The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

one in my tale of two dogs.—My father was advanced in life when he married; I was the eldest of seven children; and he, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labour.—My father’s spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken.— There was a freedom in his lease in two years more, and to weather these two years we retrenched expenses.— We lived very poorly; I was a dextrous ploughman for my years; and the next eldest to me was a brother, who could drive the plough very well and help me to thrash.— A Novel-Writer might perhaps have viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I: my indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel tyrants insolent, threatening epistles, which used to set us all in tears.

      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:

      I am curst with a melancholy prescience, which makes me the veriest coward, in life. There is not any exertion which I would not attempt, rather than be in a horrid situation —to be ready to call on the mountains to fall on me, & the hills to cover me from the presence of a haughty Landlord, or his still more haughty underling, to whom I owed —what I could not pay.

      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:

      Waefu’ Want and Hunger fley me

      Glowerin by the hallan en’

      Sair I fecht them at th’ door

      But ay I’m eerie they come ben.

      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:

      Many days my family, & hundreds of other families, are absolutely without one grain of meal; as money cannot purchase it. —How long the Swinish Multitude will be quiet, I cannot tell: they threaten daily.

      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:

Jacobinism —although the seminal principle of all political evil in all ages alike of advanced civilisation— is natural to the heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A good man, a high minded man, in certain circumstances, must be a Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns’s Jacobinism appears is striking; there is a thought which an observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its particular bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in old countries exists for the labourer humbly to beg permission that he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man’s brow, —that is bad; and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But when that is all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse makes that a jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like an oriental slave, in order to win his fellow man, in Burns’s indignant words ‘to give him leave to toil’. That was the scorpion thought that was forever shooting its sting into Burns’s meditations, whether forward looking or backward looking; and, that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent reason, charges upon his prose writings.6

      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:

      Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

      That bide the pelting and the pityless storm!

      How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides,

      Your looped and window’d raggedness, defend you

      From seasons such as these.

      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:

      ’Twas noble, Sir;’ twas like yoursel,

      To grant your high protection;