The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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decided to contain, if necessary by emasculation and vilification, what he perceived to be the threat of the revolutionary impetus of Burns as man and poet. Jeffrey’s arguments derived from Currie but even, in some instances, exceeding the latter’s account are not to be understood in literary terms without understanding the politics that underlay the aesthetics.52 Like all men of his class, the French terror had bitten into his soul. Evidence real or invented of a common people diligently, culturally, passively loyal was everywhere sought. Burns had consequently to be fitted to the procrustean bed of their political anxieties and phobias. Hence this account of the degree to which Burns and the Scottish peasantry exceed all others in educated, hence, conformist virtue:
We shall conclude with two general remarks — the one national, the other critical. The first is, that it is impossible to read the productions of Burns, along with his history, without forming a higher idea of the intelligence, taste, and accomplishments of the peasantry, than most of those in the higher ranks are disposed to entertain … it is evident … that the whole family, and many of their associates, who have never emerged from the native obscurity of their condition, possessed talents, and taste, and intelligence, which are little suspected to lurk in those humble retreats. His epistles to brother poets, in the rank of farmers and shopkeepers in the adjoining villages, — the existence of a book-society and debating club among persons of that description, and many other incidental traits in his sketches of his youthful companions, — all contribute to show, that not only good sense, and enlightened morality, but literature and talents for speculation, are far more generally diffused in society than is generally imagined; and that the delights and the benefits of these generous and humanizing pursuits, are by no means confined to those whom leisure and affluence have courted to their enjoyment. That much of this is peculiar to Scotland, and may be properly referred to our excellent institutions for parochial education, and to the natural sobriety and prudence of our nation, may certainly be allowed … It is pleasing to know, that the sources of rational enjoyment are so widely disseminated; and, in a free country, it is comfortable to think, that so great a proportion of the people is able to appreciate the advantages of its condition, and fit to be relied on in all emergencies where steadiness and intelligence is required.53
As analysis, this is, of course, an inversion of the cultural and political truth. The common readers of the Scottish late eighteenth century, especially key groups like the weavers, were more likely to be reading Tom Paine than anything else. Also, given that Burns’s ‘carnivalesque’ poetry is the quintessence of dissidence against the prevailing church and state, it is not easy to see how it can be squared with the pacific vision of the lower orders. What Jeffrey did was to use his enormous authority to impose a crude binary division on Burns’s poetry so that we have the ‘good’ acceptable poet as opposed to the ‘bad’ rejected one. Among other things this involved him in reinventing the Scottish vernacular tradition with that ‘bletherin’ bitch’s’ unique capacity for reductive, derisory satire, acute psychological insight, and often bitter realism, transformed into a mode suitable for historical and psychological regressive nostalgia. The Kailyard begins here:
We beg leave too, in passing, to observe, that this Scotch is not to be considered as a provincial dialect, the vehicle only of rustic vulgarity and rude local humour. It is the language of a whole country, — long an independent kingdom, and still separate in laws, character and manners. It is by no means peculiar to the vulgar; but is the common speech of the whole nation in early life, — and with many of its most exalted and accomplished individuals throughout their whole existence; and, if it be true that, in later times, it has been, in some measure, laid aside by the more ambitious and aspiring of the present generation, it is still recollected, even by them, as the familiar language of their childhood, and of those who were the earliest objects of their love and veneration. It is connected, in their imagination, not only with the olden times which is uniformly conceived as more pure, lofty and simple than the present, but also with all the soft and bright colours of remembered childhood and domestic affection. All its phrases conjure up images of childhood innocence and sports, and friendships which have no pattern in succeeding years. Add to all this, that it is the language of a great body of poetry, with which almost all Scotchmen are familiar; and, in particular, of a great multitude of songs, written with more tenderness, nature and feeling, than any other lyric compositions that are extant, and we may perhaps be allowed to say, that the Scotch is, in reality, a highly poetical language; and that it is an ignorant, as well as an illiberal prejudice, which would seek to confound it with the barbarous dialects of Yorkshire or Devon.54
Opposed to this, was the dissident Burns who had, as man and poet, to be condemned to outer darkness as quickly as possible. While Currie could grant Burns’s satirical poetry some virtue, Jeffrey could conceive of nothing in it but the malign manifestations of the poet’s personality:
The first is, the undisciplined harshness and acrimony of his invective. The great boast of polished life is the delicacy, and even the generosity of its hostility, —that quality which is still the characteristic as it is that denomination of a gentleman, — that principle which forbids us to attack the defenceless, to strike the fallen, or malign the slain, —and enjoins us, in forging the shafts of satire, to increase the polish exactly as we add to their keenness or their weight … His ingenious and amiable biographer has spoken repeatedly in praise of his talents for satire, —we think, with a most unhappy partiality. His epigrams and lampoons appear to us, one and all, unworthy of him; —offensive from their extreme coarseness and violence, —and contemptible from their want of wit or brilliancy. They seem to have been written, not out of playful malice or virtuous indignation, but out of fierce and ungovernable anger. His whole raillery consists in railing; and his satirical vein displays itself chiefly in calling names and in swearing.55
In fact Jeffrey’s criticism of Burns is overwhelmingly ad hominem. The poet is seen as the great transgressor in terms of his multiple morbid and impolite discontents. He is a threat, not least a sexual threat (‘his complimentary effusions to ladies of the higher rank, is forever straining them to the bosom of her impetuous votary’) to the desired, indeed, necessary order of things. Burns, in fact, is corrupted by the Romantic, revolutionary spirit of the age with its absolute moral dispensation for the self-anointed man of genius:
But the leading vice in Burns’s character, and the cardinal deformity of all his productions, was his contempt or affectation of contempt for prudence, decency and regularity; and his admiration of thoughtlessness, oddity and vehement sensibility; his belief, in short, in the dispensing power of genius and social feeling, in all matters of morality and common sense. This is the very slang of the worst German plays, and the lowest of our out of town-made novels; nor can anything be more lamentable, than that it should have found a patron in such a man as Burns, and communicated to a great part of his productions a character of immortality, at once contemptible and hateful.56
Granted the applicability of contempt and hate for his poetry, Jeffrey returns to the fallible, fallacious nature of a man who, having forgotten the ordinary duties of life, loses himself in various forms of self-absorbed licentiousness:
It requires no habit of deep thinking, nor anything more, indeed, than the information of an honest heart, to perceive that it is cruel and base to spend in vain superfluities, that money which belongs of right to the pale industrious tradesman and his famishing infants; or that it is a vile prostitution of language, to talk of that man’s generosity or goodness of heart, who sits raving about friendship and philanthropy in a tavern, while his wife’s heart is breaking at her cheerless fireside, and his children pining in solitary poverty.57
This, of course, is derived from the language of The Anti-Jacobin of the previous decade with its insistent connection of exaggerated moral fallibility, especially sexual, with political anarchy. (The Anti-Jacobin