BOOKS

The Burns Game

BY KARL

MILLER

THE dark nights are getting darker, Burns's weather has arrived with its winds and rains and so—loud, deep and long—has his festival. The tables are laid, the new editions* have come out Plain and kilted and round the world they will I be playing the Burns game, this time with special I bicentenary fierceness. The objections to the game Were established long ago. It is perfectly clear that Burns has often been used as a sort of vaccine Which guarantees the players against all other literary infections, or as a plaid to hide them from the new world in which Scots people live, a world Where no one builds the Forth Road Bridge, where many beautiful things have been put away, as Lockhart predicted, 'only for that they were old and our own,' and where they need this 'dearest consolation' more than ever before. Few writers Could be expected to survive the claques and jam- borees of a game like this. Burns, however, has. The affection for him has stood the celebrations and he continues to be read almost as eagerly and Inquiringly as ever in the past. 'The large dark eYe of the portraits, with the best clothes which reminded the Edinburgh professors of a 'master of a merchant vessel of the most respectable class,' looks down in the living-room like Garibaldi, Stalin or any other holy picture, but he is still literature and he is still here.

There is this to be said, too, for those who have turned the poet into a Holy Fair. A great part of his poetry is something of a game itself. One of its main conventions is a convention of pleasure, Which is why he is sometimes read nowadays, by 'those who do read other writers, with a little shy- ness and discomfort. More and more over these 200 years literature has been asked to play an edifying, truth-bearing role, but Burns, who wrote With his hand on the plough, wrote for fun, and made a point of saying so. When he was dying and poor he refused to take money for his mar- vellous songs, out of a continuing sense, as much as anything, of the old convention which had first encouraged him to write. And during the abundant early time at Mossgiel he wrote not for publica- tion but for himself and the greater pleasure of those about him in Ayrshire. He and his audience Were closeted together in a way that could hardly happen again. They sang his songs, and they really Were songs; indeed everything he wrote was oral In a way that had already become rare in accepted literature. It was Ayrshire stuff, one more diver- sion among the debating societies, Bible-readings, Holy Fairs, drinking clubs and- elections, and it carried from the start the intimate, practical, pub- lic appeal which had kept the folk tradition in

Scotland awake. .

Of course Burns was soon aware that there were other audiences and,other kinds of poem, aware of the poet's duty to be noble and impressive and * Editions of the poems have been published by Chambers (I5s.) and Collins (21s.). The second volume has an excellent introduction by David baichcs, but both are hung with illustrations: as so often, and poor ones at that. Even the 'cauld blast' of the song has its drawing. Everyman have published a full selection of the poems (fts. 6d.) as well as an edition of Lockhart's Life (10s. 6d.).

to sound like an English gentleman. There is a high Burns, in fact, which Malenkov and the home supporters seem to prefer, and a low. The first," with its dutiful rhetoric and its good ideas about liberty and married love, is well supplied with bad verse. And the low Burns has more of the element of play, more of the early audience and much more contemporary appeal. None of this means that he was any the less a thoughtful and sophisti- cated writer. His sharpness of mind, very popular in Ayrshire. was quite capable of striking its own bargains with the learned scepticism quartered over in Edinburgh and of forming keen suspicions in the matter of religion or public affairs. He was an intensely qualified writer by the highest stand- ards of the age. But it does mean that, as with Pope, a ggeat deal of his most serious and poetic verse is comic, satirical and funny. The low or less romantic Burns is a great writer. Modern readers have a finer body of poetry even if a divided one, with the songs seen as a third force, very much involved with their music. 'Holy Willie's Prayer' is a masterpiece fully and newly fledged, 'Death and Doctor Hornbook' a poem of real originality and power. Death is found to be another member of the labouring poor.

'Folk maun dae something for their bread, An' sac maun Death.'

He complains that he is being put out of business by a quack, Doctor Hornbook, whose original actually lived in Burns's neighbourhood. Games have their bite, and it was entirely in the character of the poem that the doctor should sell up over the head of it and leave for Glasgow, where the folk imagination troubled him no more.

His first audience, then, wanted a neighbour- hood poetry of ranting and ironic moods, strong feelings, a knowingness about human nature and a knack of rich and solid Scots. Burns gave them that, and more. In his 'Address to the Deil,' for example.

Lang sync in Eden's bonie yard, When youthfu' lovers first were pair'd, An' all the soul of love they shar'd, The raptur'd hour.

Sweet on the fragrant flow'ry swaird, In shady bower.

The scene is set for a small and homely Fall, which checks the note of voluptuous innocence and makes it all the more touching—the later idylls are apt to go sky high. • Then you, ye :told, snick-drawing dog! Ye cam to Paradise incog, An' play(' on man a cursed brogue.

(Black be your fa' ! ) An' gicd the infant world a shog, 'Midst ruin'd a'. - The poem is a game at the expense of 'the lads in black,' but there is also a faint sadness about these verses, they are more than just local and funny. Again and again in his poetry the moving passages appear as shocks or undertones in the midst of trenchant or joyful Scots. Burns hated the idea of original sin. But, in ways. he accepts it. He believed that life was trying and harrowing, and in his talk about 'M isfortune' and stormy weather there seems at times to be someone who rejects the teachings of Calvinism only to find them painfully appropriate to the conditions of his own life. He made up a blues, like the Negroes, because he was beaten and poor. He also believed that blues and catastrophe were right.

Lockhart's biography is as good a description as any of the brutal conditions which screwed him down both as an ordinary peasant and as an aspiring one. 'Very lately I was a boy,' he said at the end. 'but t'other day a young man.' However much it helped to foster the idea of Burns as a national hero, 'a credit till us a',' the book has the virtue of respecting the verse and seeing him as one writer among others. For a hero Burns has drawn a huge amount of detractors: a number of (he people v■ ho will he kindling their bonfire on the 25th would no doubt have been the ones to roast him on it in the old days. Cleaning up the poet's character, therefore, cutting down on his proverbial drinking, setting him right with his wife —Lockhart must have felt that he owed this austere service to the poetry. And while it fills extraordinary areas of the book, he performs it. on the whole, impartially and well. Not loud enough, though, for the Oxford Contpattiotr which still soberly weighs his literary activities against his 'tendency to dissipation.'

Lockhart's book, on the other hand, made D. H. Lawrence spit, and there will be many readers to agree with him. Lawrence cared particularly about Burns and even started a novel which takes his bachelor life to Nottinghamshire and treats it with remarkable sombre insight. And it is true that Lockhart's account of Burns's achievement is hostile, in the end, to its greatest and dearest qualities. The nerve of his poetry is a miraculous animal honesty in his dealings with men and women and the life about him. His kindness and his coarseness come from the depths of his nature and far outdo his taste for misfortune. He apolo- gised for the elements of 'Pride and Passion' in his character (the one had been 'humanised into integrety and honour,' the other was bound by turns to 'Love. Religion, or Friendship'), but they are the great and welcome elements of his charac- ter and his poetry alike. He believed with his 'whole nature, as a lover and a drinker and the rest, in 'the carnal moral works of charity, humanity. generosity, forgiveness.' The low Burns has plenty of the observant social writing that pleased the Augustans, indeed the theme of male friendship is nearly as prominent as it is in Pope, but Burns is not polite and the social interest is surrounded by very different realities of feeling. Nor was there any longer anything in Pope's Lon- don to correspond to this background of con- viviality and play. The qualities which mark him off are the ones which matter most in Burns and which have enabled him to keep out over all these long years the assaults and bonfires of his admirers.

This year the anniversary falls at a sad and important time. It was only natural that Burns's heroic work (for he was at least one kind of hero) should create a bias in Scottish culture, lack of interest, for example, in the intellectual or critical aspects of literature, which came in time to need correction. And the man who did more perhaps than any other to achieve this, one of the two Main talents of modern Scotland, has recently died. Edwin M uir was obviously a very different man and the decisions he made as a writer were very different too. as they had to be. But he lived the same difficult, dedicated life. Like Burns he gave his deepest attention to the culture of his country and worked creatively on its behalf. Any- one who hopes that we will still have a Scottish literature will think not only of Burns but of Edwin Muir.