JAMES MACPHERSON, ROBERT BURNS
The achievement of the Scottish Chaucerians was almost out of memory when James Macpherson (1736–96), inventor of the Gaelic poet Ossian and the most successful forger in British poetry, burst on a jaded eighteenth-century world. The apparent energies of his translations seemed to mark a new beginning for a distinctly Scottish literature. Twenty-three years after his birth, and without his social or material advantages, a genuinely new force emerged, speaking and singing not in pseudo-Gaelic but in English and in the dialect of his part of Scotland. This poet lived hard and died poor at thirty-seven—the same year that Macpherson’s remains were ceremoniously deposited, at his request, in Westminster Abbey.
Of the eighteenth-century poets, Robert Burns is most out of place. He belongs among the Romantics, not because they romanticized him but because he emancipated himself from Augustan language and decorum as decisively as Blake did, not by means of madness or through the agency of angels but by listening to the traditional songs and poems of common people and daring to write in their language. “By our own spirits are we deified,” to follow Wordsworth a line further. He and his sister, Dorothy, visited Burns’s last home and his grave in a spirit, to judge from Dorothy’s letter, of tutting melancholy. The poet, only six years dead and as yet undeified, lacked a respectful headstone.
For Coleridge, Burns was “Nature’s own belovèd bard,” and “always-natural poet.” Edward Thomas quotes a poem of his and says: “It is as near to the music as nonsense could be, and yet it is perfect sense.” His poetry is a relief because he uses language according not to rules but to deeper laws. “Spirit and body are one in it—so sweet and free is the body and so well satisfied is the spirit to inhabit it.” The poems “seem almost always to be the immediate fruit of a definite and particular occasion.” They remain true to their occasions by remaining true to their speakers.
Burns was so successful (though he tasted few material fruits of his success) that for many he stands for the whole of Scottish poetry. With Burns Nights to celebrate his memory each year in Scotland, Moscow (“That Man to Man the warld o’er, / Shall brothers be for a’ that”) and Chicago, with a Burns industry that has (it is not his fault) cast a tartan haze over the literature of his country, it’s no surprise that Scottish writers keen to revive their literature this century, after the abyss of the nineteenth, should lay so many literary and cultural ills at his door. His most vehement detractor is Hugh MacDiarmid. “The highest flights of [Burns]—from any high European standard of poetry—may seem like the lamentable efforts of a hen at soaring; no great name in literature holds its place so completely from extra-literary causes as does that of Robert Burns.” It is true that Burns has been appropriated by the heritage industry. He is sanitized, bowdlerized, sentimentalized. If we turn away from this, and from MacDiarmid’s corrective verdict, to the poems, we do not need to reserve judgment. This is not the work of a chicken Icarus:
O wert thou in the cauld blast,
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt
I’d shelter thee, I’d shelter thee.
Keats had a more complex view of Burns than Wordsworth did and was more generous than MacDiarmid. In “On Visiting the Tomb of Burns” he writes:
All is cold Beauty; pain is never done
For who has mind to relish, Minos-wise,
The Real of Beauty, free from that dead hue
Sickly imagination and sick pride
Cast wan upon it! Burns! With honour due
I oft have honour’d thee. Great shadow, hide
Thy face; I sin against thy native skies.
Writing to Reynolds from Scotland Keats says, “One song of Burns is of more worth to you than all I could think of for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead weight on the nimbleness of one’s quill... he talked with Bitches—he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We can see horribly clear in the works of such a Man his whole life, as if we were God’s spies.” Yet neither misery nor joy characterizes the work. He is sufficiently of his century to find more interest in man, his foibles, his institutions, his ballads, than in mere personal revelation or natural description. Byron, less drawn to the accidents of his biography, valued the lucid pathos of the poet, and something more. “What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—all mixed up in one compound of inspired clay!” Matthew Arnold in 1880 wrote a warm appreciation of his comic and satirical work, criticizing the sentimental poems. His assessment was crucial in the reappraisal of Burns’s merits. The modernists—MacDiarmid excepted—generally ignored him.
There is a political version of Burns. Radicals English, Scottish and European have set up a bronze bust, emphasizing the anticlerical satires, the tilting against hypocrisy and rank, the “egalitarianism.” Burns’s life attracts them: it does little credit to the Scottish bourgeoisie and gentry. His sympathy for the American and French revolutions adds to his usefulness. His appeal in the Soviet Union was partly explained by this. In “Scots Wha Hae” he wrote:
By Oppression’s woes and pains,
By your sons in servile chains,
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
In more familiar manner he says, in “For a’ that,”
The version of Burns that irked MacDiarmid, who led the Scottish renaissance with the cry “Not Burns—Dunbar!,” was the one that read the poet in narrow chauvinistic terms. Scottish expatriates and nostalgic Scots at home championed him with what Arnold called “national partiality.” And in MacDiarmid’s view Burns’s rural and ballad poetry in Scottish dialect set a disastrous example for a century of dialect poets who imitated what had become an outmoded idiom and subject matter, producing a linguistic and cultural caricature. Burns answers to each partial description and includes rather more than their sum. He wrote more than six hundred poems; his formal, tonal and thematic range is greater than that of his Scottish predecessors and of most of his English contemporaries.
He was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, in 1759, into the family of a tenant farmer, an event the poet later commemorated in “There was a lad was born in Kyle.” The gossip in the poem predicts, “He’ll be a credit till us a’ ”—and he’ll have a lively future among the ladies (which he did). Burns’s father and neighbors, though poor, had a respect for education and hired a tutor to see to their children’s schooling. Later, the father himself undertook to teach them. At the age of fifteen, working on his father’s farm, Burns wrote his first verses. His Latin was indifferent, but he was well-read in the English poets and understood French enough to read Racine. The Scots poetry of Allan Ramsay suggested to him the possibilities of dialect. Robert Fergusson’s Scots verse proved the eventual catalyst: after reading it, Burns began his “demotic” career in earnest, but he was already that way inclined. At sixteen he wrote,
O once I loved a bonnie lass,
An’ aye I love her still,
An whilst that virtue warms my breast
I’ll love my handsome Nell.
Nell was Nelly Kirkpatrick, and he noted: “For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.” He had a native tradition and a native tongue. To Fergusson he addressed three poems, largely about that poet’s (and perhaps his own) hardships and neglect: “Curse on ungrateful man, that can be pleas’d, / And yet can starve the author of the pleasure.” Burns’s English poems have merit, but pale beside the Scots writing. He knew this himself: “These English songs gravel me to death,” he wrote. “I have not the command of the language that I have of my native tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch.” His attempts to “translate” his poems were fruitless.
The key year in Burns’s poetic career was 1786, when the Kilmarnock edition of Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published. In the years before the poet watched his father’s death in 1784, a year after his bankruptcy. Burns was now provider and head of the family. His mother’s servant, Betty Paton, gave him his first child out of wedlock in 1785, a daughter.
He also composed “The Fornicator. A New Song.” “The rantin dog the Daddie o’t” is a song put in the mouth of Betty. Throughout his work we find songs of a sexual frankness and jollity as outspoken as some of the poems of the Restoration, and yet a good deal more down-to-earth than those. Eighteenth-century Scotland was an unlikely environment for them.
In 1785 Burns met Jean Armour, whom he married in 1788 after she had borne him two sets of twins. His brilliant satirical attacks on Calvinism begin at the time of her pregnancy. In the same month in which Poems was published the Calvinists took revenge and exacted from him a public penance for fornication with Jean. He was tempted to emigrate with another girl, composing poems about his planned departure. The gossips were right; he had a complicated and thorough love life.
Poems proved a success; the next year a second, enlarged edition was published. Both versions omitted the church satires and included instead more general satirical pieces. Apart from the church satires, the Poems contain the core of his original work. Most of it was composed in 1785 and early 1786—a remarkable production, including “To a Mountain Daisy,” “Halloween,” “The Address to the Deil,” “To a Mouse,” “To a Louse,” “The Cottar’s Saturday Night,” the best epistles, “The Twa Dogs” and many others: satires, pious pieces, dramatic monologues, mock elegies, songs, lyrics and flytings. The poet was twenty-six. Four years later he wrote “Tam O’Shanter,” completing his important original work. He wrote more poems, but his chief labor thereafter was to collect and publish Scottish folk songs and ballads.
Literary Edinburgh took him up—no doubt as one who “walked in glory and in joy / Behind his plough,” a role he found it hard to sustain without big doses of alcohol and the camaraderie of low types. As a result, literary Edinburgh in general put him down again. Sir Walter Scott as a boy of fifteen saw the poet and recalled his “manners rustic, not clownish,” his “massive” countenance, his shrewd look: “The eye alone indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling and interest.” Lord Glencairn and Mrs. Dunlop became his patrons and friends. His admirers secured him a post in the Excise Division in Dumfries and rented a farm for him. He worked hard, investing his imaginative energy in collecting and revising material for The Scots Material Museum (1787–1803) and the Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793–1818). He traveled, gave up farming, was promoted in the Excise Division. His work took him out in all weathers. He caught rheumatic fever and died in 1796, leaving a wife and a large progeny. Jean was not his only current love. There were Betty, Mary Campbell, Mrs. McLehose (“Clarinda”) and others.
Perhaps he died bitter. Though he had friends and advocates, he’d certainly been ill-used. He had foibles, could be curmudgeonly and difficult, held firm and outspoken opinions, did not suffer fools. But he scarcely deserved the hardships that befell him, or the hostility. Carlyle in his essay gets the proportions right: “Granted the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged, the pilot is blameworthy... but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.”
Burns’s place in Scottish culture is very different from his place in English. Debts to the Augustans are few: the polite tradition of Edinburgh, with few exceptions, was an echo of Dryden and Pope, a world of fixed rules of diction and form. We can see him in connection with English Romanticism. But as Donald Davie reminds us, he was “adopted posthumously.” In reading Wordsworth’s and Keats’s tributes, do we recognize any but a simulacrum of Burns? Only Byron—another Scot “mad, bad and dangerous to know”—heard him more or less clearly. F. R. Leavis goes too far when he suggests Burns “counts for much in the emancipation represented by the Lyrical Ballads.” He counts for something: a comparison between Burns’s and Wordsworth’s ballads reveals how much and also how little. Arnold precedes Leavis when he writes, “Wordsworth owed much to Burns, relying for effect solely on the weight and force of that which with entire fidelity he utters. Burns could show him.” Wordsworth’s “At the Grave of Burns” and other poems written on Burns and about his neighborhood borrow one of the Scottish poet’s forms, but not his energy. Wordsworth records a debt:
He has gone
Whose light I hailed when first it shone,
And showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.
A pious moral more than a poetic lesson learned. Burns might have grimaced at such sanctimony.
Arnold stripped away some of the sentimental gloss: “Let us coldly say that of much of this poetry, a poetry dealing perpetually with Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a Scotchman’s estimate is bound to be personal.” Burns’s world is “often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world”—part of its attraction and also its limitation. Much of the bacchanalian verse is “poetically unsound,” vitiated by a factitious bravado, written in reaction, to shock and amuse, but not to extend or interpret experience. He often lacks “the high seriousness which comes from absolute sincerity” (which is just as well). One feels this in the poems about fornication and those about drink: defiance in verse is rare, especially difficult to achieve when the poet defies an audience without questioning his own position. Yet there is a great poet in Burns: Arnold compares him to Chaucer: “Of life and the world, as they came before him, his view is large, free, shrewd, benignant—truly poetic, therefore; and his manner of rendering what he sees is to match.” Unlike Chaucer, he has “a fiery, reckless energy” and “an overwhelming sense of the pathos of things.” After all, his great poems were written when he was a young man.
Arnold directs attention to a poem central to Burns, but until then generally neglected, “The Jolly Beggars.” It has “hideousness,” “squalor,” “bestiality”—“yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and power which... are only matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes.” Other good poems possess “archness and wit” as well as “shrewdness.” These include “Duncan Grey,” “Tam Glen,” “Whistle, and I’ll come to you my lad,” “Auld Lang Syne”—and, no doubt, “A Red, Red Rose,” “Green Grow the Rushes,” “The Banks o’ Doon” and a score of others.
After reading a lot of Burns, we reluctantly agree with Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote in a letter to Robert Bridges of “a great want” in his utterance. Hopkins defined this a little imprecisely: “He had no eye for pure beauty,” a lack he shares with another poet equally versatile: Dunbar. There is little repose in Burns. The closest he comes to it is in a few lyrics and the epistles, where he addresses one or two and speaks with the candor Arnold described in his essay. In “Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet” Burns confesses how sour he is about his own wants, and the unequal distribution of wealth (it is no wonder that he was immensely popular in the old Soviet Union: he was easy to politicize). But he finds consolation in the open air:
