SOURCE: "Poet of the Parish," in Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, Oliver and Boyd, 1960, pp. 111-46.

[In the following essay, Crawford analyzes Burns's attempt at treating local themes in a universal manner in his poetry.]

Many poems of Burns's first period embody the experience of a rural community in a way that has rarely been equalled in English. Ever since neolithic times, the settled village has been, next to the family, the most fundamental unit of society; it has survived war and pestilence, flood and famine, the fall of empires and the decline of civilisations. An art which successfully reflects the way of life of such a community will tend to have a universality broader and more general, though not necessarily deeper, than that of any other sort; it will tend to mirror, not what the best or the cleverest men have seen and felt, but what the overwhelming majority of our species have met with during, let us say, the last five thousand years. There is nothing more international than nationality, nothing more all-embracing than locality.

Nevertheless, a writer like Burns is faced with certain pitfalls; in his rendering of the life of the parish, he will often be tempted to be too narrowly particular, too minutely realistic, too restricted to the vernacular, too faithful to the customs and idiosyncrasies of his district. If he wishes to reach a larger audience than the men of his own place and time, he must concentrate on those aspects of the village which have the largest relevance; he must paint the streaks of the tulip without destroying the general form and shape of the flower. The moon that rises over Cumnock hills must still be recognisably the moon that shines over Fujiyama or the Urals.

Burns's development as a poet was from his immediate surroundings outwards the nation and finally to all mankind, but this movement was never simple and gradual; it never followed a straight line. One might have expected him to reproduce universal emotions in those poems, early or late, where his aim was to "transcribe the various feelings, the loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, in his own breast." All too often, in poems of this sort, the result comes perilously close to mawkishness and bathos. Conversely, one might have expected his descriptions of the "sentiments and manners" of his "rustic compeers" to be of documentary interest only; instead of that, they often transcend parochial mediocrity and acquire a solidity that seems independent of time and place. But on other occasions Burns is unable to make the necessary leap from the particular to the general.

In the course of a letter to Mrs Dunlop dated 21 Aug. 1788, Burns calls to mind a fragment of one of his "manners-painting" poems which is of extraordinary importance to the critic because it presents in concentrated form the raw material of the whole genre. In Aug. 1785 Robert had been in love with Betsy Miller, one of the Mauchline belles; her brother had recently married a sister of "Sandy Bell, who made a Jamaica fortune," and the "braw" Betsy began to put on airs because of her new sister-in-law's wealth—£500. The result was a comic burlesque, entitled "A Mauchline Wedding":

In the second verse there occurs a detail that seems even more narrowly confined than the mention of Cumnock, which John Ruskin [in "Fiction, Fair and Foul," in On the Old Road, 1899] thought so limiting; it is a hill with the name of Blacksideen:

By now we have moved away from Blacksideen to a region common to Burns and the author of The Rape of the Lock: the target is female affectation and pride in dress. As befits the humbler sphere that Burns is describing, the texture of his verse is coarser than Pope's, and the scene is freed from any suggestion of prurience by the presence of a typically Burnsian delight in human character:

—As I never wrote it down, my recollection does not entirely serve me.

The fourth stanza is surely as good as many of those in his published poems:

In the first couplet Burns expresses the movement of silk as surely as ever Herrick conveyed the liquefaction of Julia's clothes, while in the second the point of view of the two girls is ironically assumed in order the more fully to display their naïve delight in their new finery; it is, of course, Burns's favourite trick when he writes satire. Like most Scots girls, Nell and Bess have been brought up to distrust the vanity of dress, so that in reproducing their very turn of expression the couplet mirrors also a conflict at the very centre of their minds. By the equation of "burd," a girl, with "bird," a flying feathered creature (the conflict of homonyms had probably long existed in Scotland), the stanza ends with the comedy of the bird-hizzies strutting like Papagenas across the Mauchline scene, and scandalising the common mother of us all with the shameless violation of Eve's state of nature provided by their enormous behinds.

The fragment ends in a flurry of colour and movement as Nell, Bessy and their father enter the post-chaise that will take them to the ceremony:

Burns explains that the poem was never finished because his quarrel with Bess ended before he had time to write another line; if it had been completed, it might have become as lively a rendering of a lower-class marriage as Suckling's "Ballad upon a Wedding." This fragment was never intended for publication but was probably meant to be recited before a small number of Mauchline lads who knew the Miller family; and though Burns was certainly rhyming "for fun" here, he still had the taste of a particular group in view. As soon as he puts pen to paper he moves away from Mason Will and Blacksideen to the universale in re, the "concrete universal" that is to say, to those characteristics that Nell and Bess have in common with all clothes-conscious young women, and John Trot with all pompous fathers; despite the quarrel with Bess which set him writing, he produced a distanced but not unsympathetic presentation of the people concerned. If this is satire, it has a far more tolerant appreciation of the essential humanity of its victims than Swift's, Dryden's, or even Pope's, and it lacks the element of condescension to one's classinferiors which mars Suckling's poem.

"The Court of Equity" may have been written for the same audience as that for which "A Mauchline Wedding" was intended: the "ram-stam billies" Smith ("the slee'st, pawkie thief), Richmond and Hunter. Together with "Poet Burns" they were the élite of Mauchline's "fornicator loons," chosen by the rank and file to form a Court of Equity:

To take beneath our strict protection,
The stays-unlacing quondam maiden,
With growing life and anguish laden,
Who by the Scoundrel is deny'd
Who led her thoughtless steps aside.

Clockie Brown the watchmaker and Sandy Dow the Coachman are indicted because they have been so dishonourable as to

refuse assistance
To those whom [they have] given existence,

and are summoned to appear before the Court in the Whitefoord Arms on the fourth of June next. If Brown does not then acknowledge his crime and face up to his responsibilities he will be tied naked to the village pump while the girl he has ruined does what she likes with him for at least three hours. The poem ends with a parody of legal language; but in spite of this, and the euphemisms for certain actions and parts of the body derived from the watchmaker's trade, the verse does not attain the distinction of the fragment on William Miller's wedding. "The Court of Equity" is local bawdry and nothing more; it does not rise beyond the level of moderately competent light verse.

"The Auld Farmer's New-Year Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie, on giving her the accustomed Ripp of Corn to Hansel in the New-Year," provides yet another example of Burns's manners-painting strain. It has often been considered as a poem of essentially the same sort as "To a Mouse," important primarily as exhibiting Robert's sympathy with the lower animals; and its language has been widely praised. Miss [Christina] Keith, for instance, says [in The Russet Coat, 1956] that it "shares with 'Halloween' … the honour of having the finest Lallans Burns ever wrote," and that no poem "has more verbs to the square inch—and all of them verbs of motion." It seems to me, however, that the Scots of "The Auld Farmer's Salutation" is often a matter of the individual word, so that in spite of the sound and movement of lines like

How thou wad prance, an' snore, an' skriegh,
An' tak the road!

or

Thou never lap, an' sten't, an' breastit,
Then stood to blaw,

the vernacular is not so creatively employed as in "Death and Doctor Hornbook," where Scottishness is more consistently bound up with phrasing and idiom.

It is not Burns who speaks in "The Auld Farmer's Salutation," but a character whom he has projected, and the poem is primarily a naturalistic sketch whose source is a gently humorous and pathetic appreciation of personality and mood. The life of man and beast has been a shared struggle on the road and in the fields, from which the main values to emerge are independence, companionship and sheer survival against odds:

The horse, man's comrade in the life-long battle against nature, is perhaps intended as a symbol of friendship; if so, I cannot feel that the symbolism is as vivid, or as moving, as it might have been.

In "The Auld Farmer's Salutation" the poet gets so completely inside his subject's brain at a unique moment of time that his very success constitutes an artistic limitation—largely because the farmer does not see the full meaning of his life. Although his situation obviously implies a criticism of society, the old man only hints at his sufferings: "monie a sair darg" and "monie an anxious day." Like most Scots (and many Englishmen and Americans) he is shy of giving expression to his deepest emotions; but his understatement is so extreme as to form a real barrier to the non-Scottish reader. One feels that the farmer does not want to understand why his life has been such a hard one; all he can do is to endure. "The Auld Farmer's Salutation" is photography, not painting; it is documentary, not art of the most highly creative or imaginative kind. At the level of dramatic empathy which does not go beyond the limits of a single occasion it is a fine poem; but—in my view at least—it does not rise above the local and the particular as the greatest of Burns's works certainly do. From the standpoint of literary history, however, the poem's novelty resides mainly in its particularity. In the Great Britain of 1786, to report a humble person's mind as completely as Burns does here was in itself an act with tremendous possibilities for the future, pointing forward to Wordsworth and the Lyrical Ballads.

"The Auld Farmer's Salutation" is generally ascribed to January 1786. Almost exactly a year before that date, Burns had written the best of all his purely local poems—"Death and Doctor Hornbook: A True Story." Even in Scotland, where education has long been idolised, teachers have never been well paid; and the Tarbolton schoolmaster's pittance was so meagre that he had been forced to open a little grocer's shop in order to make ends meet. Gilbert Burns tells us that "having accidentally fallen in with some medical books, and become most hobby-horsically attached to the study of medicine, he had added the sale of a few medicines to his little trade. He had got a shop-bill printed, at the bottom of which, overlooking his own incapacity, he had advertised that 'Advice would be given in common disorders at the shop gratis'." Robert used this situation as the occasion for a work which converts the ridicule of self-importance and pretence into pure comedy of the most fantastic and unrealistic sort. His humour consists in inflating his victim to superhuman proportions in order simultaneously to deflate him; Hornbook is larger than the real dominie, John Wilson, just as Holy Willie is larger than the real William Fisher. Such exaggeration is, of course, found elsewhere in Scottish poems and novels; but that it is a specifically Scottish characteristic may well be doubted, for it occurs in most of the great comic creations of European literature. One finds it, with individual modifications, in writers as different from each other as Rabelais, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Molière, Dickens and Joyce.

As Miss Christina Keith has pointed out, "Death and Doctor Hornbook" looks forward to "Tam o' Shanter," both in landscape and in narrative skill. In the very first verse the-point of view of the poem is established as a datum from which the work can proceed; it is in fact a poetic construct, a selection from the attitudes of the real Burns which becomes a framework around which he organises his piece. Some books, says Burns, are lies from beginning to end, some lies have never been written down, and

Unlike these, the story we are going to hear

Is just as true's the Deil's in hell
Or Dublin city.

This statement superficially resembles the well-known device by which writers like Defoe or Swift palm off their own inventions as the relations of actual voyagers or as the memoirs of somebody who actually lived through the Great Plague, but in reality it is more complex than that; there is an underlying audacity which implies that the Deil is not in Hell, or even in Dublin—but that he is just as much a fabrication as the story whose truth Burns vouches for so loudly. The stanza is a triumph of ambiguity in some Empsonian sense.

Miss Keith rightly praises the rhythmic effects of the third stanza, with its precise reflection of the staggering, erratic gait of a drunken man on his way home:

But the effect is as much the result of diction as of soundvalues: it is the amount he "kens" that is important, his tipsy confidence in his ability to distinguish between the natural and supernatural worlds.

Inebriation is the ideal preliminary for an encounter with the unseen; and sure enough, as he is approaching Tarbolton Mill, three hundred yards or so to the east of the village, he meets with "Something"—a supernatural figure called "Death," although in actual fact it incorporates some of the traditional attributes of Time, such as the beard and the scythe:

Death is seen through friendly eyes, as is Satan in the "Address to the Deil." He is as concrete as Coila in "The Vision." The effect is that everything is localised, and the whole universe, including Death, has shrunk to kailyard dimensions—this in spite of the tallness of Burns's allegorical personage. The poet and Death sit down to "have a crack"; and Death is full of complaints about Doctor Hornbook, who peddles certain infallible specifics with strange Latin names, like "sal-marinum o' the seas," the "farina of beans an' pease," "aqua-fontis" [sic], "urinus spiritus of capons":

When the poet comments that this will ruin the local gravedigger, Death groans out an "eldritch laugh" at such naïveté. The trouble is that for every person that Hornbook saves from natural death, he kills a score with his physic, thus cheating Death of his lawful prey. Just as Death is about to tell Burns of a scheme he has to get his own back on Hornbook, the church clock strikes "some wee short hour ayont the twal," and the two have to part:

I took the way that pleas'd mysel,
And sae did Death.

In "Death and Doctor Hornbook" Burns succeeded in converting an apparent limitation into a source of positive strength. The comedy arises from the grotesque belittling of universals like death and human folly, which transmutes satire into fantasy; in order to make Death (or Death-Time) into a comic figure, Burns had to parochialise him through the intermediary of the raciest and most intimate conversation that it was possible for him to create. Dialogue here is not primarily a matter of choosing individual words, as it tends to be in "The Auld Farmer's New Year Morning Salutation"; it is rather an affair of idiom. Perhaps nowhere else in Burns do we get so close to the actual give-and-take of village conversation. To the seven examples noted by Miss Keith one might add another seven—or a score, for the whole poem is a synthesis of colloquial, racy and semi-proverbial expressions:

The extraordinary skill with which Burns fits the dialogue into his metre is something new—not only in Burns, but in Scots poetry. Here he has achieved complete fusion between a traditional stanzaic form and living conversation. Of English poets, only Swift, Pope, Prior, Byron, and T. S. Eliot have achieved a comparable excellence, though there are foreshadowings amongst the poets of the Restoration period. Unlike these English conversational poets, who are concerned primarily with the speech of the upper classes, Burns weds his form to a selection of the language of the people themselves, and in doing so shows unique skill.

I cannot agree with Dr [David] Daiches [Robert Burns, 1952] that the main interest of "Death and Doctor Hornbook" lies in its technical perfection, that its satire can be dismissed as "rather crude," or that it is "an amusing squib at best." On the contrary, here are both poetry and comedy of a high order, as well a highly creative use of all the resources of spoken Scots.

One of the last of Burns's purely parochial poems is "Tam Samson's Elegy," written in the interval between the publication of the Kilmarnock volume and his departure for Edinburgh. Samson was a noted sportsman, especially fond of curling and shooting; and the poem is a linguistic tour-de-force in which the technical terms of these occupations are pressed into the service of the mock-elegy in order to describe the old man's imagined death. In the sixth and seventh stanzas, the traditional elegiac theme of "all Nature mourns" is transformed into its exact opposite:

There are lines as good as any Burns wrote—

The Brethren o' the mystic level
May hing their head in woefu' bevel….

Or up the rink like Jehu roar….

'Lord, five!' he cry'd, an' owre did stagger….

—and there emerges a clear impression of yet another of the "social, honest men" whom Robert loved. Tam Samson is completely alive—an unforgettable member of the gallery of Burnsian characters. He is worthy simply because he exists, a congeries of minute particulars; yet at the same time he is the Universal Sportsman. To find his like we have to go to Scott's Dandie Dinmont, or the novels of Surtees, or Sassoon's Diary of a Foxhunting Man, or the idyllic figure of "Uncle" in Tolstoy's War and Peace.

There is nothing obscurely parochial about the "sentiments and manners" underlying "The Auld Farmer's Salutation," however bare and restrained they may appear in the telling; nor does one need to know the exact meaning of such technicalities in the vocabulary of curling as "wick a bore" in order to appreciate the warmth and simple honesty of Tam Samson. It is quite otherwise with "Halloween." The customs and habits in which it centres were so unfamiliar to at any rate the more sophisticated of his fellow-countrymen that Burns had himself to append a series of explanatory notes—an itemised account of the superstitions of the natives—in order that the poem should be understood by contemporary readers.

Most Scottish and American critics share the view of critics like W. E. Henley ["Essay on Burns," in The Poetry of Robert Burns, 1896-7, edited by W. E. Henley and T. F. Henderson] and John Speirs [The Scots Literary Tradition, 1940] that Burns is the last and finest flower of an old vernacular tradition before it withered into inevitable decay. If they are right, then "Halloween" should be among the very best things Burns ever did. Its language is pure vernacular Scots, its subject a series of rustic genre pictures: homely, vigorous and concrete, full of a pulsating, joyous movement, and free from any taint of the abstract or the rhetorical. And yet, considered as a whole, the poem fails to please. Burns is always at his best when he connects local themes and personalities with the abiding interests of the nation and the universal preoccupations of mankind. Here, for once, he fails: and he fails because, for all its movement and activity, the poem does not develop. It revolves upon a single spot; and, furthermore, it seems to narrow in smaller and smaller gyrations. It is true that in the second stanza there is an attempt to unite a local scene with the heroes and symbols of nationhood:

Bruce was at one and the same time an Ayrshire man and a leader of national resistance, and the mention of his name is surely intended to remind us that the "merry, friendly, country-folks" of the poem belong to a nation as well as to a parish. But the placing of the stanza is unfortunate; it comes so early that we soon forget it in our contemplation of the rustic highjinks that follow. Though there is none of Jonson's intellectual wit, the comedy of "Halloween" is Jonsonian rather than Shakespearian. The characters are both objectified and framed, and their frantic animal gaiety seems to explode in miniature, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Take the eighth stanza, in which a young girl puts two nuts in the fire to foretell the outcome of her courtship:

This is one of the vividest stanzas in the poem: but the distorted accentuation of "máir part" and "sáir heart," forced on Burns by his metre, serves to dehumanise the emotions and subordinate them to the rhythm of an unending Bacchanalian dance. It is instructive to compare Burns's treatment of Jean in this stanza with his attitude in the seventh and eighth stanzas of the later dramatic lyric "Tam Glen."

In "Tam Glen," Burns's sole concern is to transmute into poetry the loving and delighted recognition of character; in "Halloween," there are elements of superciliousness, of conscious superiority, and even of thinly disguised cruelty. Peasant and small-town humour is often of the sort which rejoices in the misfortunes and discomfiture of others, but the admission does not thereby turn "Halloween" into a great comic poem. In "Halloween" there is altogether too much whimsical rusticity disporting itself for the amusement of such educated readers as have the patience to look up the glossary. Here, for example, is fighting Jamie Fleck, who sows hemp-seed, drags a dung-fork behind him as a harrow, and calls out the traditional charm:

In spite of his boast that he does not believe in such old wives' tales:

The commotion of all this is superb, and the passage reads like a rehearsal for the sixth, seventh and eighth stanzas of the "Address to the Deil"; but in spite of these undoubted merits it is marred by its tone. However much he may try, the modern reader cannot altogether share in mean guffaws at the physical defects of the helpless and the deformed; he is unable to appreciate these lines to the full, just as he feels considerable embarrassment when reading a more fantastic exercise in the comedy of cruel flyting, the lyric "Willie Wastle":

The worst stanzas of "Halloween" are the fifteenth and sixteenth, containing the grandmother's reminiscences, where it almost seems as if we are expected to laugh at senility; and the best are the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth, which describe the amorous and sensual widow:

And they owe their brilliance almost entirely to their onomatopoeic quality, so all-pervasive as to evoke—not sounds merely, as in

But och! that night amang the shaws,

which reflects the very "sough" of the wind in the trees—but sights, moods, and—above all—human character.

The reader, if he has been responding actively to the poem, creates for himself a picture of the widow's whole personality and appearance: small, dark, vivacious, playful and exquisitely silly. His heart jumps with hers, and he can almost feel the bitter chill of the water as it fills her ears. He laughs; but there is no malice or cruelty in his reaction, because the ducking does not endanger life or limb or even beauty. It is the middle stanza of the three just quoted that lifts the whole incident to the level of poetry, gaining an extra dimension from the reader's recollection of the opening stanza of the whole poem:

The stream which the widow seeks is white, cool and dazzling like the fairies, and dances as lightly as they; it is as "cantie"—and even as treacherous, despite its apparent placidity, as Leezie herself. Then, as so often with Burns, the poem ends suddenly and abruptly, like some country dances, in a rather perfunctory description of "social glee." It is all over, Burns's longest flight in relatively uncontaminated vernacular Scots; and it is nearly as unsatisfactory as such purely "English" poems of his as those addressed to Robert Graham of Fintry. True, Burns here secures effects that are more impressive than anything in either of the poems to Graham: a breathless, never-ending motion reminiscent of "Christ's Kirk on the Green," Dunbar's "Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis," or that anonymous folk-ballad which is known to all Scotsmen and many Englishmen and Americans—"The Ball of Kirriemuir." But the very merits of "Halloween" are also its defects. It is all particulars, and lacks that saving infusion of the general, uniting and giving significance to details and minutiae, which is essential if a poem, or a scholarly treatise, or a scholarly treatise, or a scientific dissertation, is to achieve the highest excellence. "Halloween," it is true, is not entirely without a tincture of philosophy. In its Rousseauistic preference for the natural and in its criticism of "art" (i.e., civilisation), the poem is in intention similar to "The Cotter's Saturday Night," but the reader would never guess this for himself if it were not for the epigraph:

Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain,
The simple pleasures of the lowly train:
To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm, than all the gloss of art.
GOLDSMITH.

If it was part of Burns's purpose to illustrate this sentiment, his actual achievement was quite different. There is a detachment, a withdrawnness about the humour which would seem to make "Halloween" the perfect exemplum of W. P. Ker's judgment on the poet [in On Modern Literature, edited by T. S. Spencer and J. Sutherland, 1955]:

But one must note that he does not 'render' or interpret the life of rural Scotland simply as one of the people. He stands apart. His is not the voice of the people, but the voice of a judge to whom the people are more or less indifferent, who is far above them, and who sees them as small creatures moved by slight and trivial motives.

This is borne out by Burns's own lofty comment in his preface to the poem:

The passion of prying into futurity makes a striking part of the history of human nature in its rude state, in all ages and nations; and it may be some entertainment to a philosophic mind, if any such should honour the author with a perusal, to see the remains of it among the more unenlightened in our own.

Precisely because in "Halloween" Burns has applied the tones and attitudes of a certain type of satire to ordinary everyday life, he is less universal, more embarrassingly parochial, and less truly national than in any other of his longer poems. The consequence is that "Halloween" is today read almost exclusively by Burns scholars. while, despite the sneers of professional critics, "The Cotter's Saturday Night" finds a welcome among quite ordinary readers throughout the world.

Like everything else that Burns wrote, "The Jolly Beggars, A Cantata," was influenced by literary tradition—by the burlesque cantatas so popular in the eighteenth century, where the trick consists in using recitatives to link songs set to popular tunes; by Gay's Beggar's Opera; and by innumerable stall-ballads and chapbooks celebrating the happy lives of beggars and tinkers and vagabonds of all sorts. Typical of this whole class of popular literature is the English song, "A Beggar, a Beggar, a Beggar I'll be" (1660), with its amusing use of the thieves' slang of the time:

The beginnings of this convention have been traced (at least in English) to the sixteenth century, but (as Miss Keith points out) its sources go much further back, to Old French and the medieval Latin lyrics. The first vernacular examples in Scotland were "The Gaberlunzie Man" and "The Jolly Beggar," two songs traditionally attributed to King James V (regn. 1513-42). Now the sixteenth century was an age of agrarian crisis and of "study rogues and vagabonds," displaced peasants and monks, many of whom were forced into a wandering life in town or country. Their very existence-was a denial of the values and conventions of village communities and corporate towns; they were, surely, lower-class picaroons, the popular counterparts of those upper-class adventurers who were the originals of the heroes of the sixteenth-century Spanish novel. As Dr [A.] Kettle has pointed out [in An Introduction to the English Novel, 1951], in another connexion:

The best illustration in English literature of the social phenomenon which gave rise to the picaresque novel is the Falstaff section of Henry IV. (Poins would have made an admirable picaresque hero with his vitality and resource and lack of morals.) Falstaff and his cronies are of varying social origin; but they are all the rejects of feudalism, and they belong to the Elizabethan rather than to the fifteenth-century world. In another sense they do not 'belong' to any society at all. They are without roots. They have no fixed abode. They live on their wits. They have no morals except the good new rule of each for himself and the devil take the hindmost. And they mock every sanctity of the feudal world—chivalry, honour, filial piety, allegiance, even kingship.

In the country districts and the slum areas of towns like London and Bristol there were ragged equivalents of Pistol and Poins—the innumerable "rufflers, whipjacks, hookers, priggers of prancers, palliards, walking morts" and "kinchin coves" of Elizabethan rogue literature. It seems hardly accidental that the two great periods of agrarian change in British history, when society appears to have produced more than its usual quota of lawless vagabonds, footpads and prostitutes, were also ages in which the lower orders brought into being a large number of ballads and songs celebrating the prowess of the delinquent and the maladjusted. This is perhaps the place to recollect Dr Daiches's remark that "The Jolly Beggars" appeals "to humanity's 'unofficial self (to employ the useful phrase coined by George Orwell) to a degree extremely rare in literature": a comment which applies not only to Burns's cantata, but holds good, to a lesser extent, of all the beggar songs of the eighteenth century. Labourers and small farmers struggling to remain in the state into which it had pleased the Lord to call them inevitably dreamed their dreams of irresponsible freedom, in which beggary and crime seemed preferable to the eternal struggle to make ends meet. "Acclaimed in chaps and broadsides for his love of liberty and his disdain of the proprieties," the Jovial Beggar had become, even before Burns got hold of him, something of a "popular Ideal"; and it is as such an archetype that he appears in "The Merry Beggars," one of the immediate precursors of Robert's work:

Burns took this wish-fulfilment fantasy of the masses, corresponding almost exactly to the educated profligate's obsession with the symbolic figure of Macheath, and made it into a great lyrical dramatic poem.

Nae mair then, we'll care then,
Nae farther can we fa',

he had written in the "Epistle to Davie" when contemplating the possibility of destitution; "The Jolly Beggars" extracts the last ounce of meaning from such a situation, using it to frame a root-and-branch criticism of organised community life and morality from a point of view as extreme in its own way as those sometimes found in Byron and Shelley. The world of "The Jolly Beggars" is in opposition not simply to the aristocracy or the citizen class or the "unco guid," but to every kind of social stability and institutional cohesion; yet, paradoxically enough, it is at the same time a grotesque parody of the real world of catch-as-catch-can, and even to a certain extent of the very special individualism which, as we have seen, is expressed in the "Second Epistle to Lapraik." It is also Burns's version of the Superman and his noblest tribute to instinct and libido. Over twenty years ago, Christopher Caudwell [in his Illusion and Reality, 1937 and Studies in a Dying Culture, 1938] characterised as the supreme illusion of modern times the idea that man is most free when he is liberated from social restraint, when he is allowed to live according to some inner primeval urge, or secret prompting of the blood; and he traced the development of this concept from Marlowe through Rousseau to Freud and D. H. Lawrence. Burns in this cantata gives vent to his own special variant of primitivism, and it is one which—in spite of Matthew Arnold—does constitute a genuine "criticism of life."

I do not think that Miss Keith is altogether right when she compares "The Jolly Beggars" with the literary world of the Vie de Bohème: "To Burns' beggars, as to Mürger, life is but that—noise and song and Bohemia." The beggars' circle is more anarchistic than even the life of declassed students in a nineteenth-century Paris garret; and the poem is much more corrosive of accepted values than, say, the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. "Nothing," says Miss Keith, "—neither drink nor lust—can unite this pack," thereby putting her finger on one of the main qualities of the work. Though the beggars are a group, they have no abiding mutual loyalty, since their coming-together is altogether fortuitous. But because they burn with the flame of vitality, because the Life Force works in them still, they are the embodiment of a positive value. The competition of merchants and lairds is pettifogging and therefore evil, but the rivalry of wolves and tigers is good; are they not vigorous, earthy, and free from hypocrisy, and are not these qualities to be commended above the deceptions of civilised life? No doubt this is Burns's own special version of pastoral, and no doubt it is possible to see the concept of the Noble Savage behind it all; but the really important thing, the essential point of difference from other expressions of the Rousseauistic myth, is that Burns neither arcadianises nor sentimentalises his ragged crew. They are that they are; in "The Jolly Beggars," existence and essence are one….

"The Jolly Beggars" pushes parochialism to the level of the utmost universality. Beginning with the actual observation of a scene in a village inn (so Burns's friend Richmond assures us), it concentrates in dramatic form the essence of "ram-stam," of all that is best in the early epistles. It takes its origin from that world of "Scotch drink" and "Scotch manners" which Matthew Arnold thought so unlovely; how then was Arnold compelled to call it a "puissant and splendid production"? "In the world of 'The Jolly Beggars'," he says [in "The Study of Poetry," in Essays in Criticism, second series, 1954], "there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach's Cellar, of Goethe's Faust, seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes." The reason, I think, lies in this: the parochial unloveliness of "The Jolly Beggars" is made to mirror a general European squalor and a general European energy of which Rousseau and Blake, each in his own way, were also aware—and at the same time to express the quintessence of a popular dream with a very long history behind it. "The Jolly Beggars" is the other side of the medal to "Man was made to Mourn." It is the poetry of lasting human values as they appear in times of agrarian revolution, and the flower of all the beggar literature of both Scotland and England.