The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Indeed, not only did Burns but all radical thought, as it developed throughout the eighteenth century, was an amalgam of intermingling Scottish and English traditions. As is demonstrated in Caroline Robbins’s seminal work, The Eighteenth-Century Common-wealthmen (1957), eighteenth-century radical political philosophy was a functional construction made from diverse elements. As John Dinwiddy has cogently remarked:

The traditions or discourses on which they drew, and to some of which their conceptions of revolution were related, were numerous and diverse. They included ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘Country’ ideology, the myth of the ancient constitution, millennial religion, natural-rights theory, American republicanism, French Jacobinism, Irish insurrectionalism. Some of them were quite closely linked to one another both historically and conceptually, as American republicanism was to Country ideology. Others, such as historic rights and natural rights were theoretically more distinct; but none the less they were often treated in practise as mutually reinforcing rather than competing modes of argument, and radicals moved to and fro between them without any great regard for logical consistency.13

      From what has already been said and from our consequent textual analyses of individual political poems, this description fits Burns like a glove. His ideas are absolutely in the mainstream of eighteenth-century radicalism; it is not his beliefs but, like John Milton or William Blake, the quality of his poetic genius that makes him exceptional.

      Should there still be any doubt about Burns’s debt to eighteenth-century radical thought, consider, for example, these extracts from Cato’s Letters published through the early 1720s and, tellingly, jointly English and Scottish authored:

There is nothing moral in Blood or in Title, or in Place; Actions only, and the Causes that produce them are moral. He therefore is best that does best. Noble blood prevents neither Folly, nor Lunacy, nor Crimes, but frequently begets or promotes them: And Noblemen, who act infamously, derive no honour from virtuous Ancestors whom they dishonour. A Man who does base Things, is not noble or great, if he do little Things: A sober Villager is a better Man than a debauched Lord; an honest Mechanick than a Knavish Courtier.14

      It is of course no accident that the poet’s closest friend during his period at Ellisland, Robert Riddell, a highly respected Whig polemicist, wrote under the pen name Cato, Or, again from Cato’s Letters, on the rapacious cupidity and the political consequences of the aristocratic and propertied classes at home and abroad:

      They will be ever contriving and forming wicked and dangerous Projects, to make the People poor, and themselves rich; well knowing the Dominion follows Property; that where there are Wealth and Power, there will always be crowds of servile Dependents; and that, on the contrary, Poverty dejects the Mind, fashions it to Slavery, and renders it unequal to any generous Undertaking, and incapable of opposing any bold Usurpation. They will squander away the Publick Money in wanton Presents to Minions, and their Creatures of Pleasure or of Burthern, or in Pensions to mercenary and worthless Men and Women, for vile Ends and traiterous Purposes.

They will engage their Country in ridiculous, expensive, fantastical Wars, to keep the Minds of Men in continual Hurry and Agitation, and under constant Fears and Alarms, and, by such means, deprive them both of Leisure and Inclination to look into publick Miscarriages. Men, on the contrary, will, instead of such Inspection, be disposed to fall into all Measures offered, seemingly, for their Defence, and will agree to every wild Demand made by those who are betraying them.15

      If this, as it should, sounds familiar so to is the stress that, with Lockean contractuality, power should reside not with a corrupt elite but with the people:

The first principles of Power are in the People; and all the Projects of Men in Power ought to refer to the People, to aim solely at their good, and end in it: And who will ever pretend to govern them without regarding them, will soon repent it. Such Feats of Errantry may do perhaps in Asia: but in the countries where the people are free, it is Madness to hope to rule them against their Wills. They will know, that Government is appointed for their Sakes, and will be saucy enough to expect some Regard and some from their own Delegates.16

While there is some doubt about Aberdonian Thomas Gordon’s commitment to the Right Whig cause after his joint-authorship of The Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, he is certainly the fore-father of a stream of Scots who went south to fill prominent and powerful positions in English radical circles. We need to modify the notion that Scottish writers going south, from giants like Smollett to minnows like Mallett (Malloch), were simply on the make by being hyper-patriotic propagandists in the forging of the Anglo-British Empire. Thus, for example we have the expatriate radical careers of Gilbert and Peter Stuart, Thomas Hardy, Secretary of the London Corresponding Society, James Perry (Pirie), editor of The Morning Chronicle, Dr Alexander Geddes, radical Catholic priest, poet and religious contributor to The Analytical Review and James Oswald, who not only, like a significant number of Scots, went to France, but died in the Vendée fighting for the revolutionary army. Certainly, if they were to emerge from historical darkness, their political values and consequent rhetoric would also help to return Burns to his appropriate cultural, political context. We need also to understand the headlong flight of poets and writers such as James Thomson Callander, James Kennedy and James ‘Balloon’ Tytler, mainly westward to America in the wake of the 1793/4 Treason trials, to see parallels between their lesser political poetry to that of Burns.17 The absence of these radicals voices serves to diminish appreciation of the iron grip Dundas had in suffocating dissent by means not only of the prostitution of the Scottish legal system but because that system was inadequate in terms of defining treasonable behaviour. As John Thelwall, the great English radical and intimate friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, in the 1790s, wrote:

It is a protest against an alarming threat held out —not by the sovereign —not by the legislature but by Mr Secretary Dundas. —He alone it was who had the audacity to threaten the violation and subversion of those yet remaining laws that guarantee Englishmen an impartial trial by Jury of their country, and to substitute in their place, the arbitrary tyrannical practices of the Court of Justiciary in Scotland.18

      Perhaps the single greatest source of reformative change affecting Burns, was, however, within Scotland itself and had its origin in that charismatic Ulsterman, Francis Hutcheson and his professorial tenure at Glasgow University. His tradition ended in the 1790s with Professor John Millar whose cosmopolitan scholarship, integrity and passionate commitment to democratic reformation was lost in the vortex of repression. His 1796 Letter of Crito: On the Causes, Objects and Consequences of the Present War, dedicated to his friend Charles James Fox, published along with John McLaurin’s (Lord Dreghorn) anti-war poetry in Edinburgh’s The Scots Chronicle, both confirm Burns’s rhetoric and experiences in the same decade. They also signal the tragic death of Hutcheson’s aspirations for not only Scotland but the still festering sore of the Irish problem. While we do not know if Burns read Hutcheson, there can be no doubt of his teaching’s proximity to the poet’s own values:

      In every form of government the people has this right of defending themselves against the abuse of power … the people’s right of resistance is unquestionable.

      But when there’s no other way of preserving a people; and when their governors by their perfidious frauds have plainly forfeited their right; they may justly be divested of their power, and others put into their places, or a new plan of power established.

Nor does this doctrine of the right of resistance in defence of the rights of a people, naturally tend to excite seditions СКАЧАТЬ