The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

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      Painful reality taught Burns economics, but he was not only aware of Adam Smith’s sentimental theories but his economic ones. As he wrote of his current reading to Robert Graham in 1789:

      By and by the excise-instructions you mentioned were not in the bundle.— But ’tis no matter; Marshall in his Yorkshire, & particularly that extraordinary man, Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, find my leisure employment enough.— I could not have given any mere man credit for half the intelligence Mr Smith discovers in the book. I would covet much to have his ideas respecting the present state of some quarters of the world that are or have been the scenes of considerable revolutions since his book was written.

Central to the ‘considerable revolutions’ that had taken place was Burns’s chastened experience that the manifest increase in wealth in the latter part of the century was not accompanied by any growth in equitable distribution. All boats were certainly not rising on this flood tide of new wealth. As David Cannadine has cogently pointed out there was throughout Burns’s adult life an intense massification of wealth among the aristocracy both by carefully calculated pan-British marriages and their capacity to insert themselves in the burgeoning civil and military offices of a state expanding to meet its ultimate conflict with France.9 Nor did the initially reformist middle-class, the ‘stately stupidity of self-sufficient Squires or the luxuriant insolence of upstart “Nabobs”’, offer the people political and financial hope. Thus in The Heron Ballads, Burns lifts a stone on Scottish provincial life to reveal a bourgeois world replete with sexual but mainly fiscal chicanery. His vision of the entrepreneurial personality is significantly close to John Galt. Indeed, his vision of crime and Edinburgh makes him a precursor of R.L. Stevenson. Indeed, even Stevenson never wrote anything quite of this order about his loved and loathed Edinburgh —the letter is to Peter Hill, the Edinburgh bookseller, a correspondent who always evoked his most extraordinary rhetorical salvoes:

      I will make no excuses my dear Bibliopolus, (God forgive me for murdering language) that I have sat down to write to you on this vile paper, stained with the sanguinary scores of ‘thae curst horse leeches o’ th’ Excise’. —It is economy, Sir; it is that cardinal virtue, Prudence; so I beg you will sit down & either compose or borrow a panegyric (if you are going to borrow, apply to our friend, Ramsay, for the assistance of the author of those pretty little buttering paragraphs of eulogiums on your thrice-honored & never-enough-to-be-praised MAGIS-TRACY —how they hunt down a [Shop (deleted)] house-breaker with the sanguinary perseverance of a bloodhound —how they outdo a terrier in a badger-hole, in unearthing a resettor of stolen goods —how they steal on a thoughtless troop of Night-nymphs as a spaniel winds the unsuspecting Covey— or how they riot o’er a ravaged B—dy house as a cat does o’er a plundered Mouse-nest —how they new-vamp old Churches, aiming at appearances of Piety —plan Squares and Colledges, to pass for men of taste and learning, &c. &c. &c. —while old Edinburgh, like [a (deleted)] the doting Mother of a parcel a rakehelly Prodigals, may sing ‘Hooly & fairly,’ or cry, ‘Wae’s me that e’er I saw ye,’ but still must put her hand in her pocket & pay whatever scores the young dogs think proper to contract) —I was going to say, but this damn’d Parenthesis has put me out of breath, that you should get the manufacturer of the tinselled crockery of magistratial reputations, who makes so distinguished & distinguishing a figure in the Ev: Courant, to compose or rather to compound something very clever on my remarkable frugality; that I write to one of my most esteemed friends on this wretched paper, which was originally intended for the venal fist of some drunken Exciseman, to take dirty notes in a miserable vault of an Ale-cellar.

      Burns’s political thought, then, is created by his perception of political, institutional degeneration driven by individual economic rapacity and how this might be countered by alternative forms of justice-creating communality. The immediate question arising from this is, of course, the question of Burns’s fidelity to the British State of which he was not only a subject but a paid civil-servant who, as Tom Paine had also been, was bound to it by an all-encompassing oath, which cast a shadow over the rest of his life. The Excise oath is deeply revealing of the pressure the British State exerted:

I, …….., do swear that I do, from my Heart, Abhor, Detest, and Abjure, as impious and heretical, that damnable Doctrine and Position, that Princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope, or any Authority of the See of Rome, may be deposed or murdered by their Subjects, or any other whatsoever. And I do declare, that no foreign Prince, Person, Prelate, State or Potentate hath, or ought to have, any Jurisdiction, Power, Superiority, Pre-eminence or Authority, Ecclesiastical or Spiritual, within the Realm: so help me God.10

      In part, Burns’s protestations of fidelity to that state were wrung out of him as his masters in the Excise grew ever more worried about his revolutionary tendencies. In protesting fidelity, however, to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Burns was not simply being hypocritically skin saving. That revolution had been acceptable, certainly as a stage to further democratic progress. What he and his fellow radicals believed, however, was that the trajectory of the British State with its Hanoverian monarchy was degenerately downwards. As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop in 1788:

      What you mention of the thanksgiving day is inspirational from above. —Is it not remarkable, odiously remarkable, that tho’ manners are more civilised & the rights of mankind better understood, by an Augustan Century’s improvement, yet in this very reign of heavenly Hanoverianism, & almost in this very year, an empire beyond the Atlantic has had its REVO-LUTION too, & for the same maladministration & legislative misdemeanours in the illustrious & sapientipetent Family of H [anover] as was complained in the tyrannical & bloody house of STUART.—

      The ‘Empire beyond the Atlantic’ was for Burns, as Blake, a benchmark for his ideal of Republican, democratic virtue. It was the revolution that presaged the desired revolutions to come. As he wrote in The Tree of Liberty:

      My blessings ay attend the chiel,

      Wha pitied Gallia’s slaves, man

      And staw a branch, spite o’ the Deil

      Frae ’yont the western waves, man!

      The demonic forces of reaction were for Burns, however, usually more successful in hindering and, indeed, destroying the transmission of the forces of liberty. Worse, Britain which had been because of its history the initiator and prime mover in the cause of liberty was now become the chief oppressor. In poetic terms this dialectic between a self-betraying England and a self-creating democratic America achieves its most complete expression in his Ode for General Washington’s Birthday. This is a poem of extraordinary importance in terms of Burns’s political ideas but one which his conservative commentators have almost wholly ignored by conveniently drawing attention to their sense of its linguistic and formal inadequacies caused by the poet’s use of the Pindaric Ode. For Burns himself, however, the subject of the poem was ‘Liberty: you know my honoured friend, how dear the theme is to me.’ For Burns and his fellow radicals the cause of liberty was a pan-European phenomenon, nations were tested by the degree by which they had gone beyond absolutism towards democracy. Most of them, as he testifies in that brilliantly satiric tour de force and tour of Europe, To a Gentleman who had sent a Newspaper, failed the test miserably. It was, however, particularly painful to see England fallen from her pre-eminent position. As he wrote in the ‘Washington’ poem:

      Alfred, on thy starry throne,

      Surrounded by the tuneful choir,

      The Bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre,

      And roused the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire,

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