The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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definably the pure, uncompromised revolutionary spirit. This is hardly borne out by either history or biography. Was the mine-owning self-dramatising aristocrat ever under the cosh in the way Burns was? Is individual nihilism of the Byron, Baudelaire variety the necessary prelude to utopian change? MacDiarmid seems not to have read Dostoevsky deeply enough to have understood that Russian’s genius in tracing the demonically possessed connection between such nihilism and social catastrophe. In fact, MacDiarmid, as hierarchically preoccupied as Ezra Pound, was, at best, antipathetic to the universal democratic revolution of the late eighteenth century.86 His revolution was predicated on a quantum leap in human consciousness to be made by a scientifically attuned, necessarily tiny avant garde. Iain Crichton Smith thought that this position destroyed him as a poet, committing his later poetry to versified, programmatic propaganda for his science-manual saturated version of beyond the human.87 That is why he loathed Burns’s A Man’s A Man, seeing in it not a profound statement of fraternity but only crassly self-indulgent sentimentality. According to MacDiarmid, the real Scottish tradition, manifest in Byron, would return Scots to their hard, pristine selves, purged of the cloying psychological excesses and political corruptions of an imposed, Anglicised identity.
The failure to claim Byron for Scottish literature — the deference paid to English standards of taste in that and other ‘Scottish’ anthologies — is a characteristic of the Anglicisation of Scotland. All the natural perspectives of Scottish literature are arbitrarily manipulated in the light of entirely false interpretations of Scottish character. The type of people who are constrained to whitewash Burns are naturally anxious to disavow Byron—whom it would be impossible to ‘puritanise’ … He stands outwith the English literary tradition altogether. He is alien to it and not to be assimilated. English literature … has developed moral limitations — a quality of censorship which renders it impossible to naturalise certain attitudes of life, certain tendencies in expression …88
MacDiarmid’s capacity for intellectual absolutism, albeit frequently self-contradictory, has the ideological danger inherent in literary criticism of thesis-driven misreading. There is no little irony in the fact that it is an Englishman, W.H. Auden, who made a much more convincing distinction between Burns and Byron and, in so doing, makes one of the most acute critical remarks about the essence of Burns’s genius:
At the beginning of the Romantic age stand two writers of Light Verse who were also major poets, Burns and Byron, one a peasant the other an aristocrat. The former came from a Scottish parish which, whatever its faults of hypocrisy and petty religious tyranny, was a genuine community where the popular tradition in poetry had never been lost. In consequence Burns was able to write directly and easily about all aspects of life, the most serious as well as the most trivial. He is the last poet of whom this can be said. Byron, on the other hand, is the first writer of Light Verse in the modern sense. His success lasts as long as he takes nothing very serious; the moment he tried to be profound and ‘poetic’ he fails. However much they tried to reject each other, he was a member of ‘Society’, and his poetry is the result of his membership. If he cannot be poetic, it is because smart society is not poetic.89
MacDiarmid’s nationalist essentialism offers a heady, narcissistic appeal. If, however, history should be written about relationships between states not about mythically essential nations, literary history has constantly to concern itself with the inherent, ongoing dialogue between literatures. This is why Burns and the 1790s have been so misunderstood. Jeffrey wanted all relationships between Burns and the English Romantics, especially Wordsworth, terminated because the Scots were naturally loyal. MacDiarmid inverts the terms of the equation, the Scots are innate radicals and the English inherent constitutionalists, but he too achieves the same end in divorcing Scottish and English writing. This, particularly, in the 1790s is nonsense. Albeit in differently accented voices, Blake and Burns are deeply compatible, just as Cowper and Burns are. That savagely funny, neglected English satirist and friend of James Perry of The Morning Chronicle, Professor Richard Porson, produced polemics in a Scots-styled stanza that could, to the untrained eye, be easily mistaken for Burns. Wordsworth in particular, but almost all English radical writers of that decade, knew exactly what politics were inherent in Burns’s poetry. Indeed they were influenced by his example as man and poet. Equally, Burns along with the innate strengths of his native vernacular and the profound influence of Fergusson in particular, creatively plundered Shakespeare, Milton, the Tory Augustans, the Eighteenth-century Novel, and his sentimental English and Irish (Goldsmith) contemporaries to create a unique synthesis. As Thomas Preston has notably remarked in viewing Burns through the highly rewarding perspective of Bakhtin:
Burns’s poetry offers a gold mine of contestation among Scottish, English, classic, European, and non-European matters — a wondrous intertextuality of quotations, traditions, dictions, idioms, dialects, languages, meanings. His texts do not produce, I suggest, the agonistic of conflicted tongues heard by Thomas Crawford nor the Smollettian dialect of synthesized literary traditions sought by Carol McGuirk. Instead they orchestrate a polyphony of voices contesting languages, literary traditions, and cultures. Burns’s poetic project is dialogical through and through, internally within and between poems and externally within and between Scottish and other cultures. It scripts a future Scottish national culture that is inherently diverse — an imagined community whose lack of uniformity would appal Tobias Smollett, whose last and dying years, despite his anglicizing in aid of a sublated British culture, nevertheless were spent, perhaps fittingly, outside of Britain. Kenneth Simpson has written the most persuasively, I think, of Burns’s varying roles and poses, a poetic strategy he considers a reflection of the protean eighteenth-century Scot undergoing the dissociation of sensibility caused by the Union. Burns, he thinks, ‘became trapped behind the roles he so readily created’. I would suggest instead that these roles register the rich profusion of personal and cultural possibilities, opportunities, and identities made available to both individuals and Scottish society by the dialogic — indeed postmodern — world Burns’s poetic project scripts. This paper serves merely to suggest the many possibilities for exploration that Burns’s dialogism offers. Alan Bold misleadingly argues that Burns ‘looked back in ecstasy and did not take the future of Scotland into account’. It can be argued that dominant Scottish discourse since the Union has instead looked back in ecstasy while enacting the literati’s rather than Burns’s implied national script, and this possibility may cause some subconscious guilt that the ‘great tartan monster’ and the annual Burns Supper orgies seek to absolve. If this is so, tartanry and toasts to the ‘Immortal Memory’ yet also serve to keep alive the possibility of attending to Burns’s script.90
Preston’s essay is a deeply perceptive and provocative argument in favour of Burns creating a sort of healthily open, dialogically energised Scottish literature which was in opposition to the integration of Scottish writing into the standardised language, envisaged by such as the Irishman Thomas Sheridan and advocated by Edmund Burke and James Boswell, of the Anglo-British empire. Burns knew and loathed the power and accent of the Scots who served that imperium: ‘Thou Eunuch of language—Thou Englishman who was never south of the Tweed —Thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms’. Henry Dundas would be the prime example of that category though he, according to a jealous Boswell, had hardly the capacity to put pen to paper. Preston’s account requires only the modification that the relationship with English literature in the 1790s was not only dialogical but collusive in that these writers were seeking a republican reorientation of the British state through the resurrected democratic nationalism of its English, Scottish, Irish parts. The failure of this ambition is, as we shall see, tragically embodied in Ode for General Washington’s Birthday. Though, as Preston notes, two hundred years later we seem to be entering similar territory. It is the primary impulse behind this edition, then, to make Burns available to a contemporary Scottish consciousness that is hopefully more openly responsive to the man, his values and, above all, his poetry than has largely been the case over the last two centuries.