The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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to govern them without regarding them, will soon repent it. Such Feats of Errantry may do perhaps in Asia: but in the countries where the people are free, it is Madness to hope to rule them against their Wills. They will know, that Government is appointed for their Sakes, and will be saucy enough to expect some Regard and some from their own Delegates.16
While there is some doubt about Aberdonian Thomas Gordon’s commitment to the Right Whig cause after his joint-authorship of The Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, he is certainly the fore-father of a stream of Scots who went south to fill prominent and powerful positions in English radical circles. We need to modify the notion that Scottish writers going south, from giants like Smollett to minnows like Mallett (Malloch), were simply on the make by being hyper-patriotic propagandists in the forging of the Anglo-British Empire. Thus, for example we have the expatriate radical careers of Gilbert and Peter Stuart, Thomas Hardy, Secretary of the London Corresponding Society, James Perry (Pirie), editor of The Morning Chronicle, Dr Alexander Geddes, radical Catholic priest, poet and religious contributor to The Analytical Review and James Oswald, who not only, like a significant number of Scots, went to France, but died in the Vendée fighting for the revolutionary army. Certainly, if they were to emerge from historical darkness, their political values and consequent rhetoric would also help to return Burns to his appropriate cultural, political context. We need also to understand the headlong flight of poets and writers such as James Thomson Callander, James Kennedy and James ‘Balloon’ Tytler, mainly westward to America in the wake of the 1793/4 Treason trials, to see parallels between their lesser political poetry to that of Burns.17 The absence of these radicals voices serves to diminish appreciation of the iron grip Dundas had in suffocating dissent by means not only of the prostitution of the Scottish legal system but because that system was inadequate in terms of defining treasonable behaviour. As John Thelwall, the great English radical and intimate friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, in the 1790s, wrote:
It is a protest against an alarming threat held out —not by the sovereign —not by the legislature but by Mr Secretary Dundas. —He alone it was who had the audacity to threaten the violation and subversion of those yet remaining laws that guarantee Englishmen an impartial trial by Jury of their country, and to substitute in their place, the arbitrary tyrannical practices of the Court of Justiciary in Scotland.18
Perhaps the single greatest source of reformative change affecting Burns, was, however, within Scotland itself and had its origin in that charismatic Ulsterman, Francis Hutcheson and his professorial tenure at Glasgow University. His tradition ended in the 1790s with Professor John Millar whose cosmopolitan scholarship, integrity and passionate commitment to democratic reformation was lost in the vortex of repression. His 1796 Letter of Crito: On the Causes, Objects and Consequences of the Present War, dedicated to his friend Charles James Fox, published along with John McLaurin’s (Lord Dreghorn) anti-war poetry in Edinburgh’s The Scots Chronicle, both confirm Burns’s rhetoric and experiences in the same decade. They also signal the tragic death of Hutcheson’s aspirations for not only Scotland but the still festering sore of the Irish problem. While we do not know if Burns read Hutcheson, there can be no doubt of his teaching’s proximity to the poet’s own values:
In every form of government the people has this right of defending themselves against the abuse of power … the people’s right of resistance is unquestionable.
But when there’s no other way of preserving a people; and when their governors by their perfidious frauds have plainly forfeited their right; they may justly be divested of their power, and others put into their places, or a new plan of power established.
Nor does this doctrine of the right of resistance in defence of the rights of a people, naturally tend to excite seditions and civil wars. Nay they have been more frequently occasioned by the contrary tenets. In all ages there has been too much patience in the body of the people, and too stupid a veneration for their princes or rulers; which for each one free kingdom or state has produced many monstrous herds of miserable abject slaves or beasts of burden, rather than civil polities of rational creatures, under the most inhuman and worthless masters, trampling upon all things human and divine with the uttmost effrontery.19
Such Hutchesonian values would, in any case, have percolated down to Burns through his connection to Glasgow-trained New Licht clergy in Ayrshire. This entails that the wonderful anti-Auld Licht satires of the early Ayrshire period are not provincial storms in a tea cup but a variant on the intense British struggle by reforming religion to shake off the theocratic control of both the Trinitarian Anglican and, in Scotland, the reactionary Presbyterian churches whose vision of the innately sinful, fallen nature of man renders impossible a reformative, never mind utopian, politics. At the heart of the poetry of Burns and Blake is this preoccupation with removing the absolute political power given to the reactionary state by the teaching of what they saw as a perverted institutional Christianity. Burns’s Address to the Deil is profoundly different in language and tone from Blake but not in essential purpose and meaning. Had he been aware of his true English peer he would have been transfixed by such Blakean lines:
… & the purpose of the Priests & Churches
Is to impress on men the fear of death; to teach
Trembling & fear, terror, constriction; abject selfishness.
Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on
In fearless majesty annihilating Self … (Milton, 11.37–41)
As Richard Rorty has written,
The Romantics were inspired by the successes of antimonarchist and anticlericalist revolutions to think that the desire for something to obey is a symptom of immaturity. These successes made it possible to envisage building a new Jerusalem without divine assistance, thereby creating a society in which men and women would lead the perfected lives which had previously seemed possible only in an invisible, immaterial, post-mortem paradise. The image of progress towards such a society —horizontal progress, so to speak— began to take the place of Platonic or Dantean images of vertical ascent. History began to replace God, Reason and Nature as the source of human hope.20
This accounts, too, for the religio-mythical compatibility of Burns and Blake in that both are obsessed with those transgressive figures who destroy the institutional, regressive corruption of the established world in the name of a new earthly heaven. Blake is the more extreme and mythopoetic. Burns never similarly defines Blake’s transgressive Christ as discovered in The Everlasting Gospel. But both are preoccupied with not only the heroic, vitalising figure of ‘Blind John’s’ Satan but with the problematic figure of Job. Cynthia Ozick21 has commented on Job:
Like the noblest of prophets he assails injustice; and still he is unlike them. They accuse the men and women who do evil; their targets are made of flesh and blood. It is human transgression they hope to mend. Job seeks to rectify God. His is an ambition higher, deeper, vaster, grander than theirs; he is possessed by a righteousness more frenzied than theirs; the scale of his justice-hunger exceeds all that precedes him … he can be said to be the consummate prophet. And at the same time he is the consummate violator. If we are to understand him at all, if we are rightly to enter into his passions at the pinnacle, then we ought to name him prophet; but we may not. Call him, instead, antiprophet —his teaching, after all, verges on atheism: the rejection of God’s power. His thesis is revolution.
Both Burns’s poetry and prose are saturated with the deeply varied ways he employed his early exposure to the sermon and his life-long, intense reading of the Bible. No story affected him more deeply than that of Job’s.
Liam McIlvanney, one of a tiny minority of the legion of Burns commentators