The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 to have sympathetic knowledge of Burns’s true politics, traces in a particularly fine article, ‘Presbyterian Radicalism and the Politics of Robert Burns’, a similarly long tradition of radical political gestation from a more distinctively Scottish point of view. He highlights the ambivalence at the heart of Burns’s relationship to Presbyterianism thus:

      … it remains unfortunate that Burns’s run-ins with the kirk have obscured the extent to which his own political philosophy is grounded in his religious inheritance. His politics are shaped by two complimentary strands of Presbyterian thought: on the one hand, the New Light, with its subjection of all forms of authority to the tribunal of individual reason: on the other, the traditional contractarian political theory long associated with Presbyterianism. These influences are evident in Burns’s repeated avowal of ‘revolution’ principles in his support for the American Revolution and, above all, in his satirical attacks on political corruption. The whole framework of assumption on which Burns’s political satires rest recalls the contractarian principles of Presbyterian thought: that authority ascends from below; that government is a contract, and political power a trust; and that even the humblest members of society are competent to censure their governors. That Burns deplored certain aspects of Calvinism —its harsh soteriology, its emphasis on faith over works— should not blind us to his sincere identification with the Presbyterian political inheritance:

      The Solemn league and Covenant

      Now brings a smile, now brings a tear.

      But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs;

If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.22

      Burns, of course, was not the only Scotsman to embrace such radical ideals. We cannot properly understand his life and much of his poetry if we do not understand the degree to which his personal relationships and affiliations were directed towards and driven by seeking out similarly politically sympathetic groups and individuals. It was the Lodge friends and patrons who eased his path towards Edinburgh; that so politically riven city which was to prove so disastrous to him in both life and death. Without, as all his generation, fully understanding the political causes of what happened in the capital, the ever astute Edwin Muir put his finger on the events of his sensational first extended visit to the capital as the cause of Burns’s subsequent accelerating decline:

It was after his first trip to Edinburgh that his nature, strongly built and normal, disintegrated. He had hoped, in meeting the first shock of his astonishing triumph in the capital, that an escape was at last possible from the life of hardly maintained poverty which as a boy he had foreseen and feared. He left Edinburgh recognising that there was no reprieve, that hardship must sit at his elbow to the end of his days. Fame had lifted him on the point of an immediate pinnacle; now the structure had melted away and, astonished, he found himself once more in his native county, an Ayrshire peasant. Some fairy had set him for a little in the centre of a rich and foreign society; then calmly and finally, she had taken it from under his feet. There is hardly another incident in literary history to parallel this brief rise and setting of social favour, and hardly one showing the remorselessness of fortune in the world. The shock told deeply on Burns, working more for evil than the taste for dissipation which he was said to have acquired from the Edinburgh aristocracy.23

      Given Muir’s lack of knowledge of the covert political forces operating on Burns, this is well said. It does, however, under-estimate the extraordinary degree to which Burns, in the midst of his Edinburgh triumph, was conscious not only of its transience but the darkness to follow. As he wrote to Robert Ainslie on 16th December 1786:

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