The Canongate Burns (2 page)

This notion of it being an essential part of democracy that one be, so to speak, ‘on stage', that all men have a right to be visible in the public domain of history, a visibility the schoolboy Burns believed he had, is a concept to which we will return. If there was no economic base for this, such freedom was impossible. Burns's experience was one of the intensification of power of the land-holding class fired by the energies and methods of agrarian capitalism which were making life for many economically worse. That, in fact, the Enlightenment pressures towards democratic reform expressed through the new Freemasonry and, for him, present in the
American Revolution were being undermined by a re-energised, even more avaricious propertied class. The childhood threat of being thrown off their farm stayed with Burns. Always, for diverse reasons, a keen Bible reader no book was more pertinent to him than that of the Book of Job where he clearly discerned both his father's ill-fate and his own in that nothing they turned their hands to would prosper. His father's death saved him from debtor's prison. The trauma stayed with the son:

The creative compensation was that this fear and rage drove some of his best poetry whether, as in the cunning irony of
The Twa Dogs
or the biting, black anger of his demonic monologue about the initial stages of the Highland Clearances,
The Address of Beelzebub
. Though Burns himself was never ejected, the fear of dispossession either through debt or due to his radical beliefs, haunted him to the end. As he wrote in that marvellously reworked late song of ancestral suffering, the primal agony of not being able to feed one's children,
O That I Had Ne'er Been Married
:

And come ben they did. The physical agony of his death bed, as terrible as that of his great admirer Keats, was horrendously intensified by his sense that all he would leave his wife and children were the terrible consequences of his debts. Further, that the spectre of famine, as a consequence of the war with France, was loose in the Dumfries streets:

That Burns should so allude to Burke's remark of the pig-sty quality of the cultural life of the French common people, a remark unforgivably burnt into the consciousness of all the British radicals of that age, implies he did not die purged of his revolutionary aspirations.

Indeed, none of his contemporaries thought he had. Ironically, it was that singular English Romantic Tory, Thomas De Quincey, who most penetratingly and passionately revealed the social vision at the heart of so much of Burns's poetry. De Quincey had no doubt that Burns was a compendium of the radical vices of the Jacobin type, the quintessence of the revolutionary personality.
5
He feared and disliked, given his disposition to traditional order, Burns's ‘peculiarly wild and almost ferocious spirit of independence'. As much as his friend Charles Lamb adored the poetry, De Quincey loathed the letters which he found self-declamatory, irascible, resentful, provocative manifestations of personal and public unrest. Yet of all the English Romantics, it was De Quincey, who had himself for a time lived among the dispossessed and, indeed, had come to Scotland to take ecclesiastical refuge from his creditors, who best defined, probably because of the very contradiction between his personal experience and his political ideology, Burns's social vision:

If De Quincey finds Burns's political position paradoxical, his own is no less so. Burns's compassion, according to De Quincey, touches the nerve of the greatest evil, not work but its denial from which stems starvation and dispossession. De Quincey supports an established order which not only turns its face from such suffering but also economically promotes it. Little wonder that
King Lear
haunted the writers of the 1790s for when the hierarchical King is made destitute, he finds a form of being hitherto unimaginable to him. Thus Burns, in that early bi-lingual cry of rage against social oppression and exploitation,
A Winter's Night
, invokes Shakespeare's earlier cry of outrage:

As we have seen, Burns as a farmer led a near subsistence existence which his subsequent Excise work did not financially transform. Nor did the business of poetry ease his fear of debt and the abyss into which he might fall. Only the Edinburgh edition sold in great numbers. Even here, he significantly under-earned due to the contractual conditions then prevailing between book publisher and author, which was added by William Creech's, at best, dilatory behaviour. Even then, the bulk of his earnings from the Edinburgh edition went to save the family farmat Mauchline, propping up Gilbert Burns with money he never returned. Subsequent editions made money for Creech who purchased the copyright of the Edinburgh poems and laid claim to everything Burns wrote thereafter with a merciless callousness, which saw the poet receive only a few presentation copies of the 1793 edition. The later songs he wrote for the nation and not the cash. The covert political poetry was sent to newspapers to support the radical cause and not for personal gain. He was, in any case, characteristically both reckless and generous with money.

Burns's constant stress on his own personal, political and enforced fiscal independence found everywhere in his writings, partly stems from his constant sense of rejection by his social superiors. Hence, for example, his witty, wry, characteristic account of having to make it on his own:

This brilliant comic reduction of the world of Diogenes and Alexander the Great to his own terminal fate in the Scottish countryside ironises the desperation of his own financial situation. Great men smiled seldom; one can also smile and be a villain and, thus, spread infection. When he did occasionally think that he had encountered a relationship not polluted by social condescension, as with Lord Daer or Dugald Stewart, such men shone for him in an idealised glow. He craves that such a figure should enter his life so that, ironically, the democratic poet should return to a traditional, even feudal, situation where the patron provides both imaginative and financial succour. Hence, this account of the Earl of Glencairn, whose premature death struck him to the very core of his being:

Glencairn being so defined in terms of that key Real Whig text, Addison's
Cato
is, as we shall see, politically important. For De
Quincey, however, even the notion that Glencairn was the true patron who tested the rule of Scottish aristocratic indifference to Burns was nonsense. He saw nothing in Glencairn's activities beyond the gestural:

Though Burns often reached similar depths of despairing self-prognosis about his life and career, he did make extensive and misguided attempts to replace Glencairn in his life with Robert Graham of Fintry, a Commissioner of the Scottish Board of Excise. How misguided these attempts were we have recently discovered; Graham was not only looking with increased scepticism on reports of Burns's Dumfries activities but was himself on the payroll of that vast network of paid informers reporting back to Robert Dundas about the activities of radical dissidents. The only thing Fintry is to be thanked for was that he inspired two major English language poems,
To Robt. Graham of Fintry, Esq., with a request for an Excise
Division and To Robert Graham of Fintry, Esq
. which are masterful, creative reworking of themes initially found in Swift's perhaps greatest poem,
On Poetry: A Rhapsody
. The latter Burns poem was of such quality, in fact, that only now has it become known that for years, a fragment of it, slightly bowdlerised, has been attributed to Coleridge. As well as learning from Swift, Burns's thinking on poetry and patronage was influenced by Dr Johnson. As he wrote:

Nor does Burns's analysis of the desperate life of the late-eighteenth century poet, an age replete in prematurely terminated and self-destructive careers, yield, especially in the two Fintry poems, to the quality of Johnson's psychological and sociological grasp of what was taking place. His rhetorical style may not be ours but there is actually little self-indulgence in what he sees as his own fate and that of his immediate predecessors. This is particularly so with regard to his beloved Edinburgh predecessor, Robert Fergusson, as mentioned in
To William Simson
:

He was not to know that not only was he to share Fergusson's pains in his life but, like Fergusson he was also to be pursued beyond the grave by the vilification of genteel Edinburgh and by its master spirit, Henry Mackenzie, who never forgave Fergusson's fine parody of
The Man of Feeling
in his poem,
The Sow of Feeling
. Underneath Mackenzie's simpering mask was a malice easily provoked by slights to his vanity or, in Burns's case, if he felt the reactionary power base, which propped up his doubtful talent and his monstrous ego, endangered.

It is not inevitable that out of a background of constantly threatening poverty, a profound sense of communal economic and political dissolution, bloody international warfare on land and sea, failure to make a living after being, initially, declared a poetic genius, a revolutionary spirit will emerge. Oliver Goldsmith, a poet Burns loved, came to the political conclusion that what the age needed to restrain the greedy, fractious aristocracy was an increase in the authority of the King. Burns, however, manifestly belongs to the temporarily dominant radical British literary culture which emerged with the loss of America. Hence all his actual and epistolary connections with the English radicals: Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, William Roscoe, Dr Wolcot (pen name, Peter Pindar). Hence his persistent seeking to publish in not only Edinburgh and Glasgow radical newspapers but, from the very beginning of his career, in London ones. Hence the resemblance in his
poetry's theme in image, if rarely in quality, to the outpouring of Scottish and English radical protest poetry accompanied by his signal influence on the dissenting Ulster radical poets. Hence the manifest parallels, albeit they were quite unaware of each other, with William Blake. De Quincey's definition of Burns as a Jacobin was anything but singular among the English radicals. John Thelwall, Wordsworth and Coleridge's political mentor, greatly admired Burns. James Perry, editor of the anti-government
Morning Chroni
cle
not only published his poetry but, simultaneously, sought to hire him and Coleridge to work in London for his newspaper. Indeed, this was a conversational paradise lost. Politically, of course, not only Coleridge but Wordsworth knew Burns for the revolutionary spirit which, at that early stage of their lives, they themselves were. In burying their own past, they were important influences in allowing subsequent reactionary critics to deny Burns. This denial of Burns is not the least of the offences Shelley holds against Wordsworth in his parody of him,
Peter Bell the Third
.