The Canongate Burns (93 page)

… over-subtle, misleading us as to Burns's relation to his theme. Folk-poetry constantly mixes common speech and romance (and romantic) diction and it usually does this innocently… There is indeed much linguistic variety and paradox in
Love and Liberty,
and it is vastly amusing – a concomitant of the mock-heroic posturing of the beggars; but I do not read it as a deliberate social criticism. It seems to me only the kind of stylistic comedy Burns often indulged in just for fun; one way of looking at the beggars; and a means of taking part in the action by verbal proxy. The victims of his irony, indeed, are not his moral readers, but the beggars themselves.

… It is easy to draw parallels between sentiments and attitudes in
Love and Liberty
and passages in Burns's familiar epistles; but many of these are the common coin of eighteenth-century popular literature, and Burns's principles were ‘abundantly motley'. He certainly did not think of
Love and Liberty
as a
significant personal manifesto; he wrote casually to George Thomson in September 1793:

I have forgotten the Cantata you allude to, as I kept no copy, and indeed did not know that it was in existence; however, I remember that none of the songs pleased myself, except the last – something about,

Courts for cowards were erected,

Churches built to please the priest.

During the winter of 1785, one year before publishing his first book of poems, Burns wrote
The Jolly Beggars.
The final poem was a result of considerable revision: Burns' friend John Richmond reported that he had heard three other songs for it which are now lost, and Burns rejected another song and its introduction which are traditionally included in the poem. But the poem, even in its most finished form, never received Burns' final polishing touch for publication. Professor Hugh Blair of Edinburgh University, one of Burns' many misadvised genteel advisers, was evidently so appalled by its bawdiness and fierce nihilism, and protested so strongly against letting it see the light, that Burns, probably with other such prudish admonitions echoing in his ears, resigned it to the relative oblivion of private circulation in manuscript. One of these manuscripts provided the text for a printing in a chapbook three years after his death, then a year and a half later in a collection of his posthumous pieces, and finally, at the urging of Sir Walter Scott, in his collected works, where it has since appeared in the many editions with its text in varying degrees of corruption.

That Burns's best poem—perhaps among the four or five best in Britain during the century—should remain unpublished during the poet's lifetime seems remarkable and sad. But the explanation
is simple: the poet was unusually vulnerable by being poor, and the poem was and still is unusually heterodox. Burns's poverty, the insecurity of his various schemesof life, andthe sometime pathetic eagerness of his efforts at public relations need no demonstration. But the bold theme requires some emphasis. Into this poem, more than into any of his others, Burns freely poured almost the full measure of his favorite ideas and attitudes. The eighteenth-century ideal of the Honest Man, the man whose worth is shown by inner not outward signs [
Second Epistle to J. Lapraik,
stanzas 11, 12, 15], appears here with an emphasis on contempt for the world of respectability [
Address to the Unco Guid
] in contrast to the vigorous ‘hair-brained, sentimental… hairum-scairum, ramstam' world of social deviation [
Epistle to James Smith,
stanzas 26–8]. Here also we find the favorite related theme that happiness comes from the heart alone, not from external rewards [
Epistle to
Davie, a Brother Poet,
stanza 5]. Pushed further, since the duties necessary to external rewards are denied, this theme modifies into the hedonistic one that obeying inclination is, in a world that is all ‘enchanted fairy-land,' the only real principle of life [
Epistle
to James Smith,
stanza 12], and even into the complete moral nihilism that denies meaning to anything in the world [
Extempore
to Gavin Hamilton
]. Liberty here is absolute and is contrasted to any kind of coercion, even that imposed by loyalty to a similar group. Thus independence is absolute too, and leads to an anti-social pride in self [‘I Hae a Wife o' My Ain,'
To Mr. M'Adam,
stanzas 4–5]. Other attitudes enter: that those who are poor are more likely than those who are rich to be good lovers and poets [
Green Grow the Rushes, O; Second Epistle to J. Lapraik,
stanza 16] and the old theme, with its corollary of licensed irresponsibility, that those who are at the bottom can be comforted by knowing they cannot fall lower [‘The last o't, the warst o't, / Is only but to beg'—
Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet,
stanza 2].

These attitudes were not unique to Burns, of course, and were ready to his hand in the many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century songs, plays, and broadsides about beggars, gypsies, and other vagabonds. They still are not uncommon, although in different forms, in the literary and folk expressions of man's ‘unofficial self,' to use George Orwell's phrase, which David Daiches has aptly borrowed to characterize what this poem appeals to in us. It appeals to our suppressed longing for freedom from the restraints of the official world. But Burns' poem is unique in that the themes are embodied in characters and actions of extraordinary energy. Even the little world surrounding Falstaff
in the Boar's Head appears tired in comparison with the world in Poosie Nansie's. Goethe's carousers in Auerbach's cellar of
Faust
seem, as Matthew Arnold asserted, ‘artificial and tame' in contrast to the ‘breadth, truth, and power' of Burns' beggars. Blake's poems about individual freedom seem weak beside them. Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, with his legion of derivatives, is brooding and dim in contrast. What Burns has done is to write an ‘immoral' poem which has amoral effect, because the life force of his outcasts makes us believe by extension in man's powers, endurance, and color. What is all the more remarkable, as the fine Scottish critic Thomas Crawford has noted, this poem, in contrast to other expressions of Rousseauistic and Shaftesburian primiti-vism in the century, does not arcadianize its subjects but brings them forward with a realism in which the occasional loathsome-ness is balanced by the vivacity of their performances. These are the Noble Savages of the eighteenth century saved from the usual concomitant sentimentalism by Scots realism and abounding energy. The only weary, defeated, self-derisive singer, the Merry Andrew in the traditional text, Burns excised from an early draft.

The Jolly Beggars
must be read as a miniature comic opera. It has three parts: an overture (the maimed veteran and the camp follower), and action (the rivalry between the fiddler and the tinker for the favors of the widowed pickpocket, with the resolution provided by the bard, who relinquishes one of his three women to the disappointed lover), and a finale (the bard's, second, climactic song). After the veteran begins the show, each character has a dramatic reason for coming forward to sing. The character's views of and positions in life are not exactly the same. The veteran is still loyal to themilitary establishment, but has been forced out of it by its own evils. His companion embodies total sexual permissiveness and contempt for respectability. Both have found a present substitute in vagabondage for a former better life during war times. The widowed pickpocket has found no satisfactory substitute for a life in which as a thief and a wife of an outlaw she was never accepted by society. She is the only dissatisfied one, whose unhappiness is mitigated by the obvious lusty pleasure she takes in singing of her lost love, and later, as part of the dramatic resolution, by her love match with the tinker. Her hatred of Lowland law and the camp follower's contempt for hypocritical sanctity are preludes to the bard's final devastating dismissal of the Establishment. The fiddler is more vulnerable than the rest, but his pluck and resilience save him from pathos; he just wants to be left alone to enjoy himself in his tiny way, and his ideal of the
care free life is a dainty anticipation of the bard's more robust hedonism. The tinker presents another contrast: he is a hulking and bullying amoral materialist who vaunts the security his occupation and occasional bounty jumping give him. The bard, who rises to give his magnanimous approval to the fiddler's timely seduction of one of his three women, also has an occupation, but his is not to gain security but to celebrate the compensatory pleasures of a life of insecurity. After his first song, in which he divorces himself from the genteel world and declares himself for a life of indulgence in sex and art, he is then led by acclamation to sum up in his second song the common attitudes of all who have gone before him in the drama: their animal joy in the outcast's life, their jaunty and pugnacious
joie
de vivre,
their belief in making the best of the moment. But in the excitement of the occasion he takes them along with him to a position more radical and explicit than their previous ones, by comparing the pale pleasures of the artificial world to the scarlet pleasures of the natural one. The artificial world, however, is only attacked by being contemned and not by charging that it is productive of involuntary miseries. These are voluntary beggars, whose attitudes are emotional, not intellectual. The beggars do not express any direct attack on the evils of society. The social criticism emerges indirectly, in the manner of burlesque, from the ironic language of gallantry and elegant sentiment put into their unconscious mouths and used to describe their actions. The criticism of life emerges as an exaltation of the freedom of the natural man, with all his real savagery and lust for life, in contrast to the slavery of the social man, with all his safe and tepid pleasures.