I could never fancy that Burns had ever followed the rustic occupation of the plough, because everything he said had a gracefulness and charm that was in an extraordinary degree engaging.
(Miss Jean Jeffray, 1789)
1844, 1859, 1896, 1909 and now 1959. The anniversary dates toll like an anthem down the years. sounding the passing of one man’s life into a legend and now into a legacy for Scotland and all things Scottish. The sesquicentennial year of 1909 had virtually passed without notice coming so soon as it did after 1896 and, in any case, by that time the large-scale anniversary dinners associated with his name in the main centres had given way to the smaller, more intimate gathering appropriate to each local Burns club. By the time the Great War had made its ghastly interruption in 1914, it may be said that the formal Dinner had become the cosy Supper.
However, with each passing milestone the man that was Burns grew inevitably distant. At the same time the myth expanded proportionately till it was almost impossible to separate the fact from the fiction. He was either a god or a ghoul to many and in 1959, to the Anglified Edinburgh establishment at least, he certainly did not err on the divine side. Permission was refused to have a plaque put up on the wall of St Giles and the legal profession, almost to a man, refused to attend a special service at St Giles dedicated to the memory of Burns, saying that they only attended such services when members of the Royal Family were likely to be present.
No such qualms attended the annual gathering at St Louis, and once again we return to their records to see how they acknowledged the bicentennial anniversary. This time, there was no invited speaker. At their annual dinner on 24 January 1959, secretary Irvin Mattick presented a roll-call of previous St Louis Memories.
This is not my address. What I have to say to you has been said before, in this very room. I have culled from the books of Burns Night speeches published by the club, what I considered the best. They are excerpts from the addresses by those who have long gone before throughout the 55 years of the Club’s existence. And I have taken such excerpts, which bear most on the subject of Burns, the man, the poet, the lover. Really, in Burns there can be no true separation of those three classifications. He was a genius in all three. In him they overlapped, fused, flowed one into the other. As living the part of a man of his day he was always the poet. As the poet he was always the lover.
What you will hear is a symposium taken from the great of our Club, again speaking to us tonight from beyond, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of our Bard.
From the many available, I chose parts of the talks made by the following members, once with us:
From the 1911 Dinner – John Livingstone Lowes, then head of the English Department, Washington University.
From 1912 – William Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy’s Mirror and literary lion of St Louis.
1913 – The Reverend Dr W C Bitting, once Pastor of the Second Baptist Church here.
1928 – W Roy Mackenzie, former head of the English Department of Washington University.
1938 – Thomas Shearer Duncan, classic scholar, and a Professor of Washington University.
1939 – Read from a reprint from an article by Dr Otto Heller, Professor of German, and of Modern European Literature, at Washington University.
And this is part of what they said:
If we could tonight take ourselves back some 200 years, and review the Passing Parade of the 18th-century, we would recognise many men and women of genius and renown. Among others there would be Newton, Pope, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goldsmith, Frederick the Great, Gainsborough, Franklin, Washington, Goethe, Schiller and Haydn. And in the procession, during the latter half of the century, there would be walking, sometimes upright and defiant, at other times bowed by toil and depressing hypochondria, but more often singing and laughing, or wittily scourging, a Scottish Ayrshire peasant, sturdy and keen, wearing the hodden grey of the ploughman as proudly as any Louis of France wore his ermine and gold. He is dark and handsome, a magnetic man, his eyes flashing right and left and up and down, on all the scene around him. His hand at whiles is either firmly on the plow, or gripping a quill wet with burning ink, or raising a bumper, or chucking a girl under the chin… Robert Burns took his part manfully, toilsomely, and not vainly. Only those who sought to destroy him wrought in vain. They were either destroyed themselves, or, if any are left, they shall be destroyed if they try to upset what Burns started for the liberation of man and womanhood in that intolerant 18th-century. For, after the parade had passed, after the mob had stamped on his sheafs, and the clowns had jostled him along until he turned the corner, there still was music and laughter and pity which he had wrought for all mankind.
And the wonder continues to grow, that here was a man, a spirit, who gave more life away than he ever himself lived; who dipped his pen in his own blood and so fused his genius with the universal heartbeat of mankind that today what he left is immortal, aye, will remain even after the name of Robert Burns is forgotten, as the names of the psalmists are now unknown to us.
It is not with most, as perhaps it was not with you, when reading Burns for the first time, that the whole new planet swims into our sight. And as our reading progressed it is borne in how great a poet Burns is by the number of his lines that have been absorbed into the language of all people. There they are, passage after passage, enough to make a biggish bibelot. Often these passages are whole poems. I suppose that Auld Lang Syne can almost be called the whole world’s Internationale… Burns came here dowered in head and heart, and gifted with a grasp upon and a hunger for life and all that it contained.
His life and work show that good sense and sentiment, reason and passion, waged a mighty struggle in his heart all his days. The push and the pull of those opposite forces gave him the full swing of the pendulum – all the ecstasies of life, from rejoicing to despair. Burns’s spirit seized upon each detail of experience, warmed it, fanned it, and fashioned it into forms of beauty which still speak their truths to all the children of men.
He had the ink in his veins, and as things moved his thought or emotions he wrote them off. Life was the matter and breath of his singing. It had to be released from him as a valve releases pressure. He claimed:
Yet when a tale comes in my head,
Or lassies gie my heart a screed,
As whyles they’re like to be my dead,
(O sad disease!)
I kittle up my rustic reed:
It gies me ease.
But Burns had studied life. He had met with smugglers, sailors and roisterers, and had found them human beings often of better and more honest stuff than most of the gentry he knew. He had met and gathered with those fine fellows who are so bad for good fellows. Drink and doxies fascinated him, for his was the temperament that finds generous pleasure resistless, all, ironically stimulating to a poet’s genius. He was yet to find, and to write that:
Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower; its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river –
A moment white, then melts forever.
At Mossgiel, the ploughman failing in his crops, wrote 133 poems in three years, 60 of them undying songs. Burns knew by now that he was a poet. In his letters and verses he was referred to himself as ‘Bardie’. And he made a high resolve:
That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake
Some useful plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least.
Written out in his round, brave handwriting, never before was such verse so circulated since certain sonnets of Shakespeare’s moved among his friends. They were composed at the plow and after the ‘countrawark’ written out by candlelight in a low garret. And later, all the better was this flash of song, for through the meditations at the plough and at the driving of the kind there flitted the face, and we must not forget the figure, of Jean Armour: ‘Bonny Jean.’ Much of the great work of the world in all times has been done for, and to the audience of one woman – not necessarily for the same woman. Jean Armour stung Burns into song and glory! For all the sordid details of that story, as we might call part of it now, Burns married Jean, and, as he wrote, ‘made a decent woman of her.’ We know that Jean grew in womanly dignity and loving kindness, well content, not to understand, but to love the genius who was her husband. Some observers believe that the reason Jean and Robert finally were so happy was that Jean was the only woman who really loved Burns. Her trials and patience certainly substantiate that belief.
In three years at Ellisland, 132 poems and songs were written. Here, Tam o Shanter was created. Ellisland failing, Burns moved to town, to Dumfries. In Dumfries, where life was gay after a fashion, Burns was exiled. He was never a townsman. He had a sharp tongue – a tongue that spoke the truth too often. He said things he shouldn’t have said, and in the worst places: the tavern and the marketplace. He uttered treasons before the Royal natives. To a toast to Pitt he responded: ‘To George Washington, a better man!’ Burns was a Jacobite by romantic tradition, but republican by his reason. A democrat with a small ‘d’, he was still Jacobite because he loved the lost cause, the unfortunate Stuarts, and misfortune never appealed to Burns in vain. Satirist though he was, he had a vast common sense. His judgments upon himself and others were always fair. In his Epistle to a Young Friend, he wrote:
Adieu, dear, amiable youth!
Your heart can ne’er be wanting:
May prudence, fortitude, and truth,
Erect your brow undaunting!
In ploughman phrase, ‘God send you speed,’
Still daily to grow wiser;
And may you better reck the rede
Than ever did th’ adviser!
The last five years in Dumfries brought forth 100 more poems and songs, some his most brilliant and immortal. The lower the flame of the man burned, the higher the divine muse soared! The end came one afternoon, on 21 July 1796. He had sung Scotland back to something like nationhood. And on the day they buried him, many high and low were heard to murmur: ‘Who will be our Poet now?’ Well, no one else has been their poet since. He still is. They who had cast stones were now ready to bring bread. There is little else to say.
The annual Burns Conference was held in Ayr that year but it was a low-key event. One would have thought the 200 years milestone would have inspired them but it limited itself almost entirely to a review of the various bicentenary events and a bemoaning about the falling sales of the Burns Chronicle. It was time for a whole change of attitude, but, alas, the mills of the Burns business turn slowly and no far-seeing changing decisions were made – yet. But they would come. Meantime, the Immortal Memories flourished among the celebrations. Dumfries drew an interesting double. Sir Alan P. Herbert, the writer, proposed the Immortal Memory for the Burns Club at their Bicentenary Dinner and the falconer and sometime film star, James Robertson Justice, followed a few days later doing likewise for the Scottish Southern Counties Association.
Niall Macpherson, the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland introduced Alan Herbert, as ‘a man of independent mind’ who was going to speak of another of the same cast. Sir Alan certainly spoke his fertile mind.
It would be a wonder indeed if, after 200 hundred years of due, sincere and unremitting commemoration, there could be found a man who had anything new to say concerning the shining soul, the splendid singer, Robert Burns…It would be more surprising still if that man were a ‘poor, wee timorous, English beastie’ of Irish extraction. Yet I see no reason why an Englishman should not be invited to try. It is true we do not know the poet so intimately and well as the sons of his own soil; yet he is a part, a familiar part, of the life of every Englishman, more so even than any poet of our own. Only the great Kipling perhaps – another singer – is so often on the lips of the Common Man.
It is not only on New Year’s Eve, on Ludgate Hill before St Paul’s – nor by Scotsmen only – that Auld Lang Syne is sung. Through all the year, wherever two or three Englishmen are gathered together who wish to express their love of life, their affection for their fellow men, their simple gratitude for simple happiness, how do they do it best – not with solemn speeches that begin the feast, but with a friendly Scottish song that sends them home to bed. And this is not in England only. All round the world, on every ship that flies the British flag; all round the world, wherever the sons of Britain are dwelling or serving, are sweltering or shivering, they sing that song whenever they are in company… It is safe to say, that there is no moment of the day at which, somewhere under the circling moon, some company of men, in merry or melancholy mood, is not singing Auld Lang Syne. How happy any one of us would be if he thought such a thing would be said of his work 162 years after his death…
Burns loved all natural life and beauty but was condemned to wreck himself by cruel labour in the country he loved. But among the many men that filled that brief but fruitful span of eight and thirty years there was one, I believe, who governed and survived them all:
For thus the royal mandate ran
When first the human race began,
The social, friendly, honest man,
Whate’er he be,
Tis he fulfils great Nature’s plan
And none but he.
We call that man, rather proudly and patronisingly, the Common Man, but Robert Burns discovered and glorified him 200 years ago.
Two hundred years ago, Robert Burns was born. A little more than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet, Horace, was born. He, too, was a lyric poet, with strong powers of satire. He, too, is sung a little in England, at least in the schools. He, too, had the gift of putting a few common words together so that they shone like a posy, or a cluster of jewels of wit and wisdom. He, too, has left many a saying that is still a part of the coinage of life for those who studied him in youth – and, indeed, for many who did not. Near the end of his days he wrote –
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
(I have built a monument more lasting than brass.)
That, I believe, was the grandest boast, the boldest prediction, that a mortal has ever made. Yet it was true. The Rome he knew is dust and ruin – the Latin tongue, they dare to say, is dead; yet his polished pearls of verse are as fresh and fascinating as ever. If you ever need a new motto for your annual celebrations you might do worse than take these tremendous words of the poet Horace…for it is safe to say that 200 years from now, if the human race is still alive on this rash and undeserving planet, at every moment of every day, someone will be singing, under the circling moon –
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And auld lang syne?
No song, I swear, will go round the world unless the poet is as worthy as his words; and by worthy I don’t mean an example of all the usual virtues but an honest witness and interpreter of the human heart and mind…
Behind the singer there must be a soul…
Sir Alan went on for several pages more of sound sense and acute observation of the poet’s craft which reminded the hearers that he was no mean writer of verse himself. At the end of his speech, he was rewarded with an ovation and a scroll that declared him to be, like John Buchan, an honorary life member of the Dumfries Burns Club.
No such honour came Mr Robertson Justice’s way. This bluff, blunt, bearded man of many parts, who described himself as ‘by nationality a Scot and by profession, a scientist’ had never been to a Burns Supper in his life and he astounded his Dumfries audience by saying immediately, and not so foolishly:
Of course it was pure twaddle to maintain that everything Burns wrote should be inscribed on tablets of pure jade. No artist in the history of the world had produced 100 per cent pure gold…. I speak, I hope, as an intelligent layman, and though so to say will probably result in my heel dangling in the air and a halter round my neck suspended from a neighbouring lamp post, I venture to say that Burns wrote a great deal of rubbish…John Anderson, My Jo is a sentimental monstrosity and The Cotter’s Saturday Night must have been written with a remorseful hang-over or with tongue in cheek – or both…
(Murmurs)
The real miracle is that he wrote so much that is immortal and that his prose is so good it could be used today… He was a great lyrical poet and had a magical personality and a gentleness that would not allow him to harm a living creature – BUT – it is the uncritical worship of his work which I personally find enough to make a sensitive student take a scunner against the entire haggis. Burns was a victim of his time, a time which made it possible, or even desirable, for him to become, at least outwardly, a toady, a shocking sentimentalist, and, at times, a cad.
(More murmurs)
I cannot believe in the ‘great lover’ nonsense that was talked about Burns…
The psycho boys have a word which describes the promiscuous male, the inference being that, at heart, he despises women. But even so, Burns behaved in a detestable way towards his girl friends, if only because he kissed and told – (Loud shouts) – a habit against which I was always warned. It must have been poor consolation for the girls to be immortalised in verse though the surprising thing is that none of them seemed to protest and accepted his advances as willingly as they forgave him later-’
(Uproar)
Just as many of his audience did, we must leave Mr Robertson Justice at this point, although it must be said that for a certain type of man this was a reasonable view of our Bard, and, remembering him from Pinewood Studios, he was that kind of man. His essential thesis, it must be said, had a lot going for it, but not enough, it would seem, to impress Dumfries.
There was no report of such controversy at the London Burns Club No 1, which had a record turn-out, nor even when 700 Americans – or Scottish Americans – rallied to a dinner in Cuyahago County, Ohio. That was a big turn-out but an even bigger moment was experienced by the Glasgow and District Burns Association at the opening of the Jean Armour Burns Houses at Mauchline. This had been for so long a project of theirs and in the warmth of a sunny afternoon they had the great satisfaction of seeing it finally realised when the Houses were officially opened by Mrs Myer Galpern, the Lady Provost of Glasgow. Edinburgh’s Burns Clubs did their part
by producing an Exhibition of Children’s Art on Burns Themes which was displayed at Riddle’s Court before going on tour around the country.
Arbroath at last got its Burns statue in time for the bicentenary – after 70 years of talking about it. The Arbroath Burns Club had first proposed it all that time ago and now they had their wish realised in the only statue raised to Burns in modern times. It is a striking work. The sculptor had given the town a seven-foot bronze, uncompromising in its defiant outward stance. Scott Sutherland’s fresh-faced, neat-headed Burns stands with hands clasped in front of him, facing out, legs apart, his plaid across his shoulders. The 15-inch clay model for the work was given to me by Mr Sutherland’s daughter and it now stands, just as defiantly, on a bookcase only a step or two from my desk. You can never move far from Burns in my study.
25 January fell on a Sunday in 1959, and almost the first flag raised for the bicentenary was a red one. Three thousand people packed St Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow for an event organised by the Scottish Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Hundreds were turned away at the door. The actor, Alex McCrindle, delivered the prologue, and Alex Clark, later to be secretary of Scottish Actors’ Equity, chaired the proceedings and read out the messages to the demonstration that had come in from all over the world. Dr C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) spoke eloquently, claiming that nowhere else in the world would so many ordinary people gather together to honour a poet. (See his Immortal Memory below) John Ross Campbell, editor of the Daily Worker, (one remembers Colin Rae-Brown’s weekly The Worker) took up MacDiarmid’s point that Burns is the only authentic voice of the Scottish people and then asked who is speaking for them today if not the Daily Worker and the Communist Party.
Bob Horne, a noted Burnsian was also present. He had been brought to the Bard by hearing the same John Ross Campbell deliver a stirring Immortal Memory in London twenty years before. Horne quoted Edwin Muir, like MacDiarmid, a Scottish poet of the time, who wrote of Burns:
He is so deeply embedded in Scottish life that he cannot be detached from it, from what is best in it and what is worst in it.
Burns songs and poems were performed thoughout the evening but the highlight was undoubtedly the closing sequence. This was a production by Scottish Television’s Jimmy Sutherland of The Jolly Beggars performed by members of the Young Communist League under the direction of James Callan with the recitavo spoken by David McDowell. This well-rehearsed presentation roused the huge audience to such an extent that they rose to their feet as the cast gathered under the specially-painted banner for the finale of the cantata which came in a thunder of applause and went on for minutes on end. So great was the enthusiasm for this climax to the evening that Willie Stewart, who had designed the Burns banner hung behind the performers, was asked to create a painting of that wonderful finale. This now hangs in the Burns Room of Mitchell Library,
There has long been an accepted link between Burns, the natural rebel and Burns, the radical red. In fact, Ross Campbell, the proposer of the Immortal Memory during the evening, was also the author of Burns the Democrat, a booklet published by Scottish Arts and Letters in 1945 which sold for ninepence. In this Campbell argues for Burns’s life-long hatred of the ruling gentry however much he had to mix with them. His view was that Burns:
looked rather to the gradual economic progress of the tenant farmers, small manufacturers and the middle class in general to create the elements of a better order, with, of course, the more intelligent members of the working class admitted to their ranks. The political reforms which he supported were to contribute to this end by the removal of unjust privilege. As he wrote to the Earl of Mar:
Does any man tell me that my feeble efforts can be of no service and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation? I tell him that it is on such individuals as I, that for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence a nation has to rest. The uniformed mob may swell a nation’s bulk; and the titled, tinsel, courtly throng may be its feathered ornament, but the number of those who are elevated enough in life to reason and to reflect; and yet low enough to keep clear of the venal contagion of a court, these are a nation’s strength.
Burns takes his place, and a foremost one, in the procession of great Scottish Rebels who have striven to make the lot of the common people a happier one. And now the common people themselves, with ever-growing unity and determination, go forward to achieve their freedom and to make our beloved country a land of which Burns would be proud.
1959 was important in another Burns respect as it was also the year of the first publication of Maurice Lindsay’s seminal The Burns Encyclopaedia. As J. B. Hardie, the then President of the Burns Federation, said at the time – ‘A study of this Encyclopaedia is a generous education in itself’. Dr Lindsay, a poet and writer of some standing, and one who had shared many a platform with Hugh MacDiarmid and others, had written on Burns before in Robert Burns; his Work; the Legend (1954). It was while working on this he had the idea of a simple reference work giving the basic information on Burns to the general reader. It is much more than that of course, and over the years, with further printings, it has enlarged from the basic ‘hand rail’ the compiler envisaged and has become a whole Burns staircase in itself. It is mandatory reading for anyone embarking on a Burns project, this writer included, and Dr Lindsay has to be thanked for his contribution, not only to Burns scholarship, but to the added pleasure it gives to the reading of the Burns works.
This element of entertainment was to found in Dr Lindsay’s many other sides which offset his day-to-day work as a director of public companies, administrator of arts foundations and public servant. He continued as a published poet as well as a lecturer on every aspect of Scottish letters, particularly on Burns. One of the most recent of these was to the University of Glasgow on Burns and Scottish Poetry, part of which, with his kind permission, is reproduced here.
It is difficult, if not virtually impossible, to imagine English literature without Shakespeare, broad and generous as is England’s literary heritage. It is absolutely impossible to imagine Scotland’s literary heritage without Burns. In making this claim I am not comparing Shakespeare and Burns. Leaving aside the fact that Shakespeare’s greatest poetry is meant to be spoken on the stage, mainly by kings and the great – or not so great – rulers of the past, while Burns
wrote, so to say, for the mind’s ear – by far the subtlest way to enjoy poetry, in my view – there is the fundamental difference which, broadly speaking, distinguishes the two literary traditions.
Recently, a daughter who teaches English in a Southern English school in the Home Counties, as they used to be called, found herself involved in a scheme where the pupils in the English department were exposed to a selection of contemporary work by English, Welsh and Scottish poets. The comparison most of the youngsters chose to make was between the English and the Scottish attitudes. One youngster, my daughter remarked, seemed to put it particularly well when he described how he saw the difference. ‘The Scots,’ he opined, ‘seem to be inside looking out. There’s much more people poetry than in the English work.’ I’m sure he’ll go far, that lad, for it seems to me that he hit the nail on the head – which is, of course, where you are suppose to hit them.
‘People Poetry.’ That, indeed, I think, is the outstanding characteristic of Scottish poetry down the ages…While it is true that Dunbar, but more particularly Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, to some extent did their share of celebrating the ways of kings and queens, the religious turmoils of the seventeenth century partially drove poetry underground. When it re-emerged, so to say, in the eighteenth century, though stimulated by the threat to the sense of nationhood caused by the Union of 1707, Scottish poetry was already firmly people-orientated.
There are, I suppose, two kinds of artist: those who forge new forms or ways of expression; and those who take the forms already to hand and use them with greater richness than any of their predecessors had done. An analogy with music comes to mind. Two of the sons of the great Bach – Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian – were innovators; the former both formally and with the personalisation of expressiveness, the latter stylistically, giving an elegance to the gallant manner which has, happily, been re-appreciated in our own day. Mozart, on the other hand, though greatly broadening and extending their use, took the forms that were to hand and by substituting genius for great talent, endowed them with a perfection not hitherto achieved. And so it was in Scottish literature.
Allan Ramsay – himself of fairly humble origin – and the other lesser literary figures around him, were essentially ‘people poets’. Ramsay, indeed, through his anthologies and his library – the first circulating library in Scotland – wanted to make literature more widely available and was only thwarted by the clerical establishment from setting up a theatre in Edinburgh the better to reach the people through drama. He wrote about ‘low-life’ people – a brothel madame and a keeper of a tavern, for example and he was unsparing with the verbal lash against the Kirk-Treasurer’s man, whose sanctimoniousness oppressed the people.
Robert Fergusson, his successor, was even more of a people’s man, and – as befitted the growing urban influence being brought about by the Industrial Revolution – more or less our first town poet. He, too, had no hesitation in applying the satirical lash to pompousness and social pretension.
The ‘people’ business – like the ‘Standard Habbie’ stanza they often favoured and which was imported from France – was used by one of the comic characters in Sir David Lyndsay’s one surviving play Ane Satire of the Three Estates – a comic masterpiece, as we all know, which surely couldn’t have been Lyndsay’s sole dramatic endeavour. So it was the practical poetic heritage which Burns came to heir.
Like Mozart, Burns took the materials of his immediate predecessors and enriched them beyond anything hitherto imagined. Incidentally, there are two other significant links between Mozart and Burns. Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, tilting ridicule at the unacceptable ‘droit de Seigneur’ privileges of the aristocracy, appeared in 1786, the same year as Burn’s Kilmarnock poems, satirising the unacceptable practices of the Scottish establishment. Both were Freemasons, much favoured by socially conscious late 18th century intellectuals. And both paid for their temerity: Mozart through the withdrawal of Viennese upper-class support during the late 1780’s; Burns by the growing coolness with which the Edinburgh upper classes came to regard him after the novelty of his year or so as ‘the wonder of all the gay world’, as Mrs Cockburn called him, began to wear off.
The notion that poetry had to be written in a high-falutin’ manner and be about exalted topics, while a romantic fallacy already widely believed long before Romanticism ever raised its introspective head, was never one that fully pertained in Scottish poetry. Scotland never seriously succumbed to an Augustan phase. James Thomson, the leading Scottish Augustan, decamped to England and the circle of Pope beside the Thames. With so much cultural publicity focused on the Augustan English poetry of the time, it is hardly to be wondered at that, from time to time Burns should have raised his eyes from his true preoccupation with the people, to emulate, almost always unsuccessfully, Shenstone’s ‘bosom-melting throe’.
Virtually anything can provide the subject-matter of poetry, and one of the reasons for Burns’s astounding success with the Kilmarnock Poems was that they proved just that. The ways of country folk, and of the animals with whom the farmer necessarily worked in the closest contact, rather than, for example, the pampered lady at her toilet in front of her dressing-table mirror, were shown to reflect the basic values that matter in life. It is not without significance that out of all the stilted upper class affectation – the Clarinda and Sylvander nonsense of Burns’s affair with Mrs Maclehose – there was finally distilled the one last note that summed it all up and rang true – the song, Ae Fond Kiss, a people’s poem if ever there was one.
From the particular, Burns could draw the universal generality. Probably arising out of his love for an unattainable country lass, Alison Begbie, came the song Mary Morison, with its heartache line celebrating the uniqueness of the beloved, ‘Ye arena Mary Morison’ – incidentally, thought by Hugh MacDiarmid to be just about the greatest line in Scottish poetry. And from the exposure of the secret lust of that poor old sanctimonious local, Willie Fisher (who died miserably freezing to death in a ditch) came what is possibly the wittiest and most devastating denunciation of religious hypocrisy to be found in European, if not in world literature, Holy Willie’s Prayer.
Burns’s people’s instinct rarely faltered – momentarily, perhaps in Edinburgh, when he was subjected to the patronising flattery of the social glitterati: and certainly in his over-enthusiasm for the French Revolution which ended, as most violent Revolutions do, in the establishment of a repressive and cruel dictatorship: but Burns was not the only poet to be carried away by the French Revolution’s initial breath of democratic liberty: Wordsworth made the same misreading of the situation, though he at least lived long enough to be able to question his earlier unqualified enthusiasm before descending into stultified conservatism.
In his best work – and, ultimately it is only a poet’s best work that really matters – Burns’s democratic sincerity rang clear and true… It was, I believe, a combination of his use of ordinary subject matter and everyday imagery, coupled with this unflinching sincerity that brought him, almost immediately, in 1786, the wide range of his readership. He was writing at a time when the old agrarian way of life, the time-honoured country values, were being assailed by the very different social and economic conditions evolving from the Industrial Revolution. In a sense, therefore, Burns perhaps seemed to enshrine the very qualities which were then regarded – and, indeed, have been ever since – as the fundamental qualities which constitute the Scottish character.
It is difficult to find any other explanation for the phenomenon of the cult of Burns Supperism which established itself within a couple of decades of his death and, institutionalised by the establishment of the Burns Federation, has flourished ever since wherever in the world a handful of Scots find themselves gathered together around 25 January… Now, as in his lifetime – despite, in the intervening years, such sentimental absurdities as The Star o Rabbie Burns and the often stultifying attitude induced by the Burns Cult – it is the quintessential honesty of his poetry and its accurate capturing of the basic tenets of our Scottishness that has preserved his popularity among readers from generation to generation.
When we come to consider his influence – or rather the influence of his work – on later generations of Scottish poets, it is quite another story. There was, for instance, the mistaken belief that it was his having been a ploughman, a former Excise-man, that explained the secret of his genius. So, with vastly mistaken energy, a certain Mr Edwards, in 52 volumes, proceeded to collect a wide assortment of worker poets, categorising them trade by trade. Virtually all of them were Burns clones, not only without the genius but without even traceable literary talent. At a rather higher level of imitation, or at least model-copying, there were writers gifted in varying degrees – some, like James Hogg, a writer of imaginative distinction (as we are at last discovering) in other forms and literary fields; others, like Robert Tannahill, with some individuality and ability (albeit, in his case, ‘a too-quick despairer’, leading to his suicide). There was also, of course, a vast and now utterly forgotten horde of local versifying followers who thought the touch lay in the couthy use of
the Doric.
Scots, like Gaelic, must come under increasing pressure in the years ahead. Gaelic, for the time being, like Welsh, has the support (at very considerable cost) of special promotion by the most powerful media arm of our day, television: the same arm of the media that is exercising increasing pressure even against English as spoken in England, with its ever-increasing quantity of imported transatlantic material. The ‘talkies’ in the ‘Twenties’ no doubt made some small impact against Scots and its dialects. But the BBC charter, when concerned only with sound radio, contained provision for the nurturing of local languages and dialects, a condition that it was obviously quite impractical to impose upon television. ‘Market values’ have now been, of necessity, let loose against ‘the guid Scots tongue’. It has, indeed, been under sentence of death for many decades; yet is still of literary use. But for how much longer, who can say? Yet it seems unthinkable that a time should ever come when the people of Scotland would no longer understand the language of Burns, let alone that of Henryson, Dunbar and MacDiarmid.
The fact is that Burns virtually perfected the use of the poetic tools which lay to hand when he ‘commenced poet’, to use his own quaint phrase. Even quite gifted poets in later years who tried to don his mantle like Stevenson (though, fortunately not exclusively) or John Buchan – walked, so to say, as if in antique guise; indeed, in literary fancy dress. It simply isn’t possible to be sincere wearing the borrowed clothes of your literary ancestor Hogg, as I’ve already mentioned, though much influenced by Burns, and who, indeed, though that the Ayrshire poet’s mantle had descended on him, had himself a touch of genius, though it is only in our own times that his stature, both as poet and novelist, is being properly reassessed.
The link between the major influence on Scottish literature during the 19th century and Burns is a tantalisingly minor social one. The boy who became Sir Walter Scott was present at a social gathering where Burns was the centre of attraction and was able to supply him with the identification of a poet, which had slipped Burns’s memory. What Burns did for the Scots tongue, Scott, through the Waverley Novels, did for Scotland’s history. As a lasting influence on their preservation of our sense of nationhood, the two must be seen in tandem. We are apt to forget that the ordinary Scot did not have easy access to the history of Scotland before Scott popularised some of its main confrontation points through fiction. Thus the stemming of the tide which threatened to engulf Scotland and North Britain was achieved jointly by Burns and Scott, spreading knowledge both of the Scots language and the old Scots ways of rural life as well as the actions and decisions which shaped her destiny in the dubious years.
In any case, the first half of the 19th-century was not a rich gleaning field for poetry in Scotland, the novel taking precedence in readership popularity. In the weedy rural sidewalks, of course, there were plenty of versifiers imitating Burns in form and content. Indeed, it was not until the middle of the century that the rural shadow of Burns was finally shaken off, poetically speaking. Urban and industrial influences began to be felt in the work of John Davidson and James B.V.Thomson, the one born in the industrial Clydeside town of Greenock, the other in the neighbouring town, Port Glasgow. The work of neither of them showed any Burns influence whatsoever, unless one counts anti-Calvinism, indeed anti-religion, as to some extent a Burns influence… Nevertheless, Scots itself trickled on, not ineffectively, into the early years of the 20th-century in the work of such writers as Charles Murray, Violet Jacob, Marion Angus and Helen Cruikshank; no longer Burns-influenced perhaps. The ladies struck an original rather plangent note and demonstrated that the Scots tongue whose demise had been prophesied since the 18th century, was certainly itself a gey long time a-dying!
It has been said that the creative energy flung into religious disputation in 17th-century Scotland and into cultural pursuits in the 18th, found its true expression in the 19th through engineering. There may be something in this, of course. Yet the great Scots concentration in providing engineered products for the world market – mainly, of course, a Glasgow and Clydeside preoccupation – did not in any way stem public enthusiasm for Burns’s poetry. It has often been remarked of the English in recent years that they have never really taken to industrial urban society; that they believe the countryside to be their natural habitat. Thus, when they make money out of industry (or however), they buy themselves back into a kind of sanitised countryside; a countryside that has nothing, of course, to do with the hard work, low pay and battle with harsh elements of the real agricultural workers. I think the same social phenomenon probably also exists in Scotland. At any rate, Burns as a creative literary influence – though not, of course, as a source of delight to successive generations of readers – waned as the voices, mostly in English, celebrated, or denounced, Industrial Society gathered in strength. And so we come to our own century – ‘the Age of Anxiety’, as Auden called it; the decade of bloody wars, as many have experienced it; or ‘The People’s Century’, as the BBC Television service currently calls it. All are true definitions in their way.
In Scotland, what part has the Burns influence played in shaping our literature and our sense of nationhood which, during the last three quarters of the century, has, slowly but surely, been showing signs of renewed strength? On ‘the-sense-of-nationhood’ business, undoubtedly an enormous invisible influence, so to say, though difficult to quantify since impossible precisely to define. But on creative Scottish writing, I should have thought, very little; beyond, perhaps, reminding Burns readers and the vast army of passive Burns-Supperites, that in a master’s hands, the Scots tongue awoke and still awakes ancient, still valid values deeper than the marketplace ‘value for money’ attitudes increasingly urged upon us today.
The main influence on, and to a large extent the heart and centre of, the Scottish Renaissance movement, which flourished in Scotland from about 1925 to 1975 or so, has undoubtedly been Christopher Murray Grieve, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Sangshaw and Pennywheep, those two books of superb lyrics, are broadly speaking, rural inspired in content and imagery. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, however, ranges widely over contemporary life and thought as it existed in the 1920’s. ‘Not Burns – back to Dunbar’ was MacDiarmid’s cry for many years. For his own exquisite early lyrics the by then debilitated state of the Scots tongue as used so wonderfully by Burns was an insufficient tool; so, as everybody knows, MacDiarmid set about constructing Lallans, Plastic Scots – call it what you will – reviving words with latent imaginative potential out of Jameson’s Scots Dictionary. Against all odds, it worked.
No one with an ounce of feeling for true poetry can fail to thrill to the lyric wonders of Sangshaw and Pennywheep, or be excited and impressed by the wit, the satire and the sheer energy of the Drunk Man. But MacDiarmid’s success and what he achieved in these early years though surely imperishable – was built upon an intellectual structure poorly able to withstand the tides of chance and change that swirl up the deposit that is history. It had several flawed planks in its construction. It is sadly, a well-proven fact that a language can only survive if it is used in commerce and the everyday business of life. The most obvious example of the failure of Government legislation artificially to revive a language not so used is the lack of success in Eire over the long-standing official programme to revive Erse as the daily Irish tongue.
By the time MacDiarmid burst upon the Scottish scene, Scots had largely fragmented into a series of local dialects. Most non-Gaelic speakers by then spoke a kind of Scoto-English, the thickness of the dialect depending to some extent on education and social class. Now please – and I don’t want anyone to get me wrong about all this – I treasure and revel in our Scots literary heritage as much as anyone; every word of it. And I applaud all the gallant workers in the language section of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies – of which, indeed, I am a past-President – not to mention the School of Scottish Studies, who labour so enthusiastically on its behalf. But no matter how vigorous their endeavours, the artificial – if I may put it that way – restoration of Scots as a used tongue is, in my view, even less likely to succeed than the late-in-the-day efforts to lift Gaelic off the rather low-lying plateau where, happily, for the moment at least, it seems more or less to have stabilised.
In his early days, MacDiarmid inveighed against the only Scots tides that showed any signs of stirring popular living Scots at all. I refer, on the one hand to the honest efforts of the Burns Federation to stimulate interest in Burns’s Scots among schoolchildren; and on the other to the vibrant use of it, albeit in a thin, debased strain, by Scots comedians like Harry Lauder and Will Fyffe – ‘Music Hall Scots’, if you like. At least that kind of Scots was undoubtedly people’s tongue. The faulty planks I referred to as being built into the MacDiarmid Scots Revivalist structure were: firstly, that he was a Communist who, in old age, even supported the brutal suppression by the Soviet Army of the Hungarian and Czech popular democratic risings – and that’s a far cry from Burns’s ‘Liberty’s in every blow / Let us do or die’.
As it happens, I got to know him very well in the post-war years, because he lived in a house in the West End of Glasgow almost back-to-back with my father’s house. I saw him frequently. Basically, I think he didn’t much like people. Certainly he could not brook any suggestion that he might be wrong over some things, or that not everything he wrote was necessarily a manifestation of genius. Secondly, he ceased to practise what he preached, abandoning Scots in favour of a fairly rhythmless, quotation-larded English sprawl. There have been many explanations for this curious reversion. The most probable, however, seems that told to me by Norman MacCaig. MacDiarmid, who was accidentally tossed from a London double-decker bus in the late twenties, lost his sense of rhythm as a result of the injury sustained in that incident.
But this is not a lecture on MacDiarmid. It is, however, important in my view, to establish that however great the Scots lyrics written between 1924 and about 1932 – and they are very great indeed – they will never likely ever make him a popular poet. There has never been any question of its being ‘move over Burns’. Whatever may be the future course of Scots, MacDiarmid’s influence is to be found not so much on his use of the Scots tongue, as in the internationalising of Scots thought. So low had the esteem in which Scotland held itself become that until the post-Second War years, Scottish literature was not taught in Scotland’s schools; not, at any rate, systematically and as a requirement. All that has changed for the better. Young people in future should come out of some Scottish schools at least able to understand what Burns was writing about.
If I had a criticism to make of the work of the Burns Federation over the years – apart from its perhaps incidental encouragement of Burnsolotry, a mindless condition which has nothing to do with the merits of this poetry – it would be that for years they treated Burns as if he were an isolated phenomenon, springing, so to say, fully armed to the forefront of Scottish letters. Obviously, that view is nonsense. Great poet that he is, it is simply not the case that he is so much better than all the other earlier Scots writers that none of them are worth reading. I hope this is an attitude which no longer prevails anywhere. ‘Back to Dunbar’ was thus not such a bad cry, if it could have been held to apply also to all other so-called Scottish Chaucerians or Makars.
It is probably true that Scotland’s three greatest poets have been Dunbar, Burns and MacDiarmid. By far the greatest of the three, however, is Burns. It would appear from Dunbar’s verse that, like MacDiarmid, he wasn’t awfully fond of other people. Certainly, like MacDiarmid, Dunbar never was, nor ever can be, in any real sense a ‘people’s poet’. But he was a master technician, a creator of great bursts of verbal music: one of many of Burns’s predecessors who should certainly still be studied and enjoyed by the general reader.
Finally, there is the influence of Burns, the man, to be considered. I once did a rough check in a library to try to find out who had inspired the greatest number of books in English. Leaving aside Jesus Christ as being a special case, numerically, Burns is rivalled only by Shakespeare and Napoleon. That was some years ago. Many of these Burns books, of course, are worthless. Those that fulminate against strong drink as the cause of his death – it was a contributory cause, no doubt, but not the main cause. Those which simply regurgitate the common facts of his life story – and we still get those regularly appearing – and those (a minority) which genuinely advance our knowledge of the facts of his life or result in an increased understanding of his work or the texts which contain it.
All this regurgitation, however, at least suggests that, whether conveyed in strictly factual form, in semi-fictional, like the biography by Catherine Carswell, or wholly fictional, as in the novels of James Barke, our interest in the man and his milieu seems to be more or less insatiable. And no wonder. What a story it is! Born in an agricultural labourer’s cottage – though Burns’s father never thought of himself in quite such lowly terms – part of the thatched roof of which was blown off in a storm; smitten by the charms of love and poetry at an early age; as a boy, engaged in a heart-dancing labour in the fields; easily – perhaps too easily – successful with women; a hater of social injustice and an upholder of the rights and dignity of the ordinary man; an exposer of fake pretence and hypocrisy; fond of the good things of life, or such as he could afford; one with a talent for friendship, regardless of status or rank; one capable of making enormous mistakes and bitterly repenting them afterwards; here, if ever there was one, is a man whom nearly everyone who reads his story warms to and can identify with.
Then again, some people like to assume that he would have supported this or that cause which happens to involve their own interest. Take religion, for example. When Burns was writing to his ‘mother-confessor’, Mrs Dunlop, knowing that she was of religious turn of mind, he larded his letters with pietistic references; for example, ‘I hope and believe, that there is a state of existence beyond the grave where the worthy of this life will renew their former intimacies’. Yet a few weeks earlier, to Alexander Cunningham, he was declaring: ‘Of all Nonsense, religious Nonsense is the most nonsensical.’ Probably his true beliefs were agnostic – again, pretty well echoing the general modern view, so well expressed by Burns to Robert Muir on 7th March, 1788:
‘If we lie down in the grave, the whole man a piece of broke machinery, to moulder with the clods of the valley – be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care, woes and wants. If that part of us called Mind does survive the apparent destruction of the man, away with old wife prejudices and tales! Every age and nation has had a different set of stories; and as the many are always weak, of consequence they have often, perhaps always been deceived. A man conscious of having acted an honest part among his fellow creatures; even granting that he may have been the sport, at times, of passions and instincts; he goes to a great unknown Being who could have no other end but to make him happy; who gave him those passions and instincts, and well knows their force.’
The story of ‘a man, conscious of acting an honest part among his fellow-creatures…’ particularly when he happens also to have been the greatest literary genius Scotland has produced – the story of such a man never ceases to absorb our interest and involve our deepest feelings…
Hugh MacDiarmid claimed, like Walt Whitman, ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’ Maurice Lindsay is too diffident a man to make such a claim but he has worn an amazing number of hats in his time. As well as his literary and bureaucratic concerns, he has also acted as an articulate interviewer on television and was a noted presenter being especially remembered, like Frank Muir, for his range of colourful bow ties. He once interviewed MacDiarmid when that poet was being sculpted in the BBC studio by Benno Schotz. The result now stands in the foyer of the BBC studios in Glasgow. Later in his broadcasting career, moved to become Controller of Border Television in Carlisle, and in that capacity, he presented a Burns programme with Moira Anderson, Bill McCue, Mary Marquis and the present writer.
It suddenly occurs to me, that in my professional life as an actor, I have not only been presented by Maurice Lindsay on television but I, too, have shared a platform with Hugh MacDiarmid (at Kirkcaldy Art Gallery with Alan Bold) and I have had my bust sculpted by Benno Schotz. It stares stonily over my head as I write. Much of what I write goes over my head, and even more of what I read, except when I read of Burns. As Dr Lindsay has said, his story is compelling in every aspect as far as I am concerned, especially when I have the help of commentators such as Lindsay, David Daiches, Tom Crawford and Donald Low. It says much for Burns’s calibre that he has engaged, and continues to engage, such eminent Caledonian minds. Yet, with all due respect to these names, perhaps the finest Scottish literary mind of the 20th-century was the pugnacious, mischievous, elf-like figure already much mentioned – Hugh MacDiarmid. A little man with a big head, piercing eyes, a squeaky voice and beautiful hands, MacDiarmid was a poet and polemicist, a true colossus in letters, internationally respected and, arguably, Scotland’s best poet since Burns himself.
Dr Christopher Murray Grieve, otherwise known as ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’, was born in Langholm, Dumfries, the eldest of the two sons of a postman who died when they were very young. Chris, as he was called in the family, was first trained as a schoolteacher at Broughton, where he came under the influence of a good teacher, George Ogilvie, but, in 1911, his most promising pupil was expelled for stealing books. Grieve then became a journalist with the Edinburgh Evening News where he was sacked for selling the books he had been given to review. Fortunately he was saved from a life of crime by war service with the RAMC in Salonika from 1915. The army experience turned him to poetry. On his release in 1918, he had various journalistic jobs before settling with the Montrose Review. In Montrose, he met and married a girl in the office, Peggy Skinner, despite having been unofficially engaged to a Langholm schoolteacher, Minnie Punton, before joining the army. He soon became a father, a respectable town councillor and Justice of the Peace and began to edit the Scottish Chapbooks. It was around this time that he adopted the nom-de-plume by which he was to become known.
He also took up his life-long cause of Scottish Nationalism and in 1928, helped to found the Scottish National Party, taking as his cue, Burns’s own comment:
What are the boasted advantages which my country has gained from this Union with England that can counter-balance the annihilation of her independence and her very name.
MacDiarmid always had a remarkably clear idea of what the International Burns movement could become. That is a world-wide organisation that would uphold:
Burns’s essential motives applied to crucial contemporary issues as he applied them while he was living to the crucial issues of his own time and generation. What a true Scottish Internationale that would be – what a culmination and crown of Scotland’s role in history!
There was also an uneasy parallel with Burns in MacDiarmid’s own love life. He had never married his childhood sweetheart, Minnie Punton, and in 1929, he lost his wife, and mother of his two children, to a local coal merchant. In his despair, he took off for London to work for Sir Compton Mackenzie, but the first thing he did was to fall off the top of an open double-decker bus and land on his head on the pavement. He might just as easily have been killed but instead suffered severe concussion, which resulted in headaches for months. Various other mishaps occurred in England and drove him back to Scotland as far north as the Shetland Isles where he suffered a serious nervous breakdown in 1935.
However, Valda Trevlyn, a fiesty Cornishwoman, whom he had met in London, gave him all the support he needed. She also gave him a son, Michael, and after a hard spell in the Shetlands, the family spent the Second World War in Glasgow, at 35 Havelock St. By this time, MacDiarmid had been conscripted into an engineering firm and Valda got a job behind the counter in Smith’s, the bookshop in St Vincent St. Finally, in 1951, through the influence of William MacLellan, the kilted Glasgow publisher, they moved to a farm cottage outside Biggar. It was very basic but it became their first real home. Called Brownsbank, it also became a mecca for the constant stream of literary and artistic visitors who found their way there for the remaining 27 years of his life.
Hugh MacDiarmid wrote much and most of it was good but his undoubted masterpiece is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle from 1926. This meditative monologue in Scots vies with Burn’s Tam o Shanter as the greatest long poem produced in the Scottish language. At 2,685 lines to Tam’s 229, it is certainly longer.
The following is a brief excerpt.
To prove my saul is Scots I maun begin
Wi’ what still deemed Scots and the folk expect,
And spire up syne by visible degrees
To heichts whereto’ the fules ha’e never reeked.
But aince I get them there I’ll whummel them
And souse the craturs in the nether deeps,
For it’s nae choice, and ony man s’ud wish
To dree the goat’s weird tae, as weel’s the sheep’s!
Sic transit gloria Scotia – a’ the floors
O’ the forest are a’ wede awa’. (A blin’ bird’s nest
Is aiblin biggin if its brood is like the rest!)
You canna gang to a Burns Supper even
Wi’oot some wizened scrunt o’ a knock-knee
Chinee turns roon to say – ‘Him Haggis, velly goot!’
And ten-to one the piper’s a Cockney.
Crouse London Scotties wi’ their braw shirt-fronts
And a’ their fancy freens rejoicin’
At similar gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Baghdad – and Hell, nae doubt – are voicin’.
Syne, here’s the cheenge – ‘The Star o’ Rabbie Burns!’
Sma’ cheenge. Twinkle, twinkle, the memory slips
As G. K. Chesterton heaves up to gie
The Immortal Memory in a huge eclipse.
Or somebody else as famous, if less fat.
You left the like in Embro in a scunner
To booze wi’ thieveless cronies sic as me.
And a’ the names in history mean nocht
To maist folk, but ideas o’ their ain,
The very opposite o’ onything
The deid ‘ud own gin they come back again.
A greater Christ, a better Burns may come,
The maist they’ll dae is to gie bigger pegs
To folly and conceit to hang their rubbish on…
MacDiarmid, as a card-carrying Communist, had a life-long admiration for Burns’s work and philosophy but he did not have quite the same feeling for Burns Clubs although his links with the Burns Federation went a long way back. He attended the Birmingham Conference in 1921. At the delegates dinner, in replying to the toast ‘To Scottish Literature’, he tried to make a case for the retention of the Lallans in Scots writing but it was poorly received. Some felt that he was wrong-headed in his approach, but MacDiarmid, a poet in the direct line from Dunbar, was unrepentant. As he said – ‘Wrang-heidit? Mm. But heidit! That’s the thing.’
He fell out of sympathy with the Burns movement in general as many good Scots minds did, like Dr David Daichies, for instance. There was a common feeling that the Federation held themselves to be high priests of all things Burnsian and that they kept him to themselves, in a rarified strata just out of reach of everyone else. However, in 1958, just to be awkward, MacDiarmid and friends formed the 200 Burns Club at Milne’s Bar in Hanover St, Edinburgh. Sydney Goodsir Smith and Norman MacCaig were admitted as his fellow Bards. MacDiarmid said, ‘While we may not be the Three Musketeers, we were a great trio.’ They certainly were. The club was a great success and held many Burns Suppers thereafter. From the proceeds of these they were able to re-publish MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and A Scottish Noel by Fionn Mac Colla.
In 1959, to mark the birth bicentenary, the 200 Burns Club arranged to have a special envelope made substituting the head of Burns, created by Aba Bayevska, for the head of the Queen on the stamp and hundreds were addressed to people of influence and power around the world but the postmaster at Alloway refused to accept them. By this time, MacDiarmid had become the Grand Old Man of Scottish Letters and travelled extensively to speak for the Chinese and Russian Friendship Societies in Peking and Moscow. For the bicentenary year he toured Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary on behalf of Burns. None of these countries, incidentally, boasts a Burns club although their interest in the poet is great. MacDiarmid, by this time, and mellowed sufficiently towards Burns Suppers to propose the Immortal Memory for a special BBC broadcast Bicentenary Burns Supper from Edinburgh. A private tape of this event was sent to me by Norrie Paton, that well-known Burns espouser, and the following text is taken from it with his permission:
Mr Chairman, my lord, ladies and gentlemen. I regard it as a great honour to have been asked to propose the chief toast on this auspicious occasion.
The bicentenary of Robert Burns has shown no diminishment of homage to him, but on the contrary, an increase. Within the past few years a vast new public has accrued to him – in the Soviet Union, China, Hungary, Bulgaria and elsewhere. In all these countries leading poets have published new translations of his poems and songs and these have circulated in hundreds of thousands of volumes. But North America is of course the great stronghold of Scottish sentiment, and consequently of the Burns movement, not only because both Canada and the United States have
an element in their populations of hundreds of thousands
of Scots with a great array of St Andrews societies, Edinburgh associations, Clan societies and Burns clubs, most of which celebrate Burns every January but because the preferred Scottish feeling is continually refreshed by the huge and
ever increasing number of visitors to Scotland, most of whom visit the places associated with Burns and carry back a renewed enthusiasm.
Nor is that merely emotional. There is a sound background to it, of practical interest in Scottish affairs and of intensive scholarship. It is for this reason that most of the best books of Burns, and of Scottish literature generally, are being written in the United States. The radio too, has played its part in broadcasting Burns to many millions of listeners in every part of the world. The way in which Burns continues to be celebrated annually is a phenomenon unique in literary history. Sir Alan Herbert was right when he said, ‘ At the present time, there’s a lump of metal going round the sun. I heard the other day,’ he said ‘that some solemn ass described the dispatch of this lump of metal as the supreme achievement of man. How much grander is the fact that Robert Burns put a girdle round the earth with a single song – Auld Lang Syne – owing nothing to electricity or science, his only instrument the hearts and tongues of ordinary men.’ (Hear! Hear!)
The secret of the whole thing is in that last phrase – ‘the hearts and tongues of ordinary men’. I have said elsewhere [that] Burns remains the authentic and almost the only voice of Scotland in the world today. The reason for his unparalleled fame is not far to seek. It is based on his belief in the creative power of the broad masses of mankind. His glory lies in his tremendous faith in the common man and woman everywhere. No one who does not share, and live by this faith really appreciates Burns. Wordsworth said of [him] – ‘he showed my youth / how verse can build a princely throne on humble truth’. Longfellow put the whole thing in a nutshell when he wrote ‘the burden of his song is love of right, disdain of wrong, its masterchords are manhood, freedom, brotherhood!’ (Hear! Hear!)
Many famous poets have expressed their love of Burns but all of them at the same time have denied him a place among the world’s greatest poets. Even Walt Whitman was constrained to say ‘while Burns is not at all great in the sense that Isaiah and Aeschylus and the Book of Job are unquestionably great, he is not to be mentioned with Shakespeare. He has a nestling niche of his arm, all fragrant and quaint and homely; a lodge built near, but outside the mighty temple of the gods of song and art.’ Nevertheless Whitman continued to say – ‘that after a full retrospect of his works and life that Burns remain almost the manliest, tenderest, and even if contradictory, almost the dearest flesh and blood figure it all the streams and cluster of bygone poets!’ (Hear! Hear!)
How is this paradox to be resolved? If Burns is not one of the world’s greatest, why has he this unprecedented world-wide acclamation? Whitman again came nearest the solution when he wrote – ‘Think of the petty environage and limited area of the poets of past or present Europe. No matter how great their genius, it almost seems as if a poetry with cosmic and dynamic features, of magnitude and limitless suitable to the human soul were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the democratic masses never was!’ Burns comes as near to that perhaps as any poet has yet done. Carlyle was right when he said that if Burns had been a better intellectual workman he might have changed the whole cause of European literature. As it is, despite his worldwide fame, Burns has had no real successors. Most subsequent voices of any rank have appealed, not to the broad masses of mankind but to a very small, specialised reading public.
To reach the common people is a glory not often achieved by the great artistic poets but Burns has achieved it (and) in greater measure than any other poet so, if he is not to be counted among the world’s greatest poets, he nevertheless appeals to an immensely greater public than all these other poets put together. A public that has little or no use for any other poetry, no matter how great the literate might think it. (Hear! Hear!) For it is above all true of Burns that he wrote, not to extrovert his personality, nor to comply with the demands of taste, but to voice the common thought of masses of men. His poems and songs express something clamouring
for utterance.
The glory and generous shame,
The unconquerable mind and freedom’s holy flame.
That is why, two hundred years after his birth, the star of Robbie Burns is beaming more busily than ever all over
the globe.
(applause)
The language he wrote in had a great deal to do with it. Because Scots poetry is almost entirely a poetry of song whereas English poetry is extremely deficient in song. Song is nearer to the hearts of all people and Scottish song owes its immense effect to the open vowels of the Scots language. Whereas the narrow, clipped sounds of modern English are no medium for song at all. It would be very sad thing if the language in which Burns wrote is allowed to die out and if the independent Scots literary tradition to which Burns owed so much ceases to be carried on. Burns would never have done his great work if he had not been concerned, as he said, to see subsequent bards carrying on that tradition to endless generations. (Hear! Hear!)
Over 3,000 books have been devoted to Burns. I think the best of them is Hans Hecht’s critical and biographical study first published [in English] in 1936. Hecht summed up the whole matter splendidly when he said that into little more than 37 years of life there is compressed in Burns such a wealth of love and sorrow, of passion, success and disappointment of errors and triumphs, as seldom fall to the lot of any individual. He has been granted the happiest lot that can fall to any poet. He is enshrined forever in the hearts of his fellow countrymen and has became such an essential part of their spiritual possessions that it is impossible to imagine Scotland without Robert Burns. He has remained a living force in the nation. The sun that rose over the grave by the churchyard wall in Dumfries was the sun of immortality.
Nulla crux, nulla corona!
We toast the immortal memory of Robert Burns and the whole world agrees. But homage is not enough. We must continue his great work and carry it on in the conditions of a world that has changed out of all recognition since Burns day. Only in so far as we inherit Burns spirit at its very best and carry forward his work to new levels of achievement are we worthy to call ourselves Burnsians. Immortality is a word really beyond our comprehension, whereas it is within our power to ensure the future of Robert Burns and develop his influence on the world.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to be upstanding and drink with me to the immortal memory of Robert Burns.
To Robert Burns!
The gathering repeated the toast then gave prolonged applause to the speaker until the piper entered playing The Floors o the Forest – a tune that speaks to ancient Scottish loyalties. In his speech, Dr Grieve had mentioned that Burns ‘had no real successor’ but modestly omitted to mention himself in that category. Finally, as far as Christopher Murray Grieve is concerned, it is good to keep in mind that while Burns had his red, red rose, MacDiarmid’s was white.
The Rose of all the World is not for me,
I want, for my part,
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet – and breaks the heart.
It was MacDiarmid’s latest editor, and my good friend, Dr Alan Riach of Glasgow University’s Department of Scottish Literature, who, when I told him I was involved in the preparation of this book, said, ‘You know what MacDiarmid said such a book would reveal, of course…?’
Hear, Land o’ Cakes, and brither Scots
Frae Maidenkirk to Johnnie Groat’s,
If there’s a hole in a’ your coats,
I rede you tent it;
A chield’s amang you takin notes,
And faith he’ll prent it.:
(On the late Captain Grose’s peregrinations thro Scotland)