The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

      At the end of this assault on the unfortunate James Grant Wilson, we also find this remark on Burns:

A point of curiosity is the rest of Burns’s Ode about Washington, some lines of which appear already in his Correspondence. It is a very poor performance, but interesting as another testimony to the profound sympathy of Burns for all democratic movements. Why does Mr. Wilson tell us no more about the history of the piece.74

Or, indeed, why did Stevenson, given his brilliantly innovative essay on Walt Whitman in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, not himself write about the democratic Burns. Partly perhaps because when talking about Scottish subjects he was infected by a sort of internalized Calvinism so that the empathy he could extend to Villon and Baudelaire (he was preoccupied with both these anarchic French spirits) could not be replicated for Burns who, like Hazlitt, he declared a sexually out-of-bounds bounder.75

      A second wave was to follow Stevenson in the wake of the First World War. The British imperial economic and political project was damaged beyond repair, as correctly interpreted by the tiny Scottish avant garde, and it was felt that Scotland needed to be reconnected to its roots. Obstacles to this were the travesty of Celticism present in the sentimental tartanisation of the nation. ‘Out of the Celtic twilight’, as MacDiarmid wrote, ‘and into the Gaelic sun’. Another cultural, political phenomenon as destructive to what the avant garde considered vital to a resurrected Scotland was the Burns phenomenon now incorporated into The Burns Federation. Between the avant garde and the established Burnsians there was no co-operation and, indeed, relations were soon to turn to active hostility. Catherine Carswell’s honest, passionate biography of Burns was met with a bullet sent through the post to her. Written from her Lawrentian influenced position of a reintegrative instinctual and erotic vision, such open discussion of the poet’s sexual nature was unacceptable. By far the greatest of all Burns’s scholars the American John De Lancey Ferguson, as his correspondence with Mrs Carswell shows, was met not with open hostility but a marked lack of co-operation from the Federation regarding his magisterial edition of the poet’s letters. His subsequent biography, the fine The Pride and the Passion, was met with, as he ruefully put it, ‘passionate apathy’. Presbyterian Tory-Unionism would not release its death grip on a poet to whom, unlike Sir Walter Scott, it had absolutely no claim. Edwin Muir, while not personally empathetic to Burns as a poet, concisely summed up what he perceived as an end-game for Burns and Scotland. The occasion for Muir’s observations was the unveiling of a new statue to Burns with that bastion of ‘socialism’, Ramsay McDonald, making the oration:

      The symbolism implicit in this scene is quite casual and involuntary. The churchyard could hold only a certain number of people; the ‘platform party’ (in Scotland one is always hitting against platform parties) was naturally chosen from the more well-to-do admirers of the poet: landlords, baronets, and officers in the British army. Objectively one can see that, Scotland being what it is, a ceremony in honour of its greatest poet should just take this form and no other. But at the same time one is driven to ask what can have happened to Burns since his death to make him now the implicit property of the middle and upper classes, when he was the property of the poor man at the beginning. This change may be briefly described by saying that Holy Willie, after being the poet’s butt, has now become the keeper of his memory …

      Burns set the world in a roar of laughing at the people who now unveil statuary in his honour. Why is it that they are so kind to his kail and potatoes?

One reason for this is that the figure of Burns has become quite vague, and that the vaguer he becomes the more universally he pleases his countrymen. His words no longer mean anything.76

      Muir then turns to an exemplary example of this vagueness by dealing with MacDonald’s eulogy to Burns. At this time Scottish society was in a state of political unrest, although somewhat different from the 1790s. There existed, however, a similar pattern of economic breakdown, profiteering and war weariness though the revolutionary cloud on the horizon was Russia, not France. Muir quotes MacDonald’s maunderings on Burns as revolutionary whereby ‘Burns’s revolution, was a revolution in soul, a revolution in being, a revolution in manliness, a revolution in humanity’. That is, of course, a revolution whereby everything except economic power and social justice are effectively changed. With his customary lucidity, Muir pointed out how the events of the darkening 1930s cast their shadow on the then contemporary interpretations of the 1790s:

I think I have said enough to show that Burns has been ostentatiously but securely swallowed and digested by Holy Willie during the century and a bit since his death. Burns was not the revolutionist who Mr. MacDonald makes him out to be, but he was an honest writer. And though he was a revolutionist, he showed his sympathy with the French Revolution in a quite practical way, without stopping to consider whether it was a mere revolution in circumstance or a revolution in soul. We cannot imagine the Burns whose statue Mr. MacDonald unveiled sending arms even to the constitutional government of Spain against the expressed wishes of the established order, as the living Burns did to the leaders of the French revolution against a similar prohibition. Something has happened to him since his death, and it is what happens to all writers after their death, no matter what they have written. It may not be true that all writers reflect the economic ideology of the society in which they live—I do not think it is—but it does seem to be true that their writings are finally and in the long run made to reflect that ideology, by a process of elimination and transformation, until the most influential classes in society can finally put their seal on the result. This necessity for social elimination and transformation probably accounts for Mr. MacDonald’s sharply condemnatory but vague references to Burns’s recent biographers (he could only have meant Mrs. Catherine Carswell’s plain-spoken and entirely sympathetic Life). For an honest biography helps to destroy the imposed image and to undo careful work of social transformation.77

      Muir, of course, was not to know that in 1993, Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, toasted the ‘Immortal Memory’ in the Edinburgh Central constituency (we are reliably informed by a still enraged Old Labour source) without mentioning Burns at all.

      One would have anticipated that Hugh MacDiarmid, bourgeois Scotland’s worst nightmare, with his celebration of John Maclean, Lenin and his intended book on Red Clydeside would have been prolix on the parallels between the 1790s and 1930s. With his early involvement in the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.), he was, overtly and expansively, a far more politically committed writer than Muir. Even so, he rarely mentions Scottish culture’s constant, mendacious denial of Burns as a democratic revolutionary. He was, however, constantly caustic about the literary implications of the Burns cult and how it had diverted attention not only from Burns’s poetry but poetry per se into a morass of biographical, antiquarian trivia. As he wrote:

Those who love poetry best today, and understand best its nature and function, have least to say of Burns as poet. To the quest for increased facilities of human self-expression —to the evolution of the art of poetry— Burns contributes nothing. It is almost exclusively in non-literary circles, amongst people who seldom read poetry of any kind, that Burns is still enthusiastically acclaimed as a great poet.… Burns the satirist is another matter. And the Burns of the verses that are not to be found in the expurgated editions —those little lewd revelations which enable us to discern in him (sed longe intervallo) a forerunner of James Joyce.78

      Burns, for MacDiarmid, had a Janus-face. He saw him, by analogy with Joyce, as a proto-modernist capable of literary innovation and the changing of human consciousness. But he also saw him as a redundant poet not entirely irresponsible for the sterile cult created in his name. As MacDiarmid grew older, culminating in his dreadful polemic, Burns Today and Tomorrow (1958), the latter view prevailed. Initially, however, he thought that he could not only co-opt Burns but the Burns Federation into