The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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as described by Freud refer to a temporary shift of ‘moral’ emphasis. Students of English literature are familiar with this move from the open sensuality of Fielding and Laurence Sterne to Victorian prudery (‘propriety’) in Dickens or Trollope. Rousseau’s Confessions or Diderot’s Les Bijoux Indiscrets confirm this … Seventy years ago, my Russian immigrant uncles, aunts, and cousins were still speaking freely and colourfully about bodily functions and things sexual — ‘country matters’, as Shakespeare called them in Hamlet. (Such lewd double entendres are common in his plays, specialists in Tudor and Stuart literature have collected them.) Bawdry has a long pedigree. Conversation in the courts of Elizabeth and James I was not what we came later to call ‘respectable’.68
Of course, Eros may have been driven underground in the Victorian world. He could not be obliterated. Prostitution and pornography flourished and Burns himself became a set text for the elbow-nudging male smoking room.
It is, however, this sort of respectability that, in part, conditions Matthew Arnold’s influential view of Burns. Despite his virtuous courage in opposing the crass, material philistine Victorian world, Arnold’s ethnic prescriptions for literature were not happy ones. Having designated, indeed invented, Celtic literature as fey and ethereal, he saw in Burns’s Scottish writing, the very opposite of this, as often nauseatingly tangible. Thus he wrote in November, 1879:
I have been reading Chaucer a great deal, the early French poets a great deal, and Burns a great deal. Burns is a beast with splendid gleams, and the medium in which he lived, Scotch peasants, Scotch Presbyterianism, and Scotch drink, is repulsive. Chaucer on the other hand pleases me more and more, and his medium is infinitely superior.69
This epistolary remark, he fleshed out in The Study of Poetry:
We English turn naturally, in Burns, to the poems in our own language, because we can read them easily; but in real poems we have not the real Burns.
The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems. Let us say that much of his poetry, a poetry dealing perpetually with Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a Scotchman’s estimate is apt to be personal. A Scotchman is used to this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners; he has a tenderness for it; he meets its poet half way. In this tender mood he reads pieces like the ‘Holy Fair’ or ‘Halloween’. But this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against a poet and not for him, when it is not a partial countryman who reads him; for in itself it is not a beautiful world, and no one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beautiful world. Burns’s world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world; even the world of his ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is not a beautiful world. No doubt a poet’s criticism of life may have such truth or power that it triumphs over its world and delights us.70
In one respect Arnold simply represents the consequences of the insistent Scottish claims for exclusive possession of Burns. Arnold, with a vengeance, locates him in a brutally circumscribed ethnic world. In another respect, Arnold is quite wildly wrong. He assumes Burns as a naïve realist, almost a poetic pig in clover in a Scottish sty, whereas Burns was a political satirist of the very elements, especially Hebraic spiritual and material hypocrisy, which Arnold himself attacks. Worse, he disconnects Burns, partly linguistically, from the radical British fraternity of the 1790s to which he belongs. Burns’s accent and examples are Scottish; his themes and insights are comparable to Blake. Despite Edward Dowden’s The French Revolution and English Literature (1897) which reintegrates Burns with his English peers, Arnold’s authority caused damage so severe that elements of it still exist. It may indeed have influenced the even more authoritative figure of T.S. Eliot, that provincial American who so yearned for Arnoldian metropolitan status, so that he saw in Burns the last flare-up of a subsequently redundant Scottish tradition, rather than a poet who used that tradition to write some of the greatest radical poetry of the late eighteenth century. Given of course, Eliot’s monarchical, High Anglican tendencies, it was not in his interest to see in the Scottish literary tradition such virile, dissident flexibility.71
By the latter part of the nineteenth century and with the embryonic stirring of Modernism, the roots of the later self-defined Scottish Renaissance Movement, a crucial problem for Scottish creative writers was whether Burns could be exhumed as a creative force from under the growing mountains of verbiage, false history and commercial artefacts. The initial movement in this direction came from R.L. Stevenson with his acutely attuned antennae both to contemporary world literature and to the Scottish tradition. Along with that went a peculiar, even psychic, identification with Robert Fergusson and associated fellow-feeling with Burns. He also grasped the degree to which Burns was indebted to Fergusson. Hence his haunted, near death retrospective of Edinburgh’s ‘three Robins’:
Burns alone has been just to his promise: follow Burns, he knew best, he knew whence he drew fire — from the poor, white-faced, drunken, vicious boy that raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse. Surely there is more to be gleaned about Fergusson, and surely it is high time the task was set about … We are three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre this last century. Well the one is the world’s, he did it, he came off, he is for ever: but I and the other—ah! What bonds we have—born in the same city: both sickly, both pestered one nearly to madness, one to the madhouse with a damnatory creed … and the old Robin, who was before Burns and the flood, died in his acute, painful youth and left the models of the great things that were to come … you will never know, nor will any man, how deep this feeling is; I believe Fergusson lives in me.72
Despite the genuine intensity of this feeling, Stevenson felt the task of resurrection of Fergusson and Burns beyond him. The Calvinist and genteel claustrophobia of Edinburgh which he believed had destroyed his namesake was something, with Joycean acumen, from which he fled into ever geographically further exile. Before doing so, however, he diagnosed in his earliest journalistic writings the remarkably over-inflated literary culture that infected Victorian Scotland in general and Burns’s false reputation in particular. Rather than Arnold’s vision of the Scots retreating north of the Tweed, clutching to their bosoms their shibboleth poet, Stevenson, with much more literary sociological realism, saw the Scots as enormously successful commercial exporters and exploiters of a pseudo-national literary tradition. While the more mature Stevenson would not have adhered to these disparaging remarks about Burns’s vernacular poetry, his sense of national literary narcissism did not abate:
It is somewhat too much the fashion to pat Scotch literature on the back. Inhabitants of South Britain are pleased to commend verses, which, short of a miraculous gift of tongues, it is morally impossible they should comprehend. It may interest these persons to learn that Burns wrote a most difficult and crude patois … there are not so very many people alive in Scotland who could read his works without a furtive reference to the margin … any Englishman need not be ashamed to confess he can make nothing out of the vernacular poems except a raucous gibberish — which is the honest belief of the present reviewer, is about the measure of his achievement. It is partly to this that we must attribute the exaggerated favour of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, by no means one of his best poems, but one of the most easily understood …
But even the least intelligent condescension of the South Briton is better than the hysterical praise with which Mr Grant Wilson bedaubs his native literature … Wilson thinks that Burns spoke ‘with too much extravagance’ when he called The Gentle Shepherd ‘the most glorious poem ever written’ … this barbarous gallimaufry or hotch-potch of indiscriminate laudation does not come fairly to the boil, until we hear that Falconer’s ‘Shipwreck’ placed its author ‘in the front rank of Scottish poets’ … Was there ever such an irreverent hurly-burly of names, such a profane morris-dance of great men and little poetasters? Whaur’s