Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
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 âto the evolution of the art of poetryâ 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 âthose little lewd revelations which enable us to discern in him (sed longe intervallo) a forerunner of James Joyce.
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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 his programme for his version of radical, revolutionary change. Hence the sestet of this appalling sonnet
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.
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This grimly bad version of third-rate post-Miltonic Wordsworth was addressed to Dr McNaught who had distinguished himself by declaring that, âAfter 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, âThe 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 beenâcould even yet becomeâif 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 âwhat 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!
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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 â with obloquy and financial hardship and all the dastardly wiles of suave Anglicized time servers â¦
It has produced mountains of rubbish about him â to effectively bury the dynamic spirit â but not a single good critical study â¦
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 â its role as a lying agent of the Anglicizing process Burns repudiated â 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 â 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 â 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.
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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 âand 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.
âMy followers too,' He says, âare 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
âTruth goes from Calvary to Calvary!'
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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 âas was Gaugin's for instance, when he ceased to be a stockbroker and reverted to savagery. Burns went in the opposite direction âfrom genius to âgauger'.
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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.
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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 âNot 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 amoralâfull of illimitable potentialities, unexplored, let alone unexhausted, in the Spenglerian sense. And Byron was beyond all else a Scottish poetâthe most nationally typical of Scottish poets, not excluding Burns. He answers â not to the stock conceptions, the grotesque Anglo-Scottish Kailyard travesty, of Scottish psychology â but to all the realities of our dark, difficult, unequal and inconsistent national temper.
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Implicit in MacDiarmid's concept of Byron as the essential Scottish writer, is the notion that he is also definably the pure, uncompromised revolutionary spirit. This is hardly borne out by either history or biography. Was the mine-owning self-dramatising aristocrat ever under the cosh in the way Burns was? Is individual nihilism of the Byron, Baudelaire variety the necessary prelude to utopian change? MacDiarmid seems not to have read Dostoevsky deeply enough to have understood that Russian's genius in tracing the demonically possessed connection between such nihilism and social catastrophe. In fact, MacDiarmid, as hierarchically preoccupied as Ezra Pound, was, at best, antipathetic to the universal democratic revolution of the late eighteenth century.
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His revolution was predicated on a quantum leap in human consciousness to be made by a scientifically attuned, necessarily tiny
avant garde
. Iain Crichton Smith thought that this position destroyed him as a poet, committing his later poetry to versified, programmatic propaganda for his science-manual saturated version of beyond the human.
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That is why he loathed Burns's
A Man's A Man
, seeing in it not a profound statement of fraternity but only crassly self-indulgent sentimentality. According to MacDiarmid, the real Scottish tradition, manifest in Byron, would return Scots to their hard, pristine selves, purged of the cloying psychological excesses and political corruptions of an imposed, Anglicised identity.
The failure to claim Byron for Scottish literature â the deference paid to English standards of taste in that and other âScottish' anthologies â is a characteristic of the Anglicisation
of Scotland. All the natural perspectives of Scottish literature are arbitrarily manipulated in the light of entirely false interpretations of Scottish character. The type of people who are constrained to whitewash Burns are naturally anxious to disavow Byronâwhom it would be impossible to âpuritanise' ⦠He stands outwith the English literary tradition altogether. He is alien to it and not to be assimilated. English literature ⦠has developed moral limitations â a quality of censorship which renders it impossible to naturalise certain attitudes of life, certain tendencies in expression â¦
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MacDiarmid's capacity for intellectual absolutism, albeit frequently self-contradictory, has the ideological danger inherent in literary criticism of thesis-driven misreading. There is no little irony in the fact that it is an Englishman, W.H. Auden, who made a much more convincing distinction between Burns and Byron and, in so doing, makes one of the most acute critical remarks about the essence of Burns's genius:
At the beginning of the Romantic age stand two writers of Light Verse who were also major poets, Burns and Byron, one a peasant the other an aristocrat. The former came from a Scottish parish which, whatever its faults of hypocrisy and petty religious tyranny, was a genuine community where the popular tradition in poetry had never been lost. In consequence Burns was able to write directly and easily about all aspects of life, the most serious as well as the most trivial. He is the last poet of whom this can be said. Byron, on the other hand, is the first writer of Light Verse in the modern sense. His success lasts as long as he takes nothing very serious; the moment he tried to be profound and âpoetic' he fails. However much they tried to reject each other, he was a member of âSociety', and his poetry is the result of his membership. If he cannot be poetic, it is because smart society is not poetic.
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MacDiarmid's nationalist essentialism offers a heady, narcissistic appeal. If, however, history should be written about relationships between states not about mythically essential nations, literary history has constantly to concern itself with the inherent, ongoing dialogue between literatures. This is why Burns and the 1790s have been so misunderstood. Jeffrey wanted all relationships between Burns and the English Romantics, especially Wordsworth, terminated because the Scots were naturally loyal. MacDiarmid inverts
the terms of the equation, the Scots are innate radicals and the English inherent constitutionalists, but he too achieves the same end in divorcing Scottish and English writing. This, particularly, in the 1790s is nonsense. Albeit in differently accented voices, Blake and Burns are deeply compatible, just as Cowper and Burns are. That savagely funny, neglected English satirist and friend of James Perry of
The Morning Chronicle
, Professor Richard Porson, produced polemics in a Scots-styled stanza that could, to the untrained eye, be easily mistaken for Burns. Wordsworth in particular, but almost all English radical writers of that decade, knew exactly what politics were inherent in Burns's poetry. Indeed they were influenced by his example as man and poet. Equally, Burns along with the innate strengths of his native vernacular and the profound influence of Fergusson in particular, creatively plundered Shakespeare, Milton, the Tory Augustans, the Eighteenth-century Novel, and his sentimental English and Irish (Goldsmith) contemporaries to create a unique synthesis. As Thomas Preston has notably remarked in viewing Burns through the highly rewarding perspective of Bakhtin:
Burns's poetry offers a gold mine of contestation among Scottish, English, classic, European, and non-European matters â a wondrous intertextuality of quotations, traditions, dictions, idioms, dialects, languages, meanings. His texts do not produce, I suggest, the agonistic of conflicted tongues heard by Thomas Crawford nor the Smollettian dialect of synthesized literary traditions sought by Carol McGuirk. Instead they orchestrate a polyphony of voices contesting languages, literary traditions, and cultures. Burns's poetic project is dialogical through and through, internally within and between poems and externally within and between Scottish and other cultures. It scripts a future Scottish national culture that is inherently diverse â an imagined community whose lack of uniformity would appal Tobias Smollett, whose last and dying years, despite his anglicizing in aid of a sublated British culture, nevertheless were spent, perhaps fittingly, outside of Britain. Kenneth Simpson has written the most persuasively, I think, of Burns's varying roles and poses, a poetic strategy he considers a reflection of the protean eighteenth-century Scot undergoing the dissociation of sensibility caused by the Union. Burns, he thinks, âbecame trapped behind the roles he so readily created'. I would suggest instead that these roles register the rich profusion of personal and cultural possibilities, opportunities,
and identities made available to both individuals and Scottish society by the dialogic â indeed postmodern â world Burns's poetic project scripts. This paper serves merely to suggest the many possibilities for exploration that Burns's dialogism offers. Alan Bold misleadingly argues that Burns âlooked back in ecstasy and did not take the future of Scotland into account'. It can be argued that dominant Scottish discourse since the Union has instead looked back in ecstasy while enacting the literati's rather than Burns's implied national script, and this possibility may cause some subconscious guilt that the âgreat tartan monster' and the annual Burns Supper orgies seek to absolve. If this is so, tartanry and toasts to the âImmortal Memory' yet also serve to keep alive the possibility of attending to Burns's script.
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