Robert Burns

The Canongate Burns


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Tory poets to emulate and surpass the ‘bards of Freedom’ of the 1790s, with their ‘wood-notes wild’. This latter description was, of course, on Burns’s waxen seal.) Character assassination was and, indeed, is an essential establishment weapon. Jeffrey’s intemperate indulgence in it gave open season to varied lesser talents as that for the first two decades of the nineteenth century memoir writers and biographers of Burns outdid each other in denigrating him. Such personal denigration always carried within it the connection between his varied irresponsible, dissolute behaviour and his revolutionary politics. Here again, Jeffrey provides the model:

      This brutal allusion to the horrendous events of 1793–4 which manifested the criminal breakdown of the Scottish legal system with Braxfield as front-man for the Dundas clan demonstrates the depths of vindictive fear in Jeffrey’s heart for radicalism. Hence Burns himself is to be spared nothing:

      Jeffrey then, condescendingly, lets Burns wriggle, if not escape from, the hook on which he has impaled him:

      The alleged naïvety inherent in inferior social status has forever haunted Burns criticism and commentary. Jeffrey’s attempt to detach Burns from radical, Romantic connections was as successful as it was erroneous. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and The Edinburgh Review appeared simultaneously and it was Jeffrey’s intention, from the magazine’s inception, to do as much harm to Wordsworth’s poetic reputation as possible because he saw inherent in it a perverse democratic tendency which really was a manifestation of culturally and politically regressive tendencies. In Jeffrey there is, in fact, contempt and fear of the lower classes as not only threatening political disruption but of dragging civilised achievement backwards. Jeffrey feared that the adult condition which he believed his society had attained might be lost in the childish state inherent in socially inferior persons. One of his most repeated protests against the Romantics, Wordsworth in particular, was that their poetic diction was both an expression of and invitation to such regression. Infantilism was its essential mode of speech and society was thereby threatened. Wordsworth, linguistically, offended the law of literary progress:

      But what we do maintain is, that much of the most popular poetry in the world owes its celebrity chiefly to the beauty of its diction; and no poetry can be long or generally acceptable, the language of which is coarse, inelegant, or infantine.

      Given this principle, it was absolutely necessary for Jeffrey to detach Burns from any possibility of his poetry being infected by Wordsworth. It was not really his Europhobic attitude to Schiller’s The Robbers but his attitude to Wordsworth in whom he discerned the dangerous source of aesthetic, psychological and political contagion. Thus he wrote:

      Not the least of the consequences of Jeffrey’s obsessive fear and contempt and what he, initially and derogatorily, named as the Lake School, was a blindness, which this edition supplementing recent modern scholarship seeks to rectify, about the actual relationship of Wordsworth to Burns. As Wordsworth wrote in At the Grave of Burns, 1803: Seven Years After His Death:

      I mourned with thousands, but as one

      More deeply grieved, for He was gone

      Whose light I hailed when first it shone,

      And showed my youth

      How Verse may build a princely throne

      On humble truth.

      What enraged Jeffrey was not simply the belief that the aesthetically highest art should engage with the socially lowest class, it was the radical political commitment behind that poetry. Aesthetically, linguistically to deny any possible connection between the English Wordsworth and the Scottish Burns was to deny a radical Scottish political poetry. In the 1790s Burns (especially in the Kilmarnock Edition) and Wordsworth were creatively preoccupied with precisely the same economic and political issues. Hence Wordsworth’s retrospective account of Guilt And Sorrow, or Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain, is not only, as we shall see, related to Burns’s A Winter’s Night, but could be read as a summary of the Scottish poet’s political sympathies and preoccupations at exactly the same period:

      During the latter part of the summer of 1793, having passed a month in the Isle of Wight, in view of the fleet which was then preparing for sea off Portsmouth at the commencement of the war, I left the place with melancholy forebodings. The American war was still fresh in memory. The struggle which was beginning, and which many thought would be brought to a speedy close by the irresistible arms of Great Britain being added to those of the Allies, I was assured in my own mind would be of a long continuance, and productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation. This conviction was pressed upon me by having been a witness during a long residence in revolutionary France, of the spirit which prevailed in that country. After leaving