The Canongate Burns (123 page)

Dumfries, 31st January, 1794

This was sent to Anne Graham, the elder daughter of Graham of Fintry, along with a copy of Thomson's
Select Collection
of Scots songs on 31st January, 1794. While apolitical, the poem in language and tone, strongly echoes the sombre, elegiac
The Scotian Muse
written in October 1793.

This was written on Maria Riddell when her friendship with the poet was temporarily suspended after an incident in December 1793 during discussion of the classic ‘Rape of the Sabines' at Robert Riddell's home. The episode is normally cited as a prelude to condemning Burns out of court for drunken, shameful behaviour towards his host, Mrs Robert Riddell. Few actual facts are known. Most commentary is circumstantial, stressing the poet's over dramatic apology (Letter 608). The poet's personal acceptance of guilt is too often equated with complete responsibility for all that occurred. As a result, Burns was effectively ostracised by Maria Riddell, sister-in-law to Mrs Robert Riddell. It is now known that Mrs Robert Riddell had a reputation for spiteful behaviour and had rowed with Francis Grose. She also detested her brother-in-law Walter Riddell (See headnotes to Letter 608). The ‘scene' may have been an aristocratic prank that embarrassed the poet and led to his being asked to leave. Whatever occurred, it led to a breakdown in cordiality between Burns and the Riddells.

Kinsley and Mackay damn Burns for writing what they both describe as a ‘tasteless libel'. Burns tells the story as follows to Mrs McLehose:

Mackay, always quick to condemn the poet's behaviour, castigates Burns: ‘The scandalous conduct was her temerity in rebuking Burns' (p. 511). When Currie first printed this work he substituted ‘Eliza' for Maria, to eliminate embarrassment to Maria Riddell. He was certainly not trying to protect the poet's reputation. Indeed by printing the apologetic letter to Mrs Robert Riddell, Currie was unfavourably representing Burns, loading him with the guilt of all, leaving everyone else stainless. By so doing Currie added to the mythology of Burns as an ill-mannered peasant drunkard. Maria Riddell obsessed Burns erotically, creatively and politically. The withdrawal of her favour led him to deadly, if transient, antagonism and in
From Esopus to Maria
to pathological jealousy. Burns is a perfect example of Blake's dictum that: ‘Love & Hate are fed by the same nerve.'

This epigram was sent to Mrs McLehose with the
Monody
addressed to Maria in the letter Burns wrote from Castle Douglas around the end of June 1794 (Letter 629). It was also offered to Patrick Miller Jnr to be passed on to
The Morning Chronicle
signed under the pen-name ‘Nith'.

Cunningham records that he copied this from a window at Friar's Carse Hermitage, alleging that Burns wrote it on a visit after the death of Robert Riddell. Kinsley doubts this but without further substantiation accepts the epigram into the canon. One version replaces the word ‘Reader' with ‘Wand'rer'. It reads as authentic despite the lack of manuscript authority.

Burns wrote these lyrics to match an air composed by Lady Elizabeth Heron (1745–1811) of Kirroughtree, wife to Patrick Heron. The poet visited their country estate home during a second tour across Galloway in 1795. After the poet's death Thomson printed the lyrics to the tune of
The Flowers of Edinburgh
.

Dr William Babbington (1746–1818) was a priest of the Episcopal Church in Dumfries. A copy of this exists in the Glenriddell manuscript collection.

The ‘Loyal Natives' was an association set up in Dumfries in January 1794 to preserve the Constitution, and display loyalty to King and Country against French Jacobins and their radical supporters in Britain. It is known that there was friction between members of this group and Burns's circle of friends in the town. Burns is supposed to have written the above after being provoked by reading
The Loyal Native's Verses
:

The Dumfries loyal association was no exception during these times. In the intense political tumult of December 1792 up until early 1796 the loyalty of all Scots, particularly those of position and rank, was called upon to help maintain social stability against the threat of so-called ‘Jacobins'. It is now known as fact that such a pro-French group existed in Dumfries and that its delegate to the National Convention of the Friends of the People in Edinburgh in 1794 was John Drummond, a friend of the poet's. This information was collated by a spy, Claude Irvine Boswell, the Depute Sheriff of Fife and passed to Robert Dundas in Edinburgh. So, from late 1794 onwards, the authorities in Edinburgh knew for certain there was a cell of the Friends of the People in Dumfries.

General George Washington (1732–99) was born on 22nd February. Burns probably began writing this work
after
the American president's birthday, but dedicated the work to him because of his iconic position as a leading world figure of Liberty and Independence. During the 1793–4 period there are many letters by Washington printed in the British radical press.

On June 25, 1794 Burns wrote to Mrs Dunlop from Castle Douglas in a letter that travelled ‘through many devious paths', in Galloway:

Burns then quotes the last stanza of the poem dealing with a disinherited, morbid Scotland. It is impossible to know his intentions regarding the poem. Nor, like his newly retrieved Bruce poems, was the poem suitable in 1794 for rallying the dispersing, ever more pressurized radicals. In this poem Washington, as hero, is tragically exclusive to America. The poem did not finally emerge in all its four stanzas till 1874 in
Notes and Queries
, then during the same year, in
The Glasgow Herald
. Kinsley, in an extreme example of his, at best, political evasiveness, deals with the poem in a few lines by citing its, to him, formal deficiencies. In fact, it is one of Burns's most important and darkest political poems. Its theme is, precisely as Burns defined it, the relationship between liberty and degeneracy. Liberty is expressed by the virile success of the American Revolution but the success of this child of British democratic ideals is not being replicated in the British Isles. American democratic
values are being not simply dissipated but actively destroyed. Burns's initial response in his poetry to the American War was to celebrate republican American victory. Quite unknown to him, Blake, differently expressed, is writing similar political sentiments. This, for example from his
Plate 13
of
America
:

As Roger Fechner has written in ‘Burns and American Liberty' in
Love and Liberty:

While generally true, Fechner's comment is problematised by this particular poem. Each of the four stanzas of the poem is relevant to four different countries: America, Ireland, England and Scotland but the poem charts a course of democratic degeneration in the latter two.

As we now know from Hogg's research, the second, recently discovered two-stanza version of the poem, ‘Columbia's offspring brave as free' refers to the Irish Radicals. This, of course, is before the bloody end of the Irish insurrection in 1798 with 30,000 supporters of ‘The Royalty of Man' dead. Burns may have had knowledge of the
Address from the Society of United Irishmen in
Dublin,
1792
to encourage their Scots counterparts. Stanza two certainly reflects such Irish values. First, the sense that rather than traditional hostility between nations their only competition should be in who first achieves democratic reform:

Further, in saving the British Empire by converting it into a federation of harmonious democratic nations, the Irish were re-sponsive to the luminous American example:

The roots of such Irish dissent, nourished by the sort of Hutch-esonian-derived Protestantism combined with elements of Freemasonry (See A.T.Q. Stewart,
A Deeper Silence: The Hidden
Origins of the United Irishmen,
London, 1993) were the same as those influencing Burns himself. He did not think, however, that by 1794 they were strong enough to defeat the evil empire of an increasingly reactionary England. Further, an England that was betraying its own founding democratic principles. As we saw in the introduction, Burns was well aware of the historiography of English radicalism. Hence his invocation in this poem of King Alfred, the English equivalent of William Wallace. In fact, ll. 39–43 are an attack on England's contemporary activities in putting together a reactionary European coalition to destroy the French Revolution. Professor John Millar's great cry of despair in his remarkable analysis of Pitt and Dundas's war policy,
Letters of Crito, On the
Causes, Objects and Consequences of the Present War
(republished by the Faculty of Political Science, University of Rome in 1984 and discovered with its pages uncut on the library shelves of Millar's
own university) can be read as a prose scansion of Burns's response to the matter. This is from Letter VIII: ‘Does not this abundantly show, that the danger of conquest by the French was a mere bugbear, set up by those persons to terrify and delude the nation; and that, so far from wishing to force a peace, as they might easily have done, by offering to guarantee a reasonable treaty, and by threatening upon the refusal of either party, to throw the weight of Britain on the opposite scale, our ministers were in reality desirous of joining the framers of the league of Pilnitz and of entering the war of extermination against France, not for the reasons they assigned, but from motives best known to themselves.'

The last stanza presents a nation over which the Bard weeps real un-Ossianic tears. There is no redeeming Bruce as in
The Edinburgh
Gazetteer
poems of the previous year. Wallace is a buried corpse whose spirit would be violated by what has happened in Dundas's Scotland. Perhaps this image of the incarcerated Scottish spirit was one repeated in Edwin Muir's image of Bruce under the permafrost in his poem,
Scotland's Winter
. This stanza is an inversion of his earlier, unconvincing
Caledonia
which portrayed a nation never conquered. Unlike Bruce's arm in the 1793 poems Scotland's arm is now palsied. Heroic Scotland is dead and gone and with Wallace in the grave.