The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

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СКАЧАТЬ é lite. Thus we have not epic heroes drawn up for battle but a list of new men of virtue who tangibly seem, in varied ways, to be delivering the reformative Scottish Enlightenment project. Thus ll. 109–14 celebrate the patriotic, military valour of the Montgomeries of Coylfield. This is no distant hero-worship, however, as Burns was on fraternal terms with James Montgomerie in the merged Tarbolton Masonic Lodge in 1781. L. 115 refers to Barskimming, the home of the improving Sir Thomas Miller, Bt. (1717–89). His steam-boat innovating brother Patrick Miller (1731–1815) of Dalswinton let Ellisland to Burns in 1788. Thomas Miller had an extremely successful legal career. As Lord Barskimming he became Lord Justice Clerk in 1766 and, as Lord Glenlee, Lord President of the Court of Session in 1788. He seems the antithesis of the terrible Lord Braxfield who was to run amok in the political trials of the 1790s: ‘Though well aware that offended justice required satisfaction, he knew that the vilest criminal was entitled to a fair and dispassionate trial … he never uttered a harsh or taunting word’ (Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, l. 343–50.) Ll. 121–6 deal with the noted Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh Matthew Stewart and his even more celebrated son Dugald (1753–1828) who was a tangible friend to Burns in Edinburgh. As Burns wrote to Mrs Dunlop (Letter 152A) of this exceptional man: ‘It requires no common exertion of good sense and Philosophy in persons of elevated rank to keep a friendship properly alive with one much their inferior.’ The letter continues as an act of homage to Stewart’s innate democratic virtues. Ll. 127–32 refer to William Fullerton, diplomat, politician, soldier and agricultural improver who accepted Burns’s advice on the care of cattle and to whom in 1791 the poet sent songs and poems (Letters, 472, 474). Unlike the absentee, Europhile, aristocratic degenerates of The Twa Dogs who, in Fergusson’s lines, ‘… never wi’ their feet hae mett/The marches o’ their ain estate’ these men are tangible assets to Ayrshire and Scotland. Further Burns enjoys support and degrees of intimacy with the best of them. There are, indeed, significant grounds for national optimism.

      The second Duan is devoted to Coila’s monologue in which she pours a cornucopia of promised gifts not only on the head of her chosen poet but over all Ayrshire by dint of the aid of her accompanying spirits (perhaps derived from The Rape of the Lock). In this very non-Burnsian happily hierarchical society, each is given according to his needs. Regarding the ‘embryonic’ Burns she gives a detailed account of the growth of the poet. Pre-Wordsworth, Burns believed that the child was father of the creative man. As a sort of angelic counsellor, she offers soothing solutions to the anxieties which, with varying intensity, preoccupied him concerning the nature of his poetic career. Ll. 235–40 are particularly memorable in dealing with the central, crucial problem in all Burns’s poetry and thought concerning the rights of the instinctual self as opposed to imposed conformity. He knew libidinal energy was essential to his art; he was never certain whether it was not only a predatory force for others but, finally, also a self-destructive one. Coila also, in a poem concerned with Scotland’s political independence, deals with his properly modest but worthy relationships to English poetry (ll. 247–8). Finally, l. 259 she reassures him that his true role as rustic poet more than compensates for the lack of money and fame. Crowning him with her holly she triumphantly asserts that:

      To give my counsels all in one,

      They tuneful-flame still careful fan;

      Preserve the dignity of Man,

      With Soul erect

      And trust the Universal Plan

      Will all protect.

      Partly energised by his experience, social and intellectual, with Free Masonry this is a pre-Whitmanian dream of progressive, enlightened social and political virtue and not the thing itself. Ayrshire, of which Burns himself is the best witness, was a deeply frictive culture marked by severe economic instability even for the prosperous and much poverty for the rest. It was also subject to extreme clerical bigotry. The aesthetic stresses we feel in the second Duan derive from the forced, if not false, historical vision Burns here uncharacteristically adopts. There is, of course, the problem, significantly discussed in Issac Kramnick’s Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Cornell U.P.: 1990), as to whether such reformists could deliver their partly practical, partly Utopian project. They were not to be given the opportunity. By the mid 1790s these progressives were, with their poet laureate, in the deepest of trouble as Burkean derived hierarchy and economics brutally reinherited the world. Dugald Stewart like his fellow Whig academics was suspiciously confined. At least, unlike the octogenarian Thomas Reid, he was not roughed up. The admired James Beattie (1735–1803), whose The Minstrel influenced Wordsworth, and, as ll. 123–6 state, allegedly defeated David Hume’s atheism, relapsed, like James Boswell, into a semi-hysterical Toryism to the degree of involving himself in drinking bouts with the frequently besotted Henry Dundas.

1 Duan, a term of Ossian’s for the different divisions of a digressive Poem. See his Cath-Loda, Vol. 2. of M’Pherson’s Translation. R.B.

2 The Wallaces. R.B.

3 William Wallace.

4 Adam Wallace of Richardton, cousin to the immortal Preserver of Scottish Independence.

5 Wallace Laird of Craigie, who was second in Command, under Douglas Earl of Ormond, at the famous battle on the banks of Sark, fought anno 1448. That glorious victory was principally owing to the judicious conduct and intrepid valour of the gallant Laird of Craigie, who died of his wounds after the action. R.B.

6 Coilus King of the Picts, from whom the district of Kyle is said to take its name, lies buried, as tradition says, near the family-seat of the Montgomeries of Coilsfield, where his burial place is still shown. R.B.

7 Barskimming, the seat of the Lord Justice Clerk. R.B.

8 Catrine, the seat of the late Doctor, and present Professor [Dugald] Stewart. R.B. His father was Matthew Stewart, also Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh.

9 Colonel Fullerton. R.B.

10 William Fullerton.

11 George Dempster, M.P. (1732–1818)

12 Dr James Beattie (1735–1803).

13 Commenting on ‘Potosi’s mine’ (in Bolivia, South America) to Peter Hill, Burns wrote: ‘these glittering cliffs of Potosi where the all-sufficient, all powerful Deity, WEALTH, holds his immediate court of joys and pleasures’ (Letter 325).

       Halloween

      First published in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786

       Yes! let the Rich deride, the Proud disdain,

       The simple pleasures СКАЧАТЬ