SOURCE: "Robert Burns: 'Heaven-taught ploughman'?," in Burns Now, edited by Kenneth Simpson, Canongate Academic, 1994, pp. 70–91.

[In the following excerpt Simpson examines the myth of Burns as an uneducated peasant and the benefits and limitations such an image held for Burns.]

It was Henry Mackenzie who, in December 1786, wrote admiringly of Burns as 'this Heaven-taught ploughman'.¹ Within a few decades Scott was claim ing, 'Burns … had an education not much worse than the sons of many gentlemen in Scotland'.² Scott's version is probably closer to the mark than Mackenzie's, but each had his reasons for forming a very specific conception of Burns, just as each had a specific conception of Scotland (and the two are closely interrelated).

Mackenzie's essay in The Lounger was headed 'Surprising Effects of Original Genius, exemplified in the Poetical Productions of Robert Burns, An Ayrshire Ploughman'. Mackenzie, whose values epitomise the polite taste of the Edinburgh literati, laments Burns's use of 'provincial dialect' as a 'bar … to his fame' but notes enthusiastically 'with what uncommon penetration and sagacity this Heaven-taught ploughman, from his humble and unlettered station, has looked upon men and manners'. Mackenzie's enthusiasm is symptomatic of the desire of Scottish writers and thinkers that Scotland should lead the response to Rousseau's plea for a return to Nature on the grounds that Reason had failed man by creating a corrupt social order. Heaven's greatest gift is the values of the heart; heaven teaches natural benevolence. 'Heaven-taught' is used by Burns himself with reference to Robert Fergusson as a term of the highest praise. In 'Ode for General Washington's Birthday' Burns addresses Scotland in these terms:

Freedom is lost, but the 'heaven-taught song' endures.

It is strikingly paradoxical—and somehow typically Scottish—that while the work of the Scottish philosophers, essentially secular in its bias, was placing man at the centre of human investigation, at the same time Scottish poets were to be seen as the recipients of divine inspiration. Scottish intellectuals, intent on proving Scotland's right to cultural partnership with England, were determined to show that Scotland was in the vanguard of taste. With a strong religious tradition and sublime landscape, Scotland seemed a plausible breeding-ground for the noble savage as poet. Michael Bruce, a prime contender, had died young, while James Macpherson's undeniably massive achievement had been shown to be a forgery. The Ayrshire ploughman-poet fitted the bill perfectly. Burns was recruited to the cause of establishing Scottish pre-eminence in the vogues of noble savagery and sensibility. He enlisted readily and helped perpetuate the myth, presenting himself as follows in the Preface to his Commonplace Book:

As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but as I believe, they are really his own, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human-nature to see how a ploughman thinks, and feels, under the pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety, Grief with the like cares and passions, which, however diversified by the Modes, and Manners of life, operate pretty much alike I believe, in all the Species.³

It is ironic that Burns's prose is often at its most formal when he is claiming in letters to his social superiors that he is an uneducated peasant. In fact these letters prove that he was a master of voice and persona. Yet the belief persisted that Burns always wrote about himself and his own experience and was incapable of anything as sophisticated as the invention of personae. His first editor, James Currie, was adamant that 'if fiction be … the soul of poetry, no one had ever less pretensions to the name of poet than Burns … the subjects on which he has written are seldom, if ever, imaginary'.⁴ With help from the poet himself, the image of the untutored rustic was firmly established. It has bedevilled Burns criticism ever since.

Yet the reality was altogether different. Commenting on the work of a fellow poet, Burns challenged the description of Truth as 'the soul of every song that's nobly great', offering instead, 'Fiction is the soul of many a song that's nobly great'.⁵ As one who numbered himself among 'the harum-scarum Sons of Imagination and Whim'⁶, he upheld the importance of the imagination. His social life was characterised by inventiveness and self-drama, so much so that Maria Riddell pronounced him unequalled in 'the sorcery of fascinating conversation'.⁷

If Burns was indeed 'this Heaven-taught ploughman', then the Almighty's school was indeed a good school. Burns is revealed in both poems and letters as an alert observer of events in the wider world. The French king and queen are labelled 'a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled Prostitute'.⁸ Of events across the Atlantic he writes:

I will not, I cannot, enter into the merits of the cause; but I dare say, the American Congress, in 1776, will be allowed to have been as able and as enlightened, and, a whole empire will say, as honest, as the English Convention in 1688; and that the fourth of July will be as sacred to their posterity as the fifth of November is to us.⁹

A week later he was writing to Mrs Dunlop:

Is it not remarkable, odiously remarkable, that tho' manners are more civilized, & the rights of mankind better understood, by an Augustan Century's improvement, yet in this very reign of heavenly Hanoverianism, and almost in this very year, an empire beyond the Atlantic has had its REVOLUTION too, & for the very same maladministration & legislative misdemeanors in the illustrious and sapientipotent Family of H—as was complained of in the 'tyrannical & bloody house of Stuart'.¹⁰

Developments in the sciences interested him also. In one letter he writes of the soil structure of Ellisland in terms which indicate some awareness of James Hutton's infant geology, and Mrs Dunlop discusses with him experiments in chemistry and natural physics. Mrs Dunlop sends for his appraisal some poems she has written in French. They debate the respective merits of Dryden's Virgil and Pope's Homer ('I suspect the translators would have suited better had Pope and Dryden exchanged authors',¹¹ comments Mrs Dunlop). She sends him Ariosto and Tasso, only to remark ruefully, 'I fear you have not liked Tasso'.¹²

Burns's own letters are replete with evidence of his range of reading. To Moore he writes:

I know very well, the novelty of my character has by far the greatest share in the learned and polite notice I have lately got; and in a language where Pope and Churchill have raised the laugh, and Shenstone and Gray drawn the tear; where Thomson and Beattie have painted the landskip, and Littleton and Collins described the heart; I am not vain enough to hope for distinguished Poetic fame.¹³

What he termed 'the history of MYSELF which he sent to Moore has references to Addison, Pope, Shakespeare, 'Tull and Dickson on Agriculture, The Pantheon, Locke's Essay on the human understanding, Stackhouse's history of the Bible, Justice's British Gardiner's directory, Boyle's lectures, Allan Ramsay's works, Taylor's scripture doctrine of original sin, a select collection of English songs, Hervey's meditations … Thomson's and Shenstone's works … Sterne and Mackenzie—Tristram Shandy and the Man of Feeling were my bosom favorites'.¹⁴ The letters are testimony to the range and quality of Burns's education. That education helped shape both the man and the poet.

Burns wrote to Mrs Dunlop, 'I cannot for the soul of me resist an impulse of any thing like Wit'.¹⁵ His reading helped him to give free play to such impulses. At regular social gatherings in a fairly close community the play of wit was a useful outlet for his considerable intelligence. His wide reading also introduced an element of stability and it was a source of values. It had a more practical function, too, as this remark to Mrs Dunlop suggests:

Do you know, I pick up favorite quotations, and store them in my mind as ready armour, offensive, or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence. Of these is one, a very favorite one, from Thomson's Alfred—

Attach thee firmly to the virtuous deeds
And offices of life: to life itself,

With all its vain and transient joys, sit loose'.16

(He had already quoted these lines in a letter to her two years earlier.) As 'Sylvander' he writes to Mrs McLehose's 'Clarinda':

The only unity (a sad word with Poets and Critics!) in my ideas is CLARINDA. There my heart 'reigns and revels'—

I like to have quotations ready for every occasion. They give one's ideas so pat, and save one the trouble of finding expression adequate to one's feelings.¹⁷

(If he was truly devoted to 'Clarinda', wouldn't he have taken the trouble? Or wouldn't he at least have found something better than those lines of turgid cliché from an anonymous song in The Hive (1724)? This suggests that the Sylvander/Clarinda correspondence involved a considerable degree of posing and play.) The letter continues:

I think it is one of the greatest pleasures attending a Poetic genius, that we can give our woes, cares, joys, loves &c. an embodied form in verse, which, to me, is ever immediate ease.

Emotions need to be expressed. Having a stock of quotations readily speeds the process and brings ease. Poetry is here functioning essentially as catharsis.

On a deeper level, Burns found in literature the means of clearly identifying and expressing values and attitudes which he personally held. Nationalism is a case in point. Burns had to be circumspect as to the expression of nationalist views. Here the work of Ramsay and Fergusson was to provide useful precedent. One of the foremost indications of the ingenuity of the poets of the eighteenth-century vernacular revival is in the metaphors which they find to communicate their nationalism. 'Base foreign fashions have intervened', claims the speaker in Ramsay's 'Tartana'. How better to assert the national cultural identity than by attacking foreign tastes and trends? Music provides a fertile source. Take these stanzas from Ramsay's 'An Elegy on Patie Birnie':

The identification of culture with heroism here is significant. Fergusson's celebration of the New Year holidays, 'The Daft Days', includes this:

In these poems are two of the precedents for the favourable comparison of Scottish melodies with Italian in stanza 13 of 'The Cotter's Saturday Night':

They chant their artless notes in simple guise;
They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim:
Perhaps Dundee's wild-warbling measures rise,
Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name;
Or noble Elgin beets the heaven-ward flame,
The sweetest far of Scotia's holy lays:
Compar'd with these, Italian trills are tame;
The tickl'd ears no heart-felt raptures raise;
Nae unison hae they, with our Creator's praise.

Sometimes Burns's nationalism surfaces in the most unexpected ways. The witches in 'Tam o' Shanter' have travelled the world: their collection of trophies includes 'Five tomahawks, wi' blue red-rusted / Five scymitars, wi' murder crusted'. But when it comes to music and dance they are patriots to the core:

Warlocks and witches in a dance:
Nae cotillion, brent new frae France,

But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels,
Put life and mettle in their heels.

Food offers another metaphor for nationalism. Behind the humorous flyting bluster of 'Address to a Haggis' a serious claim is being made for Scottish values. Again Fergusson ('my elder brother in the Muse', Burns called him) was almost certainly the inspiration with his poem, 'To the Principal and Professors of the University of St Andrews, on their superb treat to Dr Samuel Johnson'. Fergusson claims that the university regents have spared no expense to treat Dr Johnson to all sorts of foreign delicacies. Had he been in charge, Fergusson would have provided a quite different menu:

Imprimis, then, a haggis fat,
Weel tottled in a seything pat,
Wi' spice and ingans weel ca'd through,
Had helped to gust the stirrah's mou',
And placed itself in trencher clean
Before the gilpy's glowrin een.
Secundo, then, a gude sheep's head,
Whase hide was singit, never flea'd,
And four black trotters cled wi' girsle,
Bedown his throat had learn'd to hirsle.
What think ye, niest, o' gude fat brose,
To clag his ribs? a dainty dose!
And white and bluidy puddings routh,
To gar the Doctor skirl, 'O Drouth!'

Fergusson goes on to infer that Scottish writing, like Scottish cuisine, is lively, and natural, and praiseworthy. The poem develops into a moving plea to the Scottish people: be true and natural Scots, for the alternative is a gloomy one—the demise of Scottish culture:

Devall then, Sirs, and never send
For daintiths to regale a friend;
Or, like a torch at baith ends burning
Your house'll soon grow mirk and mourning'.

There is a subtle irony in Fergusson's making claims for the vigour of the native Scottish literary tradition by means of techniques which epitomise it at its most expressive. Similarly, in 'Elegy on the Death of Scots Music' his expressive use of standard Habbie for serious purposes shows that despite the ostensible lament Scottish cultural forms are alive and well.

Authority is almost certainly inimical to the Scottish character; hence the vigour of Ramsay's and Fergusson's reaction against the unquestioning adoption of classical and neo-classical forms, modes, and rules. But there is also a sense in which Scottish poets of the vernacular revival compensate for the loss of political independence by asserting their cultural independence through the innovative use of classical poetic forms to render distinctly Scottish material. Here is the start of Ramsay's 'Elegy on Lucky Wood':

Burns's 'Tam Samson's Elegy' has its antecedents in Ramsay's mock-elegies. But Burns could achieve moving and original effect within the conventional elegiac mode, as the very fine 'Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson' shows.

Another important respect in which Burns was influenced by the earlier poets of the vernacular revival is in the interplay of Scots and formal English. To employ both the vernacular and standard English within the one poem was a risky undertaking. The perfect modulation of the tongues was not always achieved, and sometimes the ultimate effect was not the intended one. Here is the start of Ramsay's pastoral eclogue, 'Richy and Sandy on the Death of Mr Addison':

     Richy
What gars thee look sae dowf, dear Sandy, say?
Cheer up, dull fellow, take thy reed and play
'My apron deary', or some wanton tune:
Be merry, lad, an' keep thy heart aboon.

     Sandy
Na, na, it winna do; leave me to mane:
This aught days twice o'er tell'd I'll whistle nane.

     Richy
Wow, man, that's unco' sad! Is't that yer jo
Has ta'en the strunt? Or has some bogle-bo,
Glowrin frae 'mang auld wa's, gi'en ye a fleg?
Or has some dauted wedder broke his leg?

     Sandy
Naething like that, sic troubles eith were borne:
What's bogles, wedders, or what Mausy's scorn?
Our loss is meikle mair, and past remead:
Adie, that played and sang sae sweet, is dead!

     Richy
Dead! says't thou?—Oh, haud up my heart, O Pan!
Ye gods, what laids ye lay on feckless man!

Ramsay is making a genuine attempt to claim vernacular Scots' right to a place in British literature; but it doesn't quite succeed. Burns, too, could unwittingly achieve a comic effect by the incongruous use of formal English. One suspects that he might wish to revise these lines from 'Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet':

The makars had employed the juxtaposing of Scots idiom and formal English for reductive effect. It is the ideal means for deflating pomposity and pretension. In Fergusson, Burns encountered the clashing of tongues for comic and reductive effect. Typical is the conclusion of 'The Daft Days':

Similarly, Burns is expert at undermining pretension by the strategic use of vernacular Scots as, for instance, in stanza 6 of 'Address to the Unco Guid':

Burns's bilingualism was set to serve a range of purposes, personal as well as literary. Revealingly, after one of his visits to Edinburgh Burns wrote in exaggeratedly sustained vernacular to William Nicol, master of the High School of Edinburgh. The expressive Scots idiom seems to convey a sense of release; writing the letter has had a cathartic effect on its author.

The linguistic and cultural duality in Burns reflects in part the respective influences of his parents. Through Agnes Brown of Kirkoswald Burns had access to the native oral tradition. William Burnes, with his emphasis on the importance of both reading and correctly pronouncing English, saw clearly where the future lay.

In the English authors whom Burns read avidly there was a further rich source of personae. To varying degrees these personae corresponded with, and gave voice to, aspects of his own personality. In Pope and the Spectator essays Burns found the voice of the observer. To Murdoch he wrote, 'I seem to be one sent into the world, to see, and observe … the joy of my heart is to "Study men, their manners, and their ways'".¹⁸ This was a useful stance for the satirist. But for a satirist of Burns's skill and vehemence (he wrote on one occasion of 'the bloodhounds of Satire'¹⁹), living in a tight-knit community, one of the effects was, as David Sillar noted, to prompt 'suspicious fear'²⁰ among his neighbours and hence a progressive distancing of the poet from his community. The voice of the detached observer comes to challenge that of the exuberant participant for primacy of place in both Burns's poems and his letters. There are a number of letters in which Burns rails at the mob or fashionable society (including one to Peter Hill in which he clearly distinguishes the two Edinburghs). Here he protests to Mrs Dunlop:

However respectable, Individuals in all ages have been, I have ever looked on Mankind in the lump to be nothing better than a foolish, headstrong, credulous, unthinking mob; and their universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me.²¹

That voice is remarkably similar to that of the elderly misanthrope, Matt Bramble, in Smollett's Humphry Clinker. Six months earlier, Burns had written to Hill, 'I want Smollett's novels, for the sake of his incomparable humour. I already have Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker:'²²

To one of 'the harum-scarum sons of Imagination and Whim' the lure of Sterne's Tristram Shandy was strong. Plainly the Shandean voice struck a chord with Burns's desire to present himself as a whimsically independent spirit. Here is part of one of the letters first published in G. Ross Roy's revised edition of the Letters (1985):

Writing Sense is so damn'd, dry, hide-bound a business, I am determined never more to have anything to do with it.—I have such an aversion to right line and method, that when I can't get over the hedges which bound the highway, I zigzag across the road just to keep my hand in.²³

In Tristram Shandy Burns encountered Sterne's amused demonstration in terms of fictional practice of Locke's views on understanding, association, and identity. It is evident that the flux of the human mind and the ways in which we associate fascinated Burns, and a letter to Mrs Dunlop in which he tells of the appeal which 'The Vision of Mirza' in the Spectator had for him traces the caprices of individual association to a spiritual source—the Soul.²⁴ One of Burns's greatest achievements was—out of personal need—to shape the verse-epistle into a medium for communicating mental flux. 'The self-dramatisations of the epistles', says Thomas Crawford, 'express a mind in motion, giving itself over at different times to conflicting principles and feelings; they mirror that mind as it grappled with a complex world. In order to body it forth, Burns had to be, in himself, and not simply in play, both Calvinist and anti-Calvinist, both fornicator and champion of chastity, both Jacobite and Jacobin, both local and national, both British and European, both anarchist and sober calculator, both philistine and anti-philistine'.²⁵ A mode and a form had been found that were capable of rendering complexity, even multiplicity, of self.

Of the qualities essential to the personality of the poet, Burns habitually identifies open-heartedness as the foremost. Gavin Hamilton's brother is complimented as having 'a heart that might adorn the breast of a Poet'²⁶: and to Josiah Walker Burns writes, 'You know from experience the bedlam warmth of a poet's heart'²⁷. Rousseau had claimed that our ancestors were naturally benign and that it was rationalist civilisation that had corrupted man, and in Tristram Shandy Sterne had offered man's capacity for benign emotion as a positive good. Here Burns was to find endorsement of his own belief in the values of the heart. To Murdoch he writes, on 15 January 1783:

My favorite authors are of the sentimental kind, such as Shenstone, particularly his Elegies, Thomson, Man of feeling, a book I prize next to the Bible, Man of the World, Sterne, especially his Sentimental journey, Macpherson's Ossian, etc. these are the glorious models after which I endeavour to form my conduct²⁸.

Before his twenty-fourth birthday Burns has found in literature models for his behaviour as well as his writing. In Mackenzie was more than endorsement of the values of the heart: there was also the recommendation that one practise benevolence, it being not only beneficial for the victim to have relief from suffering but also rewarding for the benefactor to contemplate himself in that role. In The Man of Feeling the 'selfapproving joy' of the age of sensibility raises its refined head. Thus in 'To a Mountain Daisy' Burns could employ the sentimental rhetoric which Pope some seventy years earlier had used in 'Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady'; Burns employs it to address a flower whose stem he has severed. The Edinburgh literati found Burns exemplifying what for them was a prime requisite of the peasant-poet, pathetic struggle, and they were able to view him with benevolent condescension, rather in the manner of Burns's speaker's response to the mountain daisy. Burns paid a price for his participation in polite Edinburgh's sentimental games: in Carol McGuirk's terms it was a 'chronic anxiety'.²⁹

There is one other highly significant source of endorsement of the values of the heart. Sending Moore his impressions of Zeluco, Burns commented, 'Original strokes, that strongly depict the human heart, is your and Fielding's province, beyond any other Novellist, I have ever perused'.³⁰ Moore was being complimented; Fielding's influence was very real. David Daiches has noted that Burns, 'like Fielding's Tom Jones, believed in the doctrine of the good heart and held that kindness, generosity of spirit, and fellow feeling were the central virtues'.³¹ Could it be that Burns modelled some of his conduct on that of Fielding's romantic hero, Tom Jones? In their relations with women each maintains a clear distinction between idealised love and sexual needs. His passions aroused by thinking of his beloved Sophia, Tom leaps into the bushes with the first woman he encounters, who happens to be Molly Seagrim, fresh from a day's manure spreading in the fields. Similarly Burns writes a typically stylised and formal letter to 'Clarinda' in the course of which he makes reference to his having fathered a child to the maid, Jenny Clow.³²

In terms of literary technique Fielding's influence on Burns was considerable. Both Fielding and Burns relished their abilities as stylists. One of Fielding's aims in Tom Jones was to check by parody the excesses of popular romance. As a consequence Tom and Sophia are at times required to act and speak like the hero and heroine of that genre (for example, the chance meeting of the lovers at the corner of the canal where previously Tom risked drowning to save Sophia's little bird). Such passages must surely have been at the back of Burns's mind when he wrote this to Wilhelmina Alexander of Ballochmyle:

The Scenery was nearly taken from real life; though I dare say, Madam, you do n't recollect it: for I believe you scarcely noticed the poetic Reveur, as he wandered by you.—I had roved out as Chance directed, on the favorite haunts of my Muse, the banks of Ayr; to view Nature in all the gayety of the vernal year.—

The Sun was flaming o'er the distant, western hills; not a breath stirred the crimson opening blossom, or the verdant spreading leaf.

'Twas a golden moment for a poetic heart.—I listened the feathered Warblers pouring their harmony on every hand, with a congenial, kindred regard; and frequently turned out of my path lest I should disturb their little songs, or frighten them to another station.—'Surely,' said I to myself, 'he must be a wretch indeed, who, regardless of your harmonious endeavours to please him, can eye your elusive flights, to discover your secret recesses, and rob you of all the property Nature gives you; your dearest comforts, your helpless, little Nestlings.'

Even the hoary Hawthorn twig that shot across the way, what heart, at such a time, but must have been interested in its welfare, and wished it to be preserved from the rudely browsing Cattle, or the withering eastern Blast?

Such was the scene, and such the hour, when in a corner of my Prospect I spyed one of the finest pieces of Nature's workmanship that ever crowned a poetic Landskip; those visionary Bards excepted who hold commerce with aerial Beings.—

Had CALUMNY & VILLAINY taken my walk, they had, at that moment, sworn eternal peace with such an Object.—³³

It is inconceivable that Burns, as an accomplished mimic and master-ironist, did not realise that what he was offering here was the posturings of romance.

One of the main elements in Fielding's Tom Jones is the comic-epic. Ordinary, even mundane, experience is presented with the elaborate formality appropriate to the classical heroic mode. In Ramsay and Fergusson Burns found that inflation and reduction were integral to the Scottish poetic tradition. Fielding, writing in a different tradition and a different genre, sanctioned the technique further. Two traditions met, the common ground being the clash of manner and matter, or formal and idiomatic language, or generalisation and detail. One episode in Tom Jones finds the narrator following Mr Allworthy to the top of a hill to watch the sunrise. If there is anything finer in nature, he suggests, it can only be that which Mr Allworthy represents—a being replete with benevolence. Mr Allworthy has to descend because his sister rings the breakfast-bell—from the sublime to the mundane, but doubly so because the narrator is now concerned about how to get the reader safely back down the hill of his elaborate prose without breaking his neck. Compare the following extract from a letter of Burns to Thomson in which a lengthy passage in the grand manner reaches a climax, only to be undermined:

Do you think that the sober, gin-horse routine of existence could inspire a man with life, & love, & joy—could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos, equal to the genius of your Book?—No! No!!!—Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song; to be in some degree equal to your diviner airs; do you imagine I fast & pray for the celestial emanation?—Tout au contraire! I have a glorious recipe, the very one that for his own use was invented by the Divinity of Healing & Poesy when erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus.—I put myself in a regimen of admiring a fine woman; & in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion are you delighted with my verses.

The lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, & the witchery of her smile the divinity of Helicon!

To descend to the business with which I began; if you like my idea of—'when she cam ben she bobbit'—the following stanzas of mine, altered a little from what they were formerly when set to another air, may perhaps do instead of worse stanzas.³⁴

Also noteworthy is a wonderfully, almost manically, exuberant letter to Cunningham in which Burns plainly relishes his expertise in the grand manner for comic effect. It includes, 'I feel, I feel the presence of Supernatural assistance! Circled in the embrace of my elbow-chair, my breast labors, like the bloated Sybil on her three-footed stool, & like her too, labors with Nonsense'.³⁵ Likewise, the account of the celebrations before sunrise at Ben Lomond is, simply, a tour de force?⁶

In the poems the reductive contrast of manner and matter is used to telling effect. For instance, this is part of the description of Moodie's preaching in 'The Holy Fair':

In 'Elegy on the Year 1788' international and local events are set on the one level, the former reduced, the latter inflated:

The Spanish empire's tint a head,
An' my auld teethless Bawtie's dead;
The toolzie's teugh 'tween Pitt an' Fox,
An' our gudewife's wee birdy cocks.

In 'Death and Dr Hornbook' the process of inflation and reduction informs the whole poem. Death?—He is a pathetic figure, in need of a comforting chat and struggling to retain the vestiges of his pride. Who is to be feared now?—The monstrously incompetent pharmacist, Dr Hornbook, who has made Death redundant.

It is in Burns's other great narrative poem, 'Tam o' Shanter', that the epic and comic-epic legacies are put to greatest effect:

By this time he was cross the ford,
Whare, in the snaw, the chapman smoor'd;
And past the birks and meikle stane,
Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane;
And thro' the whins, and by the cairn,
Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn;
And near the thorn, aboon the well,
Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel …

Coffins stood round, like open presses,
That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses;
And, by some devilish cantraip slight,
Each in its cauld hand held a light.
By which heroic Tam was able
To note upon the haly table,
A murderer's banes, in gibbet-airns;
Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns;
A thief, new-cutted frae a rape,
Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape;
Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted;
Five scymitars, wi' murder crusted;
A garter, which a babe had strangled;
A knife, a father's throat had mangled …

—What are these if not the epic catalogue set to the service of mock-Gothic horror? And the 'Heaven-taught ploughman' seems to have mastered the epic simile:

As bees bizz out wi' angry fyke,
When plundering herds assail their byke;
As open pussie's mortal foes,
When, pop! she starts before their nose;
As eager runs the market-crowd,
When 'Catch the thief!' resounds aloud:
So Maggie runs, the witches follow,
Wi' mony an eldritch skreech and hollow.

One effect of rendering ordinary beings by means of the machinery of epic is to endow them with representative significance. The elevating effect is most obvious in Fielding's Tom Jones in the mock-epic account of the battle in the graveyard between Molly and the villagers. The participants in the battle assume archetypal significance courtesy of the epic rhetoric which inflates and generalises; it becomes the village punch-up. Similarly Tam becomes mankind's representative; he is truly 'heroic Tam', and the account of his experiences has become the definitive version of man's encounter with the supernatural.

There is one other respect in which Tom Jones and 'Tam o' Shanter' may be compared. Fielding creates an identifiable narrator—identifiable in terms of personality and values. Urbane and witty, Fielding's narrator is also fallible and he certainly likes the sound of his own voice: scarce an episode passes that has not been prefaced by commentary from our ever-present guide. This pattern is repeated in 'Tam o' Shanter'—episode, commentary, episode, commentary. The narrator is eager to place his account of Tarn's experiences in the context of universalising commentary, the fruits of his worldly wisdom:

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet,
To think how mony counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen'd sage advices,
The husband frae the wife despises!

Like Fielding's narrator in Tom Jones, the narrator of 'Tam o' Shanter' is capable of irony and self-irony ('But here my Muse her wing maun cour / Sic flights as far beyond her power'). But as Fielding is not synonymous with the narrator of Tom Jones and so subjects his narrator to authorial irony, so Burns—who is equally not the narrator of 'Tam o' Shanter'—subjects his creation to authorial irony. 'Tam o' Shanter: A Tale'—the sub-title is deceptively simple, and deliberately so. It is a tale of what happens to Tam; it is also a tale of someone telling a tale. Tom Jones is as much an account of narrator-reader relations as a story of what happens to Tom and Sophia. Sterne's Tristram Shandy is about the narrator's desperate and largely futile attempt to give an account of his life and opinions, enlisting the reader's help when necessary.³⁷ Could it be that Burns's 'tale', traditionally regarded as the culmination of the folk-tradition, may be set alongside these sophisticated experiments in narration, where what happens is important, but how it is recounted is equally important? And could it be that in that play of relationships involving poet, narrator, and Tam there is some sort of resolution—albeit temporary—of the poet's problems of identity: multiplicity of identity finds a focus in that play of relationships; paradoxically, in the controlled flux of play lies the basis of stability? It might be added that Burns's obsessive and fluctuating relationship with the Devil (who is both 'that noble personage' and 'Auld Hangie … Auld Nickie-Ben') has a comparable function.

Burns lived in various worlds, sometimes simultaneously. The chameleon nature and the charismatic personality made this possible; and, by and large, the linguistic ability and stylistic expertise kept pace with the multiplicity of perspective (the point is perhaps most readily demonstrated by comparing 'Tam o' Shanter' with Burns's prose account to Grose³⁸ of largely the same material). Burns wrote to Moore, 'my first ambition was, and still my strongest wish is, to please my Compeers, the rustic Inmates of the Hamlet'.³⁹ In that sentence substance and style are plainly at loggerheads. In the preface to the Commonplace Book he observed, 'I was placed by Fortune among a class of men to whom my ideas would have been nonsense'. Some of Burns's finest poems are those in which he finds the means of communicating on various levels and to various audiences. 'To a Mouse' is both an address to a mouse and, as Thomas Crawford has suggested, a depiction of the plight of both the peasantry and the human race. Burns's 'compeers' may well have been amused by two dogs conversing, but 'The Twa Dogs', echoing Goldsmith and Crabbe and showing the influence of Adam Smith, is a poem about the political and social state of man in the eighteenth century. In 'The Auld Farmer's New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie' the 'rustic inmates' would hear a familiar voice—that of the peasant-farmer who gives an account of his hardships but stoically accepts his condition. Burns, ironically distanced, offers such a voice as a means of suggesting that men must begin to question their lot and challenge their condition; Enlightenment is meaningless unless it reaches such people also. 'Address to the Deil' would be immediately accessible to those versed in the folk-tradition and Presbyterianism. It is also, though less obviously, a poem about Burns trying to identify and reconcile conflicting elements within himself, elements in whose creation both the folk-tradition and Presbyterianism have played a significant part.

How could a man of acute intelligence and notable breadth and depth of knowledge countenance the reduction of himself to the stereotype of the 'Heaventaught ploughman'? One answer is that he responded to market forces. Robert Anderson challenged Burns with being more learned than he would acknowledge, and this was the poet's response:

It was … a participants of the machinery, as he called it, of his poetical character to pass for an illiterate ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration. When I pointed out some evident traces of poetical imitation in his verses, privately, he readily acknowledged his obligations … but in company he would not suffer his pretensions to pure inspiration to be challenged, and it was seldom done where it might be supposed to affect the success of the subscription for his Poems.⁴⁰

But he responded so successfully that there was no escape; having helped create the role, he was obliged to continue to play it. The range of reading, ready absorption of material, and talent for mimicry combined in Burns to produce a range of styles, modes, and personae which he used to great creative effect. Ultimately, however, these served more than a literary function: Burns became trapped behind the personae which he had so readily created.

If since 1707 Scots have been uncertain as to their identity, then it is understandable that they should worship a poet who had such a gift for creating voices and personae. But the poet himself paid a price.

Notes

¹Lounger, No. 97 (9 Dec. 1786); reprinted in Donald A. Low (ed.), Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage (London & Boston, 1974), 67–71.

² Letter to Lord Byron, 6 Nov. 1813; reprinted in Low (ed.), Burns: Critical Heritage, 258.

³Robert Burns's Commonplace Book 1783–1785, intro. David Daiches (London, 1965), I.

⁴ 'Criticism on the writings of Burns', The Works of Robert Burns, with an Account of his Life (Liverpool, 1800), I, 267; reprinted in Low (ed.), Burns: Critical Heritage, 132.

⁵The Letters of Robert Burns, ed. J. DeLancey Ferguson; 2nd edn., ed. G. Ross Roy (Oxford, 1985), I, 326.

⁶Letters, I, 109

⁷ 'Character Sketch' by 'Candidior' (Maria Riddell), Dumfries Journal, Aug. 1796; reprinted Low (ed.), Burns: Critical Heritage, 102.

⁸Letters, II, 334.

⁹Letters, I, 334–5.

¹⁰Letters, I, 337.

¹¹Robert Burns and Mrs Dunlop: Correspondence, ed. William Wallace (London, 1898), 60.

¹²Ibid., 65.

¹³Letters, I, 88.

¹⁴Letters, I, 138, 141.

¹⁵Letters, I, 392.

¹⁶Letters, II, 165.

¹⁷Letters, I, 207.

¹⁸Letters, I, 17.

¹⁹Letters, I, 175.

²⁰The Life and Works of Robert Burns, ed. Robert Chambers, rev. William Wallace, 4 vols. (Edinburgh & London, 1896), I, 68–9.

²¹Letters, I, 349.

²²Letters, I, 296.

²³Letters, I, 131.

²⁴Letters, I, 348.

²⁵ Thomas Crawford, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs (2nd edn., reprinted Edinburgh, 1978), 104.

²⁶Letters, I, 152.

²⁷Letters, I, 155.

²⁸Letters, I, 17.

²⁹ Carol McGuirk, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (Athens, Georgia, 1985), 77

³⁰Letters, II, 74.

³¹ David Daiches, God and the Poets (Oxford, 1984), 144.

³²Letters, II, 122.

³³Letters, I, 63–4.

³⁴Letters, II, 315–16.

³⁵Letters, II, 146.

³⁶Letters, I, 124–5.

³⁷ For a fuller account of Sterne's influence on Burns, see Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen, 1988), ch. 8.

³⁸Letters, II, 29–31.

³⁹Letters, I, 88.

⁴⁰ Robert Anderson to James Currie, 28 Sept. 1799, printed in Burns Chronicle, 1925, 12; cited Crawford, Burns, 198–9, n. 20.