The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

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With friends like these, Burns’s reputation hardly needed the legion of newspaper and magazine owning enemies whose overt Toryism gave them reason to destroy it. How deep Currie’s radicalism had ever been is impossible to judge. Better men than he had become apostates to the radical cause.48 It is hard not to believe that he knew what he was doing as he linked, albeit obliquely, Burns’s alleged degeneration with political turpitude. He also had that classic bad doctor’s ability to confuse mental or moral symptoms with physical ones:

As the strength of the body decays, the volition fails; in proportion as the sensations are soothing and gratified, the sensibility increases; and morbid sensibility is the parent of indolence, because, while it impairs the regulating power of the mind, it exaggerates all the obstacles to exertion. Activity, perseverance, and self-command, and the great purposes of utility, patriotism, or of honourable ambition, which had occupied the imagination, die away in fruitless resolutions, or in feeble efforts.49

      It is little wonder that Coleridge, irretrievably addicted to lauda-num, called Currie’s book ‘a masterly specimen of philosophical biography’. He was so symptomatic of Currie’s account that he must have felt as if struck by a cross-bow bolt from the blue. It is, however, most certainly not Burns. Further, the allusion to patriotism gives Currie’s game away. It is an unequivocal linking of Burns with insurrectionary, hence definably degenerate, forces.

      Not content, however, with rendering Burns’s personality a suitable case for mistreatment, Currie followed exactly Heron’s critical criteria for sifting the acceptable, sentimental chaff from the troublesome, satirical wheat. The literary analysis is an attack on the poetry as effective as the wholly related attacks on the Bard’s character. Behind both psychological and aesthetic repudiation lie, of course, the real but unnamed political reasons. Burns’s employment of the vernacular was the primary, obvious place of attack:

The greater part of his earlier poems are written in the dialect of his country, which is obscure, if not unintelligible to Englishmen, and which though adheres more or less to the speech of almost every Scotsman, all the polite and ambitious are now endeavouring to banish from their tongues as well as their writings. The use of it in composition naturally therefore calls up ideas of vulgarity to the mind. These singularities are increased by the character of the poet, who delights to express himself with a simplicity that approaches to nakedness, and with an unmeasured energy that often alarms delicacy, and sometimes offends taste. Hence in approaching him, the first impression is perhaps repulsive: there is an air of coarseness about him which is with difficulty reconciled with our established notions of poetical excellence.50

      Along with such fundamental creative castration went covert politically motivated readings of these two satirical masterpieces with which Burns deliberately opened the Kilmarnock edition. That wickedly irreverent dialogue, The Twa Dogs, is defined, absurdly, as Burns’s plan ‘to inculcate a lesson of contentment on the lower classes of society by showing that their superiors are neither much better nor happier than themselves.’ The quite extraordinary postscript to The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer with its terrible national images of the Highland soldier slaughtered in the service of an alien Hanoverian cause and ‘Mother Scotland’ as an incontinent crone, are described as purely humorous. Currie, in fact, set a tactical fashion for conservative criticism of Burns to laugh, damagingly, in the wrong places. Needless to say, one poem floats free of the clarty waters occupied by the bulk of the achievement:

… the representation of these humble cottagers forming a wider circle round their hearth and uniting in the worship of God, is a picture most affecting of any which the rural muse has ever presented to the view. Burns was admirably adapted to this delineation.… The Cotter’s Saturday Night is tender and moral, it is solemn and devotional, and rises at length into a strain of grandeur and sublimity which modern poetry has not surpassed. The noble sentiments of patriotism with which it concludes correspond with the rest of the poem. In no age or country have the pastoral muses breathed such elevated accents, if the ‘Messiah’ of Pope be excepted, which is indeed a pastoral in form only. It is to be regretted that Burns did not employ his genius on other subjects of the same nature which the manners and customs of Scottish peasantry would have amply supplied.51

      Praise, indeed, but praise granted at the price of near complete distortion. Currie’s misreading of the last two stanzas of the poem apart, this post-Burkean account of a peasant world of piety, humility and hence, hierarchical loyalty is used as the criterion by which the rest of Burns’s poetry is not only judged but condemned.

In his 1808 review of Cromek’s Reliques in The Edinburgh Review Jeffrey also expresses inordinate enthusiasm for this, indeed, exceptional poem: ‘The exquisite description of The Cotter’s Saturday Night affords, perhaps, the finest example of this sort of pathetic. Its whole beauty cannot indeed be discerned but by those whom experience has enabled to judge of the admirable fidelity and completeness of the picture.’ This review of Jeffrey’s is absolutely seminal to an understanding of the image of Burns and his poetry which was to dominate the nineteenth century and, indeed, elements of it still persist into the twenty-first. As well as Jeffrey’s legally fine-honed intellect he was from 1802 to 1829 the editor of The Edinburgh Review. This magazine having freed itself from reviewing as a mere vehicle for the book trade was not only independent but, in terms of payment to contributors, unprecedently wealthy. Ironically, it was a Whig magazine, which was on political issues almost uniformly reformative. Hence its support of Catholic emancipation and its attacks on the sale of army commissions, flogging in the British Navy and Army and the Test and Corporations Act. So exceptional were its fiscal and intellectual powers that, with the subsequent Tory Blackwood’s, it unprecedently, if temporarily, moved the locus of British critical intelligence from London to Edinburgh. It was from such a position of unparalleled authority that Jeffrey, with near total success, decided to contain, if necessary by emasculation and vilification, what he perceived to be the threat of the revolutionary impetus of Burns as man and poet. Jeffrey’s arguments derived from Currie but even, in some instances, exceeding the latter’s account are not to be understood in literary terms without understanding the politics that underlay the aesthetics.52 Like all men of his class, the French terror had bitten into his soul. Evidence real or invented of a common people diligently, culturally, passively loyal was everywhere sought. Burns had consequently to be fitted to the procrustean bed of their political anxieties and phobias. Hence this account of the degree to which Burns and the Scottish peasantry exceed all others in educated, hence, conformist virtue:

We shall conclude with two general remarks — the one national, the other critical. The first is, that it is impossible to read the productions of Burns, along with his history, without forming a higher idea of the intelligence, taste, and accomplishments of the peasantry, than most of those in the higher ranks are disposed to entertain … it is evident … that the whole family, and many of their associates, who have never emerged from the native obscurity of their condition, possessed talents, and taste, and intelligence, which are little suspected to lurk in those humble retreats. His epistles to brother poets, in the rank of farmers and shopkeepers in the adjoining villages, — the existence of a book-society and debating club among persons of that description, and many other incidental traits in his sketches of his youthful companions, — all contribute to show, that not only good sense, and enlightened morality, but literature and talents for speculation, are far more generally diffused in society than is generally imagined; and that the delights and the benefits of these generous and humanizing pursuits, are by no means confined to those whom leisure and affluence have courted to their enjoyment. That much of this is peculiar to Scotland, and may be properly referred to our excellent institutions for parochial education, and to the natural sobriety and prudence of our nation, may certainly СКАЧАТЬ