Pride and Passion: Robert Burns, 1759-1796

SCOTLAND

A Scot in the eighteenth century was a poor relation, subject to the slights and scorns of more prosperous kinfolk, and reared amid poverty, theology, and filth. When Robert Burns was born, on January 25, 1759, his native land was almost at the nadir of its independent existence. Proud and warlike and desperately poor, Scotland had been still an essentially feudal nation when King James VI was called from amid the bickerings of his jealous nobles and intransigent clergy to become James I of England. The permanent removal of the court to London left the country more than ever the prey of contention among its nobles and fanaticism among its ecclesiastics; governed by a parliament without authority; torn at intervals by rebellion and civil strife; denied commercial parity with England, and cut off from the old-time free intercourse with France.

The Act of Union of 1707, by admitting Scotland to commercial privileges formerly restricted to England, started the country on the road to material prosperity, but promised to destroy the last vestiges of national pride. It was ‘the end of an old song’. Thenceforward the affairs of Scotland were entrusted to a handful of representatives at Westminster, too small, in those days of patronage and pocket-boroughs, to have enabled even a Scottish Parnell, had there been one, to sway the balance of power. Scotland was no longer Scotland; it was North Britain. And when the House of Hanover succeeded to the English throne, the last vestige of Scottish influence in the government seemed to have vanished. Ruled no longer by the Stuarts—her own kings, even though absentee—but by ‘an insolent, beef-witted race of foreigners’, Scotland turned more and more to the things of the flesh. The last flicker of the ancient loyalties in the ’45 shed only light enough to reveal their death. The Lowlands, though they could not stomach the double treason of a man like Murray of Broughton, acquiesced in the brutal destruction of the Highland clans. Most of the comfortable merchants and landed gentry had viewed the uprising with an apprehension even livelier than that felt by the German court four hundred miles away; when the Highlands were crushed they rejoiced in their own increased security, and showed their loyalty to the reigning House by christening their daughters Charlotte and Wilhelmina, and their new streets and squares Hanover and Brunswick and George.

By the middle of the century Scottish affairs had settled into an order which might alter in degree, but would not alter in kind, for two generations at least. Politically, the country was little more than a conquered province. Economically it was beginning to emerge from age-old poverty, but the new prosperity of the lucky few was widening the gap between them and the poor and still further depressing the latter. Religiously it was awakening from the nightmare of Calvinism which had paralysed free thought and free action for two centuries. Intellectually its literary life was being overwhelmed by the fashions and standards of England, and its educated citizens were suffering from an inferiority complex of national scope.

When Warren Hastings was impeached, Burns was angry because it was done in the name of the Commons of England and not of Great Britain. Had he expressed his opinion in public, instead of in a private letter, it would have roused little sympathy among his more influential countrymen. Most would have dismissed it as the rant of a fanatic; a few would have held it downright treason. There was no money in being a Scottish patriot. As in England, all things political went by favour. The only difference was that in Scotland they went by favour of one man—the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Bute, or Henry Dundas, as the case might be. All power concentrated at last in the hands of the national boss. He ‘suggested’ the choice of the sixteen Scottish peers who were to represent their country in the House of Lords; he controlled the election of the forty-five members of the Commons; his word was law as to all appointive offices. Fifteen members of the Commons were chosen by the burgh councils—self-perpetuating groups which in ‘the taciturn regularity of ancient affairs’ allowed no outsider to intrude on their privileges and their graft. The other thirty were chosen by the counties, and in all Scotland there were fewer than three thousand qualified electors, every man of whom was ticketed as to party allegiance and family connection. Most of them also had their prices plainly marked on their tickets. Of course the price need be nothing so crude as cash. Every job, from a cadetship with the East India Company to the governorship of a province, was obtainable by influence, and by influence only; hence there were plenty of ways of swaying a man’s vote, especially if he had a rising family of hungry younger sons, without soiling his fingers with gold.

Everyone played the game, and took the rules for granted. Why wait for merited promotion, if you could get it quicker by pulling wires? The only man Sir Walter Scott ever deliberately cut was the one who publicly criticized him for securing his brother’s appointment to a post which he knew was soon to be abolished—with a pension for the ousted incumbent. It was a comfortable system for those on the inside. As for the others, they were expected to do their duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them.

But it was not merely in political jobs that the influential classes were doing well for themselves. The Act of Union had admitted Scottish merchants to the privileges of the colonial trade formerly open only to the English. Throughout the eighteenth century the south of Scotland experienced a whole series of industrial and real estate booms. Though by twentieth-century standards of bankruptcy the booms were small and local, they had all the familiar characteristics. Glasgow and its neighbourhood, for instance, when once it had recovered from the losses of the crazy Darien Expedition—as wild a speculation as the later Mississippi Bubble in France and the South Sea madness in England—throve soberly on its steadily increasing commerce with the West Indies and the American Colonies. The passerby today, between the Trongate and the Broomielaw, may read in Union Street and George Square how mercantile Scotland felt towards the loss of its parliament, and find Jamaica and Virginia Streets underscoring the reason; further west, St. Vincent Street, Nile Street, Pitt Street, and Wellington Street show the direction of Glaswegian sympathies in the long struggle with Napoleon. And since commerce is by definition two-sided the ships which brought back American cotton and tobacco and sugar took out Scottish linens and woolens and shoes from steadily growing centres of manufacture.

On the east coast, Edinburgh was not merely expanding; it was on the way to transforming itself. Unable by its location to share directly in the overseas trade, it throve on the legal business which grew out of that trade, on the increasing demand for education which benefited both the university and the printers and booksellers, and on the invested profits of Scotsmen who had made money in the East or West Indies and who settled in the capital when they retired. Until after the ’45 the city was still packed along the ridge from Holyrood to the Castle, its population crowded into the tall tenements which shut out the low northern sun from the narrow wynds. Its first expansion was to the south, in a development, near the present site of the University, on which Burns’s father and uncle found work when they struck out for themselves in 1750. To the north of the Old Town all was then open country. At the foot of the Castle Rock, where the railway tracks now run, the marshy Nor Loch still received whatever of the city’s garbage did not remain in the streets. Burns was four years old when the real growth of the modern city began with the building of the North Bridge to connect the Old Town with the ridge which paralleled it to northward. Each year thereafter saw new houses or new squares added, but as late as 1800 the New Town still consisted only of Princes, George, and Queen Streets from St. Andrew Square to Charlotte Square.

Until after Burns’s death the whole area, despite the Georgian dignity and charm of its houses, retained many of the features of a new and raw development. In particular, the valley was half choked by the hideous Mound formed of the earth excavated in grading the New Town. The laying out of the Princes Street Gardens and the crowning of the Mound with the Scottish National Gallery were still far in the future—there was even talk of a row of buildings on the south side of Princes Street which would have blinded one of the finest city vistas in the world, and have made the Gardens forever impossible. By 1786, when Burns first saw Edinburgh, wealth and fashion had already deserted the Old Town, and middle-class respectability was beginning to follow, but the business life of the city still centred in the shops and taverns which lined the High Street, crammed the narrow Luckenbooths which congested traffic beside disfigured St. Giles’s, and overflowed into all the adjacent courts and closes. Professional men transacted their business in taverns in preference to their crowded living-quarters; all Edinburgh was accustomed to gather at midday in the neighbourhood of the Cross to arrange business and social appointments.

Sanitation did not exist. Water for cooking and such exiguous washing as was done was carried by porters from the public wells to the various flats in the tall ‘lands’; the day’s filth of the household was collected in a tub on the landing of the stairs and at bedtime the barefoot maid-servants emptied it out of the windows—theoretically to be gathered up by the scavengers; actually, too often, to lie where it fell until a rain washed it away. Even the hardy nostrils of Londoners quailed before the marshalled stenches of Edinburgh, and travelling Scotsmen gauged the smells of foreign cities like Lisbon by their nasal memories of home. That children should die like flies was inevitable; the marvel is that any survived. Deficiency diseases were as rife as filth diseases. Rickets was taken for granted—a simile, humorous in intent but ghastly in effect in one of Scott’s letters, gives a glimpse of nurse-maids in Princes Street trying to compel unhappy rachitic children to walk. Human life has always been Scotland’s cheapest commodity. That a high degree of social and intellectual culture should flourish amid this filth is merely another proof of human capacity for ignoring what it is too indolent to correct.

Outside the cities, as well as in them, Scottish life was beginning to change. Primitive agriculture in the northern kingdom, like the sanitation of Edinburgh, seemed almost to be an effort to demonstrate just how badly a thing could be done. The poorest sorts of oats and barley, the scrubbiest of cattle, were raised by the worst methods. The unfenced fields were divided by a system of ridges and ditches which managed to combine the maximum of soil wastage with the minimum of drainage. The ‘infield’, as this dyked portion of the farm was called, was cultivated with ploughs so crude and awkward that they required four horses and two men to handle them. The ‘outfield’, or pasture, was never cultivated or manured; overrun with moss and weeds it yielded even in summer only a scanty and unwholesome pasturage, with little if any surplus to carry the cattle through the winter. All excess stock was slaughtered in the fall, and for six months of the year the people who could afford meat at all had to subsist like seamen on salt beef and smoked mutton hams. The wretched beasts which were kept through the winter were fed mainly on straw, and frequently by spring were so weak and emaciated that they had to be carried to the pasture.

The owners of the cattle lived in a style which an Iroquois would have thought primitive. Gilbert Burns resented the statement that his famous brother was born in a hovel. The Alloway cottage, he declared, was better than the houses then occupied by many substantial farmers. So it was. It had a chimney, whereas in many a cottage and farmhouse, long after Burns’s youth—Keats saw plenty of them in Ayrshire in 1818—such of the smoke as did not enter the eyes and lungs of the tenants escaped through the door. But even with a chimney the average farmhouse or labourer’s cottage, with its walls of stone or rammed clay, its earthen floor and thatched roof, and with the fire seldom built up except for cooking, had a winter chill and dampness that bred tuberculosis in the young and rheumatism in the old. As at Alloway, the stable was usually under the same roof, and its reek mingled with the dampness and the smell of unwashed humanity. An English proverb in the seventeenth century asserted that the Scots had neither bellows, warming-pans, nor houses of office; and that the proverb still held in the eighteenth is proved alike by experiences of Johnson and Boswell in gentlemen’s homes in the Highlands and by episodes in the chapbooks of Dugal Graham which reveal the same use of the fireplace as Shakespeare records of the inn at Rochester. Outside the door was the midden-dub or glaur-hole, manure-heap of man and beast alike, often so surrounded with stagnant water that the ‘rather pretty’ girl whom Keats saw standing at a cow-house door in the Highlands, ‘fac’d all up to the ankles in dirt’, would in the Lowlands a generation earlier have been a sight too commonplace to excite remark. When the seepage from the midden-dub reached the water-supply the cycle of filth and typhoid was complete. Dead animals which could not be eaten were usually dumped into the nearest stream, so that if the water-supply was not contaminated in one way, it was pretty sure to be in another. But unless the animal were a horse, it had to be very dead indeed not to be eaten. Sheep that had died by accident or disease had a special name—‘braxies’—and were the perquisite of the shepherds; the flesh of diseased cattle was sometimes the only meat farm servants tasted; in Edinburgh young Henry Mackenzie once observed two bakers of cheap ‘mutton pies’ suspiciously engaged by night about the carcass of a horse on the bank at the back of the Castle.

Within doors all domestic equipment was on the same primitive scale as the housing. At meal-times the pot containing the thick oatmeal porridge which was the staple food was placed in the centre of the table, and each member of the family—servants included—fell to work with his own spoon. Barley for broth was prepared on the knocking-stone, counterpart of the Mexican metate. Pewter dishes were a luxury, and crockery ones almost unknown. Wooden trenchers were frequently used even by the clergy, and were the regular thing in farmhouses; the milk was kept in wooden vessels so permeated with dirt and bacteria that it soured in a few hours. The entire family lived and ate and slept in two rooms, with sometimes a windowless loft above as additional sleeping-quarters for the servants or some of the older children. Every cottage had at least one box-bed built into the wall. When the occupants retired and closed the sliding wooden doors they enjoyed a practically airless seclusion amid their own effluvia. The rest of the family slept on rough cots, or even straw pallets on the floor. The popular saying, ‘The clartier [dirtier] the cosier’, was not satire; it was just a matter-of-fact summary of rural living conditions.

In dwellings like these, where a large family was often augmented by several servants, privacy was as impossible as in an army barrack. Any conversation too intimate to be shouted above the uproar of the children into the ears of a mixed audience had to be conducted elsewhere than in the house—in the fields, if the weather permitted; in the stable otherwise. Even so, of course, all the circumstances leading up to the conversation were known to a large and intensely interested group. Hence the young people, making a virtue of publicity, took their cronies into their confidence and employed them to arrange their trysts. Thus if James Smith beckoned Jean Armour or Betsy Miller away from her giggling family it was fairly certain that he was making an appointment for Rob Mossgiel and not for himself; if Burns waited on Jenny Surgeoner it was in John Richmond’s interests and not in his own. It was difficult to surprise, and impossible to shock by any of the normal processes of nature, a people who lived in such conditions. No one had to explain ‘the facts of life’ to the children of that world; they witnessed them daily. It would almost seem that a belief in original virtue, rather than original sin, was requisite to explain why the moral status of the peasantry was often so much less squalid than their physical surroundings.

As the century advanced, however, closer intercourse with England roused ambitious landlords to attempt improvements. Trees were planted on the hillsides and about the naked houses; the ‘infields’ were levelled and enclosed. Yet nine-tenths of the fences in Ayrshire were not built until after 1766, and as late as 1800 two-thirds of Fife was still fenceless. Rotation of crops, better cultivation, artificial grasses, more productive types of grain, were all experimented with. Potatoes and turnips, regarded as garden luxuries in the early part of the century, began to be grown on a large scale for human food and stock feed respectively. John Wesley in 1780 noted that vegetables had become as plentiful in Scotland as in England, though on his first visit, in 1762, he had found none at all, even on noblemen’s tables. Carts were introduced for farm work, to take the place of the ‘creels’ or panniers, in which manure had formerly been borne on horseback to the fields, and of the rough sledges on which the sheaves had been hauled from harvest field to stackyard. The wide use of carts, however, had in many districts to await the improvement of the roads; in some instances, when landlords first offered wheeled vehicles as gifts to their tenants, they were refused because it seemed impossible to drag them through the mud.

Some few of the improving landlords were actuated by disinterested zeal to better living-conditions; their stubborn and superstitious peasants were helped against their will. Many more landlords were motivated by simple greed to improve their rent-rolls. By breaking up small holdings occupied on short-term leases, and throwing several together, they made more profitable farms which were rented for long terms. The consequent evictions, however, produced an over-supply of would-be tenants whose desperate need for land resulted in competitive bidding from those willing to take a gambling chance on getting from the soil more than it really had to give. If they succeeded, it was too often at the expense of the health and strength of themselves, their children, and their servants.

Nevertheless, so far as the improvements in methods increased the productivity of the farms, the new developments were economically sound. But the nation’s increasing foreign trade operated to inflate land values. Merchants who had made money in the Indies wished to retire, and the prestige of setting up as landed gentry combined with the lack of sound corporate investments to bid up the value of land in the more attractive parts of the kingdom to levels where a fair return on the investment was possible only by rack-renting the tenants. Burns himself, and his father before him, were victims of this over-capitalization. They had to pay for marginal lands at rates which would have been fair rentals for the best. And of course speculation in land brought with it speculative banking. In Burns’s youth many of the Ayrshire gentry were crippled or ruined outright by the failure of the Douglas and Heron Bank, which, organized on a lavish scale, quickly got into trouble through excessive loans on real estate. The ruined gentry retired to the Continent, or to lodgings in Edinburgh, and their estates were taken over by nabobs home from the Indies.

All this drama of political corruption and of social and economic change was played against the background of the old religious life of Scotland. Though the intellectual life of the country had never been squalid like its physical life, it had at the beginning of the eighteenth century become torpid. From the time of John Knox until after the Act of Union the real government of Scotland, like that of colonial Massachusetts, was a theocracy. The King and the powers of the state were far off from the life of the average peasant or tradesman, but the Kirk watched all his goings out and comings in. Not only did it administer matters which in other times and other nations have been regarded as spiritual concerns, but it also largely took the place of magistrates and police. Critics of puritanism who have chosen colonial New England as their dire example have made a mistake. They should have chosen Scotland. Whatever the theory of church government in New England may have been, in practice the man at odds with the establishment suffered few real hardships beyond the loss of his vote and a moderate amount of discriminatory taxation—provided he had the discretion to mind his business and keep his mouth shut. But in seventeenth-century Scotland estrangement from the church might mean exile from the kingdom, under penalty of practical starvation if the rebel tried to stick it out at home. Except that it lacked the power to relax its heretics to the secular arm for mutilation or death, the Scottish hierarchy was own brother to the Spanish Inquisition.

In every parish the Kirk Session was supposed to maintain a snooping committee to investigate the conduct of the laity. The reckless parishioner who desecrated the Sabbath by cooking a hot meal, by puttering in his garden, or even by taking a walk, was haled before the Session for discipline, and could be reinstated in the communion only by confession of his sin and payment of a fine. For more serious offences the penalties were proportionately heavier, unless one were wealthy or powerful enough to cow the inquisitors. Burns had painfully intimate knowledge of the cutty stool, or mourners’ bench, whereon those guilty of fornication or other deadly sin had thrice to appear before the congregation while the minister rebuked them at length and with specific detail. Girls sometimes committed suicide or murdered their children to escape the public shame, and the effect of the ordeal on those who submitted was more likely to be hardening than chastening. Many another youth besides Burns inwardly resolved thenceforth to live up to the reputation thus fastened upon him.

The Kirk frowned upon, and tried to suppress, such secular amusements as music and dancing. In spite of the ban, the custom of ‘penny weddings’, whereby impecunious young couples in the rural districts sought, by giving what was in effect a subscription ball, to raise money enough to set them up in housekeeping, still persisted; but even these gatherings had a slightly furtive quality, and in the stricter homes all such things were taboo. The moral results of the policy of repression were almost wholly bad. The older men, in default of other relaxation, devoted themselves to drink; the younger, to the pleasures that give its point to Burns’s simile, ‘as busy as an Edinburgh bawd on a Sunday evening’.

Probably none but a native Scot can understand the finer points of Scottish theology. Fortunately, however, such understanding is not needed for a general grasp of church affairs in the eighteenth century. Primitive Calvinism shares with Marxism the distinction of being the most completely deterministic philosophy ever widely accepted in the western world. All men were held to be equally sinful and equally deserving of eternal damnation. ‘Adam as the federal representative of the human race had determined its fate once and for all by violating that unfortunate covenant which he and the Deity had contracted with regard to the forbidden fruit. A vicarious sacrifice had indeed been offered; but the power to avail themselves of this expiation was to be communicated to only a few of the minority to whom it had been made known; and these were to be saved to show that God was merciful, as the rest were to be damned to show that He was just.’[1] This was the creed of which Oliver Wendell Holmes said that any decent person really holding it ought to go mad out of mere self-respect. And like every other rigid system it had the effect of stultifying its sincerest adherents. The most patriotic of historians are compelled to recognize the general intellectual torpor of Scottish theological and philosophical writing in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The thinking of the clergy had been finished for them by John Calvin and John Knox; all that remained for them to do was to expound. No first-rate mind can subdue itself to the mere unquestioning exposition of other men’s views without losing its edge, and few of the parish clergy in Scotland had started with first-rate minds. Their preaching was commonly a dreary reiteration of the doctrine of the Four-Fold State of Man—first, Innocence or Primitive Integrity, next Nature or Entire Depravation, then Grace or Begun Recovery, and finally Consummate Happiness or Misery—brightened only by sadistic imaginings of the details of eternal torment. As if these doctrinal limitations were not sufficiently deadening, custom required that one of the minister’s two discourses each Sunday should be preached from his ‘ordinary’ text—which meant that he was expected to take the same text week after week and torture it into new applications of doctrine. If his invention failed under the strain, and he changed his ‘ordinary’ too often, zealous parishioners were likely to complain to the Presbytery. Add to these handicaps the fact that few ministers had money enough to buy books, even had they wished for books, and one begins to realize why Scottish manses two hundred years ago contributed no such leaders of national thought as were even then emerging from English rectories.

Nevertheless the tides of changing ideas stirred even the strongholds of Calvinism. Before the seventeenth century ended Michael Wigglesworth in Massachusetts had found himself compelled slightly to modify the doctrine of infant damnation in the direction of human decency; in Scotland the ‘common sense’ doctrines of the Deists penetrated during the eighteenth century even among those who abhorred the name of Deism. From 1729 until his death in 1746 Francis Hutcheson, as professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, expounded to steadily growing classes his theory of the ‘moral sense’—an allegedly innate human capacity for distinguishing right from wrong. This concept of innate virtue as opposed to the idea of original sin rapidly gained ground among the laity and the younger clergy of the cities, despite bitter hostility on the part of the conservatives. Preaching began to stress conduct rather than the will of a cruel and capricious god as the way of salvation. A healthier and more prosperous nation was in fact rebelling against a harsh and depressing philosophy, and the clergy were following the lead of their congregations. By the third quarter of the century the liberal faction, the Moderates or New Lights, were in almost undisputed control in the metropolitan districts, though the fundamentalists, or Old Lights, still flourished in the smaller towns and in the rural parishes. The more rigorous extremes of kirk discipline began to relax. Though in 1757 John Home was compelled to resign his pulpit to escape the consequence of having written The Tragedy of Douglas—to witness the early performances of which a few of his more daring clerical brethren disguised themselves in the garments of the laity—the ban on the theatre gradually sank into desuetude. Even while the Edinburgh playhouse was still unlicensed, and dramas had to be advertised as concerts of music between the parts of which the play of the evening would be presented gratis, it became possible for ministers to attend the performances openly.

But the warfare of New Lights versus Old was not conducted wholly in the realm of ideas. The fact that the more influential laity were early converts to the new doctrines brought into the struggle politics in its most worldly form. In parishes where the local magnates exercised the right of presenting the minister, New Light candidates had the preference. Hence it was the New Lights’ interest to uphold the right of patronage against the congregation’s democratic claim to elect its own minister. The supporters of patronage triumphed in the election of William Robertson as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1763; the result made the church almost as much a part of the spoils system as the government was, and gave its leadership into the hands of supple ecclesiastical politicians. In consequence the spread of New Light doctrine went hand in hand with a steady decline in the moral influence of the clergy, while schisms and secessions sapped the organization. Because the Kirk was morally as well as intellectually bankrupt the laughter of Burns’s satires shook it to its foundations. To the church of John Knox such ridicule would have meant no more than a mosquito means to an elephant. Burns’s Edinburgh friends were right in maintaining that the conduct and doctrines which he attacked would have disappeared in another generation without his aid; what neither they nor he could foresee was that in 1843 it would be the Old Light clergy who would restore moral leadership to the ministry by daring to give up their livings for conscience’ sake.

Behind the New Light doctrines expounded by Hutcheson and his followers lay of course the ideas of such English Deists as Locke and Shaftesbury. Strong convictions on philosophical and theological questions were going out of fashion; like Franklin in America the New Light Scots had persuaded themselves that enlightened self-interest, sweet reasonableness and common sense, were attainable goals for mankind at large, and could be trusted to solve problems of morals and economics alike. And this English influence in the field of theology and philosophy was typical of the entire range of literary expression in Scotland. The national inferiority complex showed itself most plainly of all in the realm of words.

Historically the Scottish language is to English what Provençal is to French and Catalan to Spanish—an ancient and independent local dialect which had developed its own literature at least as early as had the more central region which afterwards took the lead. The speech of Lowland Scotland was the direct descendant of that Northumbrian dialect of Old English which Bede and Caedmon spoke. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance Scotland maintained amid her poverty as rich a literary tradition as England did. In fact, from the death of Chaucer until the beginning of the Elizabethan era the student of British literature must look north of the Tweed to find, in the writings of King James I, Robert Henryson, Gawain Douglas and William Dunbar, anything worthy the name of poetry. The decay of Scots as a literary language was started by the Reformation and finished by the Union. By introducing the Geneva version of the English Bible the Reformation made Southern English the language of the church, in idiom if not in pronunciation. The accession of James VI to the English throne made Southern English also the language of the court. King James himself wrote in Scots; his subject, William Drummond of Hawthornden, wrote in English. Drummond’s example was followed by all the prose writers and most of the poets of Scotland from his day to ours. After the Union even the poets who used Scots did so consciously and not because such expression was wholly spontaneous.

Of these poets, Allan Ramsay, whose productive period covers roughly the three decades from 1711 to 1740, was the most popular. And Scots poetry, as practised by Ramsay and by his friend and contemporary William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, tended more and more to what Samuel Johnson would have described as the easy and vulgar, and therefore the disgusting. Their work exhibits humour, and something of the conversational quality of the familiar essay, but dignity and deep poetic emotion are notably absent. Moreover, the dialect in which they wrote tended more and more to become a synthetic and standardized language, embodying words and idioms common to a large section of southern Scotland but without firm roots in any one region. The Aberdeenshire dialect used by Alexander Ross in his Helenore is almost the last fresh transcription of the speech of a definite section of the country. Written Scots was rapidly becoming what nineteenth-century English and American authors made other dialects—a semi-literary vernacular employed for humorous effect or for an affectation of colloquial ease. Even Burns himself at times gave artificial Scottish flavour to his verse by using English idioms in Scottish spelling. Since the end of the eighteenth century no writer of Scots verse has succeeded in introducing any new elements. At its best, such writing sounds like imitations of Burns; at its worst, like imitations of his imitators.

But when Burns came before the public even this conventionalized literary Scots seemed on the point of extinction. Though Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany—which included many purely English verses—was still popular as a song-book, the rest of his work was neglected. Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s recension of Blind Harry’s History of Sir William Wallace was no more than a story-book for children. The unhappy Robert Fergusson, starved and neglected, had ended his life in a madhouse, and fashionable Edinburgh, glancing askance at his satirical verses, said it served him right. Ramsay was a crude homespun figure of the generation in which Thomson by writing The Seasons had given his countrymen a poem which they could show to Englishmen without blushing; ‘The Daft Days’ and the rest of Fergusson’s work was little better than a national disgrace when set beside the beauties of James Beattie’s Minstrel. Nevertheless there still underlay the new fashions a literary tradition which most of the anglicizing gentry scorned or ignored. An oral Scottish literature was still alive, though it was soon to perish when its lovers smothered it by writing it down. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which first gave highbrow sanction to the popular ballads of Scotland and northern England, were not published until Burns was six years old, and even Percy only scratched the surface of this rich deposit. Throughout the century scores of ballads still circulated by oral tradition which had never been recorded in writing, and in these the genuine spirit of the Scottish language flourished without concession to fashionable English.

Even more important than the ballads for the training of a poet like Burns were the folk-songs. The Scots had always been a musical people, and despite the opposition of the stricter clergy traditional songs or airs for almost every human occasion were known to everyone, high or low. The tradition, moreover, was still very much alive. Scottish song gave the nation its revenge for the military humiliations of the ’45. The taunting lilt of ‘Hey, Johnie Cope, are ye waukin yet?’ could be relied on to remind English garrisons of the inglorious conduct of their fellow soldiers at Prestonpans, and all Scotland’s contempt for the Hanoverian kings and their mistresses went into the ribaldry of ‘The Sow’s Tail to Geordie’. Even so, only a fraction of the popular songs had any political bearing. More of them were convivial; many more of them erotic. Every phase of sexual love from the crudest bawdry to idyllic beauty found some expression in verse—the latter, it must be confessed, more rarely and less effectively than the former. Yet these crude songs, interesting mainly for the surprising variety and ingenuity of their erotic symbolism, were the raw material—raw in more than one sense—from which Burns wrought such lyrics as ‘My Love is like a red red rose’, ‘John Anderson’, and ‘Coming thro’ the rye’. While Burns was still a lad, David Herd, a retiring antiquary in Edinburgh, began the systematic collection of this folk poetry on so large a scale and with such a complete absence of prudery that it was not until the twentieth century that the whole of his manuscript collection was printed. He had himself published in 1776 two volumes of what he considered the best work. At the same time musicians like James Oswald and Neil Gow were collecting the airs of Highlands and Lowlands alike. The singing of the old songs, with or without instrumental accompaniment, was a favourite pastime in Scottish drawing rooms, and even unliterary folk would frequently feel moved to compose new words to some well-liked melody.

Alongside this honest love of native things, whether expressed in a girl’s singing at her harpsichord or in David Herd’s careful recording of old words, another literature was growing up of imitation, forgery, and ‘improvement’. It had become a literary convention for every composer of an imitation ballad to offer it to the public as a copy from an ancient manuscript. Though a few of these imitations, like the ‘Hardyknute’ of Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, were close enough to the spirit of folk literature to deceive even experts, the mass of them were so mawkish and verbose as to bring the term ‘Scottish poetry’ to the verge of contempt. Primacy in these qualities, as in popularity, belonged to James Macpherson’s alleged translations of the poems of Ossian—a work passionately defended by the Scots because it depicted their savage ancestors as a trifle more chivalrous and vastly more sentimental than Bayard or Sidney, admired on the Continent because it supported the current delusion about the nobility of man in a state of nature, and cherished by Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the simple pleasures which appeal to the enterprising burglar in his hours of relaxation.

But the harm done to traditional literature by imitations and forgeries was trivial compared with that inflicted by some of those people who professed to admire it. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the teaching of music in Edinburgh had passed largely into the hands of foreigners. Names like Domenico Corri, Pietro Urbani, and Theodor Schetki are as prevalent on title-pages as their owners were on the concert stage, and under this Italianate influence many traditional melodies were ‘harmonized’ and ‘improved’ until all their native vigour was lost in empty flourishes. And as with the music, so with the words. ‘Correct’ and sentimentalized lyrics were substituted for the sturdy old words, remained in use long enough to push the latter into oblivion, and then, their novelty gone, themselves sank into disuse and dragged the music with them.

This effort to refine the national heritage of music was merely one phase of the whole sense of provincial inferiority which afflicted Scotland. Italian music and English literature, speech, and manners, were the ideals towards which genteel Scots strained. National pride in James Thomson and John Home exulted more in the fact that they wrote English acceptable in England than in their use of Scottish materials. Even the devastating scepticism of David Hume was forgiven him because he had almost purified his language of Scotticisms. When Johnson ridiculed Hume’s English Boswell writhed in agony, and was correspondingly elated when the dictator praised Blair’s sermons and was moved to tears by Beattie’s Minstrel.

When Thomas Sheridan came to Edinburgh in 1761 to give a course of lectures on elocution, ‘he was patronized by the professors in the College, by several of the clergy, by the most eminent among the gentlemen at the bar, by the judges of the Court of Session, and by all who at that time were the leaders of public taste’.

Thenceforward, ‘correct pronunciation and elegant reading’ were reckoned ‘indispensable acquirements for people of fashion and for public speakers’. In other words, these people of fashion, like Francis Jeffrey on his return from Oxford, gave up the broad Scots in return for the narrow English. In the very year of the Kilmarnock Poems, Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, one of the most public-spirited Scots of his generation, brought out a two-hundred-page volume of Observations on the Scottish Dialect. His purpose was not to preserve but to destroy his native speech. His book is a comprehensive index expurgatorius of all the words, phrases, and idioms a Scotsman must avoid—many of them today a part of the standard speech of the United States, and even of England. Thus, ‘best man’ is a Scotticism for ‘bride’s man’; ‘hairdresser’ is to be preferred to ‘barber’; ‘sore eyes’ is a vulgarism; ‘whisky’ should be called ‘usquebae’ or ‘aquavitae’. ‘Heather’ and ‘peat’ and ‘bracken’ are condemned along with ‘mittens’ and ‘kindling’; it betrays provincial origin to ask if a friend is in, or if he has gone out walking. ‘It is, indeed, astonishing,’ says Sir John, ‘how uncouth, and often how unintelligible, Scotch words and phrases are to an inhabitant of London, and how much it exposes such as make use of them, to the derision of those with whom they happen to have any communication or intercourse.’ However, he adds, a Scot should choose carefully even from the speech of London. ‘Cockney phrases a Scotchman is very apt to get into when he makes his first appearance in London. And when he can easily and fluently bring out, this here thing, and that there thing, for this or that thing; I knode, for I knew; on it, for of it, as, I heard on it; grass, for asparagus; your’n and his’n, for yours and his, he fancies himself a complete Englishman.’

The anglicizing mania extended even to people’s names. David Malloch, when he crossed the Border, changed his name to Mallet; John Murray the publisher was originally M’Murray, as his predecessor, Millan, had been Macmillan; William Almack, the proprietor of the famous assembly-rooms in London, had started life as M’Caul. One of Burns’s own friends, James M’Candlish, dropped the prefix when he entered Glasgow University, and became simply Candlish. Even today, in spite of Burns, the anglicizing process continues: the visitor in Ayr, for instance, will find the street-signs pointing him to the ‘New Bridge’ and the ‘Old Bridge’.

By 1780 Scotland could afford to smile at Johnson’s dictum that her northern lights were only farthing candles. In literature at least she could face English competition on equal terms. James Thomson had become a classic; Adam Smith and Hume and Robertson had demonstrated that the north could more than hold its own with the south in history and philosophy; Mackenzie’s lachrymose Man of Feeling disputed with The Vicar of Wakefield the claim to be the most popular short novel of the century. In Edinburgh a Scots Magazine was emulating the methods and materials of the English Gentleman’s Magazine, though when Mackenzie and his friends tried, first in The Mirror and later in The Lounger, to produce a Scottish Spectator they found the city not metropolitan enough to support such an enterprise. Many people took anything sharp in the way of satire as a personal attack, but namby-pamby was not read, and so between poverty of material and poverty of support the journals’ straw-fire flickered and went out.

But while the poor relations of England were thus looking forward hopefully to the day when their speech and writing should no longer betray their provincial origin, the social life of the country changed more slowly. The gentry added silks and laces to their clothing, and tea and other luxuries to their tables, but felt no special urgency for greater cleanliness. George Dempster, fresh from a visit to Brussels in 1756, was shocked to find that a baronet’s son of his acquaintance had been calling on a lady of title ‘in a valet de chamber’s frock and an unpowdered brown greezy head’. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century the inhabitants of a Highland mansion, though they had got beyond the point where they were satisfied to give themselves ‘a “good wash” on Sundays, and make that do for the week’, found their domestic routine upset by a guest who not only insisted on a daily bath but refused to go to the river to take it. Servants in the better houses were provided with shoes and stockings, but the general standards of neatness were still so low as to make the cleanliness of Holland a constant source of wonder to the visiting Scot.

But the aping of English manners had not yet undermined the traditional Scottish democracy of intercourse. Though the barriers which divided gentleman from commoner were fully as strong in Scotland as they were in England, they were not so visible. If many of the gentry lacked wealth, they did not lack pedigree, and a plebeian could rarely hope to cross the boundary that excluded him from social equality. Nobles married with nobles, and lairds with lairds. Yet until the end of the century the sons of nobles, lairds, and ploughmen commonly began their education together in the village school, where boy-fashion they took each other at face-value without regard to rank. The result was an almost total absence among the lower classes of that servility which was bred into their compeers in England. Only as more and more of the sons of gentlemen were sent to English public schools did the old system decay, and some of the gentry begin to compensate for the inferiority they had been made to feel in the presence of the English by assuming a haughty air with their humbler countrymen.

In short, all that had distinguished Scotland as a nation was on the way to oblivion. Literature, language, manners, and institutions were being anglicized as fast as a people roused to uneasy self-consciousness could manage it. In 1786 it seemed evident that when the former things passed away it would be into the darkness in which men and nations prefer to bury the ruder and more discreditable features of their early days. That the memory of the discarded heritage should be embalmed as a precious possession, and that the old world should be forever surrounded by the romantic glory of a golden sunset was due more to Robert Burns than to any other person. He made the Scots conscious of the richness of their national tradition. He could not restore it to life, but he taught his people to cherish its ruins.