I have been in the company of many men of genius, some of them poets; but never witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness as from him,the impulse of a moment, flashes of celestial fire.
(John Ramsay of Ochtertyre)
In his Bicentenary Review of 1959, John McVie, a distinguished Past President of the Burns Federation, made this plea with regard to the future of the Burns Federation and the Burns movement generally:
It is a record of which it has reason to be proud, but no organisation can have much of a future if its members are satisfied merely with basking in the reflected glory of their predecessors’ achievements…The present members should re-dedicate themselves to carrying on the work of the founders of the Federation who built better than they ever imagined. In particular, they should redouble their efforts to encourage the development of Scottish literature, art and music.
Significantly, there is no reference in that laudable injunction to theatre, or perhaps as ‘dramatic art’, it would come under the general label of Art. Mention has already been made at some length in these pages of Burnsians and their attitude to the stage, their high suspicion or is fear of it? Yet a feature of that same 1959 Bicentenary Year had been the presentation of a pageant in Green’s Playhouse, Ayr, entitled I, Robert Burns by ‘Sandy Thomas Ross’, a pseudonym for a writing collective led by Alex Macmillan, the Convenor of the Bicentenary Committe of the Burns Federation. The Federation had joined with Ayr Town Council to produce the work and the Town Chamberlain of Ayr, Thomas Limond and Alec Ross Taylor, a teacher at Ayr Academy were the other authorial parties involved. Funds were made available to assemble a first-rate cast – Andrew Keir as Burns, Annette Crosbie as Jean Armour and Gwynneth Guthrie as Mary Campbell. Eileen Price and Charles Greville were the singers. Despite the calibre of the participants, and the presence of more than 200 local players in the supporting cast, the summer run of the piece was not successful.
The Burns Clubs were conspicuous by their absence, as so often happens when culture intrudes in their annual calendar of events. Once again, the bias against the theatrical was evident. This does not happen when the event is musical, particularly when good singers are involved, but the Burnsian shy away from repeated attempts to portray their hero in a musical. Yet what a natural musical hero he is. But so far he seems resistant to greasepaint. One has to wonder why this is so. It’s not that people haven’t tried – myself included – to put Burns on stage in the full colour of his story in song – his own songs – and also with original material specially commissioned – but despite initial encouragement, the public reaction has been moderate at best, and from the Burnsians, consistently apathetic. Why? Is their kind of Burns too big for a theatre. Or are our theatrical talents
too small?
You might wonder at the relevance of things theatrical in a book dedicated to the Immortal Memory of Burns. The point I want to make is that anyone in the theatre is in the memory business. There is no more potent art machine for creating a memory than a stage performance when it strikes a chord or hits a note that resonates between the performer and the ‘house’ as he calls it. This is why one can feel ‘at home’ in a theatre. In my experience of playing Burns on stage I have seen audiences come to him in the course of the evening and go away at the end of it with an new understanding of this remarkable man. As I said at the time, this was my solo once-nightly Immortal Memory. That was the reason I persisted in the theatrical interpretation over the years and wished for others to follow my example – for Burns’s sake. There is an audience who will never read him but will gladly listen to him in performance.
In many ways, his poems and songs are performances, a word he himself used to describe them. They are ‘made’, in the sense that they are carefully constructed just as a play is. There is a professional at work here. He explores roles within his poems much as the playwright does. He offers a pure and spontaneous point of view, that is born of the moment and immediately pressed on the work, deftly and with assurance. The beauty he sees, we seize at once. This is the artist at work. He knows what he is doing, almost subconsciously. He ‘plays’ unabashedly and the result is often an unforced and unexpected insight that frees the image immediately. He can do and be whatever he likes. Which is why Burns was so capable of writing in an old man’s voice, a young girl’s voice, even a sheep’s voice when required. In the ensemble poems, where more than one voice is heard, he was already proffering an auxiliary theatrical experience. In effect, the dramatic Burns was writing little plays all the time.
His main milieu as a poet however, was the personal. He excelled in the miniscule, the miniature, the daintily deft, and was at his best when he could be intimate, especially in the one-to-one relationship of lover and sweetheart. Their poetic exchanges are often conversational, and to all intents and purposes, pure dialogue. In a small way, each poem or song is a playlet. See ‘Indeed will I,’ quo Finlay for example. and the verse duologues like The Twa Dogs and The Brigs o Ayr not to mention Tam o Shanter. One feels that any of these might be staged with no lessening of poetic effect. It all points to the loss of the playwright when he was not allowed to live long enough to carrying out his stated ambition to write, as he said himself, ‘a drama for Scotland’.
There was something like drama going on in St Louis, Missouri in 1960. A Professor Alexander M. Duncan was invited to give the Immortal Memory and his subject was The Burns We Praise. On 23 January, he rose with the proviso:
I doubt it’s hardly worth the while to be sae nice wi’ Robin.
He then proceeded, in a long and learned address, to take the poet at his word.
Twenty six years ago, this evening, one of the great Burns scholars spoke to this Club, – Professor DeLancy Ferguson, the editor of the poet’s Letters. The purpose of his address was to defend the reputation of the poet against the charges brought against it in what he termed ‘smoking car legends,’ and to show that Burns ‘was no worse than the standards of his class and his century.’ He claimed that the character of the poet was all of one piece, and that the man ‘whose immortal memory the Burns Clubs annually celebrate’ was the same man who could, on occasion, annoy even his best friends, such as Mrs Dunlop and Maria Riddell.
Some three years later, an honoured member of this Club found himself in the awkward position of rising to refute another pronouncement by Professor Ferguson. Our member was Dr Taylor, and the scholar’s opinion that he arose to contradict was an article which appeared in The American Scholar in the autumn of 1936. it was entitled The Immortal Memory and was a devastating attack on Burns Clubs, the Burns Federation, and the pleasant ritual of the Birthday Dinner… ‘The Burnsians,’ wrote Professor Ferguson, ‘are not students, either lay or professional; they are a cult. Cult members subscribe to certain orthodox interpretations of their founder and his writings and show marked hostility to views which challenge any part of that orthodoxy.’ It seemed to Dr Taylor, then, as it must still seem to readers of this article, that Professor Ferguson was being both tactless and inconsistent. Before the members of the Club here, and as their guest, he had in 1934 defended the poet’s memory against the moralising of his biographers and the slanders of the ill informed, giving his audience the credit of being on the side of justice and good will. Only a year or two later, he was railing at the Clubs, – this one among the others, presumably, – for clinging to a favourable interpretation of the poet’s life and work. And, while not many Club members are in a position to know the ins and outs of Burns scholarship, he denied them even the right to be called ‘students’ and branded them, amusingly and rather bitterly, as mere ‘worshippers.’
Apparently Dr Taylor’s remarks in defence of our ‘cult’, as Professor Ferguson was pleased to call it, made little impression on him or did not reach the scholar’s ears. When his study of Burns, entitled Pride and Passion, appeared in 1939, it repeated a number of the more acrid comments of the article in The American Scholar, and more criticism in the same vein was added, in almost total condemnation of our rather innocent desire to keep the memory of Burns and his work alive. He called it a ‘movement’ and traced it back to the first meetings in honour of Burns held shortly after his death:
… the movement acquired the characteristics of a minor religious cult, complete with ritual meals…In itself this establishment as hero of a national cult might be harmless. After all, if any writer was to fill the role, Burns was the inevitable candidate, for he alone of the great Scottish writers was truly a man of the people. Not the existence of the cult, but the direction it took, is the tragedy of Burns. The sentimentality which lies, like the soft core of an over-ripe pear, at the heart of writers like ‘Ian Maclaren,’ Sir James Barrie, and A. A. Milne, is widespread in Scotland. In the Burns cult this softness yearns to the answering softness of The Cotter’s Saturday Night, To a Mouse, and To Mountain Daisy, extols its hero as the Bard of Humanity and Democracy, and rejoices in the bathos of Clarinda and Highland Mary. Meanwhile the ribald magnificence of Holy Willie and The Jolly Beggars is neglected, the homely realism of satires, epistles, and dramatic monologues goes unread. Worst of all, the splendid treasury of more than three hundred songs, Burns’ most truly patriotic work, lies almost untouched on the shelves…
The charge, I think, need not bother us too much. If the general public has preferred Sweet Afton and a rather inferior version of The Banks o’ Doon to some other, and perhaps better, songs by the same hand, the Burns Clubs are hardly to be held responsible. It may simply be, as has happened with a number of the Burns products, that the dialect has been a handicap even in Scotland, and that some of the tunes have had a more general appeal than others. It has seldom happened that the popularity of a song has had much to do with the quality of the verses written for it. Perhaps Professor Ferguson feels that his great service to Burns scholarship has not been richly rewarded and takes out his sense of neglect, – which, after all, is often the scholar’s lot, – on the wrong party.
There is, however, another charge which he levels against the Burns followers that must be taken more seriously. In the article for The American Scholar, he put it quite bluntly: ‘…his worshippers,’ he said, ‘are ashamed of him.’ In Pride and Passion, he went into fuller detail:
The flattery of being a national hero would delight Burns. If his followers were only mealy-mouthed where he was outspoken, they would merely amuse him. He would not mind if they slobbered over his sins, (a practice, by the way, noticeably lacking in this Club!) for the unco guid were old acquaintances of his. But at the very thought of his worshippers exalting his weakest work and ignoring his best, his very soul would scunner. The real Burns was not the dropper of tears over ploughed-under weeds but the man who brought in the neighbours for a kirn-night and kissed the lasses after every dance, the man who sat by farmers’ ingles and on ale house benches listening to the racy earthy talk of his people and storing his mind with folk sayings and old songs. He was not ashamed of being a Scottish peasant, the heir of all the picturesque and frequently bawdy tradition of Scots folk literature. Neither was the man who wrote, ‘But yet the light that led astray was light from heaven,’ ashamed of his human nature. But his worshippers are ashamed of the best part of his nature and his work. And nobody else reads him at all.
As Professor Ferguson states it, the emphasis is a renewal of the verdict given by Henley in his famous essay of 1897:
The master-quality of Burns… is humour. His sentiment is sometimes strained, obvious, and deliberate… and often rings a little false, as in much of the Saturday Night. But his humour – broad, rich, prevailing… is ever irresistible… I, for my part, would not give my Holy Fair, still less my Halloween or my Jolly Beggars…for a wilderness of Saturday Nights.
If we add to this preference of Henley’s for humour rather than sentiment, realism before the elegance of fancy, the gist of Hans Hecht’s magnificent chapter on Burns as a Songwriter, we catch the drift of Ferguson’s choice. He prefers the Burns of Tam o Shanter and The Jolly Beggars to the seemingly other Burns of the Saturday Night and the sentimental poems to animals; and he believes with Hecht that the poet’s nine years of devotion to the writing and revising of 350 songs is the true gift for which his admirers ought to be most grateful. As Hecht summarises this gift, (the translation is Jane Lymburn’s)
He had the luck to find a still living tradition, with whose purest forms he was in close contact because of his peasant origin; he had the noble mind to recognise the national importance of this tradition, the inspired patience to study its technical peculiarities down to its smallest details, and the great genius to preserve and at the same time to rejuvenate what had come down to him, to save the old tunes from extinction and at the same time to sing a new song…
This, of course, is excellently said and, as the considered judgment of scholars, must be kept in mind by any lover of Burns. If it is possible to distinguish a ‘real Burns’ and to decide on good evidence what part of his nature and work was best, as Professor Ferguson believes, it may be our duty to know this Burns and reject any image of him that is essentially false.
Actually, I find much to agree with in what DeLancey Ferguson and Henley had to say and, to my personal knowledge, Dr David Daichies in Edinburgh is of much the same opinion. Professor Buchan did Burns scholarship a service by bringing these views forward but his speech sparked off a reaction which caused some consternation in St Louis. Professor Buchan went on:
The address by Professor Ferguson was followed, next year, by one of a very different sort which may deserve the bitter reproof of the lover of Burns. It referred to the poet as ‘giving the license to his passions that ultimately proved his moral ruin,’ – an example of the moralizing that disturbs many of us. About the Irvine episode it declared that ‘there (he) fell into company that was not good for him, and he gave vent to his indiscrimate philandering,’ – surely a harsh judgment on love affairs out of which came the stimulus for the songs. It maligned Burns’ friends in Tarbolton as ‘the graceless lawyers and topers of the locality,’ though it was to these graceless young men that Burns turned for encouragement when he began to write, and his great gift might never have been known had it not been for those groups of rowdy companions. The address reprobated the satires on the Kirk, Holy Willie’s Prayer, The Ordination, The Holy Fair, and called ‘most serious Scotsmen’ to witness that it would have been better if they had never been written. Against every bit of evidence, it asserted that ‘Burns adorned the commonplace and cast the glamour of genius about it, till even the coarse and grotesque becomes refined,’ – a strange judgement, indeed, in the light of Burns’s own repeated outcries against refinement in every shape and form.
It looks as if here, among our own records, is a paper of the kind that scholars dislike, – one that pretends to worship Burns and is yet ashamed of him. If there is a real Burns, his picture cannot surely be found among those who use his life as a theme of a sermon against license and philandering or who would gladly eliminate from his work whatever offends their tender sensibility. It is of the very essence of the understanding of Burns that the best of him, as man and poet, came of something unregenerate in his nature and tradition, and any effort to conceal this fact denies the clear evidence of the letters and the poems. He loved ardently and not always wisely, and yet, having a gift of quick speech, he wrote fine lyrics about a number of women.
He hated the Kirk and its ways and many of its elders and preachers. Ignoring this hatred does him an injustice. In the company of graceless people whom he met in shady places, and almost certainly over a glass, he listened to old tunes
and bits of rhymes out of which he could make poetry. One rowdy visit to the most disreputable tavern in Maunchline, along with two quite unregenerate companions, Jimmie Smith and Johnie Richmond, furnished the inspiration for The
Jolly Beggars.
We have no right or need to make excuses for him – the only excuses required are his own broadcast through his letters and his poems, – and what he accomplished in song, satire, and description would be inconceivable without this unregenerate streak in his nature and imagination.
There has been, however, a persistent attempt to offer apologies. His earliest editors from Currie on were willing to print some of his poems and reject others. The Jolly Beggars and a number of the satires on the Kirk were not at first allowed to appear alongside Bonnie Doon and The Cotter’s Saturday Night. Even intelligent fellow Scots, like Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, seemed to feel that they had to build up a case for him. A proper and stuffy writer like the middle-aged Wordsworth would not believe that his ploughman poet could write some of the verses ascribed to him – ‘He must be a miserable judge of poetical composition who can for a moment fancy that such low, tame, and loathsome ribaldry can possibly be the product of Burns’ – a remark calculated to prove that even a great poet may be a poor judge of composition unlike his own. The highly improper Lord Byron professed, as Professor Ferguson reminded us, to being shocked at a collection of letters loaned to him by Robert Cleghorn’s stepson:
Allen has lent me a quantity of Burns’s unpublished and never-to-be-published letters. They are full of oaths and obscene songs. What an antithetical mind’ tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay.
Yet Burns was completely honest about his own nature and the kind of literary product that expressed it, – not one kind of product but many, and the rough among the others. ‘There is,’ he wrote to Robert Cleghorn, ‘and must be, some truth in original sin. My violent propensity to bawdry convinces me of it. If that species of composition be the sin against the haly ghaist, I am the most offending soul alive’… Although given a more decorous form by Burns himself and the respectable demands of the Musical Museum and the Scottish Airs, the songs keep far more traces than is often realised of the indecorous world of folk-song and ballad out of which they emerged.
For various reasons it has only recently been possible for the common student of the poet to learn much at all about this tradition. In a well known passage of the Centenary Edition, T. F. Henderson wrote about the difficulty he had in tracing the originals of the song:
Much of the materials he (Burns) collected… has been destroyed – by his relations, or by Currie, or by later owners – in the interests partly of Scottish morals, partly of that cheap, decorous chromo-lithograph … which bids fair to supplant the true Burns – ardent, impulsive, generous; but hypochondriacal, passionate, imperfect – in the minds of his countrymen …
Less of the material may have been done away with than Henderson imagined, and it is possible today to bring the image of the poet into clearer focus than ever in the past, but his picture of the ‘true Burns’ appears substantially the one to be looked for.
Among lovers of Burns, a willingness to accept the prodigal in the man and the poet is as important as to the scholar. Great editor as he was, T. F. Henderson may have been inclined to emphasise too heavily the plain spoken tradition of the old Scots poets, and the clandestine literature of the chap-books and the oral record, but if his preference is backed up by a careful study of all the work, – not one or two pieces regularly chanted at our Burns dinners or those served up in anthologies for college sophomores, – the common reader benefits by opening up the pages and discovering what they have to say.
A word or two may be worth while on two topics of the poetry that frequently come up for mention, – his attitude toward the Kirk and its beliefs, and his feeling for animals. The picture of family worship in The Cotter’s Saturday Night has charmed believers for many generations, because the sentiments arose, during the troubled years of the poet’s apostasies, out of a fond memory of childhood under a god-fearing father. It ought to be noticed, however, that the service takes place in the home, not in the Kirk, and that it is reduced to the simplest of elements, – the singing of the old psalm tunes, the reading from the Bible, and the father’s prayer. Apparently beyond these, the essentials of simple faith, Burns’s memory and observation found nothing to please him in the rituals of the Kirk. He saw its ministers straining at the gnats of theology and swallowing the camel of their own personal sins and lack of charity. In the conventicler that he describes so vividly in The Holy Fair he finds all of the features of circus, much of the operation of the De’il and not a shred of religion. Against the one picture of sincere devotion found in the cotter’s family, and one that includes, it must be remembered, a family meal and a country love-affair, may be set a half dozen of bitter portraits, the ferocity of which is hardly lessened by raucous laughter and acid wit. It is scarcely to be expected, even today, that men of the cloth should be generous enough to a man who showed so little patience or sympathy with the institution they serve. Maybe one reason for a ‘false’ image is the intrusion of too much pulpit eloquence at the Birthday Dinners.
Neither is it all certain that Burns had for the animals of the field and the yard more affection than the average countryman displays. He had a finer gift of noting and recording the little ironies of an animal’s existence, – that his pet ewe was almost throttled by her tether, that the dog seemed to behave like the master, and that the auld mare of the farm became, in course of the years, a part of the life of the man who rode her. But for the most part he saw himself as he looked at animals, his own disaster in the wreck of the mouse’s nest, his own ideas in the head of Luath, the ploughman’s collie, and a warning for himself in Poor Mailie’s hopes for her first born:
My poor toop-lamb, my son an’ heir,
O, bid him breed him up wi’ care!
An’ if he live to be a beast,
To pit some havins in his breast!
An’ warn him – what I winna name –
To stay content wi’ yowes at hame;
An’ to no rin an’ wear his cloots,
Like other menseless, graceless brutes.
In the familiar To a Mouse, where the poet feels sorry for himself because his fate and the mouse’s are alike, he appears far less happy as a writer than in the much gayer, To a Louse, in which the ‘ugly, creepin’ blastit wonner,’ finding thin pickings in the gauze and lace of Jenny’s bonnet, achieves a vivid disreputable life of its own. Like the creators of animal fables from Aesop to Disney, Burns found the animals rather amusing cartoon copies of men and women, creatures fit to fill in the diagram of human littleness. As a farmer, he liked to have his ewes, his auld mare and his collie with him on the fields, but he lavished on them no tear-filled sentimentality.
It is through the songs, however, that there may be traced, if they can be found, the elements that go to the understanding of a ‘real Burns.’ Though the satires and the poems about animals reveal some qualities of their maker, all of them were, in a way, occasional, the expression of moods of wry humour or of irritation that came and went. But Burns began and ended his life as a writer in the pleasure of making songs, and, during the Mauchline years, as well as in Ellisland and Dumfries, it was to songs that he returned after every excursion in verse prompted by a political quarrel or a moment’s swift observation. Any reader of the letters to Johnson or Thomson, as well as to the other correspondents who had their sheet of news filled out with stanzas of new experiments in tune, can immediately recognise the deep, continuous passion for song and song writing that allayed the drudgery of the farm and the tedium of excise duties. It
was around this interest that he built up his small library of books, and for its development that he took time out for talk and singing by anybody who had a contribution to make to the store of tunes in his head and fragments of lyrics that he jotted down.
If is now possible, as it never was in the 19th-century, to trace to their sources in the folk literature and the older writers of Scottish verse many of the fragments that Burns adopted and modified for his purpose. Manuscripts have been authenticated and compared, and we are able to read various versions of many of the songs. Burns was not easily satisfied with a first draft and kept revising a number of songs again and again. What concerns us is the kind of song that interested him, in the first place, and, in the second, what happened to the original material once it came into his hands. A common critical remark has been that he spent the years in Dumfries cleaning up, for the decorous pages of Johnson’s Museum, a quantity of indelicate songs out of the past, adding verses to some, changing words and phrases in other so as to meet the demand of the respectable. To some extent this process went on, but it appears to have been only part of the story.
The poet was aware of the body’s hunger and knowledgeable in the ways of satisfying it. So long as he stayed away from Chloris or Clarinda and the affected English in which he wrote to her, he never claimed that the hunger was other than it was, and this honesty is a finer thing than the indecent pretence that love is ugly or too serious to be made the subject of a jest. The difference is apparent in an emphasis where the strict moralist may never agree with the comic artist, and it is clearly set out in two versions of Bonnie Doon. The common version first appeared in the Museum in 1792, and all of us have felt agreeably sad while singing it:
Ye banks and braes o’ bonie Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae weary fu ’o’ care!
Thou’ll break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons thro’ the flowering thorn!
Thou minds me o’ departed joys,
Departed never to return.
But an earlier version of the song went in a letter to Alex Cunningham, a year before it appeared in the Museum. While the changes are not very great, they mark the difference between a sweetly sentimental song, and one that had the clear marks of the poet and the comic artist upon it, – no ‘flowering thorn’ or ‘warbling bird’ wantoning through it, and no departed, departed joys. Much simpler, much finer:
Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
That sings upon the bough!
Thou minds me o’ the happy days
When my fause Love was true.
Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
That sings beside thy mate,
For sae I sat, and sae I sang,
And wistna o’ my fate.
It is in the second stanza, however, that the early version far excels the other, and in the meaning of the figure of the rose and the thorn.
Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’ed a rose
Upon its thorny tree,
But my fause lover staw my rose,
And left the thorn wi’ me.
.
Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’ed a rose
Upon a morn in June,
And sae I flourished on the morn,
And sae was pu’d or noon.
What Burns first did, and then had to undo for the pernickety Johnson, was to sketch the episode and temper its sweet sentiment with the use of the rough, colloquial phrase about pulling a girl’s rose: he cut the sweetness with a drop of the lemon of wickedness. And, because this dash of tartness came to him from the local Scottish speech, he felt more at home with it, more apt to turn out good poetry in it, than when he tried to imitate the sentimental English writers of the time.
The image of love making that went into The Bonie Moor-hen so offended Mrs McLehose that she begged her Sylvander not to print it, – not for her sake or his own. The euphonious little phrase about going ‘tapsalteerie’ that we associate with Green Grow the Rashes was clearly associated in the poet’s mind with the lasses, as well as with wardly men. When one of these lasses sang about her ploughman, she was even franker:
Snaw-white stockings on his legs,
And siller buckles glancing,
A guid blue bonnet on his head,
And O, but he was handsome!
Commend me to the barn-yard
And the corn mou, man!
I never got my coggie fou
Till I met wi’ the ploughman.
To the country lover, the fou coggie spoke of the same pride in masculinity as a similar vessel did, in token of his drinking prowess…Quite often, as in this kind of slang everywhere, the sense, as here in the filling of the coggie, is one thing to the innocent mind – to the pure of all things are pure, poor dears! – and another to the mind tempered by laughter and experience. The farmer’s wife who hired the man at Martinmas because he could ‘labour lea’ gave him his three arel-pennies for ploughing up the pasture, but when she cried, in one of the versions of the poem ‘O Can ye labour lea?’
But my delight’s a Ploughman lad
That well can labour lea
She was approving of him for quite another kind of service. And Burns, we are certain, did not disapprove of the service that was not paid for in cash. He sang so, often enough:
O, kissin is the key o’ love
An clappin is the lock;
An’ makin of it’s the best thing
That e’er a young thing got.
The tinker, the weaver, the ploughman, the tailor, the highland laddie and the sodger, even Prince Charlie himself on his wanderings, – all receive their meed of lyric praise from Burns for being ‘braw wooers’ who did not have to stand at the door too long asking to be let in. An unforgivable offence in his
own day, and for the strait-laced ever since, is that he sang about how
The minister kissed the fiddler’s wife,
And couldna sleep for thinking o’t
And showed pillars of the Kirk sharing in the same human activity, – though apparently without enjoying it.
O, wert thou, love, but near me,
But near, near, near me,
How kindly thou would cheer me,
And mingle sighs with mine, love.
They were not long happy worshipping one another from afar. Their road of love making was short and led to a mattress of clear rushes, or a plaidie, shared breast, as bield from the cauld blast of everyday living.
To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife;
That’s the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.
By the frequency with which those lines are recited at gatherings such as this, one would imagine that they voiced the sole and characteristics utterance of the poet about home and its loyalties. There is no need, of course, to pass by this desirable sentiment which did credit to the friend for whom the Epistle was written and to such poems as Thomson’s and Shenstone’s to which it was indebted. The lines express simply and well, if in rather general terms, an ideal of home, the same ideal as is reflected in The Cotter’s Saturday Night.
The poet, however, drew a clear mark between two kinds of writing to both of which he was prone, the sermon and
the song:
But how the subject-theme may gang,
Let tune and chance determine:
Perhaps it may turn out a sang,
Perhaps turn out a sermon.
Of the sermon variety there is quite a store in Burns, and the popular taste seizes upon this as its favourite, – the shrewd comment on experience rather than the simple cry of experience, the song, on which a poet’s chief quality rests. Memorable as are many of Burns’s comments on his own and other people’s living, he seems to have been more himself, and certainly a finer craftsman, when he sang out of the heart of simple events, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusion… Almost always, when he achieved the song rather than the sermon, it had a wry, arch lively flavour that the reader or the singer quickly begins to recognise. Quite a trace of the archness came out of the ballads and bits of rhyme on which, in many instances, the songs were made. The liveliness is felt in the tunes of olden times that the poet soughed through his head as he wrote, and they were mostly merry tunes for reels, strathspeys, and jigs – not hymn tunes by Stainer or Dykes or melodies concocted by the musicians. The quality of the life they contain is not by any means as sedate as in the Blacklock Epistle, but rough and humorous and often far from sublime. It contains Maggie of ‘Whistle o’er the lave o’t’, meek and mild, sweet and harmless as a child, before marriage, and another Meg after the wedding:
Wha I wish were maggot’s meat,
Dish’d up in her winding-sheet,
I could write (but Meg wad see’t) –
Whistle o’er the lave o’t.
In this world is Willie Wastle’s lady, as disreputable an old harridan as even Chaucer could depict:
She has an e’e (she has but ane)
The cat has twa the very colour,
Five rusty teeth, forbye a stump,
A clapper-tongue wad deave a miller;
A whiskin beard about her mou,
Her nose and chin they threaten ither:
Sic a wife as Willie had,
I wad na gie a button for her.
.
Auld badrons by the ingle sits,
An’ wi’ her loof her face a-washin;
But Willie’s wife is nae sae trig,
She dichts her grunzie wi’ a hushion;
Her walie nieves like midden-creels,
Her face wad fyle the Logan Water:
Sic a wife as Willie had,
I wad na gie a button for her.
In thus unkempt world, the wife of the Cooper o’Cuddy deceives her guideman with any number of strangers, and he is so doited and blin’ that he doesn’t know what is going on. The lass that makes up the bed for the visitor does him the courtesy, – it is Burns’s word, – of sharing the bed with him.
In incident after incident, sketch after sketch, of the sort if built up a picture of a home-life rather alien to the happy fireside clime, much closer, in fact, to Hogarth than to Gainsborough or to Millet. It is as if the poet put into practice his own little ditty,
I’ll be merry and free,
I’ll be sad for naebody.
The professors and divines turned their fine noses aside from the stench of the causeways and the taverns, but Burns walked into the tavern and made friends with the orra bodies who frequented the place. As he wandered in and out of hovels in which most of the farm folk lived, he found more of a strong sap of life in the reek filled rooms than in the fine drawing rooms of the gentry. There is a chance that he was mistaken, but to refuse to look at what he saw and recorded is to do him a grave injustice.
Very few of the 19th-century biographers or critics knew enough, or had a sound enough stomach, to describe Burns honestly, and far too many of them, even the great Matthew Arnold, lacked even a rudimentary sense of the value of laughter. They made the easy mistake of lumping the work of a magnificently realistic and Scottish poet with the romantic lyrics of Englishmen who came soon after, or, being far from robust in their likings, they praised him for his least admirable qualities. About the songs we are now able to accept Hans Hecht’s good judgment:
There are no poems containing subtle analyses of the poet’s mind… His work contains no nature poems as such, and … no examples of (an) ascent into the metaphysical… there is no trace of the romantic-visionary element… Burns’s lyric poetry is, rather, markedly unromantic. It avoids the mystic twilight, it builds no new world in the blue wonderland of Fancy, but clings to the clear realism of its chief sources – the Scottish popular and traditional songs.
In those sources he found a healthy, hearty manhood and a background of a piece with the bitter-sweet irony of your life and mine when we have the good sense to temper its ardour’s with fun. Through it courses a passionate love of the common human pleasures, – food and drink, love making in the cottage and love making in the open fields, quarrelling and making up. If there is no great abundance of reverence, the sturdier is the independence of mind, and, if refinement may on occasion be noticeably lacking, – well, who wants to be too refined when Willie brews a peck o’ maut or when a braw wooer has come striding down the lang glen?
It would seem that the members of the St Louis Club would have preferred a more refined Professor Buchan judging by the comments made in the minutes dealing with his long oration.
Minutes of Annual Dinner Meeting – 23 January 1960
And then we came to that highlight of every dinner: the main address.
Professor Buchan was our speaker, and his paper was titled The Burns We Praise. It was a scholarly, incisive approximation of the Bard, and went deep into the earthiness of the poet. There were some who wondered whether this was their Burns. There were others who knew it was. Some seemed to hover in between. Professor Buchan had his own ideas, and expressed them. Several of the members were called upon to respond to the speaker after he had finished. These men were legion about the scholarly explorations the speaker had made in preparing his paper, but could not hold altogether to all of the ideas.
After Mr Stewart and others had responded, Mr Skinner was asked for his comments. Mr Skinner contributed the view that the speaker had, perhaps, used the apparatus and scaffolding of scholarship to do nothing more than reconstruct somewhat preciously a three dimensional image of Burns that already existed in the minds of common readers of common sense. Mr Skinner suggested that we did not really need to have pointed out to us – with footnotes – the fact that Burns was a man who liked women, liquor and libertine language. All that, he held, must be apparent to everyone. And all that, he insisted, has little to do with our reasons for our holding Burns so high in our minds and hearts. Burns was, Mr Skinner observed – and he gave thanks for it – a man of sense and solar plexus like the lave of us. But he was, further a genius of high intellect, rare insight and warm humanity – and it is for these special endowments rather than for his common clay that we honour him. Burns has shown us, Mr Skinner said, what clay can aspire to become.
Your secretary was asked by the speaker to make comment, but excused himself for having opportunity to make such comments in these minutes. He agrees with the scholarly approach of the paper. He also knows the things about Burns that were mentioned.
Appropriately, the writer of the minutes had the last word:
There is an old choral glee, which used to be sung around the campfires by soldiers far way from home. One of the couplets in that choral is:
Though each one thought a different name,
They all sang Annie Laurie.
And that is just what all of us do who follow Burns.
Though each one thinks a different man,
We all sing Robert Burns.
It was all very powerful stuff, but perhaps North America’s Burns is a much more romantic figure than Scotland’s. The myth is the man as far as many of them are concerned. North Britain, by the same token, as Scotland was struggling to resist becoming throughout the 18th century, was far different from Burns’s Jacobite Caledonia, which itself owed more to myth than fact, but at least it served his Muse, and spurred him to songs like My Heart’s in the Highlands.
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove
The hills of the Highlands forever I love.
The problem today is that Scotland is a place in the heart to many as much as it is a place on the map. It is an attitude which owes nothing to latitude, an imaginative recourse rather than a real country to live in. The whisky and haggis industries are evidence enough of this and Scotland as a country measured in mere miles isn’t large enough to contain all those Grannies in their Heilan’ Hames or Heather Hills. The real Scotland is a different matter. The vital fact is that its cultural heritage is not confined to Scotland itself but extends to the many Scotlands that exist beyond its borders. The Scottish diaspora is only a little less than that of the Jews and has touched as many countries around the world. One has only to travel outside Scotland to realise this.
On Burns Night, St Andrew’s Night and New Year’s Eve, these expatriate Scots will suddenly appear, easily recognisable in self-conscious kilts. In Scotland itself, the kilt is now only worn at weddings. Yet despite this, it cannot be denied that the Scottish cultural inheritance has an international influence notwithstanding, and as such, it is much too important to be left to the Scots themselves. It is something that should be freely offered to the world as further evidence of its identity as a distinct, separate, social, political and cultural entity. Hitherto, the Scottish artist in Scotland has been overwhelmed and inhibited by his own vulnerability and insecurity with regard to his natural identity as a Scot in his own country. The shadow from south of the border looms large north of the Tweed and, as a result, the Scot finds it difficult to ‘find his light’ as they say in the theatre.
Meantime, in Ayr, on Burns Night in that same year, David D. Murison proposed the Immortal Memory. Mr Murison was then editor of the Scottish National Dictionary, so his words would have some weight. As a man of words, he knew their value, and used them sparingly, but unerringly:
Scotia! My dear, my native soil…’
That I, for puir auld Scotland’s sake,
Some usefu’ plan, or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least.
There can be no mistaking the note of the true patriot there. The true internationalist who sang of a time when ‘man to man the world o’er shall brothers been for a’ that’. You see, when pledging his immortal memory we are really passing judgement, not on Robert Burns, but on ourselves. We are reminding ourselves of our duty to keep the knowledge and love of his poetry, and of the country of which he wrote, alive in our own generation and to pass it on to those that come after us as part of their heritage.
No nation’s culture can be passive and live. It must be forever active. It must be creative. We shall all have to make it our principal aim as Scotsmen, and Scotswomen, and as lovers of Burns, the preservation of our own way of life. And for that we have no better example than Burns – who, in himself, gathered together the many threads of our Scottishness and re-interpreted them for generations to come.
He prayed indeed for world brotherhood but he never prayed for the obliteration of Scotland. Nay rather, he gave all his genius to the restoring of her name and repute as an emancipated and civilised nation, and to make her people freer and happier. And God forbid that the day shall ever come when we cease to understand and value such things…
The name Murison will remind Burnsians of the excellent Murison Burns Collection at present in the charge of the Dunfermline Central Library where nearly two thousand items relating to Burns are stored for the benefit of readers and enthusiasts. These include everything from a Kilmarnock edition to the latest CD recording and the whole thing began with John Murison, who was born in Glasgow in 1852. He became an extremely successful commercial traveller throughout Britain for a seed merchant and in his later years became friendly with the great Burns collector, W. Craibe Angus. It was he inspired Murison to start his own Burns library.
From a collection, it became an obsession and 40 years later it had become too large for him to control properly as a private project and so, very reluctantly, he had to dispose of it, which is why, in 1921, Sir Alexander Gibb, of Rosyth Naval Dockyard, bought it for the City and Burgh of Dunfermline, where it has remained and prospered ever since. What is noticeable, however, is that the smallest section by far, is that dealing with ‘Fiction, Drama and Parodies’. There are some concert programmes but John Murison’s own collection of playbills would indicate that even in his time there was some acknowledgement of Burns and the Theatre.
Meantime, in St Louis, the flow of annual speakers was unstoppable and we now feature four more from Missouri. In 1961 their speaker was Francis C. Lloyd Junior and his topic on 28 January was ‘The Letters of Robert Burns’.
The letters of Robert Burns cover a span of fifteen years. From 1781 to the year of his death in 1796, seven hundred and ten (710) of his letters have been published. There is reason to believe that a number of important letters were destroyed by overzealous and prudish admirers of the poet. The outstanding scholar in the field of Burns’ letters is Professor DeLancey Ferguson, who published in 1931 a two volume edition of Burns’ letters known as the Clarendon Press Edition. In 1953, Professor Ferguson edited a one-volume edition for the Oxford University Press which published them in its Worlds Classics Edition.
The scholarly care of Professor Ferguson is notable and in sharp contrast to earlier editions published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, the collection edited by J Logie Robertson and published by Walter Scott in 1887. So prudish were these early editors that Robert Burns was portrayed as a stuffy, pompous, self-conscious man. Most of the humour and all of the carefree gaiety of our poet had been deleted.
It can be said that letters of any significance were only written to some thirty-three persons, with his wife, Jean Armour, and one of his most faithful patronesses, Mrs Frances Anna Wallace Dunlop receiving a very high percentage.
Although the poet often referred to his peasant origin in his letters to Mrs Dunlop, he obviously wished to appear as a cultured, literary man. To quote from a sensitive lecture on Burns given last year by the poet Robert Hillyer: ‘The fact is that when Burns wrote in English – and this applies to his prose as well as his verse – he did not write naturally, because for him English, as written language, was a literary medium heavily influenced by the books he had read in that tongue. In English his humour strained toward the epigram in the manner of Pope, his romantic of Gray or Thomson, his odes, also influenced by Gray, took on rhetorical flourishes that did not quite ring true to his own genius. In other words, he had too many predecessors in English!’
In sharp contrast to the letters to Mrs Dunlop and others of her social level, are the very intimate and natural letters written to some of the members of a convivial club the ‘Crochallan Fencibles’ which was formed during his stay in Edinburgh. In these letters colloquial expressions, and earthy and red-blooded phrases are often found.
The longest letter that Burns wrote was to Dr John Moore. This letter was written after Burns had become famous in Scotland for his poetry and after his first set of twins had been born to Jean Armour, but before the second set of twins had arrived. As he says, ‘To divert my spirits a little in this miserable fog of Ennui, I have taken a whim to give you a history of myself.’
This autobiographical letter does reveal a number of important things to us. It fills in details of his early life which show on the one hand the rugged and simple existence of the farm hand and on the other hand the absorption by this sensitive, intelligent youth of every bit of great literature that came his way. The idea that so skilled a poet as Burns could spring from the new turned furrow into a famous poet is obviously absurd. The details he gives us of his reading and the influences on his life show how great was his training, self taught though it was. Another thing this letter reveals is that Burns felt it necessary to put on a polished front when he wrote to the gentry. This letter is not in the vernacular, does not have the freshness and humour that the letters to his close friends reveal. Despite the details of his life which he has given us we would know very little about Robert Burns the man.
The end of Burns’ correspondence is indeed poignant. His last two letters, one written to his beloved Jean and the other written to her father, speak for themselves. Basic love and concern speak out in these two letters written without false sentiment, theatrics, or self pity. The language of these letters is pure and unadorned.
My dearest love, I delayed writing until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing was likely to produce. It would be injustice to deny that it has eased my pain, and I think has strengthened me; but my appetite is still extremely bad. No flesh nor fish can I swallow: porridge and milk are the only things I can taste. I am very happy to hear by Miss Jessy Lewars that you are all well. My very best and kindest compliments to her, and to all the children. I will see you on Sunday. Your affectionate husband, R Burns.
And then the final letter to Jean’s father written on the eighteenth of July, 1796, just three days before his death,
My dear Sir, Do, for heaven’s sake, send Mrs Armour here immediately. My wife is hourly expecting to be put to bed. Good God! What a situation for her to be in, poor girl, without a friend! I returned from sea-bathing quarters today, and my medical friends would almost persuade me that I am better; but I think and feel that my strength is so gone that the disorder will prove fatal to me. Your son-in-law, R Burns.
On 27 January 1962 it was Thomas B Sherman with ‘Impressions of a Newcomer to Burns’.
A human being born in poverty and sentenced to hard labour for a considerable part of his life is likely to view the world with a kind of numb fatalism. Burns was such a man but he escaped the brutish consequences of poverty partly because he had an educated father and became educated himself, but mostly, I think, because he was endowed with a poet’s vision. A poet, almost by definition, is an alchemist. He turns base metal into gold. He converts the random and inexplicable commonplace events of life into something that is not only beautiful but also significant.
It is easy to fall into a wrong view of Burns by assuming that his verses dealing with familiar events and places are no more than rhymed aphorisms. It is easy to be misled by the fact that his verse is intelligible and his subjects are homely. There is much of Burns’s poetry, no doubt, that is not exactly transcendental. There are tag lines that have become ravelled from overuse. But such is the fate of most poets. The phrases that are bandied about in the market place of popular ideas are the ones that represent some plain concept that seems to be unassailably true.
What has been rewarding to me in my brief contact with your patron poet is that he really has a poet’s range and that his reputation need not rest entirely on his lyrical use of the Scotch dialect; nor on simple declaratives set in rhyming couplets.
Many admirers of Burns are really just admirers of Scotland for persona reasons. A few weeks ago I was talking to a gentleman whose name betrayed his origin and whose manner suggested that he had been influenced by one of Old Scotia’s most famous exports. I asked him what he thought of Burns. ‘A great Man’ he said ‘and the greatest poet that ever lived.’ I mention this not as a prelude to an assessment of Burns in relationship to other poets. It is not necessary to establish the superiority of one artist to another to know his value. Burns’s fame is beyond the need of proof. The existence of this club is an indicator of how his works have been cherished.
The relationship of a man to his work, however, is a relevant subject to all who are devoted to one or to another. Sometimes in making a comparison between the man and the artist we see at first a startling contrast. Richard Wagner, for instance, had defects as a human being that his most dedicated admirers could not overlook. He was arrogant, he was not loyal to his friends, he put himself and his interests above every other consideration. Yet his music expressed tenderness, love, and heroism. Actually, I believe there was no great discrepancy between the man and the artist, but to make that clear we would have to show the causal relationship between all the minutiae of his art and his personal life.
In the case of Burns I think the one suggests the other. Without knowing anything about the facts of his life one could assume that he had personal charm, that he could make friends on several planes of society, that he had a natural attachment to the soil, to nature and to humble men, and that he himself had known hardship.
The rigors of coaxing a living from the soil of Scotland were more severe than in most agricultural countries and we see that a reason for Scottish frugality which is sometimes interpreted as stinginess.
But this misconception is no greater than many others that afflict the minds of men. In Europe all Americans are regarded as dollar chasers and in America the French are frivolous and immoral and the English have no sense of humour.
As for Burns, it is remarkable that he wasn’t hard as a rock and bitter as gall. He might have been if he hadn’t become convinced in the early stages of his life that he had a ‘muse’ who would presently wait upon him.
He realised, of course, that a man couldn’t make a living from poetry; nor did he want to. From the beginning of his young manhood he intended to find an occupation that would provide his bread and salt and still leave him time enough to pursue his muse. He liked to use that word.
I find it touching that Burns wanted to keep his muse free of the market place. Implied in this attitude is the belief that to write or paint or sing for money is to demean one’s mission in life and to corrupt the product of one’s mind and spirit. I cannot believe this is a valid proposition. Many artists get paid for what they do without being adversely affected.
It seems to me that an artist will inevitably draw on what’s inside him – his ideas, his sensibility, his conceptions of significant form and the like – whether he is working for money or for nothing. He can’t do anything else.
We know, however, that Burns was determined that nothing should tarnish his ‘muse’. So he must assume that whatever he did was his best at the time he wrote.
Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song; to be in some degree equal to your diviner airs, do you imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation? Tout au contraire. I have a glorious recipe; the very one that for his own use was invented the Divinity of Healing and Poesy when first he piped to the flock of Admentus. I put myself in a regimen of admiring a fine woman; and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion you are delighted with my verses. The lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus and the witchery of her smile the divinity of Helicon.
The highfalutin prose may have been intended humorously; it is not to be taken literally in any case. But there can be no doubt that he was highly susceptible to women and that he often pursues his fancy with more ardour than judgement.
When he and Jean Armour were hauled into the Kirk and publicly rebuked for their misbehaviour, he evidently thought that such humiliation was no more than he deserved. He made no public protest against it, but I can imagine that as he stood there, a convicted sinner, he was not wholly free from resentment. Perhaps he had reason to believe that some of his accusers were also no better than they should be.
Certainly he deserves to be honoured, remembered and read. He found sermons in stones and books in running brooks, and he made them tender and warm and well accessible to his fellow-countrymen and finally to the whole world of English speaking people. The foregoing sentence has a rounded oratorical flourish if I do say so myself. But I am not finished – not yet. It is more suitable, I think to call on another poet to bring this talk to a full close. So I will quote a verse by William Wordsworth:
I mourned with thousands, but as one
More deeply grieved, for he was gone
Whose light I hailed when first it shone
And showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.
Thank you gentlemen – and long live Bobby Burns.
Why do Americans never refer to Bobby Frost – or Bobby Browning? Never mind, Mr Lloyd, as he said, was new to Burns. The next St Louis speaker, of 26 January 1963, chose to relate Burns to the French Revolution but at least Mr Lemoine Skinner Junior did not refer to the poet as ‘Monsieur Robert Ruisseaux’.
My job is to try to relate the mind, the character and the genius of our poet to the greatest intellectual and political upheaval in Western history. The last quarter of the Eighteenth Century posed all the big questions – all the questions we are still required to live with. What do we owe to tradition? What do we owe to reason? What in civilization can we hope to make better? Is there really a possibility of progress? What ought an intelligent conservative seek to conserve? What can a hopeful liberal expect reasonably to change? Where does religion fit in? Where is the place of patriotism? What does a man owe to himself? What does he owe to his family, his society, his country, his God?
These are the terrible questions that broke up the old feudalism and Century to which the United States of America, the United Nations, the French Community, the British Commonwealth and – indeed, the Soviet Union – today are seeking to provide answers. We recognise, after 200 years, that our answers continue to be tentative and partial. The good society has still to appear – perfect and without spot. We have not so far got any alabaster cities. We have so far not built the new Jerusalem.
We are, in short, still living in the half-light of the great Enlightenment, no matter how often we may wish we could draw again the comfortable covers of darkness up over our heads. We are the heirs of the Encyclopaedists, the scientists, the adventurers, the Montesquieus, the Voltaires, the Lafayettes, Washingtons, Franklins and Tom Paines. We have opened the Pandora’s box of freedom. We have eaten the apple a second time. We – and the whole human race – have chosen to break loose and to be free. Even our Communist opponents accept the ultimate goal of individual freedom as they prescribe intermediate slavery as a necessary stage to be suffered through.
We are all, then, descendants of that great Eighteenth Century time of revolution and remaking – the time in which Burns lived, and a time in which I propose to show he was part of an influence that brings us today comfort, assurance and an enduring encouragement to believe that the human race can and will grow in goodness and in slow progress toward more complete individual freedom, responsibility and happiness. Charles Dickens gave me my first schoolboy impression of it – and still my most vivid impression – at the start of A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, were all going direct the other way – in short the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good and for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
The first point that the historical record makes clear is that – Tories, monarchists, and established clergy aside – the bent of the intelligent, educated and optimistic Eighteenth Century mind was in favour not only of the libertarian philosophy of the Enlightenment; it was also outspoken in favour of political and revolutionary action to translate that philosophy into a real social order.
It would be, indeed, a fair generalisation to say that the leading men in the public life of Great Britain, taken as a group, initially applauded the revolution in France and wished for their neighbours across the channel the same benefits of personal liberty, security and freedom they were proud of having achieved in their own constitution with its Declaration of Rights after the Glorious Revolution following the deposition of James III a century earlier. As the wise, level-headed and practical politician Pitt observed, ‘Tom Paine is quite in the right, but what am I to do? As things are, if I were to encourage Tom Paine’s opinions, we should have a bloody revolution.’
It is clear that our poet, when the mood was on him, could go as far as any of the young revolutionary romantics of the day in looking to France for an example of absolute freedom – freedom approaching anarchy – freedom from all the old restraints of church and state and feudal privilege. There are moments when Burns makes even the fire eating Tom Paine seem like a model of restraint and conservative reason.
The fact of the matter is that Burns did not really have to change his view. He was no more committed with final intellectual conviction to any doctrinaire statement of the Rights of Man than he was to the divine right cause of the House of Stuart. He felt the glow of intense Scottish, national patriotism, and the exiled Stuarts became a symbol of this feeling. In this sense he was Jacobite. He felt the injustices of the established order of privilege; he suffered from the apparent unfairness of a society that gave its rewards to men for their inheritance rather than their worth. In this sense, he was a Jacobin. ‘Consistency,’ he could easily have said before Emerson, ‘is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’
Though Burns’ verses and his letters disclose deep interest in the great events of the day and an astonishing knowledge of the personalities, politics and military campaigns of Britain, America and France, it is everywhere apparent that he was never the captive of any single viewpoint, party or doctrine.
He could be, and was, a liberal – even a revolutionary – in wide areas of his thought and feeling. He was at the same time deeply conservative in the very terms Burke himself uses to define his position in his speech, On Conciliation with America, ‘Above all things, I was resolved not to
be guilty of tampering – the odious vice of restless and unstable minds. I put my foot in the track of our forefathers, where I can neither wander nor stumble.’
Burns, for his part, put his foot in the track of his forefathers, and the strongest trait in his nature was what Virgil would have called a pious reverence for the traditions and the institutions of his native land and his familiarly society. He can mock the absurdities of narrow religion. But reverence wins in the end:
The great Creator to revere
Must sure become the creature;
But still the preaching can’t forbear,
And ev’n the rigid feature:
Yet ne’er with wits profane to range
By complaisance extended;
An Atheist’s laugh’s a poor exchange
For Deity offended!
Burns, briefly, is the kind of paradox that is part of the make up of the homme moyen sensual of all ages. He is a devoted husband and father. But his eye wanders; his behaviour strays. He is disdainful of indolence. He works hard at his job. But he is again and again incapacitated by drink and debauch. He is restive against the narrow limiting rural society he was born into. But he praised its simple virtues with unmatched beauty in The Cotter’s Saturday Night. He can be scathingly sarcastic on the subject of aristocratic pretension and yet frankly, openly admire a particular aristocrat he thinks admirable… Burns’ radicalism, then, at its root can, I think, be compared to the radicalism of the Christian gospel. He saw the hope of the Enlightenment as a hope ‘not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’
‘Where Liberty is, there is my country,’ said Benjamin Franklin. ‘Where Liberty is not, there is mine,’ said Tom Paine. Compare the words of Robert Burns in a letter to Lord Eglinton, ‘I cannot,’ he says, ‘I cannot rise to the exalted ideas of a citizen of the world at large; but have all those national prejudices which I believe glow particularly strong in the breast of a Scotsman. There is scarcely anything to which I am so feelingly alive as the honour and welfare of old Scotia.’
How many read Tom Paine today? How many read Edmund Burke? How many remember, or care about, the issues of reform in England in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries? How many know the differences among our own Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Rights of Man of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the declaration, based on both, of the French National Assembly?
It is, I think, no accident that Burns’ voice – rising above the harsh particulars of the argument that still goes on around the world today – speaks the deep and universal meaning of our common inspiration for freedom and for brotherhood. It speaks so because it is a voice at once conservative and radical – a voice for change and a voice for preserving the best of our past – a voice requesting us to strive to make a better society – a voice that admonishes not to depart from the foot paths of our forefathers. But, above all, it is the voice of a unique, poetic genius – a bard in the deepest and most mysterious sense of that great name – who found images and words to touch men’s hearts as well their minds, and in simple, moving, singing language to remind us all, generation after generation of our common humanity, our weaknesses, our loves, our loneliness, our danger and our hope.
Finally in this section, on Burns Night 1964, William Stephenson reminded his fellow-Americans that young Burns ‘Wore the only tied hair in the Parish.’
I recently invited a seminar of graduate students to jot down what they knew of Robert Burns. The replies, on the whole, were all ‘doucey halesome.’ A few, of course, said ‘nothing at all.’ One thought Robert Burns wrote the script for Tight Little Island. Or was he, another enquired, a roue of the Byron type? Another said that Burns was a British poet, ‘who had a great love affair with someone – and didn’t he write Tintern Abbey?’ Several could recall a few poems – Auld Lang Syne especially, and a few familiar quotations – ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ – ‘Oh wad some power the giftie gie us.’ – ‘To see oursels as others see us!
Otherwise, Burns the man was variously described as ‘A man with a lust for living, who put the barmaid into his poetry – a man who appreciated life and enjoyed living it – a man who believed in letting life attain the potential that freedom of choice – philosophical, moral, religious – implied. Convivial, but with a strong social conscience – ‘a man’s a man for a’ that, etc – poverty-stricken, ill-healthed…who had a way of looking at the beauties of natural life. Happy, and thankful of what he had, especially his family – who loved life and happiness, not material things. – Lusty poet, born of poor parents. – gentle, hearth-loving Burns. – Robert Burns is about the only name of a poet I know.’
Snyder remarks, as well, that Burns was interested in human nature, not scenery – he loved men and women, and found his happiness in associating with them – he was a citizen of the world. The graduates emphasised the lively enjoyment, lustiness and happiness, and in one or two instances the element of freedom of choice which Hecht describes as ‘liberty of conscience,’ and Snyder as ‘passionate detestation’ of all sorts of dependence.
But for me Robert Burns the man is more astonishing than either Hecht or Snyder could discern, and far more interesting than the popular view conveys. Speaking now as a psychologist, interested in the epochs of man’s character, I propose to you that Robert Burns stands squarely as the first of modern men, 200 years before his time (and indeed far more, for few have reached his stature even now).
Some rhyme a neeber’s name to lash;
Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu’ cash;
Some rhyme to court the countra clash,
An’ raise a din:
For me, an aim I never fash;
I rhyme for fun.
The genius of Burns shows primarily when he writes for ‘fun’: Tam o Shanter is the epic of absolute fun – he takes devil worship in one hand, holds the tail of Calvinism in the other, and sings a song well described as ‘worthy to stand beside the best tales in the literature of the world.’
But by fun I do not mean the ribald verses with which his name is associated in much of the public mind. Instead, I mean pure joy which a man has essentially by himself. My graduate students caught something of this feeling, as the following remarks suggest: –
He hit upon things we’ve all thought about before, but can’t see as clearly, or express as beautifully as Burns does – his writing carry sorrow, pitifulness; yet he could find and accept gracious qualities in the most menial of subjects – he had a genius for placing reality in his poems.
It takes a great deal of something called self-consciousness to make a man autonomous. And by self-conscious I do not mean shyness, but an ability to look at oneself squarely, to recognise and respect one’s own feelings. The child learns something of this as it freely plays, in pure play; Robert Burns, by great good fortune, learned what it meant and is its epitome. He became, then, an autonomous man. But this also made it possible for him, I believe, to be the great humanitarian he was, champion of freedom and independence more generally. He knew what existence meant, he had sampled the records, books, candies, cookies of a free store – and he wanted everyone else to have the same unbounded pleasure of existence. Gentleman, I give you Robert Burns, the first of Existential, as of Brotherly, Man!
Here endeth this chapter and also the generous contribution of the St Louis Club of Missouri to this volume.
Then up amang thae lakes and seas,
They’ll mak what rules and law they please:
Some daring Hancock, or a Franklin,
May set their Highland blood a-ranklin’;
Some Washington again may head them,
Or some Montgomery, fearless, lead them.
(Address of Beelzebub)