Robert Burns

The Canongate Burns


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decided to contain, if necessary by emasculation and vilification, what he perceived to be the threat of the revolutionary impetus of Burns as man and poet. Jeffrey’s arguments derived from Currie but even, in some instances, exceeding the latter’s account are not to be understood in literary terms without understanding the politics that underlay the aesthetics.52 Like all men of his class, the French terror had bitten into his soul. Evidence real or invented of a common people diligently, culturally, passively loyal was everywhere sought. Burns had consequently to be fitted to the procrustean bed of their political anxieties and phobias. Hence this account of the degree to which Burns and the Scottish peasantry exceed all others in educated, hence, conformist virtue:

      As analysis, this is, of course, an inversion of the cultural and political truth. The common readers of the Scottish late eighteenth century, especially key groups like the weavers, were more likely to be reading Tom Paine than anything else. Also, given that Burns’s ‘carnivalesque’ poetry is the quintessence of dissidence against the prevailing church and state, it is not easy to see how it can be squared with the pacific vision of the lower orders. What Jeffrey did was to use his enormous authority to impose a crude binary division on Burns’s poetry so that we have the ‘good’ acceptable poet as opposed to the ‘bad’ rejected one. Among other things this involved him in reinventing the Scottish vernacular tradition with that ‘bletherin’ bitch’s’ unique capacity for reductive, derisory satire, acute psychological insight, and often bitter realism, transformed into a mode suitable for historical and psychological regressive nostalgia. The Kailyard begins here:

      Opposed to this, was the dissident Burns who had, as man and poet, to be condemned to outer darkness as quickly as possible. While Currie could grant Burns’s satirical poetry some virtue, Jeffrey could conceive of nothing in it but the malign manifestations of the poet’s personality:

      In fact Jeffrey’s criticism of Burns is overwhelmingly ad hominem. The poet is seen as the great transgressor in terms of his multiple morbid and impolite discontents. He is a threat, not least a sexual threat (‘his complimentary effusions to ladies of the higher rank, is forever straining them to the bosom of her impetuous votary’) to the desired, indeed, necessary order of things. Burns, in fact, is corrupted by the Romantic, revolutionary spirit of the age with its absolute moral dispensation for the self-anointed man of genius:

      Granted the applicability of contempt and hate for his poetry, Jeffrey returns to the fallible, fallacious nature of a man who, having forgotten the ordinary duties of life, loses himself in various forms of self-absorbed licentiousness:

      This, of course, is derived from the language of The Anti-Jacobin of the previous decade with its insistent connection of exaggerated moral fallibility, especially sexual, with political anarchy. (The Anti-Jacobin