The Canongate Burns (128 page)

Crawford suggests the possible date of composition for around the end of January 1795, when Burns writes of Dr John Moore's rather anti-Jacobin book on travelling through France. Crawford tellingly argues, ‘it chimes in perfectly with his prose remarks about the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, which so offended Mrs Dunlop' (Crawford, p. 246). The letter to Mrs Dunlop, quoted above, does mention the executions in a cold, matter-of-fact manner in the same way that the song almost shockingly, in a style of casual gossip tells of the King's death, ‘Cut aff his head and a', man'.
A Man's a Man
, written about this time, has many similarities with
The Tree of Liberty
. Both songs finish on a note of future optimism set in the form of a prayer: ‘Then let us pray that come it may', and,
‘Syne let us pray, auld England may /Sure plant this far-famed tree, man'. This lexical similarity in sentiment and style is surely no mere coincidence. Crawford is almost certainly correct that
The Tree of
Liberty
was written around the same time as
A Man's a Man
. His view that the song is a far better work than some editors have suggested is surely right.

In fact, the poem is developed with considerable skill, in narrative and imagery. It is particularly expressive of the poet's developing views in mid-to-late 1794, that freedom in England was being crushed by the London government – trees of liberty are not to be found ‘'twixt London and the Tweed'. This is put more forcibly in the
Ode for General Washington's Birthday
, where he condemns England for going to war against revolutionary France, then damns her for crushing the green shoots of liberty at home with a brutal tyrannical crackdown. Indeed, Crawford makes a very important point in discussing
The Tree of Liberty
when he writes, ‘during the Scottish Reform Movement of the 1790s the Tree of Liberty became almost as much a Scottish symbol as the kilt, the lion, the thistle or the holly' (p. 246).

The current editors have completed a thorough investigation of late-eighteenth-century radical poetic voices in Scotland and have found no other appropriate candidate. It is a powerful reflective work looking back on the development of the French revolution and its influence from the American War of Independence (l. 28). It is written with a fluidity of language that moves from rich vernacular Scots to English passages with the ease so characteristic of Burns. Close linguistic scrutiny and contextual evidence suggests that the lack of an extant manuscript is not a bar to canonical acceptance. It is possible that, as some other political poems,
The
Tree of Liberty
was published in the radical
Glasgow Advertiser
. Crucially, however, the copies of that newspaper for the years 1795–6 seem irretrievably lost.

This lyric, based on a song in Herd's collection (1769), was sent to Thomson in August 1793 but Burns was unhappy with the female reply and tried his hand at improving it on two separate occasions, eventually sending the final song in February 1795. Thomson printed it in 1805.

This partial parody of Pope's
Eloisa to Abelard
is written in the voice of James Williamson (Esopus is a classic Roman actor) who managed the Dumfries Theatre. Williamson and his crew of players were acting in Whitehaven when a friend of the Earl of Lonsdale (James Lowther, 1736–1802), after attending a play, reported them to the Earl who summoned them and interrogated each actor between 8 o'clock at night and 5 o'clock the next morning. They were handcuffed and jailed in Penrith, supposedly on a charge of vagrancy. From the newspaper clipping preserved and apparently viewed by Henderson and Henley, it appears to have been the content of the play that was reported to Lonsdale and irritated him into taking legal action. (See Vol. II, p. 353).

Previous editors employ the text from a manuscript seen by Cunningham in 1834 which has since vanished, presumed destroyed. Henley and Henderson, who condemn the poem as ‘inept and unmanly', err in stating that the only authority for the poem is the word of Cunningham (See Vol. II, p. 354). A much earlier transcript in the hand of John Syme is preserved in the Hornel Collection (See
The Burns Chronicle
, 1935, p. 33). The subtitle now given is also new, taken from the Syme manuscript. Ll. 47–8 are not included by any previous editors, but they have been restored to the poem from the transcript. They are a further slight on Maria Riddell that may have been censored by Cunningham, if
he used an original manuscript (probably destroyed to conceal his censorship):

What slander nam'd her seeming want of art

The flimsy wrapper of a rotten heart —.

Textually, the Syme manuscript contains more words in capitals and in italics than the version of the poem normally printed in the bard's works, originating from Cunningham. This tends to reinforce the view that it represents a better and more accurate version of the poet's writing style, given his habit of employing capitals and italics throughout his verse. Cunningham was not a professional copyist and may have dropped the poet's emphasis on several occasions, so we have selected the text of the 1815 transcript made by Syme.

In one of his rare lapses of judgement, De Lancey Ferguson (
Modern Philology
, xxviii (1930), pp. 17°–84) went to detailed lengths to prove this was not by Burns. Kinsley (p. 1471) very effectively denies this. One of the main points of Kinsley's case is that Ferguson did not know that, though there was no Burns holograph, there were three extant transcripts of which two denoted that the poem was by Burns.

In retrospect, it is hard to see how a case could be made against his authorship. There is not only the astonishing technical excellence of the opening (ll.1–10); the pathologically jealous inner monologue he creates for James Williamson; the parody of Pope's poem of absolute sexual love,
Eloisa to Abelard
but in ll. 39–42 Burns's own appearance in the poem in the most overt lines he ever wrote about what his existence was like in Dumfries in the wake of the Sedition Trials. In these trials, it should be recalled, Braxfield had announced that since the constitution was perfect any proposals of change were, defin-ably, made by enemies of the state.

The poem is not to be understood, however, without appreciation of the complex, passionate and tormented relationship between Burns and Maria Riddell. All his relationships with upper-class women were deeply problematic but Maria, creatively talented and radically inclined, was in a category of her own. She was Robert Riddell's sister-in-law. It is impossible to say whether her relationship to Burns was ever physical but, certainly on his side, it was profound. As he wrote to her in February 1792:

By April 1793, he is writing to her in terms of an intimacy which suggests not only a, at least, fantasised physical intimacy, but a political affinity. Sharing revolutionary sentiments, he promised, in a manner which exaggerates his own risk, to find her a pair of fashionable French gloves, despite such
enemy
products being prohibited. The mixture of the political and the erotic is obviously a heady brew for him as long as the only ‘Satyr Man' familiar to Maria is himself. The fall out, which was eventually repaired between them, may have been the notorious ‘Sabine incident' but the intensity of Burns's rage was not only thwarted sexuality but the difference between them in social class, which allowed Maria not sexual but political freedom. As ll. 43–4 suggest she has a freedom to speak politically quite denied to him.

How he deals with Maria's withdrawal of affection in this poem is, however, to locate his dislike for Maria not in himself but in the unfortunate James Williamson into whose pathologically inflamed consciousness we enter. His role as actor-director also allows Burns to play throughout with images of theatre versus reality. Thus we have not only Maria being made up by Harry, her servant (ll. 16–20) but the fact that Williamson cannot keep Maria focused on him on stage as her promiscuous eye is diverted from him as Highland hero to the kilted but breechless members of the cast. This nakedness they share with the
Sans Culottes
of the French Revolution so that implicit in Maria's politics is an element of rough trading. He also lists the alleged suitors besieging Maria at Woodley Park. The Irishman in ll. 31–2 is Captain Gillespie. Though the text gives ‘bronze', ‘brogue' makes much more sense because what Williamson is most jealous about is his loss of
verbal
intercourse with Maria. Even more than her appearance, her writing skills are attacked; she is a protean, derivative mimic who absorbs he language of her male admirers the better to plagiarise it. Colonel McDoual (l. 33–4) of Logan was a noted womaniser. Maitland Bushby (ll. 35–6) was sheriff of Wigtown.

In ll. 56–70 we return to the scene of Williamson's incarceration by James Lowther (1736–1802), Earl of Lonsdale who, Kinsley tells
us, was ‘more detested than any man alive, as a shameless political sharper, a domestic bashaw, and an intolerable tyrant over his tenants and dependents…. Robert Adam told me many stories of him, which made me conclude that he was truly a madman, though too rich to be confined' (Alexander Carlyle,
Autobiography
, 1910 edn, pp. 438–9). The kind of aristocrat Burns loved to hate, it was, ironically, the very man Boswell's sycophantic Anglophilia wretchedly got him into service with.

Prophetic of Burns's own relationship with Maria, the concluding (ll. 71–83) part of the poem calls for reconciliation and a return to their old linguistic alliance. Writing to Smellie (Letter 492) Burns described Maria Riddell as having ‘one unlucky failing … where she dislikes, or despises, she is apt to make no more secret of it— than where she esteems or respects'. He might envy her freedom but, finally, he could not deny her talent nor withhold his admiration. Her own memoir of Burns (see Kinsley pp. 1545–7) confirms the rightness of, at least, his literary judgement.