The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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without which even genius in all its omnipotence is soon reduced to paralytic imbecility, or to manic mischievousness’. Thus Burns’s life becomes a melodrama where he always surrendered to those elements in himself which inevitably took him into increasingly bad company.
The bucks of Edinburgh accomplished, in regard to BURNS, that in which the boors of Ayrshire had failed. After residing some months in Edinburgh, he began to estrange himself … from the society of his graver friends. Too many of his hours were now spent at the tables of persons who delighted to urge conviviality to drunkenness, in the tavern, in the brothel, on the lap of the woman of pleasure. He suffered himself to be surrounded by a race of miserable beings who were proud to tell that they had been in company with BURNS, and had seen Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves. He was not yet irrecoverably lost to temperance and moderation, but he was already almost too much captivated with their wanton rivals, to be ever more won back to a faithful attachment to their more sober charms. He now began to contract something of new arrogance in conversation. Accustomed to be among his favourite associates … the cock of the company, he could scarcely refrain from indulging in similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even in presence of persons who could less patiently endure his presumption.38
Here the suppressed rage of sentimental, genteel Edinburgh wells up. The people’s poet had no right to his creative superiority of language. Hence is evolved the fiction of the unstable genius who falls away from his prudent, real friends and into evil company and, by his sinful depravity, betrays not only his better self but the sanctified common people whom he represents. In Burke’s great shadow, a Scottish conservatism is forged which converts the dialectic of opposing secular political systems to one which, on the conservative side, has divine sanction as embodying the inherent nature of reality. By definition, opposition to this is implicitly evil. Burns is a sinner (he suffers but for the wrong things), with even a hint of anti-Christ. As with Mackenzie’s account, the speed of Burns’s descent accelerates in Dumfries. He has crosses to bear, admittedly, but they are not properly borne:
In the neighbourhood were other gentlemen occasionally addicted, like Burns, to convivial excess, who, while they admired the poet’s talents, and were charmed with his licentious wit, forgot the care of his real interests in the pleasure in which they found in his company, and in the gratification which the plenty and festivity of their tables appeared evidently to afford him. With these gentlemen, while disappointments and disgusts continued to multiply upon him in his present situation, he persisted to associate every day more and more eagerly. His crosses and disappointments drove him every day more into dissipation, and his dissipation tended to enhance whatever was disagreeable and by degrees, into the boon companion of mere excisemen, spend his money lavishly in the ale house, could easily command the company of BURNS. The care of his farm was thus neglected, Waste and losses wholly consumed his little capital.39
As with Edinburgh and The Crochallan Fencibles, the political nature of Burns’s affiliations in Dumfries, is not identified. What Heron is mainly referring to here is that Real Whig bibulous bear of a man, Robert Riddell. As we now know, Burns was the middle-man responsible for Riddell’s political essays being published under the pen-name Cato. What, of course, Heron does not narrate is the story of the collapse of Burns’s political hopes under ferocious governmental pressure but a moral fable whereby, in its terminal stage, the sinner is driven to misanthropic blackness. The peculiar fevered tearing apart of Burns’s body, the agony of night sweats and pain wracked joints, is seen as both a consequence of his heavy drinking where, in fact, his rapidly deteriorating health made his tolerance to alcohol ever less. Or, psychosomatically, his bodily agony is seen as a punishing consequence of his sins. In actual fact, a convincing case has been made that medically what was tearing Burns’s body apart in these last terrible months was brucellosis caught from infected milk, although it is generally thought he died of rheumatic heart disorder.40 That alcoholic fornicator Heron, has a quite different ‘spiritual’ diagnosis:
Nor, amidst these agonising reflections, did he fail to look, with an indignation half invidious, half contemptuous, on those, who, with moral habits not more excellent than his, with powers of intellect far inferior, yet basked in the sunshine of fortune, and were loaded in the wealth and honours of the world, while his follies could not obtain pardon, nor his wants an honourable supply. His wit became, from this time, more gloomy sarcastic; and his conversation and writings began to assume something of a tone misanthropical malignity, by which they had not been before, in any eminent degree, distinguished. But, with all these failings; he was still that exalted mind which had raised above the depression of its original condition, with all the energy of the lion, pawing to set free his hinder limbs from the yet encumbering earth: he still appeared not less than an archangel ruined!41
Whether this ‘archangel’ image is knowingly derived from the genuine addict, S.T. Coleridge, the heroic but defeated lion fits perfectly Heron’s sentimentally disguised assassination. Scottish sentimentalists have a penchant for weeping at the gravesides of their victims. Burns’s long-term friend, William Nicol, had other thoughts concerning the death of his once rampantly alive friend. As he wrote almost immediately after Burns’s death to John Lewars:
… it gives me great pain to see the encomiums passed upon him, both in the Scottish and English news-papers are mingled with the reproaches of the most indelicate and cruel nature. But stupidity and idiocy delight when a great and immortal genius falls; and they pour forth their invidious reflections, without mercy, well knowing that the dead Lion, from whose presence they formerly scudded away with terror, and at whose voice they trembled through every nerve, can devour no more.
The fanatics have now got it into their heads, that dreadful bursts of penitential sorrow issued from the breast of our friend, before he expired. But if I am not much mistaken in relation to his firmness, he would disdain to have his dying moments disturbed with sacerdotal gloom, like sacerdotal howls. I knew he would negotiate with God alone, concerning his immortal interests.42
Without the leonine Bard there to protect his manuscripts, the nature of his precipitous, premature death left his papers in disorder. Given that his death coincided exactly with the peak of the scrutiny, censorship and penal repression of the understandably Francophobic Pitt/Dundas security-state such disorder was heavily amplified by his literary executors, mainly anxiety-driven radicals, hiding, dispersing or, at worst, destroying his dissident writings. Some alleged friends, minor Judases like Robert Ainslie, also wished to retrieve their letters or mangle and censor those of the poet’s that they had in their possession.
In his magisterial editorial work of the 1930s, De Lancey Ferguson calculated that 25% of Burns’s epistolary output was irretrievably lost. The poetry undoubtedly suffered similar depredations. There was the difficulty of identifying texts pseudonymously and anonymously published in radical London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers. It seems certain that a key notebook of late, unpublished poems did go to William Roscoe but vanished without trace in 1816. Further, many of the central political poems (e.g. Address of Beelzebub and the Ode on General Washington’s Birthday) appeared erratically and fortuitously in the course of the nineteenth century. A burning of political and erotic material in the 1850s at Lesmahagow by Mr Greenshields (of the stamps fame) may not have been the last instance of genteel Scotland deciding to save the poet’s reputation from himself.
The two men immediately involved in dealing with the manuscripts were the poet’s Dumfries friend John Syme who enlisted a mutual friend, Alexander Cunningham, to help in dealing with the papers and to make an appeal for funds to aid the truly impoverished family. In Edinburgh, enthusiasm had ‘cooled with the corpse’ and Ayrshire proved equally miserly. For such virulent Scotophobes as Hazlitt and Coleridge, this treatment of the nation’s bard gave further evidence, if evidence were needed, of the treacherous, mean-spiritedness