The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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thy Burns dead?
And shall he die unwept, and sink to earth
‘Without the meed of one melodious tear’?
Thy Burns, and Nature’s own beloved bard,
Who to the ‘Illustrious of his native Land
So properly did look for patronage’
Ghost of Macenas! Hide thy blushing face!
They snatched him from the sickle and the plough—
To gauge ale-firkins.
To be fair to the committee of executors set up in Dumfries, the situation was not only complex but carried real danger with it. Also given the political spirit of the age, much of the material could not be made public far less profitably so. As Ian Hamilton has written:
The Dumfries executors’ committee had already done some preliminary sifting and, fearing piracies, had advertised for any Burns material that was in private hands. The mass of the papers they found at the poet’s house was in ‘utter confusion’ but it took no more than a glance to determine that much of the collection ought probably to be destroyed: ‘viz. Such as may touch on the most private and delicate matters relative to female individuals’. When, in August, a bonfire was arranged, Syme was more hesitant: ‘Avaunt the sacrilege of destroying them and shutting them forever from the light: But on the other hand, can we bring them into the light?’ On this occasion, only a few ‘unimportant’ notes and cards were burnt.43
As well as sexually intimate indiscretions, went political ones. Such were safer out of Scotland given that, comparatively, it was a more politically controlled environment than England.
Establishment Scots were even more zealous than their English masters in hunting down treason in a more demographically controlled environment. The radical English connection that Burns most prided himself on, indeed his intention had been to visit him, was William Roscoe of Liverpool. Roscoe, the centre of a vast web of radical connections was poet, historian and financier. His friend was a Scottish doctor and part-time scholar, Dr James Currie. Currie’s initial response to receiving the papers is replete with the personal and textual terrible harm of which he was to be both initiator and chief agent:
My dear Syme: Your letter of the 6th January reached me on the 12th, and along with it came the remains of poor Burns. I viewed the large and shapeless mass with astonishment! Instead of finding … a selection of his papers, with such annotations as might clear up any obscurities … I received the complete sweepings of his drawers and of his desk … even to the copy book on which his little boy had been practising writing. No one had given these papers a perusal, or even an inspection … the manuscripts of a man of genius … were sent, with all their sins on their head, to meet the eye of an entire stranger.44
Why Currie, a man of allegedly radical political persuasion quite at odds with Heron’s toadying Toryism was, indeed, complicit with Heron’s account of Burns will probably remain not fully explicable. The most generous explanation is that Currie, given the spirit of the times, produced a work designed to sell to a conformist, bourgeois public in order to gain as much money as possible for the bereft family. The good doctor, however, went well beyond cosmetic surgery. Himself plagued by alcoholic tendencies, he was working in 1797 on a pseudo scientific paper ‘Observations on the Nature of Fever and on the Effects of Opium, Alcohol and Inanition’. Burns’s later letters, replete with confessions of savagely black depressions and not a few severe hangovers were grist to Currie’s diagnostic mill. Worse, one addiction led to another:
His temper now became more irritable and gloomy, he fled from himself into society, often of the lowest kind. And in such company that part of the convivial scene, in which wine increases sensibly and excites benevolence, was hurried over, to reach the succeeding part, over which uncontrolled passion generally presided. He who suffers from pollution of inebriation, how shall he escape other pollution? But let us refrain from the mention of errors over which delicacy and humanity draw the veil.45
As Ian Hamilton has remarked: ‘This then was the autopsy report: alcoholic poisoning plus maybe a touch of venereal disease had killed off Scotland’s greatest poet’. Nor was Currie finished with delivering his patient into the hands of his enemies. Currie enunciated the notion that the poet, of his very nature, was susceptible to addiction. Too sensitive, the poet would always find the world on the margin of the tolerable. Again Burns’s letters supplied Currie with significant evidence for this point of view. For example, this brilliant letter of August 1790 on the essential incompatibility of the poet and the world:
It is often a reverie of mine, when I am disposed to be melancholy, the characters and fates of the Rhyming tribe. There is not among all the Martyrologies that were ever penned, so rueful a narrative as Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. In the comparative view of Wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind: give him a stronger imagination and more delicate sensibility, which will ever between them engender a more ungovernable set of Passions, than the usual lot of man: implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as, arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper (sic) to his haunt by the chirping song, watching the frisks of little minnows in the sunny pool, or haunting after the intrigues of wanton butterflies —in short, send him adrift after some wayward pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of Lucre; yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that only Lucre can bestow; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes, by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity; and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a Poet.
Since Currie edited this letter, there is little wonder about from where his principal biographical evidence comes. Further, he had used for his template that most indulgent of defences of the libertine poet, Dr Johnson’s Life of Savage. Steeped in Burns’s confessional letters, it was not difficult for Currie to articulate the poet’s frequent despairing self-diagnosis of his own tumultuous mood swings and lack of volition. Certainly from Ellisland onwards, the poet became increasingly prone to depression. As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop in June 1789:
Will you take the effusions, the miserable effusions, of low spirits, just as they flow from their bitter spring? I know not of any particular cause for this worst of all my foes besetting me; but for some time my soul has been beclouded with a thickening atmosphere of evil imaginations and gloomy presages.
All trouble, therefore, is located by Currie within Burns; he is an endogenous depressive rather than a reactive one. Yet, he had so much to react against. Ellisland was the last in an unbroken line of fiscal farm traps. After Edinburgh he felt profoundly deprived of creative company. His body was signalling premature dissolution accelerated by the physical and mental grind of his Excise duties. Also to someone so politically attuned he must have had an overbearing awareness of the darkening political scene as a wheel on which his personal and public hopes were to be brutally broken. Currie, setting the programme for all of nineteenth-century biographers and, indeed, most twentieth-century ones, paid no real attention to these grim external forces. Burns was for Currie destructively committed to his irrational, even fallen, self:
His understanding was equal to the other powers of his mind, and his deliberate opinions were singularly candid and just; but like other men of great and irregular genius, the opinions which he delivered in conversation were often the offspring of temporary feelings, and widely different from the calm decisions of his judgement. This was not merely true respecting the character of others, but in regard to some of the most important points of human speculation.46
From this Currie deduced a Burnsian dialectic ‘in which virtue and passion had been at perpetual variance’. Fuelled by alcohol, passion had achieved overwhelming, self-destructive victory. Inevitably, intentionally this diagnosis destroys