The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

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      From seasons such as these.

      As we have seen, Burns as a farmer led a near subsistence existence which his subsequent Excise work did not financially transform. Nor did the business of poetry ease his fear of debt and the abyss into which he might fall. Only the Edinburgh edition sold in great numbers. Even here, he significantly under-earned due to the contractual conditions then prevailing between book publisher and author, which was added by William Creech’s, at best, dilatory behaviour. Even then, the bulk of his earnings from the Edinburgh edition went to save the family farmat Mauchline, propping up Gilbert Burns with money he never returned. Subsequent editions made money for Creech who purchased the copyright of the Edinburgh poems and laid claim to everything Burns wrote thereafter with a merciless callousness, which saw the poet receive only a few presentation copies of the 1793 edition. The later songs he wrote for the nation and not the cash. The covert political poetry was sent to newspapers to support the radical cause and not for personal gain. He was, in any case, characteristically both reckless and generous with money.

      Burns’s constant stress on his own personal, political and enforced fiscal independence found everywhere in his writings, partly stems from his constant sense of rejection by his social superiors. Hence, for example, his witty, wry, characteristic account of having to make it on his own:

      ’Twas noble, Sir;’ twas like yoursel,

      To grant your high protection;

      A great man’s smile ye ken fu’well

      Is ay a blest infection.—

      Tho’ by his banes wha in a tub

      Match’d Macedonian Sandy!

      On my ain legs thro’ dirt and dub,

      I independent stand ay.—

      And when those legs to gude, warm kail

      Wi’ welcome canna bear me;

      A lee dyke-syde, a sybow tail,

      And barley-scone shall chear me.—

      This brilliant comic reduction of the world of Diogenes and Alexander the Great to his own terminal fate in the Scottish countryside ironises the desperation of his own financial situation. Great men smiled seldom; one can also smile and be a villain and, thus, spread infection. When he did occasionally think that he had encountered a relationship not polluted by social condescension, as with Lord Daer or Dugald Stewart, such men shone for him in an idealised glow. He craves that such a figure should enter his life so that, ironically, the democratic poet should return to a traditional, even feudal, situation where the patron provides both imaginative and financial succour. Hence, this account of the Earl of Glencairn, whose premature death struck him to the very core of his being:

      The noble Earl of Glencairn took me by the hand today, and interested himself in my concerns, with a goodness like the benevolent BEING whose image he so richly bears.— ‘Oubliez moi, grand Dieu, si jamais je l’oublie!’ He is a stronger proof of the immortality of the Soul than any that Philosophy has ever produced.— A mind like his can never die.— Let the Squire Hugh Logan, or Mass James Mckindlay, go into their primitive nothing.— At best they are but ill-digested lumps of Chaos, only one of them strongly tinged with bituminous particles, and sulphureous effluvia.— But my noble Patron, eternal as the heroic swell of Magnanimity and the generous throb of Benevolence shall look on with princely eye —

      ‘Unhurt amid the war of elements,

      The wrecks of matter, and the crush of Worlds.’

      Glencairn being so defined in terms of that key Real Whig text, Addison’s Cato is, as we shall see, politically important. For De Quincey, however, even the notion that Glencairn was the true patron who tested the rule of Scottish aristocratic indifference to Burns was nonsense. He saw nothing in Glencairn’s activities beyond the gestural:

Lord Glencairn is the ‘patron’ to whom Burns appears to have felt the most sincere respect. Yet even he —did he give him more than a seat at his dinner table? Lord Buchan again, whose liberalities are by this time pretty well appreciated in Scotland, exhorts Burns, in a tone of one preaching upon a primary duty of life, to exemplary gratitude towards a person who has given him absolutely nothing at all. The man has not yet lived to whose happiness it was more essential that he should live unencumbered by the sense of obligation; and on the other hand, the man has not lived upon whose independence as professing benefactors so many people practised, or who found so many others ready to give value to their pretences.7

      Though Burns often reached similar depths of despairing self-prognosis about his life and career, he did make extensive and misguided attempts to replace Glencairn in his life with Robert Graham of Fintry, a Commissioner of the Scottish Board of Excise. How misguided these attempts were we have recently discovered; Graham was not only looking with increased scepticism on reports of Burns’s Dumfries activities but was himself on the payroll of that vast network of paid informers reporting back to Robert Dundas about the activities of radical dissidents. The only thing Fintry is to be thanked for was that he inspired two major English language poems, To Robt. Graham of Fintry, Esq., with a request for an Excise Division and To Robert Graham of Fintry, Esq. which are masterful, creative reworking of themes initially found in Swift’s perhaps greatest poem, On Poetry: A Rhapsody. The latter Burns poem was of such quality, in fact, that only now has it become known that for years, a fragment of it, slightly bowdlerised, has been attributed to Coleridge. As well as learning from Swift, Burns’s thinking on poetry and patronage was influenced by Dr Johnson. As he wrote:

      It is often a reverie of mine, when I am disposed to be melancholy, the characters & fates of the Rhyming tribe — there is not among all the Martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.— In the comparative view of the Wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear.

      Nor does Burns’s analysis of the desperate life of the late-eighteenth century poet, an age replete in prematurely terminated and self-destructive careers, yield, especially in the two Fintry poems, to the quality of Johnson’s psychological and sociological grasp of what was taking place. His rhetorical style may not be ours but there is actually little self-indulgence in what he sees as his own fate and that of his immediate predecessors. This is particularly so with regard to his beloved Edinburgh predecessor, Robert Fergusson, as mentioned in To William Simson:

      (O Fergusson! thy glorious parts

      Ill suited law’s dry, musty arts!

      My curse upon your whunstane hearts,

      Ye Enbrugh Gentry!

      The tythe o’ what ye waste at cartes

      Wad stow’d his pantry!)

      He was not to know that not only was he to share Fergusson’s pains in his life but, like Fergusson he was also to be pursued beyond the grave by the vilification of genteel Edinburgh and by its master spirit, Henry Mackenzie, who never forgave Fergusson’s fine parody of The Man of Feeling in his poem, The Sow of Feeling. Underneath Mackenzie’s simpering mask was a malice easily provoked by slights to his vanity or, in Burns’s case, if he felt the reactionary power base, which propped up his doubtful talent and his monstrous ego, endangered.

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