The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

To Duncan McNaught, LLD., J.P., President of the Burns Federation, written in 1923:

      Burns International! The mighty cry

      Prophetic of eventual brotherhood

      Rings still, imperative to be fulfilled.

      M’Naught, who follows you must surely try

      To take his stand, where living, Burns had stood

Nor save on this foundation can he build.79

      This grimly bad version of third-rate post-Miltonic Wordsworth was addressed to Dr McNaught who had distinguished himself by declaring that, ‘After Burns became a Government official he was a shorn Samson whose duty was to be “silent and obey”; and his daily realisation of his dependant position dampened his energies and restrained the free action of his powers’. This was not propitious and led MacDiarmid to remark that, ‘The same type of mind that quite unjustly vilified Burns is now most busily engaged in quite unnecessarily white-washing him’. By 1934, however, he had lost hope of the Burns Federation as a revolutionary agent for change, and indeed increasingly saw it as the antithesis of everything Burns stood for and what Scotland had been and should become:

What an organization the World Federation of Burns Clubs could have been—could even yet become—if it were animated with the true spirit of Burns and fulfilling a programme based on his essential motives applied to crucial contemporary issues as he applied them while he was living to the crucial issues of his own time and generation! What a true Scottish Internationale that would be —what a culmination and crown of Scotland’s role in history, the role that has carried Scotsmen to every country in the world and given them radical leadership everywhere they went!80

      What obsessed MacDiarmid was not simply the need to galvanise his retarded nation but to put it at the very vanguard of what he perceived as a quantum, science-driven evolution in human consciousness. What he was faced with was an actual situation where the global network of Burns Clubs provided locations for the transmission, not of innovative consciousness, but of the worst aspects of sentimental banality. Within Scotland, things were even worse:

      It is an organisation designed to prevent any further renaissance of the Scottish spirit such as he himself encompassed, and in his name it treats all who would attempt to renew his spirit and carry on his work on the magnificent basis he provided as he himself was treated in his own day — with obloquy and financial hardship and all the dastardly wiles of suave Anglicized time servers …

      It has produced mountains of rubbish about him — to effectively bury the dynamic spirit — but not a single good critical study …

      It has failed … to get Burns or Scottish literature or the Scottish language to which Burns courageously and rightly and triumphantly reverted from English, taught in Scottish schools.

      Its gross betrayal of the Scots language — its role as a lying agent of the Anglicizing process Burns repudiated — was well seen in its failure to support the great new Scots dictionaries.

      … the need to follow his lead at long last is today a thousand times greater than when he gave it.

      We can — if we will … We can still affirm the fearless radical spirit of the true Scotland. We can even yet throw off the yoke of all the canting humbug in our midst. We can rise and quit ourselves like men and make Scotland worthy to have had a Burns — and conscious of it; and we can communicate that consciousness powerfully to the ends of the earth.

… if we don’t, if we won’t, the Burns cult will remain a monstrous monument to the triumph of his enemies.81

      What appears about this time in MacDiarmid’s poetry is the image of Burns as a latter day Christ crucified by his cultish followers. This is best known from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Less well known is this disturbing English sonnet, They Know Not What They Do:

      Burns in Elysium once every year

      Ceases from intercourse and turns aside

      Shorn for a day of all his rightful pride,

      Wounded by those whom yet he holds most dear.

      Chaucer he leaves, and Marlowe, and Shakespeare,

      Milton and Wordsworth —and he turns to hide

      His privy shame that will not be denied,

      And pay his annual penalty of fear.

      But Christ comes to him there and takes his arm.

      ‘My followers too,’ He says, ‘are false as thine,

      True to themselves and ignorant of Me,

      Grieve not thy fame seems so compact of harm;

      Star of the Sot, Staff of the Philistine

—Truth goes from Calvary to Calvary!’82

      MacDiarmid saw Burns as an incomplete revolutionary when compared to Byron, Baudelaire and (by implication) MacDiarmid himself:

He was intimidated in the most insidious fashion by the existing order of things … The pity about Burns is that he never got beyond good and evil. If he had been able to kick the traces over completely his potential genius might have been liberated —as was Gaugin’s for instance, when he ceased to be a stockbroker and reverted to savagery. Burns went in the opposite direction —from genius to ‘gauger’.83

      This concept of an early Modernist, definably post-Nietzschean Burns, MacDiarmid may have derived from a little known poem by Swinburne (a poet he admired), Burns: An Ode (1896):

      And Calvin, night’s prophetic bird,

      Out of his home in hell was heard

      Shrieking; and all the fens were stirred

      Whence plague is bred;

      Can God endure the scoffer’s word?

But God was dead.84

      Not only does the poem personify Burns within terms of late nineteenth-century atheism and, perhaps expectedly, finds him inferior to Chaucer, but also, quite unexpectedly, it sees him as inferior to Dunbar:

      But Chaucer’s daisy shines a star

      Above his ploughshare’s reach to mar,

      And mightier vision gave Dunbar

      More strenuous wing

      To hear around all sins that are

      Hell dance and sing.

      Ironically, MacDiarmid’s slogan ‘Not Burns, but Dunbar’ may have been derived from an English source. What is certain, however, is that it was not Burns but Byron whom he saw as the quintessence of Scottish literary and associated virtues:

Byron will come to his own yet in his own country, however. Scotland is shedding its super-imposed and unnatural religiosity. Unlike English literature Scottish literature remains amoral—full of illimitable potentialities, unexplored, let alone unexhausted, in the Spenglerian sense. And Byron was beyond all else a Scottish poet—the most nationally typical of Scottish poets, not excluding Burns. He answers — not to the stock conceptions, the grotesque Anglo-Scottish Kailyard travesty, of Scottish psychology — but to all the realities of our dark, difficult, unequal and inconsistent national temper.85

Implicit