The Canongate Burns (14 page)

Preston's essay is a deeply perceptive and provocative argument in favour of Burns creating a sort of healthily open, dialogically energised Scottish literature which was in opposition to the integration of Scottish writing into the standardised language, envisaged by such as the Irishman Thomas Sheridan and advocated by Edmund Burke and James Boswell, of the Anglo-British empire. Burns knew and loathed the power and accent of the Scots who served that imperium: ‘Thou Eunuch of language—Thou Englishman who was never south of the Tweed —Thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms'. Henry Dundas would be the prime example of that category though he, according to a jealous Boswell, had hardly the capacity to put pen to paper. Preston's account requires only the modification that the relationship with English literature in the 1790s was not only dialogical but collusive in that these writers were seeking a republican reorientation of the British state through the resurrected democratic nationalism of its English, Scottish, Irish parts. The failure of this ambition is, as we shall see, tragically embodied in
Ode for General
Washington's Birthday
. Though, as Preston notes, two hundred years later we seem to be entering similar territory. It is the primary impulse behind this edition, then, to make Burns available to a contemporary Scottish consciousness that is hopefully more openly responsive to the man, his values and, above all, his poetry than has largely been the case over the last two centuries.

As we have seen in our Introduction, nineteenth-century editors were seriously remiss, with varied degrees of ignorance and prejudice, in providing a proper context for the poems and the politically fractious culture out of which they emerged. One could simply not expect any knowledgeable enthusiasm for a revolutionary, democratic Burns given the victory of the British Old Regime during the ideological war of the 1790s, so complete was it that it virtually wiped the radical struggle from national memory. Towards the end of the century, the Henley–Henderson edition of 1896 brought Burns editorship to a nadir by combining Henley's rampant right-wing jingoism with a deliberate policy of ‘correcting' the poet's spelling, punctuation and stresses according to modern standards. Burns's distinctive habit of spelling place and proper names in capitals, italicising idioms and ironies and his use of long dashes are virtually all purged from their edition. This constant, careless editorial meddling seriously disrupts the intelligible rhythm of the poems by an accelerated ‘streamlining' of the reading process so that the poet's voice is significantly diminished.

In the twentieth century we had the heroic scholarship of the American, Professor J. De Lancey Ferguson, with his edition of the letters. This, as his correspondence with Catherine Carswell shows,
1
was achieved with, at best, the non-cooperation of the then Scottish Burns establishment. Despite his great scholarly virtues, De Lancey Ferguson was not sufficiently equipped in either the political history of ideas or comparative Romantic scholarship to provide the letters and their recipients with the literary and political context needed to bring Burns into fuller focus, although he did begin down this road with his last essay, the largely unknown but brilliant critique on previous editorship,
They Censored Burns
.
2
Sadly, Oxford's expensive re-edition of the letters in 1985 arguably achieved its most significant addition by appending Professor G. Ross Roy's name as editor.

The three-volume Oxford edition of
Burns: Songs and Poems
(1968) by James Kinsley, is by far the most important edition of the poems. He lists a formal number of 605 poems and songs within the
canon. However, several works are counted by him under a number with sub-categories, 100A, 100B, and so on. This means he accepts 621 poems, songs and fragments to the canon. This is increased further by the poems within Kinsley's
Dubia
section – those works he could not properly date in terms of composition. Hence, the overall Kinsley total is around 630, with a few marked as ‘probably' authentic.

There is, however, among his extensive, indeed, apparently exhaustive quarrying of Burns's poetry for the poet's quite enormous range of allusion to English, Scottish, Folk and, not least, Biblical sources, a degree of exhibitonist erudition. One really doubts that even so much a poet's poet as Burns (the very reverse of the limited ploughman) had access to such esoteric texts. Given that qualification, this new edition is everywhere marked by Kinsley's scholarly presence. As with Carol McGuirk's excellent
Robert Burns: Selected Poems
(Penguin, 1993), we have everywhere tried to acknowledge our specific debts. While Kinsley is almost Olympian in erudition, the same cannot be said of his degree of detachment. Though less obviously so, his edition carries many of the omissions and prejudices of nineteenth-century scholars. Kinsley, essentially, was a conservative eighteenth-century scholar with neither patience for nor understanding of Romantic radical poetics. It may be that such wilful obscuritanism in Kinsley is part of a much larger pattern prevailing in British literary criticism. David Norbrook, in a recent study of seventeenth-century English poetry
3
argues that there is an in-built, repressive prejudice in our national literary criticism to prefer a royalist over a republican poetics. He comments that the memory of republican poetry had been ‘kept at bay by a
cordon sanitaire
of defensive ridicule'. The parallel between the bloody crucible of the mid-seventeenth century and the political tumult of the 1790s should be obvious from our introduction with relevance to Burns and Scotland and what was subsequently done to him.

In his Warton lecture to the British Academy on 23 January 1974, Kinsley summarised what he had learned from his work on Burns. Thus he wrote:

The implications of his bizarre conclusions are not those to induce confidence in his editorial vision or practices, coming from an editor whose perhaps over-laden commentary annotates the extraordinary degree of Burns's allusiveness to other poetry. From the evidence of his poetry and letters he is about as unliterary as James Joyce. Indeed, from further remarks, it would seem Kinsley's intention was to keep Burns's poetry marginalised on the rural farm, isolated from his English contemporaries and de-politicised.

Dr James Mackay's 1993 edition, endorsed by the Burns Federation, parasitically plunders Kinsley's volume III annotations (often presenting them as his own, without acknowledgement) and, to make matters worse, reproduces the worst Burns text available, that of the corrupted Henley–Henderson edition. Mackay enlarges the Burns canon to around 650 works, without explanation. He does not number each poem, so the increase is not noticeable. He includes works
omitted
by Kinsley and
excludes
work Kinsley accepted. In the appendix he asserts that Kinsley ‘attempted to define the canon for all time, listing 632 poems and songs which were incontrovertibly the work of Burns'. He then states that all of the poems in Kinsley's
Dubia
section are shown
not to be
from Burns, although most of these are printed by Mackay as genuine. The net effect is to leave the Burns canon confused.

The essential purpose of this edition, therefore, has been to update Burns, by recontextualising him into the 1790s where he was a central creative Scottish figure. As our commentaries try to show, he was also a central figure in British radical consciousness and widely admired in that circle. His poetry and rhetoric is only properly understood as an inspired Scottish variant amid the creative language of that period for he shared the sense that generation had of being in a sort of historical cyclotron where, accelerating to breaking point, their initial Utopian hopes were eventually reduced to ‘dark despair' by the tyranny and fear inspired by Pitt's government. In a recent article ‘Beware of Reverence: Writing and Radicalism in the 1790s', Paul O'Flinn refers to the:

The real ‘onslaught' was more the British elite's hysterical reaction to the effects of the French Revolution. This was a war between democratic reformist forces and conservatism which the latter overwhelmingly won. The effect was to pervert the development of the Industrial Revolution, displace and effectively destroy the Scottish Enlightenment, silence and crush the voice of dissent, for at least a generation.

This was largely achieved through the tyrannical spy network overseen in Scotland by Robert Dundas and in London by Henry Dundas and key Home Office personnel, including a Mr John Spottiswood, a London based Scottish lawyer. Spottiswood dispensed the Secret Service funds from London to John Pringle, Sheriff Depute of Edinburgh on a regular basis from December 1792 onwards. A bill for
£
1000 was paid on 8 February, 1793 and during the first quarter of the year
£
975 had been spent on secrect service ‘spying' activities. Out of this total the poet's apparent loyal patron, Robert Graham of Fintry, as we commented in the Introduction, was paid
£
26.6s.0d.
6
Burns's fear of persecution at the close of 1792 is no isolated case. The cases of Tytler and Muir are already mentioned, but less known is the case of Professor Richard-son of Glasgow University, who had a personal letter intercepted by the government. He wrote, ‘I tread on dangerous ground. Many things may be said which cannot be written … there is not a literary man in Glasgow with whom I can speak freely on the topic of the times'
7
Even the poet's friend William Dunbar, the ‘Colonel' of the Crochallan Fencibles, was suspected of being a radical Jacobin. In a letter to a friend, Alexander Brodie, Dunbar pleaded for his job and pledged his allegiance to the crown, constitution and personal loyalty to the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas.
8
We have tried to integrate as much as possible of this political material into our poetic commentary.

Thus, the structure of this edition, rather than chronological, represents not simply the sequence in which Burns's poetry came into the public domain, but, initially, the way he chose creatively to reveal himself in the work published in his lifetime under his own name. Hence, the Kilmarnock is followed by the two Edinburgh editions. The first Edinburgh edition added 15 new poems and 8
new songs to the canon. The 1793 edition added several more, including
Tam o'Shanter
which, given that William Creech had purchased the poet's copyright, earned Burns merely a few ‘presentation copies' of his own works. The 1793 edition was re-printed in 1794 without addition.

Our next section, the songs published in the poet's lifetime, mostly in James Johnson's
Scots Musical Museum
, include many Jacobite songs that were printed anonymously. The importance of Scottish traditional music, particularly fiddle-based slow airs, to Burns's lyrics, cannot be overestimated, given his extraordinary debt to musicians and music collectors of the period. However, Burns's debt to traditional song is also extensive as our notes reveal and it is in this section, particularly songs merely improved by Burns, where the genre of traditional song and the Burns canon tend to blur and overlap. Like a grand mural tapestry, traditional Scottish folk song from the eighteenth century was effectively rewoven by Burns with a mixture of his own and older lyrics.

We then move to the Anonymous and Pseudonymous section, where, like almost all the radical writers of that darkening decade, he had deliberately to disguise his identity. We hope we have shown, with painstaking archival research and detailed textual analyses, the way in which poems, especially those recovered from
The Edinburgh
Gazetteer
, stylistically, linguistically and thematically match his other known ones. Ten of the poems printed here derive from Patrick Scott Hogg's
Robert Burns: The Lost Poems
(1997) and other new work, found since then, has been included for readers to examine. Despite the over-heated, largely media-driven debate on the appearance of that book, it has stood up extremely well to proper academic scrutiny. Only two of Scott Hogg's discoveries have been found to be certainly not by Burns. These poems we now know came from the pen of the extraordinary Dr Alexander Geddes, a radical Roman Catholic priest (Burns knew and adored his uncle, John Geddes, Roman Catholic Bishop of Dunkeld). Geddes is at the top of the list of radical Scots to be retrieved from the abyss of the 1790s into which they vanished from the national memory. Geddes was a polymath. He was at the cutting edge of the new German inspired Higher Biblical Criticism. He was an intimate of Coleridge and, arguably, an influence on Blake's Biblical views. He was co-editor of the radical house-journal of the period,
The Analytical
Review
. He not only went to France but read a celebratory ode written in Latin to the National Assembly.

The two Geddes poems identified by our then colleague at
the University of Strathclyde, Gerard Carruthers, are
Exhorta
tory Ode to the Prince of Wales on Entering his 34th Year and Ode
for the Birthday of C.J. Fox
. The Burns/Geddes connection will be dealt with in detail with regard to particular, relevant poems in the following commentary. What should be stressed is that the retrieval of Geddes will be an enormously strong element in supporting this edition's argument for a pervasive literary and radical Scottish political culture at the end of the eighteenth century.

Scott Hogg's initial case and that of this edition has also been enormously strengthened by the discovery of Professor Lucyle Werkmeister's magisterial work on the radical press in the 1790s and, in particular, her two articles on the politically necessary complex but extensive relations between Burns and the London press. Why her work was ignored is problematic. Certainly it stems in part from a sort of Scottish psychological and political conservatism that has led to Burns being detached from his radical peers. We have tried in our poetic commentary to renew these connections with Burns and the English Romantics. He is not understandable without an awareness of advanced Romantic scholarship as is recently discoverable in such books as E.P. Thompson's
The Ro
mantics: England in Revolutionary Age
(London: Merlin Press, 1998) or Kenneth Johnston's
The Hidden Wordsworth
(London: Norton, 1998).