Burns offering
STEPHEN MEDCALF
The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns edited by James Kinsley (our three volumes £9 10s) `I have been trying all my life to like Scotch- men,' Lamb, although he adored Burns, observed, 'and am obliged to desist from the experitsnent in despair.' He means a kind of Scot who knows no doubt, is heavily moral, aggressively independent, weighed down by common sense, and humourless. The difficulty about Burns is that he does not always seem to be clear whether he is in violent revolt against that kind of Scotsman or represents him.
Much of his writing is clearly in revolt. One of his Jolly Beggars sings: 'But Lordly Will, I hold it still/A mortal sin to thraw that'—lines which Blake might have written—in total re- jection of any ethic of control. But it is a limited and un-Blakean revolt in context; because the magnificent assurance of 'The Jolly Beggars' comes from the fact that Burns places its characters as the dispossessed of a stable society—there is no sense, as there would be with Blake, that the outsiders should replace the insiders. They are only superficially like the beatniks and hippies of the last ten years— oddly enough the difference is that in the eighteenth century they can afford to ignore altogether the society of which they are the underside. And similarly most of Burns's satire and ribaldry is quite unabashed because it is not at all tinged with decadence=neither partly nor wholly motivated by the sheer wish to turn his audience on by any means available— only by mere good spirits and by indignation at a genuinely established oppression quite unlike anything found today outside some local magistrates' courts. Hence we get some- thing like 'Holy Willy's prayer.'
So far so good. The revolt in Burns is always unexceptionable, except when it occasionally degenerates into swagger, as in 'The Forni- cator.' But there is also a great deal of really bad poetry, commonly when he is trying to adopt traditional stances—canting, for ex- ample, in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' about wretches who would 'betray sweet Jenny's un- suspecting youth' within months of refusing to marry the `bonie Betty' of 'A Poet's Wel- come to his love-begotten Daughter.'
The simple way to understand Burns's ex- cellence and defects is to think of him as heir to an older Scots civilisation, who goes wrong when he adopts either its later developments or the alien English culture. And it is true that to read 'The Holy Fair' with its summer open- ing, its three vivid, swiftly sketched allegorical figures, followed by a riot of social observa- tion mixed with keen hard satire, is to be not far from the Middle Ages—Piers Plowman in particular. This is the Burns who gave us bawdry and sentiment in the language of an unchanged peasant community, the trans- mitter to a book-culture of the tradition in which he is the last folksinger of an oral cul- ture, and the creator of a satiric skeleton Death with his awful scythe and trident.
But this will not quite be enough. It is one of the merits of Professor Kinsley's monumen- tal new edition of Burns that his notes give us a wealth of comparative quotations from which one can see not only how much Burns follows mediaeval traditions, but how much more he is of his own century, with Pope from England and Thomson in Scotland. And it is clear that some of his best poems are in the English dialect and style-1 once was a maid, but I cannot tell when' or 'I am a son of Mars' and 'Flow gently, sweet Afton.'
Nor can one ever really put him with Langland or Chaucer. The heart of mediaeval literature is contrition and laughter at oneself, and its binding force is a latent or expressed mysticism. Burns actually advises us against humility (`If ye hae made a step aside . . . Yet still keep up a decent pride, An ne'er owre far demean you'—though admittedly he cancelled this verse) and 'the gift to see oursels as ithers see us' is only asked for Jenny in church, up whose bonnet the louse is crawling. And his religion, deist and moralist in a deistic age, looks like stirring into life only in his reverence for patriarchal family patriotism with the emphasis on patria, land of our fathers, and patriarchal religion in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night.'
There is in fact often a lack of what new theologians and others call depth about Burns.
Another facet of this is his sentimentality—
pitying daisies, pitying his own fate by pity- ing a mouse's, offering sympathy to the ex- tremely funny Auld Hornie—his version of the principle of evil. This is often good, but some- times it trivialises. Burns feels pity for animals but I don't know that he leaves himself so far as to feel the kind of empathy that Keats had.
Keats himself, with much love for Burns, attributed his occasional swagger to the society he lived in—'how sad it is when a lutEurious imagination is obliged in self defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things
attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not.' This is alma,' what Burns says himself of fornication:
`I waive the quantum o'the sin; The hazard of concealing But Och! it hardens a' within And petrifies the feeling.'
But Burns was too intelligent and sensitive a man to give in entirely to the insensitivity within him (or his society). And great as he is in satire, bawdry and sentiment, he is at his greatest in the lyric folksong in which there is a kind of transcendence of all the difficulties which his consciousness of himself might cause. In this kind of verse (in `My luve is like a red, red rose' or `Of a' the airts the wind can blaw') the poet insists on giving himself up wholly to one contemplation, one moment (which Burns was temperamentally ready to do). If duration comes in, it is duration felt as background to the single hanging moment. If you are to understand it at all, even to con- . struing the words, you have to enter the poet's mind engaged in one simple and single ex- perience, and reaching to a single circumstance outside itself. This is a straitening and there- fore purifying thing to do, and the result is a momentary impersonalising of experience.
Since this is the kind of experience which Burns gives us at his height, it is perhaps fit- ting to end with a tribute to another kind of impersonalisation of experience, that of the devotion and labour which are necessary to such an edition as this. 'The humble man,' says Iris Murdoch, 'because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are.' In his editorial capacity, at least, one could say this of Professor Kinsley.
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