The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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conformist critical hack can and, indeed, did have the prescriptive power to censor any of Burns’s poetry not conforming to that respectability which was the first line of defence of conservative political correctness. The political poet becomes a malcontented unstable neurotic, not an incisive diagnostician of manifest ills in the body politic.
There is some evidence, both contextual and textual, that Currie politically knew very well what he was up to. De Quincey had always loathed the Liverpool coterie to which Currie belonged to as a group of narcissistic radicals who were, particularly in the case of Burns, deeply condescending, at best, to the alleged object of their shallow affections. He particularly hated Currie as the physician who was ‘unable to heal himself’. His 1801 account of this group is charged with shocked outrage at the gross indifference of these mendacious friends of the people who were deaf to the pain that he, as a Tory, could feel all too clearly:
I had for ever ringing in my ears, during that summer of 1801, those groans that ascended to heaven from his [Burns’s] over-burthened heart those harrowing words, ‘To give him leave to toil’, which record almost as a reproach to the ordinances of God and I felt that upon him, amongst all the children of labour, the primal curse had fallen heaviest and sunk deepest. Feelings such as these I had the courage to express; a personal compliment, or so, I might now and then hear; but all were against me on the matter. Dr Currie said ‘Poor Burns! Such notions had been his ruin’; Mr Sheperd continued to draw on the subject some scoff or groan at Mr Pitt and the Excise … Mr Clarke proposed that I should write a Greek inscription for a cenotaph which he was to erect in his garden to the memory of Burns; and so passed away the solitary protestation on behalf of Burns’s jacobinism, together with the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of that same Verton, in that same summer of 1801 … three men who remain at the most of all who in these convivial meetings held it right to look down upon Burns as one whose spirit was rebellious overmuch against the institutions of man, and jacobinal in a sense which ‘men of property’ and master manufacturers will never brook, albeit democrats by profession.47
With friends like these, Burns’s reputation hardly needed the legion of newspaper and magazine owning enemies whose overt Toryism gave them reason to destroy it. How deep Currie’s radicalism had ever been is impossible to judge. Better men than he had become apostates to the radical cause.48 It is hard not to believe that he knew what he was doing as he linked, albeit obliquely, Burns’s alleged degeneration with political turpitude. He also had that classic bad doctor’s ability to confuse mental or moral symptoms with physical ones:
As the strength of the body decays, the volition fails; in proportion as the sensations are soothing and gratified, the sensibility increases; and morbid sensibility is the parent of indolence, because, while it impairs the regulating power of the mind, it exaggerates all the obstacles to exertion. Activity, perseverance, and self-command, and the great purposes of utility, patriotism, or of honourable ambition, which had occupied the imagination, die away in fruitless resolutions, or in feeble efforts.49
It is little wonder that Coleridge, irretrievably addicted to lauda-num, called Currie’s book ‘a masterly specimen of philosophical biography’. He was so symptomatic of Currie’s account that he must have felt as if struck by a cross-bow bolt from the blue. It is, however, most certainly not Burns. Further, the allusion to patriotism gives Currie’s game away. It is an unequivocal linking of Burns with insurrectionary, hence definably degenerate, forces.
Not content, however, with rendering Burns’s personality a suitable case for mistreatment, Currie followed exactly Heron’s critical criteria for sifting the acceptable, sentimental chaff from the troublesome, satirical wheat. The literary analysis is an attack on the poetry as effective as the wholly related attacks on the Bard’s character. Behind both psychological and aesthetic repudiation lie, of course, the real but unnamed political reasons. Burns’s employment of the vernacular was the primary, obvious place of attack:
The greater part of his earlier poems are written in the dialect of his country, which is obscure, if not unintelligible to Englishmen, and which though adheres more or less to the speech of almost every Scotsman, all the polite and ambitious are now endeavouring to banish from their tongues as well as their writings. The use of it in composition naturally therefore calls up ideas of vulgarity to the mind. These singularities are increased by the character of the poet, who delights to express himself with a simplicity that approaches to nakedness, and with an unmeasured energy that often alarms delicacy, and sometimes offends taste. Hence in approaching him, the first impression is perhaps repulsive: there is an air of coarseness about him which is with difficulty reconciled with our established notions of poetical excellence.50
Along with such fundamental creative castration went covert politically motivated readings of these two satirical masterpieces with which Burns deliberately opened the Kilmarnock edition. That wickedly irreverent dialogue, The Twa Dogs, is defined, absurdly, as Burns’s plan ‘to inculcate a lesson of contentment on the lower classes of society by showing that their superiors are neither much better nor happier than themselves.’ The quite extraordinary postscript to The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer with its terrible national images of the Highland soldier slaughtered in the service of an alien Hanoverian cause and ‘Mother Scotland’ as an incontinent crone, are described as purely humorous. Currie, in fact, set a tactical fashion for conservative criticism of Burns to laugh, damagingly, in the wrong places. Needless to say, one poem floats free of the clarty waters occupied by the bulk of the achievement:
… the representation of these humble cottagers forming a wider circle round their hearth and uniting in the worship of God, is a picture most affecting of any which the rural muse has ever presented to the view. Burns was admirably adapted to this delineation.… The Cotter’s Saturday Night is tender and moral, it is solemn and devotional, and rises at length into a strain of grandeur and sublimity which modern poetry has not surpassed. The noble sentiments of patriotism with which it concludes correspond with the rest of the poem. In no age or country have the pastoral muses breathed such elevated accents, if the ‘Messiah’ of Pope be excepted, which is indeed a pastoral in form only. It is to be regretted that Burns did not employ his genius on other subjects of the same nature which the manners and customs of Scottish peasantry would have amply supplied.51
Praise, indeed, but praise granted at the price of near complete distortion. Currie’s misreading of the last two stanzas of the poem apart, this post-Burkean account of a peasant world of piety, humility and hence, hierarchical loyalty is used as the criterion by which the rest of Burns’s poetry is not only judged but condemned.
In his 1808 review of Cromek’s Reliques in The Edinburgh Review Jeffrey also expresses inordinate enthusiasm for this, indeed, exceptional poem: ‘The exquisite description of The Cotter’s Saturday Night affords, perhaps, the finest example of this sort of pathetic. Its whole beauty cannot indeed be discerned but by those whom experience has enabled to judge of the admirable fidelity and completeness of the picture.’ This review of Jeffrey’s is absolutely seminal to an understanding of the image of Burns and his poetry which was to dominate the nineteenth century and, indeed, elements of it still persist into the twenty-first. As well as Jeffrey’s legally fine-honed intellect he was from 1802 to 1829 the editor of The Edinburgh Review. This magazine having freed itself from reviewing as a mere vehicle for the book trade was not only independent but, in terms of payment to contributors, unprecedently wealthy. Ironically, it was a Whig magazine, which was on political issues almost uniformly reformative. Hence its support of Catholic emancipation and its attacks on the sale of army commissions, flogging in the British Navy and Army and the Test and Corporations Act. So exceptional were its fiscal and intellectual powers that, with the subsequent Tory Blackwood’s, it unprecedently, if temporarily, moved the locus of British critical intelligence from London to Edinburgh. It was from