happy union between that heavy-browed, deep thinking, solemn man from the shores of the North Sea and this merry-hearted, sweet-voiced, sunny, Carrick maid. Thirteen months later, Robert Burns was born.
As [he] grew older, his father noticed with satisfaction the quickness of his son’s mind, and with misgiving, the even greater quickness with which one mood succeeded another. The dark, obstinate little fellow, often gloomy, was astonishingly vocal, and in states of emotion, his eyes, as indeed his whole body, spoke for him as well. One day at Mount Oliphant Burnes stated to his wife ‘Whoever may live to see it, something extraordinary will come from that boy.’ The beginnings of his wisdom are to be sought in the wise counsels of his father. His love of Scottish song awoke as he listened to the sweet tones of his mother’s voice.
Too soon his boyish frame had to bear a man’s work. His shoulders were bent with holding the heavy four-horse plough, which turned a furrow fifteen to twenty inches broad. The physical effects of this toil remained with Burns throughout his life, until an overworked body and a strained heart hastened his death. The moral effect – the loss of a steady aim, the stifling of ambition, and the desire to seek pleasure while it might be found – was no less disastrous. In this stern school he learned the unheroic philosophy which he thus set forth:
Then, sore harrass’d and tir’d at last, with fortune’s vain delusion,
I dropt my schemes, like idle dreams, and came to this conclusion:
The past was bad, and the future hid – its good or ill untried;
But the present hour was in my power, and so I would enjoy it.
Thus, all obscure, unknown, and poor,
Thro’ life I’m doomed to wander,
Till down my weary bones I lay in everlasting slumber;
No view nor care, but shun whate’er might breed me pain or sorrow;
I live today as well’s I may, regardless of tomorrow.
We need not linger over the last sad days at Lochlea – the quarrel with the landlord, the law-suit, and the father’s broken health. The grey light of a February morning stole through the little window of the ‘Spence’ at Lochlea, and fell coldly on the bed in which William Burnes lay dying. By his side his favourite daughter knelt, listening amid her tears to gentle words of farewell counsel. Suddenly, the dying man raised his voice: ‘There’s ane o’ ye,’ he said, ‘for whom my heart is wae. I hope he may na fa’.’ The tall, stooping figure beside the window started and trembled. ‘O father,’ he said, ‘is it me you mean?’ For an instant their eyes met in a full deep gaze. Then slowly the father’s eye-lids fell, and his head sank on his breast in affirmation. He spoke no more. Shaking with sobs, Robert Burns turned the window. ‘Father! Father on earth and Father in heaven! I will be wise.’
It should be noted that the name of the speaker of this address at St Louis in 1957 was Robert Burns.
As we have shown in this chapter, the Robert Burns we all honour is not a Scottish monopoly. Minds like his belong to the world and his work therefore is the common property of all humanity. So perhaps it is appropriate to close with lines written by Samuil Marshak in 1959 and quoted by John Armit in his Immortal Memory given to the Paisley Burns Club in 1992.
To us – your friends as well –
Your barefoot muse is dear.
She has walked through all the lands
Of the Soviet Union.
We remember you
Amidst the banquet’s merry noise
And we’re beside you in the struggle
For the peace and happiness of the world.
I like to have quotations ready for every occasion. They give one’s ideas so pat, and save one the trouble of finding expression adequate to one’s feelings… [but] I have no great faith in unlaboured elegance. I firmly believe that workmanship is the united effort of Pains, Attention and Repeated Trial.
(Letters to Mrs Dunlop of Dunlop 1786–96)