The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу The Canongate Burns - Robert Burns страница 14

Название: The Canongate Burns

Автор: Robert Burns

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Языкознание

Серия: Canongate Classics

isbn: 9781847674456

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0b50f51c-c867-59d9-bb19-8132b5a86e27">35

      The core of these services involved his exploitation of a relationship built up with Burns in Edinburgh. Worse, on the poet’s death he rushed to print with a memoir of the poet which was to prove ruinously influential for both Burns and his poetry.

      Heron was too talented to be a mere hack. When he was the Rev. Hugh Blair’s assistant he had met Burns in Edinburgh. Heron maintained the relationship and en route to his native Galloway made a point of visiting the poet. The often prescient Bard recorded a visit from Heron to Ellisand thus:

      The ill-thief blaw the Heron south!

      And never drink be near his drouth!

      He tald myself, by work o’ mouth,

      He’d take my letter;

      I lippened to the chief in trough,

      And bade nae better.—

      But aiblins honest Master Heron

      Had at the time some dainty Fair One,

      To ware his theologic care on,

      And holy study:

      And tired o’ Sauls to waste his lear on,

      E’en tried the Body.—

      Burns got the scale of the betrayal wrong; it was infinitely in excess of a non-delivered letter to Dr Blacklock. The devil of his political enemies really had blown Heron south. Behind Heron’s black-gowned clerical front, Burns also keenly observed his capacity for chronic alcoholic and sexual dissipation. A familiar of the debtor’s prison, Heron was to die prematurely, again imprisoned for debt, in Newgate in 1807.

      Along with the new factual evidence of the Mackenzie/Heron connection, it might have been deduced both from Heron’s slavish taking of Mackenzie tactics against Burns to a biographical extreme and his equally slavish eulogy to his patron’s critical prowess. This is Heron’s account of Mackenzie’s contribution, via his Lounger magazine article, to Burns’s initial Edinburgh success:

      Heron’s biographical memoir was not the occasion of his first writing about Burns. In 1793 he published a travel book where he created a contrast on the poet’s not so much varied talents as antipathetic ones as expressed in the difference between The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Tam o’ Shanter. The latter is initially admitted as a masterpiece but this is then significantly qualified: ‘Burns seems to have thought, with Boccacce and Prior, that some share of indelicacy was a necessary ingredient in a Tale. Pity that he should have debased so fine a piece, by any things, — having even the remotest relation to obscenity’. This kind of Mackenzie-initiated sentimentalism was the seminal language of nineteenth-century political pietism which would become, mainly though Blackwood’s, the dominant mode of Scottish Toryism. Burns had to be converted into the pietistic poet of a quiescent common people. Whether they were properly reading its concluding stanzas, The Cotter’s Saturday Night became the Ark of the Covenant for the Scottish upper and middle-classes as, increasingly anxious about the fetid, brutal potentially insurrectionary common life of the new emergent industry-based (coal, iron, tobacco, weaving) towns, they sought the politically calming notion of pastoral, god-fearing peace reigning in the Scottish countryside. Heron is a seminal figure in the concoction of this fantasy:

      Of course, Heron knew as well as anyone that the bulk of Burns poetry neither sociologically confirmed this view and expressed anything but personal or popular quiescence in the face of the established order. To deal with this what he did was sycophantically flesh out the bones of Mackenzie’s account of the dead poet. Apparently more in sorrow than anger, Heron constructed the myth of Burns as betrayer of his own earliest spiritual impulses because he lacked ‘that steady VIRTUE, without which even genius in all its omnipotence is soon reduced to paralytic imbecility, or to manic mischievousness’. Thus Burns’s life becomes a melodrama where he always surrendered to those elements in himself which inevitably took him into increasingly bad company.

      Here the suppressed rage of sentimental, genteel Edinburgh wells up. The people’s poet had no right to his creative superiority of language. Hence is evolved the fiction of the unstable genius who falls away from his prudent, real friends and into evil company and, by his sinful depravity, betrays not only his better self but the sanctified common people whom he represents. In Burke’s great shadow, a Scottish conservatism is forged which converts the dialectic of opposing secular political systems to one which, on the conservative side, has divine sanction as embodying the inherent nature of reality. By definition, opposition to this is implicitly evil. Burns is a sinner (he suffers but for the wrong things), with even a hint of anti-Christ. As with Mackenzie’s account, the speed of Burns’s descent accelerates in Dumfries. He has crosses to bear, admittedly, but they are not properly borne: