Poet and Patrons

Like most writers who have laid hold on popular imagination, Robert Burns has been mythologised in various roles – as a gentle nature lover, as a drunken blackguard, as a peasant moralist dragged down by his own weakness (Carlyle’s view), as a social revolutionary stifled but not silenced by poverty and piety. Each represents the natural attempt of people to simplify a complex phenomenon in accordance with their own wishes and prejudices. But as Professor Ferguson points out in his brief and vigorous Introduction there were several factors in Burns’s environment which made it unusually difficult for him to reach equilibrium in his life and in his art. The social position of a peasant farmer in eighteenth-century Scotland was rigidly determined. Thus Burns throughout his life was obliged to show an assiduous respect to men and women who were intellectually vastly his inferiors. His very livelihood, and the survival of his family, depended on it. He writes to one patron: ‘Sir: The language of Gratitude has been so prostituted by servile adulation and designing flattery, that I know not how to express myself when I would acknowledge the receipt of your last letter . . .’.

Such language, from a man who could handle language like a rapier orpage 139 a flail, betrays the fundamental falseness of his position. His letters show more plainly than his poems how much of his egalitarianism, his touchy self-esteem, and even his addiction to the cult of sensibility, sprang from the deep humiliation of being forced to flatter. In his letters to Agnes McLehose and Mrs Dunlop, deference and sensibility are the keynote – partly, one feels, an artificial emphasis, but partly an expression of his natural impulse. It is, however, in the autobiographical sketch sent to Dr. John Moore, and in the letters written to relatives or to friends with whom no social barrier existed, that Burns’s prose gains its full balance – pungent, concrete, large in reach, and immensely vital. One ends by regarding Burns not only as a great poet and a gifted raconteur, but also as no mean philosopher.

1954 (79)