The Canongate Burns Read online

  Nor, amidst these agonising reflections, did he fail to look, with an indignation half invidious, half contemptuous, on those, who, with moral habits not more excellent than his, with powers of intellect far inferior, yet basked in the sunshine of fortune, and were loaded in the wealth and honours of the world, while his follies could not obtain pardon, nor his wants an honourable supply. His wit became, from this time, more gloomy sarcastic; and his conversation and writings began to assume something of a tone misanthropical malignity, by which they had not been before, in any eminent degree, distinguished. But, with all these failings; he was still that exalted mind which had raised above the depression of its original condition, with all the energy of the lion, pawing to set free his hinder limbs from the yet encumbering earth: he still appeared not less than an archangel ruined!41

  Whether this ‘archangel’ image is knowingly derived from the genuine addict, S.T. Coleridge, the heroic but defeated lion fits perfectly Heron’s sentimentally disguised assassination. Scottish sentimentalists have a penchant for weeping at the gravesides of their victims. Burns’s long-term friend, William Nicol, had other thoughts concerning the death of his once rampantly alive friend. As he wrote almost immediately after Burns’s death to John Lewars:

  … it gives me great pain to see the encomiums passed upon him, both in the Scottish and English news-papers are mingled with the reproaches of the most indelicate and cruel nature. But stupidity and idiocy delight when a great and immortal genius falls; and they pour forth their invidious reflections, without mercy, well knowing that the dead Lion, from whose presence they formerly scudded away with terror, and at whose voice they trembled through every nerve, can devour no more.

  The fanatics have now got it into their heads, that dreadful bursts of penitential sorrow issued from the breast of our friend, before he expired. But if I am not much mistaken in relation to his firmness, he would disdain to have his dying moments disturbed with sacerdotal gloom, like sacerdotal howls. I knew he would negotiate with God alone, concerning his immortal interests.42

  Without the leonine Bard there to protect his manuscripts, the nature of his precipitous, premature death left his papers in disorder. Given that his death coincided exactly with the peak of the scrutiny, censorship and penal repression of the understandably Francophobic Pitt/Dundas security-state such disorder was heavily amplified by his literary executors, mainly anxiety-driven radicals, hiding, dispersing or, at worst, destroying his dissident writings. Some alleged friends, minor Judases like Robert Ainslie, also wished to retrieve their letters or mangle and censor those of the poet’s that they had in their possession.

  In his magisterial editorial work of the 1930s, De Lancey Ferguson calculated that 25% of Burns’s epistolary output was irretrievably lost. The poetry undoubtedly suffered similar depredations. There was the difficulty of identifying texts pseudonymously and anonymously published in radical London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers. It seems certain that a key notebook of late, unpublished poems did go to William Roscoe but vanished without trace in 1816. Further, many of the central political poems (e.g. Address of Beelzebub and the Ode on General Washington’s Birthday) appeared erratically and fortuitously in the course of the nineteenth century. A burning of political and erotic material in the 1850s at Lesmahagow by Mr Greenshields (of the stamps fame) may not have been the last instance of genteel Scotland deciding to save the poet’s reputation from himself.

  The two men immediately involved in dealing with the manuscripts were the poet’s Dumfries friend John Syme who enlisted a mutual friend, Alexander Cunningham, to help in dealing with the papers and to make an appeal for funds to aid the truly impoverished family. In Edinburgh, enthusiasm had ‘cooled with the corpse’ and Ayrshire proved equally miserly. For such virulent Scotophobes as Hazlitt and Coleridge, this treatment of the nation’s bard gave further evidence, if evidence were needed, of the treacherous, mean-spiritedness of the Scots. As Coleridge wrote in 1796:

  Is thy Burns dead?

  And shall he die unwept, and sink to earth

  ‘Without the meed of one melodious tear’?

  Thy Burns, and Nature’s own beloved bard,

  Who to the ‘Illustrious of his native Land

  So properly did look for patronage’

  Ghost of Macenas! Hide thy blushing face!

  They snatched him from the sickle and the plough—

  To gauge ale-firkins.

  To be fair to the committee of executors set up in Dumfries, the situation was not only complex but carried real danger with it. Also given the political spirit of the age, much of the material could not be made public far less profitably so. As Ian Hamilton has written:

  The Dumfries executors’ committee had already done some preliminary sifting and, fearing piracies, had advertised for any Burns material that was in private hands. The mass of the papers they found at the poet’s house was in ‘utter confusion’ but it took no more than a glance to determine that much of the collection ought probably to be destroyed: ‘viz. Such as may touch on the most private and delicate matters relative to female individuals’. When, in August, a bonfire was arranged, Syme was more hesitant: ‘Avaunt the sacrilege of destroying them and shutting them forever from the light: But on the other hand, can we bring them into the light?’ On this occasion, only a few ‘unimportant’ notes and cards were burnt.43

  As well as sexually intimate indiscretions, went political ones. Such were safer out of Scotland given that, comparatively, it was a more politically controlled environment than England.

  Establishment Scots were even more zealous than their English masters in hunting down treason in a more demographically controlled environment. The radical English connection that Burns most prided himself on, indeed his intention had been to visit him, was William Roscoe of Liverpool. Roscoe, the centre of a vast web of radical connections was poet, historian and financier. His friend was a Scottish doctor and part-time scholar, Dr James Currie. Currie’s initial response to receiving the papers is replete with the personal and textual terrible harm of which he was to be both initiator and chief agent:

  My dear Syme: Your letter of the 6th January reached me on the 12th, and along with it came the remains of poor Burns. I viewed the large and shapeless mass with astonishment! Instead of finding … a selection of his papers, with such annotations as might clear up any obscurities … I received the complete sweepings of his drawers and of his desk … even to the copy book on which his little boy had been practising writing. No one had given these papers a perusal, or even an inspection … the manuscripts of a man of genius … were sent, with all their sins on their head, to meet the eye of an entire stranger.44

  Why Currie, a man of allegedly radical political persuasion quite at odds with Heron’s toadying Toryism was, indeed, complicit with Heron’s account of Burns will probably remain not fully explicable. The most generous explanation is that Currie, given the spirit of the times, produced a work designed to sell to a conformist, bourgeois public in order to gain as much money as possible for the bereft family. The good doctor, however, went well beyond cosmetic surgery. Himself plagued by alcoholic tendencies, he was working in 1797 on a pseudo scientific paper ‘Observations on the Nature of Fever and on the Effects of Opium, Alcohol and Inanition’. Burns’s later letters, replete with confessions of savagely black depressions and not a few severe hangovers were grist to Currie’s diagnostic mill. Worse, one addiction led to another:

  His temper now became more irritable and gloomy, he fled from himself into society, often of the lowest kind. And in such company that part of the convivial scene, in which wine increases sensibly and excites benevolence, was hurried over, to reach the succeeding part, over which uncontrolled passion generally presided. He who suffers from pollution of inebriation, how shall he escape other pollution? But let us refrain from the mention of errors over which delicacy and humanity draw the veil.45

  As Ian Hamilton has remarked: ‘This then was the autopsy repo
rt: alcoholic poisoning plus maybe a touch of venereal disease had killed off Scotland’s greatest poet’. Nor was Currie finished with delivering his patient into the hands of his enemies. Currie enunciated the notion that the poet, of his very nature, was susceptible to addiction. Too sensitive, the poet would always find the world on the margin of the tolerable. Again Burns’s letters supplied Currie with significant evidence for this point of view. For example, this brilliant letter of August 1790 on the essential incompatibility of the poet and the world:

  It is often a reverie of mine, when I am disposed to be melancholy, the characters and fates of the Rhyming tribe. There is not among all the Martyrologies that were ever penned, so rueful a narrative as Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. In the comparative view of Wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind: give him a stronger imagination and more delicate sensibility, which will ever between them engender a more ungovernable set of Passions, than the usual lot of man: implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as, arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper (sic) to his haunt by the chirping song, watching the frisks of little minnows in the sunny pool, or haunting after the intrigues of wanton butterflies —in short, send him adrift after some wayward pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of Lucre; yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that only Lucre can bestow; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes, by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity; and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a Poet.

  Since Currie edited this letter, there is little wonder about from where his principal biographical evidence comes. Further, he had used for his template that most indulgent of defences of the libertine poet, Dr Johnson’s Life of Savage. Steeped in Burns’s confessional letters, it was not difficult for Currie to articulate the poet’s frequent despairing self-diagnosis of his own tumultuous mood swings and lack of volition. Certainly from Ellisland onwards, the poet became increasingly prone to depression. As he wrote to Mrs Dunlop in June 1789:

  Will you take the effusions, the miserable effusions, of low spirits, just as they flow from their bitter spring? I know not of any particular cause for this worst of all my foes besetting me; but for some time my soul has been beclouded with a thickening atmosphere of evil imaginations and gloomy presages.

  All trouble, therefore, is located by Currie within Burns; he is an endogenous depressive rather than a reactive one. Yet, he had so much to react against. Ellisland was the last in an unbroken line of fiscal farm traps. After Edinburgh he felt profoundly deprived of creative company. His body was signalling premature dissolution accelerated by the physical and mental grind of his Excise duties. Also to someone so politically attuned he must have had an overbearing awareness of the darkening political scene as a wheel on which his personal and public hopes were to be brutally broken. Currie, setting the programme for all of nineteenth-century biographers and, indeed, most twentieth-century ones, paid no real attention to these grim external forces. Burns was for Currie destructively committed to his irrational, even fallen, self:

  His understanding was equal to the other powers of his mind, and his deliberate opinions were singularly candid and just; but like other men of great and irregular genius, the opinions which he delivered in conversation were often the offspring of temporary feelings, and widely different from the calm decisions of his judgement. This was not merely true respecting the character of others, but in regard to some of the most important points of human speculation.46

  From this Currie deduced a Burnsian dialectic ‘in which virtue and passion had been at perpetual variance’. Fuelled by alcohol, passion had achieved overwhelming, self-destructive victory. Inevitably, intentionally this diagnosis destroys the poetry as much as the poet. Currie creates a situation in which, from now on, any conformist critical hack can and, indeed, did have the prescriptive power to censor any of Burns’s poetry not conforming to that respectability which was the first line of defence of conservative political correctness. The political poet becomes a malcontented unstable neurotic, not an incisive diagnostician of manifest ills in the body politic.

  There is some evidence, both contextual and textual, that Currie politically knew very well what he was up to. De Quincey had always loathed the Liverpool coterie to which Currie belonged to as a group of narcissistic radicals who were, particularly in the case of Burns, deeply condescending, at best, to the alleged object of their shallow affections. He particularly hated Currie as the physician who was ‘unable to heal himself’. His 1801 account of this group is charged with shocked outrage at the gross indifference of these mendacious friends of the people who were deaf to the pain that he, as a Tory, could feel all too clearly:

  I had for ever ringing in my ears, during that summer of 1801, those groans that ascended to heaven from his [Burns’s] over-burthened heart those harrowing words, ‘To give him leave to toil’, which record almost as a reproach to the ordinances of God and I felt that upon him, amongst all the children of labour, the primal curse had fallen heaviest and sunk deepest. Feelings such as these I had the courage to express; a personal compliment, or so, I might now and then hear; but all were against me on the matter. Dr Currie said ‘Poor Burns! Such notions had been his ruin’; Mr Sheperd continued to draw on the subject some scoff or groan at Mr Pitt and the Excise … Mr Clarke proposed that I should write a Greek inscription for a cenotaph which he was to erect in his garden to the memory of Burns; and so passed away the solitary protestation on behalf of Burns’s jacobinism, together with the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of that same Verton, in that same summer of 1801 … three men who remain at the most of all who in these convivial meetings held it right to look down upon Burns as one whose spirit was rebellious overmuch against the institutions of man, and jacobinal in a sense which ‘men of property’ and master manufacturers will never brook, albeit democrats by profession.47

  With friends like these, Burns’s reputation hardly needed the legion of newspaper and magazine owning enemies whose overt Toryism gave them reason to destroy it. How deep Currie’s radicalism had ever been is impossible to judge. Better men than he had become apostates to the radical cause.48 It is hard not to believe that he knew what he was doing as he linked, albeit obliquely, Burns’s alleged degeneration with political turpitude. He also had that classic bad doctor’s ability to confuse mental or moral symptoms with physical ones:

  As the strength of the body decays, the volition fails; in proportion as the sensations are soothing and gratified, the sensibility increases; and morbid sensibility is the parent of indolence, because, while it impairs the regulating power of the mind, it exaggerates all the obstacles to exertion. Activity, perseverance, and self-command, and the great purposes of utility, patriotism, or of honourable ambition, which had occupied the imagination, die away in fruitless resolutions, or in feeble efforts.49

  It is little wonder that Coleridge, irretrievably addicted to lauda-num, called Currie’s book ‘a masterly specimen of philosophical biography’. He was so symptomatic of Currie’s account that he must have felt as if struck by a cross-bow bolt from the blue. It is, however, most certainly not Burns. Further, the allusion to patriotism gives Currie’s game away. It is an unequivocal linking of Burns with insurrectionary, hence definably degenerate, forces.

  Not content, however, with rendering Burns’s personality a suitable case for mistreatment, Currie followed exactly Heron’s critical criteria for sifting the acceptable, sentimental chaff from the troublesome, satirical wheat. The literary analysis is an attack on the poetry as effective as the wholly related attacks on the Bard’s character. Behind both psychological and aesthetic repudiation lie, of course, the real but unnamed political reasons. Burns’s employment of the vernacular was the primary, obvious place of attack:

  The greater part of his earlier poems are written in the dialect of his country, w
hich is obscure, if not unintelligible to Englishmen, and which though adheres more or less to the speech of almost every Scotsman, all the polite and ambitious are now endeavouring to banish from their tongues as well as their writings. The use of it in composition naturally therefore calls up ideas of vulgarity to the mind. These singularities are increased by the character of the poet, who delights to express himself with a simplicity that approaches to nakedness, and with an unmeasured energy that often alarms delicacy, and sometimes offends taste. Hence in approaching him, the first impression is perhaps repulsive: there is an air of coarseness about him which is with difficulty reconciled with our established notions of poetical excellence.50

  Along with such fundamental creative castration went covert politically motivated readings of these two satirical masterpieces with which Burns deliberately opened the Kilmarnock edition. That wickedly irreverent dialogue, The Twa Dogs, is defined, absurdly, as Burns’s plan ‘to inculcate a lesson of contentment on the lower classes of society by showing that their superiors are neither much better nor happier than themselves.’ The quite extraordinary postscript to The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer with its terrible national images of the Highland soldier slaughtered in the service of an alien Hanoverian cause and ‘Mother Scotland’ as an incontinent crone, are described as purely humorous. Currie, in fact, set a tactical fashion for conservative criticism of Burns to laugh, damagingly, in the wrong places. Needless to say, one poem floats free of the clarty waters occupied by the bulk of the achievement: