The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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radicals had a kind of millennial vision of history as an American initiated domino game of collapsing crowns. For a time the reform of a particularly undemocratic Scotland seemed a distinct possibility. The bumpers, bawdy songs and personal badinage which Burns enlisted for with the Fencibles in their howff in Anchor Close was part of what must have seemed the initial stages of an ill-disguised victory celebration. The Fencibles were of course typically a heavy drinking culture. It was not, however, the most erotically inflamed of Scotland’s men’s clubs. Public masturbation was not on the agenda. Certainly, as camouflage, it was this side of the club’s activities to which Burns confessed. He did not always publicly make the connection between libidinal energy and radical politics. Thus he wrote to Mrs Dunlop:
You may guess that the convivial hours of men have their mysteries of wit and mirth, and I hold it a piece of contemptible baseness to detail the sallies of thoughtless merriment, or the orgies of accidental intoxication to the ear of cool sobriety or female delicacy.
Or, as he wrote in conclusion to a brilliant extended parody of The Revelation of St John the Divine in a letter to William Chalmers in December, 1786, that he had never seen ‘as many wild beasts as I have seen since I came to Edinburgh.’ Burns’s own stressing of the social wildness of the Fencibles may have been a deliberate camouflage for the actual reality of their political beliefs and activities. Intellectually, they were an astonishing bunch. William Smellie, commissioned as ‘Hangman’, not only edited the first Encyclopaedia Britannica but had written much of it. Of all Burns’s lost letters, those to Smellie would possibly have been of the most profound political importance. They were destroyed by Smellie’s biographer, Robert Kerr, with an insouciance that we chillingly recognise as seminal for the manner in which Burns’s texts were to be treated not only in the hyper-respectable nineteenth century: ‘Many letters of Burns to Mr. Smellie which remained being totally unfit for publication, and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable people still in life, have been burnt.’ Smellie was also the author of a Philosophy of Natural History which postulated that the most highly refined, developed human consciousness was incompatible with the world. James ‘Balloon’ Tytler was an even more extraordinary polymath. As Burns wrote in November 1788 to Mrs Dunlop:
Those marked T, are the work of an obscure, tippling but extraordinary body of the name of Tytler: a mortal, who though he drudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a sky-lighted hat, & knee buckles as unlike as George-by-the-grace-of-God, & Solomon-the-son-of-David, yet that same unknown drunken Mortal is author and compiler of three-fourths of Elliot’s pompous Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
Poet, song-writer, polymath, Scotland’s first balloonist and eventually so politically active that he fled Scotland in 1793 to Belfast and then volunteered to return to Scotland to promote insurrection:
… he was to traverse Scotland as a Highland Piper. He learned the tongue and was to have gone from town to town to organise a General Insurrection, from there to the South of Ireland (Cork), hence to Paris to enlist the French.25
To Tytler’s extreme irritation, this mission did not take place. Like many others of his creed and generation, his journey was to be westwards to American safety. An almost equally irascible, restless spirit was Dr Gilbert Stuart who had so upset genteel Edinburgh with his writings in Smellie’s Edinburgh Magazine and Review that he had to seek employment in London thus initiating the long tradition of Scots radicals forced South. Obviously extremely important in the Fencibles was the legal profession. Of a considerable number of lawyers, the most prominent was Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and brother of the even greater radical lawyer Thomas. It was Henry Erskine’s fall at the hands of the Robert Dundas faction in the election for Dean of Faculty in 1795 that Burns turned into, in January 1796, a bitterly witty song about the loss of the men of merit and worth to the reactionary loyalists.
In your heretic sins may live and die,
Ye heretic Eight and thirty
But accept, ye Sublime Majority,
My congratulations hearty.
With your Honors and a certain King,
In your servants this is striking—
The more incapacity they bring,
The more they’re to your liking.
This, then, was the intimate company Burns was keeping. Nor did he only wholly share their politics but was an active participant not only in terms of his contributions to the radical press, but in actually attempting to send carronades, captured from the smuggling brig Rosamund as part of his excise duties, to the French revolutionaries. It is little wonder that even during his first Edinburgh visit his relationships with genteel, conformist, pro-Hanoverian society were strained. How strained we can see, for example, in the fury of his riposte to Mrs McLehose when a Mrs Stewart had checked him over his seditious anti-Hanoverian lines on the Stirling window:
I have almost given up the excise idea —I have just been now to wait on a great person, Miss N—’s friend, Mrs. Stewart. — Why will great people not only deafen us with the din of their equipage, and dazzle us with their fastidious pomp, but they must also be so very dictatorially wise? I have been questioned like a child about my matters, and blamed and schooled for my Inscription on Stirling window. Come, Clarinda— ‘Come, curse me Jacob; come, defy me Israel!’
Yet he needed his enemy’s patronage. He did join the Excise. Blair and Mackenzie, with their mixture of lachrymose and evangelical values, expressed a faith not so much of a suffering Christ as a quiescently accepting Christ as exemplar to a politically similarly quiescent, hence an apolitical, common people. As Blake wrote: ‘Pity would be no more, if we did not make someone poor.’ They were, however, able to open doors to publishing connections and offer mainly ill-received poetic advice. In the name of rules and decency, they were always trying to get Burns to tidy up his, to them, unruly act. This had almost no effect other than to irritate the Bard. As he wrote to Greenfield:
… I stumbled on two Songs which I here enclose you as a kind of curiosity to a Professor of the Belle lettres de la Nature: which allow me to say, I look upon as an additional merit of yours: a kind of bye Professorship, not always to be found among the systematic Fathers and Brothers of scientific Criticism.
These tensions were also not confined to matters aesthetic and linguistic. Unlike Heathcliff, Burns was not the brute, sub-literate, threat, that dark erotic stranger, which haunted the bourgeois imagination of the period. They were faced with someone hyper-literate, fecundly allusive to a degree far beyond their powers in canonical literary and biblical tradition, who could not only talk their pants off but, it was feared, those of their wives and daughters too. Command of language was directly related to a fixed hierarchical social order; Burns threatened social anarchy by the very nature of his poetic, rhetorical potency. It offered them some security to classify him as a class-bound ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ rather than great poet.
REPUTATION: CRITICS, BIOGRAPHERS AND BOWDLERISERS Even more than Henry Dundas, Henry Mackenzie was probably the most sustained, malign influence on Burns’s reputation. He may initially have genuinely wanted to help the poet. He also almost certainly sensed a bandwagon that his self-importance would not allow him not to join. As Donald Low has remarked, however, the nature of Mackenzie’s praise was to be in the long term confining and destructive:
… his was a disastrously inaccurate essay in criticism which gave rise to endless distortion of Burns’s poetry. The whole tendency of Mackenzie’s encomium was to emasculate Poems. He paid lip-service to humour and satire, but found them too embarrassing to discuss: introduced a comparison with Shakespeare, only to withdraw it at once: repeatedly shrank from Burns’s characteristic self-expression and fell back on general-isations. He apologised for the language in which the poet did his best work, and concentrated on the poems of sentiment in English. This was to sacrifice truth, and therefore also Burns’s long-term interests as a poet, for instant acclaim.26