Burns wrote like an angel and lived like a man.
(Ogden Nash)
Let the speeches roll…
Major-Adjutant David W. Purdie of the 2nd Battalion of the Crochallan Fencibles was not in the least over-awed when he rose to address the exalted company assembled in the National Museum of Scotland at the invitation of the Burns Federation for the first Burns Night of the Millenium. This ‘boy from Prestwick’ who was taught Burns, Boswell and Johnson by his father, studied medicine when his heart was really in the classics, but that heart is seen in the Immortal Memory which follows. Dr Purdie, as he is otherwise known, had delivered the same toast at the last West Sound Burns Supper of the old century, so he saw no reason why he should not carry on where he left off.
Mr. Chairman, First Minister, Ladies & Gentlemen
I thought that, tonight, I would tell you a story. And should the telling of a story seem to you surprising and, indeed, rather unfit for the great Toast of the Immortal Memory, let me remind you that the telling of tales has a long and ancient tradition in the Kingdom of Scotland. From the modern after-dinner speech back through the time of the Makars in the Middle Ages, right back to the time of the seannachies round the hearth fires of our ancestors at home – and round their campfires on active service in the field – the Scots have always called for the great stories from their speakers and bards. Such is the story I would tell you tonight – indeed the only story I may tell you tonight.
It is the story of how on earth it came about that an infant born in a two-roomed cottage which sat – and still sits – by a roadside in rural western Ayrshire became the man now universally accepted by modern critical scholarship as one of the greatest lyric poets ever produced in all of Europe. A man whose work sits in the lyric tradition going back through Catullus and Horace (whom he so resembled) to Alcaeus, Pindar and the poetess Sappho in Ancient Greece. A man whose poetry earned the warm praise of the great poets of the Romantic Movement who came immediately after him: Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, Walter Scott; A man whose ability to interweave words and music into song earned him the praise of the great German composers Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn and Ludwig Van Beethoven who were later to orchestrate so many of his songs for the piano. A man whose political positions, whose radical proposals for reform, whose championship of the dignity and the primacy of the Common Man, was to earn him the approval of statesmen of the stamp of Gladstone, Wilberforce and Abraham Lincoln.
The story opens on Braes of Bervie between Laurencekirk and Stonehaven in that part of north eastern Scotland – the Howe of the Mearns – later to be made famous by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in Cloud Howe and Sunset Song. It opens with a scene familiar among farming families to this very day – the departure from the family farm –in this case Clochnahill in the parish of Dunottor – of one of the sons. The year is probably 1748 and Scotland is in turmoil in the aftermath of our last great civil war, the Jacobite rising of the ’45 in which, some 18 months previously, the Jacobite cause of the House of Stuart had perished for ever on the field of Culloden.
Our story opens with the 26 year old William Burns – one of the great unsung heroes of this story – leaving Clochnahill in the company of his brother Robert and going south seeking work in the trade of landscape gardener. William Burns epitomised those very virtues which the Scots have always admired in men and women of whatever race or nation. He was hardy of body, he was independent of mind, he revered education in its broad sense and he feared neither man or beast, save only his Maker. And south to Edinburgh he went and found work in the laying out of the great park just south of the Old Town, then known as Hope Park and which we know today as The Meadows. And so if we may imagine Williams Burns pausing in his labours and looking up at the great castle of Edinburgh upon its rock, he may well have already known that his wanderings in Scotland were not finished. He may possbily have already known that he would one day settle in the West. What he could never know – or even remotely imagine – was that the cottage that he was to build with his own hands in far off Alloway would one day take its place alongside that very castle of Edinburgh as one of the most famous structures which grace the soil of Scotland, visited each year by tens of thousands from all over the world. For move to Ayrshire Williams Burns did. He worked briefly for the great family of the Fairlies at Dundonald and then he feued land from Provost Ferguson of Ayr by the banks of the River Doon – and there, his wanderings past, he came to rest.
In November 1757, the Rev. James McKnight DD arose in his pulpit in the old Kirk of Maybole and, unknown to himself or his congregation, spoke the opening lines of a drama the direct result of which is our happy conjunction, this great occasion tonight in Edinburgh. For the Rev. James, a great scholar by the way, and later to be Moderator of the General Assembly, intimated in the old style of the Kirk of Scotland which many of us remember so well from childhood, that there was ‘a purpose of marriage between Agnes Brown, spinster, residing at Maybole in the parish of Maybole – and William Burns, bachelor, residing at Alloway in the parish of Ayr – of which proclamation was thereby made’. The marriage was to be happy, it was to last for 27 years until they were parted by death and ,on a wild winter’s night in January 1759, Agnes Burns, nee Brown, was safely delivered of a live male infant, the first fruit of that union. The child was vigorous and strong and, in the old Scots tradition, he was named for his paternal grandfather – hence Robert. He was to be the poet Burns. He was to die, 37 years, later of the cardiac complications of untreated chronic rheumatic fever in Dumfries, leaving behind him a desolate widow, six children under the age of 10, and a body of poetry and song which
will ever remain one of the brightest jewels in the crown of our literature.
So what manner of man was this Burns, this Ayrshire farmer and, latterly, this Dumfries-shire officer of the Excise, that here tonight in the National Museum in Edinburgh and at literally thousands of locations throughout the known world this week, men and women like us are sitting down together, people with surnames the same as ours, to listen to the songs, hear the poetry and rise in salute to what has indeed proved, so far, to be an Immortal Memory. What manner of man?
Physically, the poet was 5’9” tall, stockily built, and possessed of great physical strength in his prime. His handsome features are familiar to us from the great portrait by his friend Alexander Nasmyth, which hangs to this day in our National Portrait Gallery – having been gifted by the poet’s soldier son Colonel William Burns with the simple and splendid stipulation – that it become the property of the People of Scotland forever. His complexion was dark, his forehead broad and his hair black, but the most arresting feature of his physical presence, clear from the Nasmyth portrait and attested repeatedly by those who knew him in the flesh, was – the eyes. For example, when John Gibson Lockhart was writing the first scholarly biography of Burns in 1828, he wrote for information to his father-in-law. Now Lockhart was married to Sophia Scott, daughter of the author of Waverley and in his letter of reply to his son-in-law, Walter Scott cast his mind back 40 years to his one and only meeting with Burns in Prof Adam Fergusson’s drawing room at Sciennes Hill House – now Braid Place – in Edinburgh.
Sir Walter wrote ‘I would have taken him, had I not known who he was, for a very sagacious Scottish farmer of the old school. Only the eye betrayed the poetic character and temperament – and it glowed, I say literally glowed when he spoke of something with feeling or interest. I have not seen such an eye in a human head.’ Those of you familiar with the biography of Walter Scott will recall that he was personally acquainted with two Kings and with all the leaders of the literary, academic and intellectual spheres of his day – yet never in all that vast acquaintance had he seen anything like the black glowing eyes of the poet.
Similarly, Josiah Walker, later to be Professor of Classics at Glasgow University and who knew Burns well, wrote that it was in his great black eyes that lay the truest index of his genius. Remarkable eyes, he said – full of mind. And, indeed, the eye is but the mirror of the mind and there is little doubt that the mind of the poet was one of remarkable depth. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, gentleman farmer, literary critic and author of Scotland and Scotsmen of the 18th Century’ wrote, ‘I have been in the company of many men of Genius – and some of them poets, but I never met with such flashes of intellectual brightness as came from him – the very impulse of the moment, the very spark of celestial fire.’
As to his depth of mind, consider this. Dugald Stewart liked to discuss moral and ethical topics with Burns on the walks they took together to the Braid Hills outside Edinburgh. A simple statement. But if you consider that Dugald Stewart did not suffer fools at all, let alone gladly, and if you further consider that Stewart was the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, a man whose speculations in epistemology and metaphysics moved in the very stratosphere of human thought, a man who was our leading philosopher following the death of the great David Hume ten years earlier – when you consider that this man enjoyed moral and ethical debate with Burns then you have a clear marker for the poet’s sheer capacity for thought and argument.
But what of his literary development? When William Burns died of tuberculosis in the spring of 1784, Robert and his brother Gilbert took their widowed mother and their sisters to the farm of Mossgiel which sits on the high road between the village of Mauchline and the town of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire – and here the story really gets going, for it was here at Mossgiel that, in some way, all the influences of his young life – he was then 25 – came together and provided the genesis of the great poetry. These influences were; his own native intelligence; his eye for the human and agricultural landscape around him; the broad education in classical and literary history which his father, despite straitened circumstances, had provided for him; his store of folk song and tradition and mythology acquired from the singing of his mother and her servant Betty Davidson at Mount Oliphant and Lochlie; his resonance with the ceaseless ebb and surge of the seasons upon his farm; and, finally, his profound affection for the geography and the history of his native land. Ability to marry the two central ingredients of breadth of vision and depth of language is the genesis of all great poetry and it was Burns’ absolute command of the great resonant Doric tongue of our forefathers with its tremendous graphic imagery and verbal firepower which allowed all of the above influences to come together in that one remarkable mind – and the poetry began to come.
This was also the time of the development of his radical politics which were to cause him such difficulties later in his life as we shall see. They stemmed as always from his championship of the social worth of the common man and the freedoms which must be accorded by society and the State in order to preserve that worth and dignity. Thus we find him writing in the great Epistle to Davy, his friend David Sillar, that neither title, nor rank nor worldly wealth could produce true happiness which could only be generated from within the heart and mind, just as Plato, quoting Socrates, had said two millenia before in Ancient Athens. As Burns has it;
the heart’s aye the part, aye, that maks us richt – or wrang. Nothing seemed to be too small to escape his notice. As is well known, one morning, ploughing for his winter barley in the parks of Mossgiel, he drove the ploughshare – the coulter – through the nest of a fieldmouse. His gaudsman, John Blane, driving the horses went after the mouse with a pattle – the tool for resharpening the ploughshare and a fearful weapon. Sixty years later, an old man in Kilmarnock, Blane was to recall that morning for Robert Chambers, Burns’ biographer. The poet had checked him, made him stop. ‘Leave it, John’, he said ‘let it live’. For the rest of the morning the poet had been silent and withdrawn and Blane, who guessed what was going on, knew not to interupt – for composition was afoot.
That day Burns went back at noon, as he habitually did, to the farmhouse of Mossgiel with his men for the midday meal, and then climbed up to the tiny room below the eaves which he shared with his brother Gilbert and in which was a plain deal table with a drawer. From the drawer he would take out a sheet of paper and his goose quill pen – and the verses would come. We know this from his younger sister Isabella who later was to recount that when the poet went back out into the afternoon, back to the fields, she would steal up to the little room beneath the eaves, open the drawer, take out the paper and read, for the first time the verses, new that very morning.
Wee sleekit cow’rin tim’rous beastie…
So runs the famous opening. He then flicks a switch and suddenly, from the glorious Doric of the first verse we are immediately into standard, pure, Augustan English. Burns wrote easily in both tongues and, at his best, we can barely see the join.
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken nature’s social union
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth born companion –
And fellow mortal.
It is absolutely remarkable to see the concept of the ecosystem – nature’s social union – set out in verse 200 hundred years before it became a natural science. And then, of course, comes what philosophers term induction, the inductive leap from the concrete to the abstract, from the specific to the general which carries the poet’s concept of the relevance of his observations to the wider world;
But moosie, thou art no’ thy lane
In proving foresight may be vain
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Gang aft a’gley
And leave us nocht but grief and pain
For promised joy
And even smaller yet, in the kirk of Mauchline one Sunday, he sat joyously watching the young lady in the pew in front of him, There she sat in all her Sunday finery, including large new Lunardi bonnet, all unaware, as she attentively listenied to the sermon, that a splendid pediculus capitis vulgaris – or common headlouse, was marching majestically across the rim of her finery.
O Jennie, dinna loss your heid,
And set your beauty a’ aspread
Ye little ken what cursed speed
The blastie’s makin…
This wonderful description is followed, again, by an inductive leap to the general;
Oh, wad some pow’r the Giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us
It would from many a blunder free us
And foolish notion…
The foolish notions were almost certainly those of the Orthodox Calvinist wing of the Kirk which held sway under the Rev. Auld in Mauchline. The central notion being that by confessing adherence to the theological tenets of the Calvinistic Faith one could enrol onself among the Elect of God, secure a guaranteed place in Paradise and aquit oneself of irregularities in one’s dealing with one’s fellow men.
‘Nonsense’, said Burns in Ayrshire.
‘Nonsense’, said the great David Hume in Edinburgh. A man’s principles and behaviour should anticipate judgement during life and by his fellow men, not in some metaphysical hereafter at a tribunal convened by a Deity.
He thus turned his firepower onto his natural and most immediate target, the canting hypocrisy of certain human elements of the Kirk. Burns took careful aim and opened fire on the Rev. Alexander Moodie, Minister of Riccarton at Kilmarnock, one of the most feared hellfire preachers of the 18th Century. In the great satire, the Holy Tulzie – a Tulzie is a fullscale scrap – Burns invisages Moodie’s flock as real sheep with Moodie, their Shepherd directing from which stank – or pool of water – they must drink, thirsting as they do, after righteousness…
What flock wi’ Moodie’s flock could rank
Sa hale and hearty every shank
Nae poisoned, sour Ariminian stank
He let them taste
But Calvin’s well – aye clear – they drank
Oh – sic a Feast!
Note the superb and crushing irony of the very word ‘feast’. He then shifted aim to a bigger target, and went for Mr William Fisher. His friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a Solicitor in Mauchline, had been persecuted by the Kirk for, among other crimes, setting a beggar to work in his garden upon the Sabbath. The persecution was led by the Minister, the Rev. William ‘Daddy’ Auld and his chief henchman among the Kirk Session, William Fisher, the farmer of Montgarswood. With the poem, Holy Willie’s Prayer, Burns opened fire on Fisher in what my own father, correctly, once described as the greatest example of poetical character assassination in the language. Into the bedroom at Montgarswood we go, where Burns’ Muse overhears the Holy Will at his devotions;
Lord I am here, a chosen sample
to prove thy Grace is great
and ample…
Responsibility for this miserable carnal sinner’s crimes and misdemeanours are resolutely placed at the Lord’s door for, were it not His will, surely his Will would not! The hypocrisy rises to Olympian heights as this dawns on Willie;
…e’en so, thy haun’ must e’en be borne –
until thou lift it !
Thus Burns’ broadsides raked the worthies of the Session fore and aft. The Kirk, was, however not without its own spiritual artillery and Burns, being Burns, was not slow at furnishing ammunition for the reply. The Kirk Session minutes for 4 April 1786 are extant and I have seen them. They record:
The Session, having been informed that Jean Armour – an unmarried woman – is said to be with child, appoint James Lambie and William Fisher to speak to the parents.
We will assume, ladies and gentlemen, after this effluxion of time, that James Lambie performed this delicate and sensitive task with diplomacy and skill. We may be utterly assured, however, that his partner did so with vengeful glee – for did you notice the name? It was William Fisher on the Armour doorstep, the very same Holy Willie, still red raw from the lash of the poet’s pen. Jean Armour, daughter of James Armour, master mason, was in serious trouble. Her father, a pillar of the Kirk, was apparently not aware of the liaison between his daughter and Burns, whom he regarded as a dangerous freethinking rake. Told of her daughter’s condition, Armour fainted clean away. He was revived with a stiff cordial and got up demanding to know the name of the father. He was told – and down he went again.
Jean was packed off to house of her Uncle’s, John Purdie – no relation – in Paisley to hide her shame while the poet, after consideration of his position, decided it might be better to create a new life in the West Indies since old Armour had destroyed the marriage certificate between the pair. He tells us that his trunk was already on the road to Greenock and to the brig, Nancy, which was to take him to Kingston, Jamaica – where he had secured a position of overseer on a plantation owned by the brother of his friend Dr James Douglas in Ayr. He was stopped from this disastrous course of action by the roar of applause which greeted the publication in July 1786 of Poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect – John Wilson, Kilmarnock, printer. He was advised, rightly, that he should capitalise on the resounding success of the book by seeking the publication of a second edition in Scotland’s literary and capital city. In other words, his course lay not to the West – and the North Atlantic – but East, and Edinburgh.
This was a time towards the final culmination of the Scottish Enlightenment, that remarkable flowering of our intelligentsia with whole new sciences coming to birth; geology by Hutton, organic chemistry by Black, political economy by Adam Smith and empirical philosophy by David Hume, some literally within the confines of the city of Edinburgh. It was a time when Benjamin Franklin, Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, of the infant United States, could write home to his wife in Pennsylvania ‘It is truly a remarkable thing that a man might stand, as I did but yesterday, at the cross of Edinburgh and, within the space of one hour, take the hand of a dozen men of genius.’
In Edinburgh he was lionised. He was the star of the social season of 1786–87. There were society breakfasts, literary lunches, evening receptions, dinners, balls. Alison Cockburn wrote to a friend that the whole town was agog with the ploughman bard who was the very image of his profession, wonderously handsome, strong and coorse! It did not turn his head however and, sharing a flat in the old town with his friend John Richmond, he set about producing an enlarged and improved second edition of the poems which were printed by a man who became his great friend. This was William Smellie, first editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and founder of the great convivial dining club the Crochallan Fencibles which met in Dawney Douglas’ Tavern in the Anchor Close off the Canongate. His publisher, William Creech, brought out the second edition in the spring of the following year, 1787 and armed with the proceeds, the poet set off on the second phase of his literary life – for this was to be the era of the Songs.
Poetry was in fact largely behind him and, although he continued to write verse for the rest of his life, his principle function henceforward was to be song collecting and song writing. This he prosecuted throughout the three tours which he took in the spring summer and autumn of 1787; first to the Borders – and indeed over the Border briefly – with Robert Ainslie, his young lawyer friend from Edinburgh; to the West Highlands on his own and, lastly, on the great northern tour in a chaise and pair with another friend, Willie Nicol, Classics Master of the High School of Edinburgh – a brilliant classical scholar and as wild, irascible and hard drinking a companion as could be found. Travelling with Nicol, Burns wrote, was like travelling with a loaded Blunderbuss at half cock. Off they set across West Lothian, up through Stirlingshire, Perthshire and Inverness-shire, across to Aberdeen and down through the Mearns and Angus and thus back to Edinburgh, a round trip of over 500 miles.
Throughout these tours the poet took down, from the singing of the people, from fish wives and farmers wives and spey wives and from men of all conditions and backgrounds, the vernacular folk songs of the country. This was a tradition which was in danger of being lost for want of being transcribed, set to music and published. The rescue, for such it was, of the Scottish vernacular folk song, was largely due to the poet, something for which he has been given nothing like the credit which is his due. From then to the end of his life he saw published through his Edinburgh collaborators James Johnson and James Thomson, some 400 of our songs appearing as they did in the Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum and in Thomson’s Select Scottish Aires. All human life was, and is, in these songs; songs of farming, songs of fighting, songs of meeting, songs of loving, songs of parting. And just as the great Raeburn captured in his paintings the faces of that remarkable generation of Scotland in the late 18th century, so Burns captured their music and their songs and, in them, their aspirations and their history – in short, their very nature. Of all the songs, the most famous are the love songs.
My luve is like a red, red rose…
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever…
And these he brought back to Edinburgh, some in fragmentary form, some fully finished – to the parlour of the house in St James’s Square in the new town in which he stayed over the winter of 1787–88. This was the home of his great friend William Cruickshank, where the daughter of the house, Jenny Cruickshank aged 12, would play a chosen air over and over and over again on the harpsichord as the poet sat beside her drafting and redrafting and crafting the words until they fitted the air like a hand in a silken glove. This description we have from Professor Josiah Walker, who visited the family in January 1788, and was not allowed by William Cruickshank into the room where the poet and young Jenny were working, because it would be a disturbance to them. And to Jenny, herself, went a book, an inscribed 2nd edition of his poems, and a dedication of one of the Songs. The poet always paid his dues. No man, or woman either, ever did him a favour and lived to regret the day. The song he dedicated to her was one of his finest:
A rosebud by my early walk
Adown a corn enclos-ed bawk
Say gently bent its thorny stalk
All on a dewy morning.
Ere twice the shades of dawn were fled
In all its crimson glory spread,
And drooping rich the dewy head
Its scents the early morning.
It sounds like a pastoral. A flower blooms in a Scottish meadow, but it is not a pastoral. It is an allegory. An allegory of youth, beauty, its advance to maturity and ultimate decay – always a favourite subject with poets. And in a later verse he foresees her future:
Thou sweet rosebud, young and gay
Shalt beauteous blaze upon the day
And bless the parents evening ray,
That watched thy early morning.
The published song carried only the simple epigraph – To a very young Lady. And the world wondered with a smile – who was the rosebud? He did not live to see it, but he was right. She did ‘beauteous blaze upon the day’. The rosebud, indeed, became the rose. Jenny Cruickshank married James Henderson, solicitor, in the town of Jedburgh in the Borders and together they raised a large and successful family. And after her death 1845, her eldest son recounted that, in her last moments, his mother as she failed had recalled her own happy childhood in her father’s house in Edinburgh – and, with great and quiet pride, the fact that it was she – who had been the rosebud.
The greatest of the historical Songs is, of course, the song which Burns put into the mouth of our hero King on that midsummer morning, long ago – on the Carse of Stirling – on the day that our forefathers fought for and won their freedom. We know that on his journeys throughout Scotland the poet had been first intrigued and then electrified to discover, wherever he went – from the Border Marches to Aberdeenshire – that the march tune Hey Tuttie Taitie was firmly believed by the people to have been the very march which was played – on the instruments of the time – as the Scots army advanced on to the field of Bannockburn. We know also that he spent many months drafting and redrafting and crafting words which would not only fit the air but would give an accurate account of the engagement and the sheer scale of the national achievement of our forefathers under King Robert. I’m certain that he went to Barbour. He went to John Barbour’s great work and our earliest surviving long poem The Bruce, written by a man born in 1320 just six years after the battle and who had talked to men who had themselves been present and had taken part in the battle
And Burns, following Barbour, begins with the King firmly telling the troops that this was to be the last battle – the final engagement of a war which had lasted twenty-eight terrible years. They were going to conclusions with our mighty neighbour and, come the day’s end – they would either stand masters of that field or lie beneath it –on a bed of blood – forever. There was no alternative. Welcome, sings Burns, Welcome to your gory bed – or to victory. And Barbour describes how the men of the army’s four divisions then knelt in their ranks and every man was shriven, that is, confessed and absolved of his sins – in the expectation of his imminent death. And Barbour describes how at that moment, far across the field, Edward Plantagenet, King of England, saw them kneel. And he turned to Sir Ingram de Umfraville a brave English knight and Crusader and said ‘They kneel! These men ask for Mercy’. And De Umfraville, veteran solider that he was said, ‘They do, Sire. They ask for Mercy – but not from you. These men are asking Mercy of a higher Power.’
And Barbour then describes how the King rode down the ranks calling out that if there was any man present who was not committed to the cause, any man whose heart had failed him, any man who had not stomach for what was about to happen, then that man might freely depart and leave the field and return to his home – for he, Robert, did not choose to die in that man’s company. And, as Barbour says, The ranks stood fast.
Wha wad be a traitour knave
Wha could fill a coward’s grave
Wha sae base – as be a slave
Let him turn – and flee.
And the climax comes, as so often with Burns, in the fourth verse when, with the tension at breaking point – at the very moment of the assault – the King, about to bring his vizor down – turns to the troops one last time – and through Burns eyes we can see him astride his nervous charger – as he levels the great broadsword at them, saying:
Wha for Scotland’s King and Law,
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Free men stand – and free men fa’
(And he swings round towards the English line)
Let him – follow me.
And the advance was on. And, as was to be said centuries later, they fought like Scotsmen – and they won their freedom.
But the poet could not tour the country and collect songs for a living. He had to return to work and he took a farm. He took Ellisland in Nithsdale, 7 miles above the city of Dumfries. His tenancy of the farm lasted but 3 years – for it was stony ground. Indeed, the poet wrote to a friend that a verse was missing from the Book of Genesis and that verse was:
And the Lord riddled all creation –
And the riddlings he threw on Ellisland.
Ellisland, however, produced Tam o Shanter, that incomparable narrative poem of ghosts, bogles and witchcraft but little else. Indeed, Tam has galloped further than his original ride, as it were, along the Nith bank at Ellisland down the farm road to the road end and on into literary history. He has turned up in numerous languages around the world. I have in my possession a splendid book, Robert Burns in Other Tongues by William Jacks, MP for Stirlingshire at the turn of the century. And in this we find a remarkable translation of Tam o Shanter by Professor Erich Reute of the University of Heidelberg. Tam o Shanter in German. Now, in my view only two languages in Europe are ideal, nay supreme, vehicles for personal abuse and these are the Scots Doric and the German. For example, here is Kate in the Doric giving Tam hell for his social delinquencies:
Oh Tam had thou but be sae wise
As ta’en they ain wife Kate’s advice etc
That was Kate. Now in Reute’s translation is ‘Kathe’ ‘O, Tam das war nicht wohlgethan etc’ was
nahmst du guten rat nicht an
oft spracht dein weib du zeist zu locker,
ein schwatzer, tagdieb, kneipenhocker
und nah beim Gottshaus am Sonntag,
trankst du im bierhaus bis zum Montag!
If you read this out loud in your very best German accent with increasing volume and you will get a flavour of the venom. We are talking serious abuse here!
In 1791 the poet moved to Dumfries and here his last five years were to be spent as a gauger, in the Excise – forerunner of the Inland Revenue. His misfortunes began to crowd upon him at this time. His health began materially to fail. He was subject to repeated attacks of what we now suspect to have been endocarditis, inflammation of the lining of the heart, a condition which follows on from rheumatic fever, and which was eventually to kill him. In 1791 his great friend and patron, his Maecenas – the Earl of Glencairn – died and was the subject of the great ‘Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn with its powerful concluding stanza:
The bridegroom may forget the bride
Was made his wedded wife yestreen
The monarch may forget the crown
That on his head an hour has been –
The mother may forget the child
That smiles so sweetly at her knee –
But I’ll remember you, Glencairn
And all that thou has done for me.
He was also in trouble for his political opinions which he never cared to hide. The poet was not a revolutionary, he was a radical and a reformer. What he wished to see were changes in the Constitution which seem second nature to us now, a secret ballot, a broad adult suffrage and fixed-term parliaments. When, in 1999, the people of Scotland elected and then summoned our restored Parliament to Edinburgh, it was by universal suffrage, and secret ballot, and for a fixed term. But these were dangerous views in the Britain of 1792 where the Government of Pitt’s first administration – with Henry Dundas of Arniston as Home Secretary, was extremely edgy in the aftermath of the loss of our American Colonies and with the French Revolution now in full swing across the Channel. Burns was carpeted by his ultimate superior, Robert Graham of Fintry, fortunately a friend and admirer of the poet, and formally reminded that he was a civil servant, a government officer and that he was paid to act not think. He was told, in effect, ‘Burns, watch your tongue and for God’s sake watch your pen.
His contract could be terminated without compensation and, having already sold the copyright of his poems to Creech, his Edinburgh publisher, his Excise salary was all that stood between him and his family and destitution. However, it is my view that he did not truly seek subversion of the State. He wanted the State to reform, not revolt, in order to avoid the horrors now clearly visible across the Channel. He wished to see reform based on the willing adherence of a free people to the three great pillars of our unwritten constitution which are to this day the Monarchy, the Parliament and the Law.
But by this time he had begun to die – and death came for him slowly. The diagnosis of endocarditis superimposed on chronic rheumatic fever is in the opinion of Sir James Crichton-Brown of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh the true diagnosis – and I think the evidence proves him right.
We would have treated him with pencillin today but it was to be 80 years before another boy would be born in Ayrshire, another Ayrshireman of genius called Alexander Fleming who would later make that most momentous of medical discoveries. Burns’s physician, Maxwell, sent him to sea bathing at Brow Well on the Solway near where the river Nith having flowed past Ellisland and through Dumfries town eventually reaches the Solway – and its journey’s end. But without effective treatment the poet literally died by inches until death mercifully released him on 21 July 1796.
Four days later his coffin was taken on a gun carriage before thousands of silent mourners from the Town House of Dumfries to his burial in St Michael’s Kirkyard. There then followed the short midsummer night. We know that the day after the funeral was a glorious cloudless day of high Summer and, as Professor Hans Hecht reflected in his great literary biography of Burns – ‘the Sun which rose so early on the morrow over the sleeping town, casting his beams on the fresh earth of that new grave was surely the sun of Immortality’.
Yes, he lives on. He lives on for many reasons. Principal among them is that wherever our people are, be they at home in Scotland or wherever they have gone throughout the known world, as settlers, farmers, soldiers, administrators, Governors of the old empire and the later Commonwealth, they simply took the poet with them. Throughout the great emigrations of the 18th, 19th and the present century, the poet’s works would be packed – together with the household effects of the people, into the family kist, and taken to the seaports and down into the holds of the awful emigrant ships and away. Across the North Atlantic they went, to the St Lawrence in Canada or to the Carolinas and Georgia in the US, or on the longer journey to the Cape of Storms and the veldt of Southern Africa and on the even longer journey, taken by tens of thousands of our people, across the wild southern ocean to the very shores of Australia and New Zealand.
This we know from their diaries and the traditions of their descendants. And the people took Burns with them, not just because he spoke to them in the language and in the accents of home. That would not have been sufficient. They took him with them because Burns has always something to say; to the struggling farmer, to the uncertain lover, to the young soldier facing his first action. And the message, delivered in a score of different ways, is simple in essence and always the same; it is, ‘Courage, brother, do not falter’. And in the poems and the songs he also called them, and us, to our duties as the inheritors of a fine tradition. The tradition of plain dealing and the plain speaking of our minds. Our passion for the education of the children, our innate contempt for displays of wealth, for bombast and empty show.And above all he prompts us never to neglect defence of the five great freedoms which our fiery ancestors bought for us sometimes at a terrible price: our freedom to think, to assemble, to vote, to worship, and to act, limited only by our own Common and Statute Law.
But most of all the poet lives on because of his timeless personal and moral philosophy. I could dilate upon it in abstract terms but in a sense it is easier and more acceptable to do so by referring to the poetry itself. The philosophy is in the poetry and it is perhaps clearest in one of the greatest of all the songs, the one which we know as A Man’s A Man for a’ that.
It’s a poor title, simply taken from within the song itself. A better would be Anthem for the Common Man for, above all, this poem epitomises the essential creed of this brave singer, the essential brotherhood of all the creatures we know as Man, with the preservation of the rights of universal mankind, being the central goal of men who know their duty. That a democratic sense was apparent among the Scots was something of which the poet was clearly proud, as was the fact that our ancestors would always seek to protect the freedom of the nation by diplomacy and force of argument if possible but, if necessary, at the very point of the sword. It is a matter of quiet pride that if you take away all our achievements in the physical and natural sciences, in engineering and in medicine and had we only given the poetry and songs of Burns to the world, we could hold up our heads among the Nations. But remember, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American writer, the Songs of Burns do not belong to Scotland and the Scots. They are the property – and the solace – of Mankind.
And in this year which has seen the new Millennium as well as the 50th anniversary of the great UN Declaration of Human Rights, it is remarkable that one of the greatest political statements in this field should have come not from one of the sages of antiquity, nor from one of the luminaries of the Renaissance, but from the pen of an Ayrshire Farmer…
Then let us pray, that come it may
As come it will, for a’ that…
That sense and worth, o’er a’ the Earth
Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that
For a’ that an’ a’ that, it’s comin’ yet, for a’ that…
That man to man – the world o’er
Shall brothers be – for a’ that.
And, for an epitaph ?
Those of you like myself and Mr Chairman who are devotees of the great game which Scotland gave to the world , if you ever have occasion to play at Prestwick St Nicholas, I charge you to pause before a great plaque in the Clubhouse. Upon this you will see listed the names of 66 Members and sons of Members who failed to return to the Clubhouse after the two great wars. Below their names is their epitaph, one which I have never seen on any other monument or tombstone or cenotaph. The words are by Pericles, the great Athenian general and statesman, the man who had the Parthenon built to crown the Acropolis and under whom Athens came to the apogee of her imperial power in the 5th Century BC. In a speech at the public funeral of the Athenian dead at the conclusion of the first year of the great war with Sparta, which was to prove fatal to imperial Athens, Pericles spoke an epitaph of the dead in terms which, if transposed to the singular, made a fitting epitaph for Burns, another young man who also took up arms and who also made war – not in his case against the historical foes of the nation but against that other dark Axis of powers which beset all mankind – ignorance, allied to hyprocrisy allied to intolerance and oppression – and the words are these;
And so he gave his life unto the Common Wealth – and achieved thereby for his memory, praise that will not die. And with that came the greatest of the resting places – not the grave in which his bones are laid – but rather a home, a home in the minds of men.
And Pericles concludes with the tremendous line
ανδρον γαρ επιφανον πασα γε ταφοΠ
For great men have the whole earth as their Immortal Memory.
And with that, Mr Chairman, I put to you the incontestable proposition that the Memory of the Poet is worthy of a Toast. Mr Chairman, First Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen, pray charge your glasses and rise for the Toast – The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.
After such a titanic oration one wants to pause. One needs to. Only silence can follow such supreme and comprehensive statement. It has been left uncut because it harks back to the great Rosebery tradition of generous public speaking in that when the audience has enjoyed its banquet for the body, it is offered a feast for the mind and when it works at this level it is solace for the soul. One has to hear it on the night to savour it fully but even on the page such speeches serve as a monumental memory and, in this instance, one well worthy of Burns in the new millennium.
And if Dr Purdie is the Rosebery for our day then that irrespressible lawyer from Glasgow, Mr Len Murray, is the Sheriff Smith. Mr Murray is also a considerable orator but diffidently hides his learning under a deliberate cloak of frivolity. What he can’t hide, however, is his knowledge and understanding of Burns. He is in constant demand as a proposer of the Immortal Memory, and one can understand why. After his usual jocular preliminaries, which are always effective, Mr Murray began in earnest with an anecdote.
Ranjit Singh was a student with me at Glasgow University. One Burns day he asked me, ‘Why do the Scots make such a fuss of Robert Burns?’ I said, ‘Probably because he was a good poet.’ But Rajit was not convinced by such an answer and had another question for me. In his native Delhi there is a famous Burns Supper every year. And he asked me – ‘What did Robert Burns have to do with India?’ And I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t tell him. But I started then to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to so many, both here and abroad. We have had other poets, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns. Why? And perhaps more importantly, why should other nations celebrate the birth of Burns?
Every year since 1801, a chain of universal friendship and fellowship makes its way around the world at this time. And wherever friends meet and friends eat the name of Robert Burns is revered. When the Burns Supper is finishing in Dunedin they have already sat down in Perth in Western Australia. And when they are rising from the tables in Perth they are already seated in Singapore. And the chain of friendship follows the setting sun and makes its way westwards to India, to the middle east, to Africa and to Europe, to this country, and then over the Atlantic and across that great continent of America to its Western seaboard and beyond. And so on right around the world and right around the clock.
And on 25 January of each year and for many days before and after, there is not an hour of the day or night when a Burns Supper is not taking place somewhere on this earth. And there is no other institution of man of which that can be said. The English have Shakespeare; the Americans have Longfellow; the Italians have Dante and the Germans have Goethe. Every one of them an internationally known and respected figure. But to none of them is paid the type of homage that is paid to Burns, even in their own country let alone abroad… There is no international acclaim of any one of them yet Robert Burns is universally revered.
His works have been translated into at least 56 languages and published in more than two thousand editions. There are more statues of Robert Burns throughout the world than of any other figure in literature.
No other writer of any nationality has ever been afforded such universal acceptance. And why should this be? It cannot be just for the quality of his poetry and writings. Scotland has produced other world ranking poets and writers in Robert Fergusson, (my elder brother in misfortune Burns called him), James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd, Walter Scott and the incomparable Robert Louis Stevenson. Yet we do not venerate them as we do Burns.
And something else to make us wonder.
Robert Burns was a product of the great Scottish Enlightenment.
That Golden Age in the late 18th century when Scotland produced more men of letters, more men of science and more men of learning than did any other nation on God’s earth. In just about every discipline known to man a Scot led the way. But why is it that in spite of all the great Scots of that time (and there were many) it is the star o’ Rabbie Burns that rose abun’ them a’?
Part of the answer must lie in what he did to preserve the language and the heritage of this country at a time when it was in mortal danger.
And let us look at that time in which he lived.
First of all, a wave of anglicisation had been sweeping this country. It had begun as a trickle with the Union of the Crowns in 1603; and it became a flood with the Union of the Parliaments in 1707. Let me not be political but it turned out not to be a Union at all. It was an absorption of the old Scots Parliament into the Parliament of England. The rules and customs and practices of the Parliament in Edinburgh were swept aside and within but a handful of years it had been forgotten. Throughout the 18th century the flood tide of anglicisation continued. And it was against that tide that Robert Burns wrote.
Secondly, these were the post-Culloden years In July 1745 seven men landed at Moidart. (One of them was a Murray, incidentally.) A month later they raised a standard at Glenfinnan, the standard of the Royal House of Stewart, ancient Kings of Scotland. A torch was thrown on the smouldering embers of the Jacobite movement. The flame that resulted would burn for only eight short months till it was crushed out by the Hanoverian Army at Culloden on the 16th of April the following year. That army was led by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the 25-year old third son of His Britannic Majesty, the German, George II. The Scots people gave Cumberland a soubriquet and seldom could any soubriquet have been more appropriate – they called him the Butcher. The pillage and the carnage perpetrated in the King’s name in the Highlands of Scotland (aye and in the Lowlands too) spoke adequate testimony to that.
Shortly after the slaughter of Culloden, the Heritable Jurisdictions Act and the Disarming Acts were passed. The bagpipe was declared an instrument of war and was proscribed; the carrying of arms was forbidden under penalty of death and the wearing of the tartan under pain of transportation. And the prohibitions would endure for 36 long and horrible years. Lord President Forbes (Scotland’s most senior judge and a staunch Hanoverian) protested to London at the new legislation. The protests were to no avail. London ignored him. So what’s new? Parliament, that institution so close to the Scottish people, debated what to do. Some suggested clearing the country and recolonising it with ‘decent God-fearing people from the South.’ Others suggested sterilising all Jacobite women. But Cumberland, he knew what to do, for he wrote home to his father: ‘This generation must be stamped out.’
The policy of repression throughout Scotland was inexorable; accused were often tried in England lest Scottish judges or juries were too soft. The axeman at Tower Hill was busy and John Prebble, that adopted Scot and brilliant historian, tells us how the hangman’s rope sang at Carlisle and at York. The English named a flower after the Duke of Cumberland – the Sweet William. The Scots people have always known it as the stinkin’ wullie and that perhaps says it all. He was given a hero’s welcome when eventually he went back to London. His father increased his Civil List allowance from £15,000 per annum to £40,000. £40,000 a year in 1746. Not bad, for a butcher. That other German who lived in London, George Frederick Handel, composed a piece of music in his honour: See the Conquering Hero Comes.
Remember its origin the next time you hear it.
Meanwhile all things English were being embraced. Even the ladies on the streets of the old town of Edinburgh, members of a profession even older than mine, advertised their wares, however few, in the newly arrived English tongue. And schools teaching that language were springing up all over the country. And James Beattie, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College Aberdeen, would write: ‘Poetry is not poetry unless it is written in English.’ The tide of Anglophilia reached its high water mark in 1782 when the sycophantic James Craig, architect of Edinburgh’s New Town, created a perpetual memory to that family who had presided over the greatest carnage known in this country when he called the streets of his new town after them. And so we have George Street, and Hanover Street, and Frederick Street and the rest. This wave of anglicisation did irreparable harm not just to the language, but also to the culture and the heritage of Scotland.
But Robert Burns believed that these were things worth preserving so he set about to preserve them. ‘The poetic genius of my country,’ he wrote, ‘bade me sing the loves, the joys, the rural scenes and rural pleasures of my natal soil in my native tongue.’ And so he wrote his songs and his poetry in that tongue. And he wrote with a simple beauty that no other, whether before him or after, has ever achieved.
Till a’ the seas gang dry my dear
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun
And I will luve thee still my dear
While the sands o’ life shall run.
Thirty, simple words. And everyone a monosyllable. No one else has ever written with such simplicity across the whole spectrum of man’s experience and emotion, from zenith to nadir. And in his works mankind are born and beget their kind and die. But throughout, his work is always supreme. There is no greater tale in any language than Tam o Shanter, nor any satire better than Holy Willie’s Prayer. There is nothing more mournful than Ye Banks and Braes; And what love song is there to excel Ae Fond Kiss written to Agnes McElhose when they parted in December 1791? And she would write in her diary on 6 December 1831 ‘This day I shall never forget. Parted with Burns in the year 1791 never more to meet in this world. Oh may we meet in heaven!’ Nor is there anything more poignant than O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, one of the last poems he ever wrote and dedicated to young Jessie Lewars who nursed him and who cared for him until his untimely end.
But whatever his other achievements, Burns thought his most important and his most compelling duty was to preserve the traditional folk songs and folk music of Scotland. And in this his efforts were Herculean. For he collected them, then he patched and he cobbled and he mended them, till he had produced things of beauty and all of this he did without reward and he constantly refused any payment for his efforts. About 380 songs, each one a priceless gem. One cannot imagine Scots song without the contributions of Burns. And were it not for him, you and I would belong to a nation almost bereft of traditional music and song. As a people we have a culture, and a heritage of which we should be incredibly proud. They are equalled by few and surpassed by none. And we owe so much of that to Robert Burns. All of these things perhaps explain the immortality of Robert Burns to us, the Scots. But what of his universality?
Why is he so universally honoured and why is he so relevant to Delhi and to peoples all over the world in a way that no other writer can ever be?
Remember that the world in which he lived was a world of opulence and oppression. By accident of birth all were born either with privilege or in poverty. With privilege there was wealth and position – with poverty, there was despair and destitution. Inequality and injustice were everywhere. And it was that world of privilege and position, poverty and injustice that Burns constantly condemned. And so his pen became the voice of the people; and he expressed the thoughts and the hopes of the people. And thus the message of Robert Burns became a universal message for all people; for all nations; and for all times.
It is a message of friendship, a message of fellowship; but above all it is a message of love. And it is just as vibrant and just as relevant today as when it was written over two hundred years ago. No figure in world literature had ever written with such compassion for his fellow man.
Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others,this is my criterion of goodness; but whatever injures society at large or any individual in it, then this is my measure of iniquity.
And elsewhere he wrote:
God knows I’m no saint, but if I could, and I believe that I do it as far as I can, I would wipe all tears from all eyes.
He died at the age of only 37. We can but marvel at what he achieved and wonder what he might have achieved had he lived his full biblical span.
The twenty-first of July 1796, the day of his death, must surely rank as yet another of the darker days in the history of Scotland. And at his funeral on the 25th of July when the procession was wending its way through the crowded streets of Dumfries to St Michael’s Kirkyard, an auld buddy was heard to call out ‘An wha will be oor poet noo?’ – a question still unanswered two hundred and five years later.
The Memory of Robert Burns will be immortal, not just for Scots people everywhere; but for people of every nation and every race and every colour whose lives have been touched by this unique genius. Tell your children, aye, and your children’s children about him and tell them just how wonderful is the legacy which he left; they will never have one that is more beautiful. This is what his Immortal Memory means to me and these are the thoughts which I want to share with you; thoughts which I want you to take away with you tonight; And perhaps, occasionally, you will recall them, so that if ever you are asked, as I once was, why do we make a fuss about Robert Burns, you will be able to tell them. Tell them if you will that he did more than any other to preserve the language, the culture, the heritage, aye the very soul of Scotland. And he did it all when Scotland faced the greatest threat to its survival as a nation that it has ever known.
I am always honoured, Chairman, when I am asked to propose the Toast to the Immortal Memory at any Burns Supper. But being invited here to propose the Toast on this magnificent occasion and amongst the largest Burns Suppers in the world, is one of the greatest honours that can ever be conferred on any Scottish speaker. I am very conscious of that honour and I shall always be proud of it. For this is certainly the proudest toast for any Scot to propose and for any Scot to drink, recalling as it does surely the greatest Scot of all time.
Ladies and gentlemen, fill your glasses now if you will. Aye, fill them to the very brim, for this is a toast we shall drink with joy and with pride. Joy at his memory and pride in that wonderful legacy which he left for us.
Join me now if you will. Take your glasses in your hands, and raise them high with me as I give you the greatest, the proudest Scottish toast of them all, the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.
That really says it all. But not quite. If, as the Bible says, those that are last shall be first then it seems appropriate that the last Memory in this collection should be from what many consider to be the first Burns club – Paisley. This club, situated as it now is in the refurbished cottage home of its founder, Robert Tannahill is unique in that it draws its speakers each year from its own members, limited each year to 40. From this quorum an astonishing standard of oration and Burns scholarship has been maintained by 133 Presidents since the initial Memory proposed by Mr McLaren in 1805. In 2001, it was the turn of President T. Lennie Herd, and he was called on by the Croupier, Ken Walton, to rise after what was described as a ‘typically dreich January day’ to propose the toast – To the Memory of Our Immortal Bard.
Mr Lennie Herd’s main worry was that of many Burns speakers. How he could possibly make it different from all that had gone before? Then he had the idea of discussing how other Great Scots viewed the Greatest Scot of them all. This is an edited version of his speech based on this topic given in the Alexander Wilson Suite of the George A. Clark Town Hall, Paisley on 25 January 2001. After a modest preamble, the speaker got on to the theme of his address – Great Scots.
In searching out Great Scots I found… [there was] only one attempt to rank them in order of greatness… This was issued by the publishers of Who’s Who in Scotland after surveying some 1500 of Scotland’s movers and shakers, the great and good, who make up the subscription list and entries… This audience will not be surprised that the runaway winner was our very own Robert Burns but most of the Top Twenty were pre-18th-century figures – people like Wallace, Bruce, Knox, King James VI etc – I’ve looked at the remainder, a mere handful, and found five who achieved international recognition as great men and who were happy to document their love of Burns’s works.
The first of these is Andrew Carnegie, born in Dunfermline in 1835. Aged 12, he emigrated to the USA with his parents. He went on to create a massive business empire in railways, rolling stock and steel production, but his greatness as a man is attributed mostly to the astonishing scale of his philanthropy. He amassed a fortune of $500,000,000 in ‘1900’ money – the richest man in the world some said – before he undertook the massive task of giving it all away… and the very first penny he earned of that fortune was from his primary schoolteacher in Dunfermline for reciting – not reading – all eleven stanzas of Burns’s Man was Made to Mourn before the whole school… There are a number of themes in this poem which might have influenced the young man. [Such as]
Of youth:
O Man, while in they early years
How prodigal of time
Mis-spending all thy precious hours
Thy glorious, youthful prime…
Of brotherhood
And Man, whose heaven-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.
Of joblessness
See yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight
Subject, mean and vile
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil…
Of independence
If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave –
By Nature’s law designed –
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
An early Carnegie biographer wrote:
It is impossible to exaggerate the influence of the national poet on this particular worshipper. Burns remained Carnegie’s favourite – and not just as a poet but as a philosopher, guide and mentor – all his life…’ Carnegie himself wrote, ‘I gloated over the gems of Burns like a Prince of India over his jewels.’ He also said – ‘The day is not far distant when the man who dies leaing behind him millions of available wealth, which was free to administer during life, will pass away unwept, unhonoured and unsung. The man who dies rich, dies disgraced’… Carnegie susequently finanaced the building of almost 3,000 libraries throughout the world, specifying only three main conditions .
1 Use of the libraries must be free of charge
2 The local authority must undertake to maintain book stocks
3 A bust of Burns must be displayed in a prominent position
Interestingly, there was no stipulation that the name of Carnegie should be in the library name.
The next Great Scot in the poll was Sir Walter Scott, born in 1771 in Edinburgh, inventor of the historical novel… [and] said to be an equally significant figure to Burns in renewing the sense of Scottish nationhood. They met in Professor Ferguson’s house in Edinburgh during 1787 and Scott descibed Burns as ‘The boast of Scotland’ and ‘one of the most singular men by whose appearance our age has been distinguished’. He also said, ‘I had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry and would have given the world to know him.’ He wrote of Burns in 1809,
In the society of men of taste… he was eloquent, impressive and instructing. But it was in female circles that his powers of expression displayed their utmost fascination… his conversation lost all its hardness, and often became so energetic and impressive, as to dissolve the whole company into tears. The traits of sensibility which, told of another, would sound like instances of gross affectation, were so native to the soul of this extraordinary man, and burst from him so involuntarily, that they not only obtained full credence as to the genuine feelings of his own heart, but melted into unthought of sympathy all who witnessed them.
In his Journal of 1826, he wrote, ‘I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time and half a century before me. We have however many men of high poetical talent but of that ever-gushing and perpetual fountain of natural water… Long life to thy fame and peace to thy soul, Rob Burns! When I want to express a sentiment I feel strongly, I find a phrase in Shakespeare – or in thee.’ Scott was clearly much impressed by Burns.
A further Great Scot was was James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist, who was born in Edinburgh in 1831… of whom Albert Enstein himself said – ‘His work was the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton’. His biographer and life-long friend, Lewis Campbell, wrote of Maxwell. ‘I well remember with what feeling he once repeated to me the lines of Burns,
The Muse, nae poet ever fand her,
Till by himself he learned to wander,
Adown some trottin’ burn’s meander
An no think lang;
O sweet to stray, and pensive ponder
A heart-felt sang.’
Maxwell was voracious reader as a child and developed a love for poetry which emerged throughoout his academic life. His poetic works were published in an 1882 edition of his biography… and he went on to combine his poetic and academic interests to a point where he presented complex mathematical problems, and their solutions, in verse. But there was no doubt where his poetic inspiration lay.
Gin a body meet a body
Flyin’ through the air.
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?
Ilka impact has its measure,
Ne’er a ane hae I,
Yet a’ the lads they measure me
Or, at least, they try.
Lewis Campbell attributed the genius of Clerk Maxwell in equal part to scientiific industry, philosophic insight and poetic feeling – a feeling engendered by an early love of Burns.
Since Sir Alexander Fleming, the great pioneer of antibiotics and the discoverer of penicillin, was born in Darvel, Ayrshire and educated at Kilmarnock Academy there is no doubt that the works of Burns would feature on the curriculum [but] there is no record of Fleming’s interest in Burns in his earlier life. This is not surprising since he had the reputation of being very dour and taciturn… One colleague said that trying to converse with Fleming was ‘like playing tennis with a man who, when he receives a service, puts the ball in his pocket.’ Yet this same man, in later life, said while lecturing on the theme of ‘Success in Life’,
Burns, who never earned more than fifty pounds a year, has gained immortality while millionaires and rulers of nations are quite forgotten.
It seems rather a pity that some politicians are not disciples of Robert Burns. Some of them have had worldly success… but Burns lives on and they will be forgotten.
Robert Burns has been the man who, perhaps more than any other, has helped to bind Scotsmen together.’
[Finally] to one of my own heroes, that great American Scot and pioneer conservationist , John Muir, who created the idea of the national park and has some two hundred parks, trails, forests and lakes named after him in the United States. He even his his own day in the US calendar. Yet he was in fact a Scotsman born in Dunbar in 1838 and emigrated to Wisconsin at the age of eleven. He became the world’s first ecologist before the word was invented, uniquely combining, for the first time, knowledge of geology, botany and biology. Yet he was steeped in the poems and songs of Robert Burns and throughout his life he acknowledged the effect that Burns’s words and thoughts had on him… Burns in particular gave Muir a profound respect for the democratic intellect and an utter disregard for matters of class, political power or social position… his conservation campaign was pitched against the flood-tide of rampant capitalism in the form of timber, mining, oil and railroad interests. He even persuaded the then President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt to join him for a week’s walking and camping in Yosemite in order to gain protected status for some some of the country’s finest scenery. [Muir] walked thousands of miles through the US wilderness armed only with two books – The New Testament and The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.
In February 1869, he wrote of his visit to the Californian Sierra:
I was singing bits of Highland Mary, oft repeating the lines.
There simmer first unfaulds her robes
And there they longer tarry…
[And] from his journal on 25 January 1906:
It is surely a fine thing to stop now and then in the throng of our everyday tasks to contemplate the works and ways of God’s great men, sent down from time to time to guide and bless mankind. And it is glorious to know that one of the greatest men who appeared in the 18th-century was a Scotsman, Robert Burns. His lessons of divine love and sympathy to humanity which he preached in his poems and sent forth white-hot from his heart have gone ringing and singing around the globe, stirring the heart of every nation and race…
What is the secret of it all? It is his inspiring genius derived from heaven, glowing with all-embracing sympathy. The man of science, the naturalist too often loses sight of the essential oneness of all living things… while the eye of the Poet, the Seer, never closes on the kinship of all God’s creatures, and his heart ever beats in sympathy with great and small alike as ‘earth-born companions and fellow-mortals’ equally dependent on heaven’s love. He extended pity and sympathy even to the deil…
Hear me, Auld Hangie, for a wee
An let poor damned bodies be;
I’m sure sma’ pleasure it cann gie,
E’en to a deil,
To skelp an scaud poor dogs like me
An hear us sqeal…
But fare-ye--weel, Auld Nickie-Ben!
O wad ye tak a thought an men’!
Ye aiblins might – I dinna ken
Still hae a stake:
I’m wae tae think upo’ yon den,
Ev’n for your sake.
Muir continued:
On my lonely walks I often thought how fine it would be to have the company of Burns. Indeed he was always with me for I had him in my heart. On my first long walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico I sang his songs all the way. The whole country and the people, beasts and birds seem to like them.
Throughout these last hundred and ten years thousands of good men have been telling God’s love; but the man who has done most to warm human hearts and bring to light the kinship of the world is Burns, Robert Burns the Scotsman.
It’s impressive that such a high proportion of Scotland’s greatest have been influenced by Burns… and while they might not have him as their sole influence, he was the one influence these five greatest of Great Scots had in common. But what’s more impressive is the probability that, with this high degree of influence at the tip, the iceberg of not-quite-so-great Scots all the way down to ordinary Scots is likely to contain many whose lives have been influenced for the better by Burns’s work. Why just Scots? With more than two thousand editions of his work, in more than fifty languages, produced since his death, this pattern will surely be reflected beyond Scotland.
And there is more than a past tense to this story… with world-wide communications opening up possibilities even Burns could never have imagined… the opportunities for Burns to be a very positive force for Mankind will continue to grow…
Gentlemen – please join me in the toast –
The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.
A well-deserved standing ovation from the company was followed by a rousing chorus of There Was A Lad led with authority by Robbie Menzies.
At 9.28pm the President called for an interval.
And, as we prepare to retire from these pages, we must now let these words from Paisley, and all the fine words that have gone before down the years from a’ the airts, sink in and find their place at the back of our minds, where everything of importance seems to lie. But we are left with a thought.
For all his avowed patriotism, Burns headed no nationalist revival, nor established a Scottish cause yet, on the whole, he is undoubtedly loved by the great majority of the Scottish people. Apart from William Wallace, and to a lesser extent, Robert Bruce, he is their only local hero. Even today, behind the industrialisation, and commercialisation of Burns as an icon, there is a genuinely warm feeling towards the man throughout the country. It is only another aspect of the Burns cult that is unique to Scotland. The nearest one might get to this national feeling for one man was America’s attitude to Mark Twain or Will Rogers, France to Balzac or Victor Hugo, Russia to Pushkin or Tolstoy, India to Tagore, China to Lao Tsu. Japan to Basho. They get near but they don’t quite make the deeply personal relationship Burns has with all Scots. He is still appropriate to the common dream, still apt to our own time, still alive in the aspirations of ordinary people who live on in the belief and hope that the best of their days are coming.
Burns knew he would make his mark, he knew he would be remembered. He was well aware of his own posterity, as most geniuses are. Even in his last frustrated years he still knew the stuff that went in to the life-mix – the love, hate, joy, misery and mirth we all know, one way or another – and he set these feelings and emotions in words and to songs that have lasted imperishably. We can read Burns today and feel something of what he felt then. We become a part of him as he remains from year to year a part of us.
Yes, Robert Burns, you are indeed immortal.
Thanks for the memory.
A last request permit me here
When yearly ye assemble a’,
One round, I ask it with a tear
Which none but craftsmen ever saw!
To him, the Bard, that’s far awa.
(The Farewell)