SOURCE: "The Background of Burns: Eighteenth-Century Scotland," in The Russet Coat: A Critical Study of Burns's Poetry and of Its Background, Robert Hale & Company, 1956, pp. 7-27.

[In the following excerpt Keith describes Scotland's Golden Age, a time of nationalism and rich intellectual life; Edinburgh's reception of and influence on Burns; and why Burns's limited reading and self-education caused him to focus on satire and song.]

The eighteenth century, into which Burns had the amazing good fortune to be born, was Scotland's Golden Age, when everywhere her latent talents were unfolding, and the sun rose towards the high meridian of her literary achievement. Not only that—it was the bright breathing-space between two centuries of religious intolerance—in different ways, both equally repellent. With the close of the nightmare seventeenth century, the Killing Times were over. No longer did the Edinburgh crowds mill round the gallows in the Grass-market for a sight of the latest Convenanter sent there 'to glorify God'. No longer were the dragoons out riding the Ayrshire mosses after hunted men. The era of the Covenant was over…. And the nineteenth century of materialism and Disruption, rending the land from the Solway to the Pentland with legalistic disputes, had not yet begun so that, in this Golden Age, Scotland had a breathing-space to think, for once, of other things than religion. It was this lighter mental atmosphere, already by Burns' birth in 1759 well-established over the whole realm, that made his literary achievement possible…. For this was the century of Boswell and Hume, of the raciest biography and the most original philosophy, of the revolutionary economics of queer Adam Smith,—the century too of the captivating old songs, 'John cum kiss me now', 'Guidwife, count the lawin' ', 'De'il tak' the wars'—of the merry Scots country dances, alike in a village barn or in a fashionable Edinburgh oystercellar—the century of the finest claret and the best law—of the infinite variety on the road from His Grace's magnificent chaise and four with its postillions and powdered footmen, to the blue-clad beggar with his badge—of chapmen like Patrick Walker with the most breath-taking broadsheets in their pack—of the first ships on the Clyde—of the beautiful old Edinburgh silver and the spacious Regency squares—of surgery and medicine such as carried Edinburgh's name far over the Seven Seas—of a New Town with the most brilliant talk in Europe—before the blighting nineteenth century fell, hushing all laughter on the Sabbath and silencing all talk but what bore on the Free Kirk or the Established, and strangling all thought, like an iron curtain between living things and the sun. The eighteenth century was Scotland's Golden Age.

For even at its outset, the atmosphere was lightened. The heavy air that had hung thick round the Laigh Parliament House in Edinburgh, where dripped the thumbscrew and the boot still red with the blood of tortured Covenanters—that heavy air was blown to the four airts. And if it were a quarrel nearly as violent as the religious strife itself that now dispelled it, it may well be that nothing less could have cleared that foul air. But in the raging contentions over the famous—or infamous—Treaty of Union of 1707, torture, arraignment, persecution itself were alike swept into the limbo of the forgotten past, to disappear for ever from contemporary Scottish thought. The atmosphere had lightened…. Tho' it was a tornado that cleared the air. Not since Bannockburn—and that was 1314—had Scotland been so conscious of her national identity, as now in 1707. And conscious of it, only, it would appear, at the moment of losing it, for henceforth her destinies were to be merged in those of the larger kingdom to the South. Fury at such monstrous annihilation—for it seemed no less to the man in the street—stung the country wide awake, intensifying and sharpening those elements in the national character that, by long disuse, had been growing blunted or even indistinguishable. But now they were pin-pointed. Never had men been so Scotch before. In the redoubtable thistle, reposing on Queen Anne's bosom on that last Scots coin struck on the eve of the Union, every prickle stuck out…. From the point of view of our poet, this process is of great importance. For the facets of Scots individuality were now being chiselled sharp and clear so that men in Aberdeen—the cool and uncovenanted Aberdeen—could realise their kinship with—say—dour Presbyterians in Edinburgh or simple country folk as in Thomas Boston's remote parish of Ettrick, or worldly merchants stepping it high on the Trongate of Glasgow. Nationality now transcended parochialisms. All were Scots now. A public was thus being created that would recognise Burns to be not now a merely local figure, but of an appeal throughout Scotland. He was indeed the first Scots writer to be of national significance…. More than that, his subjects also were being prepared for him. For, had Burns come to Ayrshire in the seventeenth century, he would have found only folk like the pious John Brown of Priesthill, whom Clavers' dragoons shot down, or the fanatic Peden the Prophet skulking in dens and caves, or the ardent young Richard Cameron, the Red Rebel of Airdsmoss, all of them men fired to utter sincerity by one idea and so, incapable of being satirised. But, with this tide of nationalism spreading—even as the flood-tide of religion ebbed—other sorts came now into view—the tinkers on the road, the topers in the howffs, Holy Willie in his pew in Mauchline Kirk. And, unlike their seventeenth-century predecessors, these were universals—folk to be found as readily anywhere else. Thus, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the public and the material were alike ready for the satirist's pen…. But, by then, other changes too had taken place. For, after the Union with its bitterness had unified the country, as nothing else could have done, came a major event that extended, as it were, that country's cultural frontiers. In 1715 Jacobite Scotland rose for James the Old Chevalier. And Jacobite Scotland was largely, if not entirely, Scotland north of the Highland Line—country Aberdeenshire, in fact ('The Standard on the Braes o' Mar') under Mar himself, the Gordons of Huntly and the Earl Marischal. Here then, for the first time, a Gaelic-speaking area in the Highlands aligned itself with Southern Scotland, if only on behalf of such a sorry personage as 'Mr. Melancholy', heir to the long line of Stuart kings at Holy rood. But tho' it was only country Aberdeenshire so far—and the more distant areas of the Highlands and Islands remained in the '15 totally unaffected—it was still the first direct infusion of different blood and different traditions into the makeup of Scottish nationality. After the '15, Scotland no longer consisted merely of the cities, the Lowlands and a strip of the East Coast with its ancient towns of Arbroath—Montrose—Dundee. After the '15, if you spoke of Scotland, you had to think of the Hinterland too, that vague, mountainous, unpredictable region of which the wilds of Aberdeenshire were but the gateway—those menacing fastnesses behind the mists—the Bens and over the trackless moors—those also were now equally Scotland. The horizon of the nation had widened, as throughout the eighteenth century it was to widen still more…. But the process came too late for Burns. Of East Coast blood himself (the most practical blood in Scotland) and born in agricultural Ayrshire, he never assimilated this new, strange element in the national character. For him Scotland was always—the beggars, the topers, the churchgoers of the Lowlands and the girls you met with them, the woods and burns they walked beside. It was left for Scott, nurtured from boyhood on Border romance (at Smailholm Tower, on Tweedside, or riding the mosses at Carter Fell) to seize on and interpret the kindred spirit of the Highlands and relate it to the national character, as one component part of it. But for Burns neither Highland Ben nor Border Peel, tho' he visited both in his journeyings, held any meaning. He was stone-cold to both. It is this limitation of outlook that has to be considered when one comes to assess his personality and his title to speak for all Scotland…. And after the '15 came the '45, a Rising on a much grander scale and involving, especially after Culloden, the whole of the Highlands as far North as John o' Groats, as far West as Barra. With the Prince hiding in moor and cave or threading his way between the Outer Isles, and the English redcoats hot after him, not a Highlander now but was conscious of the antithesis between Scots and English. Not a Highlander but knew he was part of Scotland now. The lines from Holyrood now ran straight out to Benbecula and reached to far Strathnaver. Edinburgh at long last was the nerve-centre of the whole kingdom. What the hated Union had begun in 1707, the White Rose and its aftermath completed in the '45. For the first time, the whole of geographical Scotland was one united nation…. If rather a dull one. It was a good thing Burns didn't come in the first half of the eighteenth century, for there would have been no brilliant capital to welcome him. With no persecutions truly, Edinburgh in the early 1700's had now no pageantry either. With the last Scots Parliament sitting in 1707, the ancients in the dark Closes off the High Street might well talk of the magnificence they had once seen at that very Close-mouth when, year by year, the gorgeous procession of the Riding of the Parliament would sweep through the Canongate from royal Holyrood—Commissioners of the Burghs and Shires, periwigged Judges and their train, peers of Scotland in scarlet and ermine on their gaily caparisoned horses with their lacqueys in gold and silver coats, resplendent Bishops and the two Archbishops in brilliant vestments, trumpeters and heralds and pursuivants, the Sword of State, the Sceptre and the Crown—with the lawn sleeves of the Bishop of Edinburgh reaching out from a window high above, to bless them all as they passed. The Riding of the Parliament! Back into Scotland's remotest history it ran—the jingling of the bridles, the blast of the trumpets rousing the long-dead centuries. But all that was over. With the stroke of the pen in 1707 finished and done with. No need to crouch in the Closes now, or listen for a phantom bridle jingling up the causeway. Nothing in scarlet and ermine would ever pass that way again…. So, the political Scotland over and done with, it had to be a social Scotland now. New lights were riding on the horizon now. And, with the lighter air, new interests were springing up. You could sing a song now. And it needn't be one of those 'Gude and Godlie Ballates' either that the Kirk had tried to impose. But older songs than those. And bolder. Jollier songs altogether, like those in 'Cockelbie's Sow' that uproarious old poem of the fifteenth century, or in 'The Complaynt of Scotland' of 1549, when Mary Queen of Scots was but a child of six, and Scotland still carefree. Gay songs of Robin Hood or Johnny Armstrong, the Border reiver, or wild songs of 'The Red Harlaw'. Some, it is true, had got lost in the interval, but snatches of others still survived, enough to show that even in the worst shadow of the Reformation, someone must still have been humming them beneath his breath…. And now, old Scots songs became the rage. Old Scots poems too. What with the weary Kirk and that black Geneva gown, it was many a long day since Scotland had had her fill of either. But she took it now. In 1706, on the eve of the hated Union, Watson's Collection (the first of many) came out, of Comic and Serious Scots Poems. Here you could read the famous 'Christis Kirk on the Green' of King James I, that delectable poem of villagers on high holiday, or Sempill's popular mock-elegy 'The Piper of Kilbarchan', or Montgomerie's notable allegory 'The Cherrie and the Slae', a dull poem perhaps but with a ravishing metre. Burns pored over all three…. By 1724 there was more. Allan Ramsay the poet gathered all the old songs he could find into his Tea-Table Miscellany that Edinburgh devoured. The very cosiness of its title emphasises the difference between the comfortable eighteenth century and the bad old days of the Covenanters. Was not Edinburgh sitting at her tea-table now, instead of glowering up at a scaffold? But Scotland couldn't have enough of her old songs. By the mid-century there was a flood of them. The Lark ('my constant vademecum', Burns) in 1740 held nearly 500 of them—Scots and English too—with a glossary to help you out with the old Scots words. And 'The Charmer' came out after that, with more, and 'The Linnet', 'The Thrush', 'The Robin'—the whole country was singing. From castle to cot, the songs went everywhere. Most important of all, they were in Burns' pocket as, a lad of sixteen, he guided his plough, and in his head—ringing by day and by night.

And the songs weren't the only let-up either. There were books and plays. By 1725 you could borrow a book that was not ecclesiastical from Allan Ramsay's pleasant library in the High Street, and by 1736—wonder of wonders!—you could even see a play. The Drama was coming back! Tho' it was only the inoffensive and now well-known Gentle Shepherd, and the modest hall which showed it, had incontinently—under the fury of the Kirk—to shut up shop, but—Edinburgh had seen it! And with the turn of the century in 1759 the spark had become a fire. Here was the whole town crowding to the new Theatre Royal to see that wild success Douglas—the play that turned every Scottish head that saw it. A Scotsman—and a minister of the Kirk, at that!—John Home, had written it, and here—in open defiance of the fuming Edinburgh Presbytery—here was another, the most distinguished cleric in Scotland, the unsnubbable 'Jupiter' Carlyle, actually leaning out of his box 'neath the gay Canongate candles, to applaud it. The spark had become a fire! By 1781 you might call it a furnace. The immortal Mrs. Siddons was playing in town. And the General Assembly itself—that august Parliament of the Kirk—had perforce to rearrange its sessions (or there mightn't have been a Geneva gown present!) so as not to clash with her performances. Truly the wheel had come full circle—since the long shadows by the gallows in the Grassmarket.

Excursus on Drama

Tho' it wasn't as surprising as all that. For Scotland has always been, in her way, a dramatic nation. Not, of course, in the way of great tragedy, which is fundamentally alien to her temper,—for even her great novelists fail in tragic themes, Scott's Bride of Lammermoor and Stevenson's ambitious Weir of Hermiston alike falling flat. But in the drama of low life, Scotland, like Holland, finds herself. Here, like Holland (also afflicted with a stern Reformation and also finding relief from it in a similar way, in the alehouse studies of Jan Steen)—here, like Holland then, she excels. Give her a pot-house scene or the rollicking merriment of the road, and no one can do it better. In this sphere, the nation's dramatic history has been continuous. It began, as far as can be traced, in the early fourteenth century with the Tale of Rauf Colzear, a collier who, entertaining an unknown foreigner, knocks him about in the wildest horse-play—only to discover on his return visit, coals and all, to Paris, that it is Charlemagne, the King himself, he has been buffeting about—a situation fraught with the authentic appeal of its descendant, the Pantomime Transformation Scene. Cockelbie 's Sow too has just as lively vignettes, with a harlot feasting her jovial friends on the proceeds of the sow's sale—for a threepenny bit! While, all through the (still un-Reformed) fourteenth and fifteenth centuries went on the immensely popular miracle-plays and pageants,—presenting Bible-stories of the most sensational kind (by choice)—like Daniel in the lions' den, or Herodias dancing for John the Baptist's head, with the head actually being struck off. You couldn't have it too thrilling! It was in the towns, naturally, you'd see most of this play-acting. Here is the city of Aberdeen, in 1445, performing in the open air 'the secret drama of the Halie Blude' (Holy Blood)—and in the next century the City of Edinburgh's official welcome to Marie of Guise (mother of Mary Queen of Scots)¹ takes the form of a pageant and a play. A few years later, on Good Friday morning in Stirling, they put on 'a drama against the Papists' by a certain Friar Kyllour before King James V himself. And you might have thought the Reformation, that stopped so many interesting things, would have put a stop to this fun too. But at first it did not. For here, on a July day in 1571 (eleven years after Scotland had been 'converted') is no less a personage than John Knox himself listening to a play at the University of St. Andrews. It wasn't a mild play either, for he saw 'The Castle of Edinburgh, according to Mr. Knox's doctrine, being besieged and taken, and the captain, with one or two with him, hanged in effigy'. So writes the engaging James Melville, himself a young St. Andrews' student at the time. Even six years later at Perth, play-acting was still rampant. They were staging the Corpus Christi play,—that 'idolatrous and superstitious fancy' as it was now called—on a June day in the open. Now, however, the Kirk had had time to get going and the rash players were threatened with her excommunication…. Aligned with these Bible stories is the famous Christis Kirk on the Green (a wild success for three centuries and the direct spiritual ancestor of Burns' Holy Fair) where the jollification takes in the whole village and is as rough and riotous as either Rauf Colzear or Cockelbie's Sow. It is not till the eve of Flodden, in the flush of the Renaissance, that sophistication comes in, with the Court poet Dunbar and his incredible 'Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo' on that summer midnight over the roses and the wine—a dramatic interlude as outspoken as anything in the Heptameron of La Reine Margot, its contemporary in France—.Sophisticated too is, a little later, Lyndesay's drama of the Three Estates. And with that—like a thunderbolt—in the sixteenth century, descends the terrible Reformation. But even then, the dramatic instinct is not wholly quenched. Oddly enough, John Knox himself is the best witness to it, in those parts of his History like the brilliant dialogues between himself and the Queen—in his realistic account of Cardinal Beaton's murder—in his eyewitness tale of the sacking of St. Giles—all of them good 'theatre'. Nor, in the dreary Killing Time that followed, did drama utterly die. Driven underground, it is true, but here is Patrick Walker the chapman, up and down the road. And if you buy his broadsheets, as they did like wildfire alike on Edinburgh streets and lonely Galloway moors, you'll get every kind of a thrill that you could ask of the tensest drama—the thud of the dragoons riding across the mosses after John Brown, the jingle of Clavers' bridle and the curt order to shoot, the wild eyes of Peden the Prophet, as he sat in mortal danger, at your ingle-cheek. But now, in the Golden eighteenth century drama was free again. And down in country Ayrshire Burns was to write his 'Jolly Beggars' and later, at Ellisland, his exhilarating 'Tam o' Shanter'. Sudden and unheralded as these two pieces may appear, there is in reality nothing of suddenness about them. Like the 'small white rose of Scotland' itself, their roots strike deep and far—sunk profoundly in the nation's past…. And after Burns' day, the drama of low life still went on. In the strait-laced nineteenth century, it is true, it was again driven underground—but now, Neil Munro's Para Handy stories, Joe Corrie's tense 'one-act'ers, the Repertory Theatres in Glasgow—Perth—Dundee,—the Drama Festivals over the whole land, are one and all in the tradition. Scotland's dramatic instinct, over the centuries has been continuous.

Eighteenth-Century Scotland's Books

But if the theatre, in the late eighteenth century, was making the most notable come-back, it was by no means the only one. Scotland itself was crackling with life—intellect stirring in all directions. Tho' it was, unexpectedly enough, from the Highlands that the first sheet-lightning broke, with the publication of Macpherson's famous Ossian in 1762. Ossian indeed carried Scotland's name to every library table in Europe, and to every literary salon—starting the rage for sentiment that was to last for half a century and issue in Goethe's Werther and Scott's own early work, Lenore. Were the Highlands—it was the universal query now—really as Ossian showed them, misty mountains and mournful heroines—tears and laments and phantom heroes? No one knew but it made you weep to think they were. If hard-headed folk like Mme. de Staël in worldly Paris (not to speak of Napoleon later) choked with sobs over Ossian's plaints, no wonder that inexperienced young Robert Burns in stolid Ayrshire didn't quite know what to make of this queer Highlander. Over Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (published nearly ten years later in 1771) 'a book I prize next to the Bible' he was clearer. It, at any rate, was Scotch of the brand he knew and written by a plain Edinburgh man. Nothing here about mountains or mist, tho' plenty still about tears. Burns, untaught by wider reading (for 'prizing the Bible' didn't mean reading it. It was not until his accident in Edinburgh in 1787 that he took to that, getting as far as Joshua) and inexperienced in the great masters, lapped its easy pathos up. And while the mawkish sentiment of both these prize best-sellers must have been bad for any young poet—accounting, later on, for such things as the fulsomeness of 'Edina' and the worst sentimental patches of 'The Cottar'—they probably did him no more harm than that. For, reflecting at the mature age of twenty-eight in his autobiographical letter to Moore, on the books that had given him the most pleasure, of all he'd ever read, Burns singles out an astonishing couple—(1) an obscure Life of Hannibal, author unnamed and (2) the History of Sir William Wallace (himself an Ayrshire man) in a bowdlerised version, then current, of Blind Harry—from which it can safely be assumed that Robin's was not a bookish mind. Unimpressionable with regard to scenery, he was just as unreceptive to the written word. When he came to his life-work, the songs, he had fortunately shaken off both Ossian and Mackenzie…. Tho' there were books then being written in his Scotland, that were well worth reading. Edinburgh knew them all. Apart from the two best-sellers, there was the Glasgow-born novelist Smollett whose latest work Humphrey Clinker (1771) brought his Southern readers to the beauties of Loch Lomond and later, if somewhat less flatteringly, up Edinburgh's own historic High Street. In Theology, if you liked it—and Edinburgh did!—there was a new and broad-minded kind purveyed by the admirable Dr. Blair of the High Kirk, author of those Sermons that even George III wished to read. In History there was Robertson, Principal of the University, for the first time bringing the History of Scotland in pleasant, and still readable narrative to Londoners that had never looked at a Scots historian before. In Philosophy—ah! here Scotland had once again a native-born son, David Hume, as completely at home in Paris as her sons like Duns Scotus had been in older days. Even more so, perhaps. For Hume not only wrote his Treatise of Human Nature that the Sorbonne studied, but knew Paris's fashionable world too in his friendship with a delightful French Marquise—and moved, as to the manner born, among the candles and music of Versailles. And in a quiet corner of the Canongate, sat shy Adam Smith whose epoch-making Wealth of Nations in 1776 had just introduced the world to the new and portentous subject of Economics. It was a society bred on books like these—the books Burns never read—that was being prepared to welcome him, as no Edinburgh society before or since would have welcomed a raw Ayrshire poet. For what would the fanatic seventeenth century have done to the brazen author of 'The Holy Fair', or the narrow Disruption nineteenth confronted with the blasphemy of 'Holy Willie's Prayer'? But the broad-minded eighteenth, at a first glance in 1786, asked him—straight from the plough—to dine with the cream of their own intellectual company, and unhesitatingly set the cachet of immortality—then in their gift—to the hitherto provincial Kilmarnock Edition so that, when in 1787 the first Edinburgh Edition of his poems came out, London (that had left the Kilmarnock unheeded) printed it at once, with Dublin—Philadelphia—New York—following suit. It was eighteenth-century Edinburgh 'made' Burns.

Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh

The Capital that welcomed him, the Edinburgh that had been growing up now from 1769 on, was the city that is still the delight of Europe—that New Town of those splendid streets and squares, with their spacious, uncrowded magnificence and their long, alluring vistas carrying the eye far over the Forth into the distant mountains of the North. Robert Adam was at work, planning the elegance and perfect proportions of Charlotte Square: in the drawing-rooms of Moray Place—but a stone's-throw away—there were again mantelpieces and ceilings of a delicacy and curious carving that recalled the art of the sixteenth century in town-houses such as that of Marie of Guise, the Queen-Regent, in the old, dark Edinburgh High Street…. And by the close of the eighteenth century, Raeburn was painting men like the Highland chief, The Mac-Nab, in full—and no longer forbidden—Highland dress, or the eminent Sir John Sinclair, Founder of the Board of Agriculture, or the homely and wise Dr. Adam, Rector of the High School, or the sinister hanging Judge, Lord Braxfield—even as young Allan Ramsay earlier painted the fine Scots ladies in their delicate satins and pearly lace, with roses as exquisitely poised on hair or bosom as ever was the Pompadour's—so that the eye to-day can picture the people who moved in those drawing-rooms or walked in those pleasant squares. A wonderful Edinburgh—and a brilliant Scotland!

For if Edinburgh in the second half of the eighteenth century seethed with intellectual life, it wasn't only Edinburgh, but country Scotland as well. Boswell, touring it with Dr. Johnson in 1773, has left it on record that in the rudest country inn, as at Glenmoriston, he'd come across books like The Spectator (which you would never nowadays in any Scots inn at all!). In Dunvegan, over in lonely Skye, on every window-sill the Doctor could finger a classical tome. In the ministers' manses he saw the walls lined with authors of the standing of Bossuet or Massillon. And the very rustics knew their Latin. While in the wilds of the excessively practical Nor'-East he came upon eccentrics like Lord Monboddo arguing with almost Oxford learning about the Homeric problem or the Origin of Man. And if you think Boswell is carefully choosing his evidence, you've only to look at Sir John Sinclair's First Statistical Account, published, it is true, at the close of the eighteenth century in 1798, but written of an era at least ten years earlier, to find Boswell's account elaborated in detail. Not a parish in rural Scotland but was alive with interest in the Arts. The brilliance of the Capital was reflected in a thousand facets in village and hamlet and town. Never had Scotland been so well-educated before. Never has she been so well-educated since. It was on to a stage like this, before an audience as many-sided and as gifted that Burns came forward in the second half of the eighteenth century to make his trials.

Burns Against His Literary Background

Educated he was, if only self-educated, but without the discipline of Church learning which Knox, for example, a trained priest, had had. With it, or because of it, Knox was able to write that long and fascinating History of the Reformation. Without it, Burns, never having had the advantage of any mental discipline whatsoever, can write nothing long at all. His interest soon flags—his répertoire a series of occasional pieces. By contrast, again, with Knox, who had seen and lived in other countries, Burns, who had done neither, is, in outlook, provincial. He sees nothing but Ayr-shire. By contrast, further, with Fergusson, his immediate predecessor (and to some extent, model) who had had a University education, Burns' outlook is illiterate. For while Fergusson, with his University behind him, is sensible of his own ignorance and will write only of what he knows, 'The Leith Races', 'The Farmer's Ingle', Burns, without any University standard, is totally unaware of it. Never once does it dawn on him there is anything more to know, so that he will write with equal confidence an epigram on a translation of Martial (whom he did not know) and a poem on Hallowe'en (which he did)…. And when one comes to the perennial stuff of poetry—things like the Charlemagne legend, or the even more famous story of King Arthur and the Round Table, that had embroidered and enriched the fabric of all European literatures (Scots literature among them) from the fifteenth century on—all that is but a blank page to Burns. He knows nothing of it. Nor of that wealth of classical mythology that, with a single word, can light torches of poetic fire to illumine and glorify the surrounding scene. Yet Dunbar before him has the trick of it, and the modern Scots Renaissance School ('Babylon blaws doun in stour'—Wm. Soutar) after him. But Burns? No: alone of Scots poets, he claims no link with the immemorial background of European poetic thought. He alone knows no Muses. His poetry, therefore, rings no bells. There is a thinness about it that, if you come to it from any other poet, strikes you at once. It is all on the surface. That is all that Robin sees. And sometimes—you will say—a very good surface too. But in the Edinburgh of Hume's Treatises and Robertson's History and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations—even of Smollett's Humphrey Clinker—they looked for something more. And Edinburgh opinion—even kindly Edinburgh opinion—was quick to notice that the young man from Ayrshire was over-sure of himself. A clever tongue—and ideas—but he made no allowances at all, in this exceptionally gifted Capital, for anybody else having either. It is a shallowness that is apparent also, if inevitably, in his work…. For, apart from Ossian and Mackenzie, Burns had read little. Fergusson and Allan Ramsay, to be sure—some Shenstone, Pope, Sterne—Thomson's Winter—Beattie—nearly all of them his own contemporaries, or near-contemporaries. Yet it is not from these, but from writers of an earlier age, breathing a different air and looking at life from a different angle, that a man broadens his mind. But to these, Burns, not being a bookish person, was allergic. So that, without the breadth of mind this kind of education gives, he came to believe—for all his window-dressing of the brotherhood of Man (borrowed from the contemporary slogans of the French Revolution) that Virtue resided only in the class he knew. 'The birkie ca'd a lord' never had a trace of it. And Robin becomes—to his own disaster—Scotland's first class-conscious poet…. And, as it is assuredly from the Past, its standards and its art, that a man acquires a knowledge of Beauty, Burns, being thus insensitive to the Past (for his mental interest, like his physical, took in only what was nearest to him, as the mouse, the mountain daisy, the girl just then on the doorstep)—Burns therefore never attained to this, for a poet, most vital knowledge. So that he writes, as readily, abominations like 'the tenebrific scene', as gems like

He has no aesthetic criterion…. His appeal to the ear also traverses but the range of everyday things—the only things that interested him—like the hisses in the 'Holy Fair', the reel in 'Tam o' Shanter', staggering lines in 'Death and Dr. Hornbook'. A witchery potent, no doubt, and at times both instant and compelling—but a witchery of the street. For he cannot lift you, like Milton or Tennyson, those masters of verbal harmonies, into the sonorous music of the spheres…. And being thus insensitive to the past, it further follows there is little appeal in Burns' work to the imagination. When the Kirk (the only traditional institution to which he responded) is behind him, her imagery does indeed colour his thought, which elsewhere is but plain statement, unrelieved by literary figures of any kind…. In the main, then, his appeal—ironically enough, like that of the Kirk he hated—is neither to the imagination nor to the ear, but to the intellect. But, luckily for him, Scotland has always been a country that looked to the intellect for enjoyment. Even from the time of Barbour, author of the earliest known Scots poem 'The Brus', emphasis falls largely on the intellect, for Barbour was not only Archdeacon of Aberdeen, but an Oxford scholar too. And the galaxy of poets at the Renaissance Court of James IV were not only poets, but men of learning as well—Henryson, author of the delightful pastoral 'Robin and Makyn' but also a learned Benedictine at Dunfermline Abbey, Dunbar of 'The Golden Targe' an Oxford man again and as a Franciscan, trained in the Church's lore, Gavin Douglas, first European translator of Virgil's Aeneid. Even when the writer is not himself of much learning, the appeal is still the same, as in Davie Lyndesay's 'Three Estates', making a direct bid to the intellect, in its powerful political satire. To this traditional bias in favour of the intellect rather than the senses, the Reformation only added strength, for Knox, author, it is true, of the famous History, is even better known as the planner of Scotland's austere and highbrow modern education. In the seventeenth century, the great Samuel Rutherfurd of the magnificent Letters and the rebellious Lex Rex—the foremost author of his time in Scotland—was to be found in the Chair of Latin in Edinburgh University and later as Principal of St. Mary's College, St. Andrews. While in the eighteenth Hume—Boswell—Adam Smith—were all of them definitely preoccupied with learning. And if Burns, who now took up their mantle, was Scotland's first unlearned writer, the appeal of his work was nevertheless—paradoxically enough—the same as theirs, and in line with his country's long tradition. As firmly as Knox himself, Burns aimed at the intellect. Tho', being as he was, without the ancient learning, he—more than any of his predecessors—was thrown on his own resources to do it.

These were, however, considerable. He was possessed of a native wit, keen and sharp, that made him see through shams, and a tongue, the match of it, to pillory them. And not having the learning of his forebears to trick out and adorn the wit, he must needs polish that wit itself till, sharp as a surgeon's knife, it cut right through to the bone. You might miss a point of Dunbar's for the aureate gods and goddesses nearly smothering it. Nobody in this world ever missed a point of Burns's. With nothing to shade it, it is diamond-clear…. And having great natural parts, he did not transmogrify the rural life he saw around him, into such stylised woodenness as Ramsay's 'Gentle Shepherd'. He looked directly at his world and drew from that. Moreover, the Cottar, tho' clearly drawn from life, is not a transcript either, but an artistic whole. Burns could create…. He had, further, an imagination that,—since it could not feed on the famous mythology of the past—had perforce to feed on something within its own range, as—the superstitions of the Kirk, the twa dogs, the mountain daisy. Within that range, it is both original and sincere and can move an audience as it will. When, however, it is flung beyond that range and faced with the historic past or the glorious present of Edinburgh, it fails dismally, as in the artificial 'Edina' which moves nobody. The quality, indeed, of Burns' imagination is sharply realist. For while Scott at the mouth of an old Close in the High Street would see the centuries roll back in vivid and romantic cavalcade, Burns—at the same point—never saw anything but a tavern, and a chair to carry him to Clarinda. And no visitor, great or small, of all the millions that, down the ages, have paused o'er the city, ever saw less of Edinburgh's beauty. Robin, indeed, looked through it blankly, as he did through Highland Ben and Border Peel. For him they had, all three, no existence…. And he had, finally, a gift that only came to him late in life, after much trial and error—an artistic skill that became, in his best songs, well-nigh impeccable. Here, with a self-criticism as remarkable as it is unexpected, in a man of his hot blood, he pruned and cut, cut and pruned, till only the rounded bud remained—the glowing heart of the song, crystal-clear and brief as the rose itself. And the song, with the certainty of an eagle's wing, carried the emotion he desired, straight to the listener's heart…. With these gifts and these deficiencies, Burns had really no choice in the form his work took. Apart from the epistle (which has more the character of versified prose, but to which he gave a new life by making it the vehicle of his own rich personality) there are only two literary forms that demand no background and no mental breadth for their successful practice—the satire and the song. With the wit, and the tongue—you can write satire. From Rome down, who wrote it first, it needs only these and concentration upon its immediate object. The song, again, is all the better for no background and demands the same kinds of heat and concentration as the satire, but in a positive—not negative—direction. To the song, then, and the satire, by his very limitations, Burns was, of necessity, driven. Of these forms and of these only, he made a complete success.

So that, on the momentous November evening in 1786 when, an unknown young man of twenty-seven, he first rode into Edinburgh, he was not as empty-handed as he seemed. He had, indeed, considerable assets. Already to his credit stood the Kilmarnock Edition. And in the Kilmarnock was 'The Cottar's Saturday Night' that he himself considered his best work, and for satires, that scathing 'Holy Fair' and for epistles, some of the best he was ever to write, like that gay one to James Smith

And for songs, that 'Corn-Rigs' (the only good one) that would ensure him a place, if not at the head, at least among the first half-dozen of his country's lyrists. And, for humour, the incomparable 'Address to the De'il'. Up his sleeve (written, but not published) there was the blistering 'Holy Willie's Prayer', that most perfect example of satire in our tongue, and the highly original cantata of 'The Jolly Beggars'. All in all, Burns came to Edinburgh with a full quiver. Had he never written another word, he would still take his place, on his satires, as a classic of English literature…. Apart from his poetic achievement, Burns came to Edinburgh in the prime of manhood, with his mind razor-sharp to the characters of those around him. Had he not proved it, with the beggars in Poosie Nansie's, with the ministers and their audiences in Mauchline Kirk, pin-pointed one and all in his ruthless satire? With an eye too, to the excellences of family life. The Cottar, if over-sentimentalised, is still a recognisable picture of a well-known original…. And with a fund of humour for all things, high and low. Burns, that is, was now in the full tide of mastery of his craft…. Yet, after Edinburgh, he wrote no more satires, few of these salty epistles even, so full of urbane wisdom—nothing of low life to compare with 'The Jolly Beggars', nor of good life to set alongside 'The Cottar'. At twenty-seven, the full flood of his genius seems arrested—dammed up. That wit, diamond-clear, razor-sharp, found nothing, it seems, further to cut…. What, then, happened to Burns in Edinburgh? It was not lack of recognition. For Edinburgh—brilliant, sophisticated Edinburgh—it is a matter of history now—took the young poet straightway to her arms, if not to her heart. Within a fortnight of his arrival, every door was opened to him. And it is likewise admitted that this tumultuous reception did not sweep him, raw as he was, off his feet. He moved through the elegant drawing-rooms, sat at wine with the learned and the travelled and the polished and talked with them as if he were sitting and talking in his rightful place, where he had always been, where he should be. And yet—found nothing to write of! But by his second visit in 1787 it had got about that the clever young Ayrshire satirist was keeping a memorandum-book, with the characters of his entertainers shatteringly—and amusingly, if you took it that way—hit off to the life. And the epigram on the dignified Lord Advocate ending

or that on the eloquence of the Dean (the extremely popular Henry Erskine)

tho' neither was at the time published, may well explain why brilliant Edinburgh, on second thoughts, had appreciably cooled off. A formidable pen! But the epigrams, clever as they were, were not satire. Edinburgh might enjoy them—or fear them—but the world at large, to whom the Lord Advocate and the Dean were but names—could not savour them to the full. Whereas folk like Holy Willie or the preachers at Mauch-line Fair, unlike the Dean, had a universal audience, for hypocrites are kent folk to all the world. How then came it that Burns wrote no more satire? … But for satire you have to know your victims—so to speak,—inside out, as Horace knew the bore of the Via Sacra on his daily walks through the lively Forum, and the travellers he would meet on the way to the coast. As Burns did too, who had lived all his life with Holy Willie at his elbow and seen Holy Fairs times without number. Whereas the men he met now at the fine Edinburgh tables, with the candle-light falling softly on polished silver and fragile cut crystal, were men he met only there—mere voices to him. They talked—or listened—but what they did to-morrow, or what they were really thinking now? Who could tell? How could any man tell? For there was an impenetrable armour of sophistication—polish—conventionality—whatever it was—about them, that kept you at arm's length and effectually prevented you from ever really knowing. Burns would plunge with a forthright Jacobin sword-thrust, and the Lord Advocate, or his like, merely lifting an eyebrow, would riposte. You couldn't even make them angry. So that satire faded out. Unlike Daddy Auld, these men never gave themselves away. So that you could only hate them—those 'elegant patricians'. And hatred filling all your mind because of the too too vivid contrast, seen now at close quarters, between what they had and what you hadn't, stifled all the laughter and the mockery that alone made Horatian satire (Burns's kind) possible. It was, perhaps, inevitable that the brilliant Have-Not, meeting the brilliant Have's, should react like this. And the hatred lasted, after Edinburgh—long after Edinburgh—till it issued in fierce thunderbolts like 'A Man's a Man for a' that'. So maybe the fine Edinburgh tables had done their work after all…. For the conditions for satire were gone for ever.

But if the New Town, all unconsciously, killed something in Burns, the Old Town made amends. Over there in the High Street, in the dark, crowded Closes, with the winter dusk ancient Edinburgh of the dead-and-gone centuries seemed to come alive again. And as Burns moved out from his Lawnmarket lodging into the black street, an old song would greet his ear, 'De'il tak' the wars', or, in lighter vein, 'Saw ye my dearie, my Eppie Macnab?', or that universal favourite 'John, cum kiss me now'. From the Anchor Close? Or the Advocate's? Or even the aristocratic Canon-gate? From any or from all of them, for everybody was singing the old songs here. Robin knew them too, from The Lark that he had pored over, as a boy in Ayrshire, but here in Edinburgh you could hear them every night—in every Close—and from all sorts of people. A periwigged Judge, perhaps, like Lord Hailes, a connoisseur in all these old songs—or a sedan-chair would come past, with the brightest eyes in Scotland flashing out at you from it—the Duchess of Gordon?—and she knew them too—or Mr. Creech (the famous bookseller)'s printer, that convivial William Smellie, founder of the Crochallan Fencibles, that riotous club that met in the Anchor Close—and the coarser the old song here, the more to the taste of the Crochallans. Burns knew that too. Or, best of all, in Libberton's Wynd, down the Cowgate way, in the dark recesses of Johnnie Dowie's Howff—far ben, in that innermost stifling cellar they called 'the Coffin'—two men would be sitting, that had all the Scots songs at their finger-tips. Here Burns would drift in oftenest, as if pulled by a magnet, for one of the two was the now famous William Herd, that poor Edinburgh clerk who had been writing down every odd scrap of old Scots song—every random line still floating in the air—all his working life, and who, like as not, had the treasure-trove with him there. The other was noteworthy too—that James Johnson on whose little music-shop in Lady Stair's Close, Burns could look down from his window in the Lawnmarket. Johnson had the authentic passion too. Songs by Scotsmen were what Johnson wanted, whether in the vernacular or no. Herd would have naught but songs in the braid Scots. Over the good Edinburgh ale and the guttering candles in Johnnie Dowie's, Burns would listen to Herd and Johnson. It was surely Destiny herself brought these two within his ken—the two of all then alive in broad Scotland, who could help him most in the work he had to do. And when the clock of St. Giles' beat out twelve, and Dowie's doors shut—as shut they aye did on the stroke—and Burns made home, under the midnight stars, to the Lawnmarket again,—the High Street, as he passed down it, would be still aglow with life—fiddles scraping and laughter pealing and the tap-tap of dancing feet. Reels and strathspeys down every Close—and as a stray cellar-door would open, you could see the lighted room within, and the whirl of gay brocade and the gallants' fine coats. And ever and on, the quick beat of the reels—the slower strathspeys. Slow them both down a beat or two, and you could set a song to them. A Scots song. And Robin knew all the tunes. Were they not, every one in that Caledonian Pocket Companion he'd studied all his life? … Night after night in Johnnie Dowie's, talking with Herd—night after night with those reels and strathspeys ringing in his head. Down in Ayrshire as a boy he'd liked the Scots songs himself, but up in the New Town the vogue had been all for the English. Tho' maybe Herd was right. Maybe the Scots ones were better—'We're a' kissed sleepin', 'Guidwife, count the lawin'! You couldn't get better than these. Like his own 'Cornrigs were bonnie', that he'd put in the Kilmarnock. And most unlike his own 'From thee, Eliza, I must go', that he had also put…. Those old Scots songs. Was there anything else that could charm you—hold you—fill your whole mind like them? 'There is a certain something in the old Scotch songs, a wild happiness of thought and expression', Burns is writing from Edinburgh in the winter of 1787. 'An engraver (Johnson) in this town has set about collecting and publishing all the Scotch songs with the music, that can be found … I have been absolutely crazed about it, collecting old stanzas … ' Absolutely crazed about it! To the two over the ale in Dowie's howff there was nothing in the whole world but just Scots songs. And to that third man now, making home under the midnight stars, to the fiddles scraping out the fey old tunes in every dark Close—to that third man now too. From then on, to his last breath in 1796, nothing in the world for Robert Burns either but Scots songs. It was eighteenth-century Edinburgh, the Old Town and the brilliant New, that together 'made' Burns.

Notes

¹ For this information I am indebted to Moffat's The Bible in Scotland, pp. 30-2.