The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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The monuments and traces of antiquity, scattered in abun-dance over that region, led me unavoidably to compare what we know or guess of those remote times with certain aspects of modern society, and with calamities, principally those consequent upon war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject.63
Jeffrey’s example opened the floodgates to a tide of abuse, denigration, innuendo which constantly made the connection between licentious character flaws and radical politics. In a gallantly unsuccessful attempt to stop this, an Edinburgh lawyer, Alexander Peterkin, brought out in 1815 A Review of the Life of Robert Burns, and of Various Criticisms of his Character and Writings. As well as mounting a lucid empirical case for the defence, he enlisted Gilbert Burns, James Gray of the Edinburgh High School, Alexander Findlater of the Excise and George Thomson, song publisher, to testify to Burns’s actual practices as family man and gauger. In a controlled rage against what he considered a simian caricature of the poet, derived from ‘the drivelling fanaticism’ of right-wing politics, Peterkin wrote:
We hold the adversaries of Burns to be aggressors; misguided, we are inclined to think, and ready, we trust, in charity, to renounce their errors on satisfactory proof, that they have been misinformed, or have misconstrued the conduct and writing of Burns. But by their public and voluntary assertions and reflections of an injurious tendency, they have, successively, thrown down the gauntlet to every Scotchman who takes an interest in the honour of his country, of its literature, and of human nature … from the system of reitered critical preaching, which has become fashionable in all the recent publications about Burns … remaining uncontradicted and unexposed, we are afraid that future biographers, might be misled by longer silence, and adopt declamatory ravings as genuine admitted facts. The most celebrated literary journal of which Britain can boast, and of which, as Scotchmen, we are proud, began the cry; all the would-be moralists in newspapers, magazines, and reviews, have taken it up, and have repeated unauthenticated stories as grave truths: at length these have found a resting-place in large and lasting volumes.64
Given the quantity and quality of the vilification of Burns as documented in Peterkin (not least Walter Scott’s anonymous, execrable account in The Quarterly Review), Burns might have vanished from view perhaps beyond resurrection. What his critics also offered him, moreover, was celebrity on their terms. The bibulous, gustatory junketings which became ritualised in the Burns Supper began in the first decade of the nineteenth century with Jeffrey presiding. Burns was thus both for a period simultaneously radical scapegoat and sentimental national icon. To misquote Edwin Muir, he was the real Bard of a false nation. As the political anxieties calmed, the sentimental Burns of corrupt national imagining could occupy centre stage. He was a multi-purpose deity. The amnesia purging of Burns’s radical politics, meant the nation could forget the actual events of the 1790s when not only Burns, but a generation of enlightened Scottish writers, political idealists and academics were driven into internal psychological exile or exile in England, France, Australia and America.
The subsequent Victorian Burns cult was bizarrely multicausal.65 The anglophobic Professor John Wilson (Christopher North) harangued a crowd of 40,000 at the opening of the Burns mausoleum. The body was exhumed three times in the nineteenth century partly to seek phrenological confirmation of his genius. As with ‘Ossian’ MacPherson and John Home, Burns was seen as a titanic national poet fit to face down Shakespeare. This compensatory cultural account, partly derived from Scotland’s lack of real political power, quite missed the point that Burns had much more of a creative relationship with Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley and the still disgraced Byron, quite absent from his relationship to his bourgeois Scottish apostles. Carlyle, that anti-democratic antithesis of everything the reforming humanism of the Enlightenment stood for, discovered in Burns a Scottish peasant who, like himself, had made good. Indeed, forgetting the bitter marginalised reality of Burns’s premature death, Scotland saw in him the archetype of the ‘lad o’ pairts’, the man whose sheer talent brings him to the top. Also, a society locked into the squalid suffering and mortality of the horrors of urban industrialization read Burns as a pseudo-pastoral antidote to everyday reality. As Richard J. Finlay has cogently put it:
The important point to emphasise here is that … for most of the nineteenth century his work was used to give credence to laissez-faire liberalism. Burnsian notions of freedom and liberty and the dignity of mankind were ideally suited to Scottish middle-class self-perception and the erection of statues in his honour throughout the country reinforced the belief that talent was God-given and not the preserve of noble birth. The achievement of Burns’s rise from lowly birth was something that all Scots could aspire to emulate … Burns could be used to promote notions that the dignity of hard work, the perseverance of toil and calm stoicism in the face of adversity were values that were intrinsic to Scottish society.
Burns was praised for inculcating family values. According to Rosebery, Burns ‘dwells repeatedly on the primary sacredness of the home and the family, the responsibility of fatherhood and marriage’. The vision of family life in ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ was an antidote to the widespread unease about moral degeneracy in the sprawling slums of urban Scotland. He was likewise praised for making respectable the old Scottish songs which contained language that was crude and vulgar and unfit for genteel company. Burns transformed the baseness of Scottish society into something sublime.66
Or as Lord Rosebery put it in his conception of an entirely apolitical poet:
A Man’s A Man for A’ That is not politics — it is the assertion of the rights of humanity in a sense far wider than politics. It erects all mankind; it is the character of self-respect … it cannot be narrowed into politics. Burns’s politics are indeed nothing but the occasional overflow of his human sympathy into past history and current events.
Hollow rhetorical misrepresentation disguised as eulogy, Rosebery’s straw man cum icon is hoisted free of the contextual political events and ideals that helped forge the democratic anthem. Distortion and abuse of the dead artist’s memory is the theme of Patrick Kavanagh’s marvellous poem A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue, dealing with the small minded betrayals and corruptions of Irish society to its artists. It catches better than anything what was done to Burns during the nineteenth century:
They put a wreath upon the dead
For the dead will wear the cap of any racket,
The corpse will not put his elbows through his jacket
Or contradict the words some liar has said.
The corpse can be fitted out to deceive—
Fake thoughts, fake love, fake ideal,
And rogues can sell its guaranteed appeal,
Guaranteed to work and never come alive.
The poet would not stay poetical
And his humility was far from being pliable,
Voluptuary tomorrow, today ascetical,
His morning gentleness was the evening’s rage.
But here we give you death, the old reliable
Whose white blood cannot blot the respectable page.67
As well as the particularly Scottish virulent, conformist forces controlling the response to both Burns’s reputation and writings, Burns was also a victim, as most eighteenth-century writers of substance, of a pronounced shift of the boundary of sexual accept-ability in nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Gulliver’s Travels is expurgated and on such as Smollett and Sterne the library key is firmly turned. Writing about Mozart, in several respects Burns’s kindred spirit, Saul Bellow noted that:
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