His power of poetic response to music and emotion nevertheless did not fail with his failing health. A few weeks before his death he asked Jessie Lewars, sister of one of his best friends among the Excise officers of Dumfries, to play him her favourite tune. She responded with the roguish little air, ‘The robin cam to the wren’s nest, and keekit in, and keekit in’. Burns, humming the tune to himself and altering the tempo, produced almost extemporaneously the beautiful ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’. From his earliest lyric to his latest, music was the catalyst which transformed emotion into poetry. Yet for more than a century after his death the dominating influence of music on his art went almost unrecognized; and George Thomson, the man who of all others among Burns’s contemporaries had had the best opportunity to realize the nature and the power of his lyric expression, wrote an obituary which, besides inaugurating the legend of mental and moral deterioration in the last years at Dumfries, summed up its author’s appreciation of the wit, critical acumen, and real erudition of Burns’s letters by saying that probably the poet ‘was not qualified to fill a superior station’ to the humble one he held in the Excise. Of all the Holy Willies who eyed Burns askance during his life and after his death, he would probably, had he realized his true character, have despised Thomson most. The others were merely trying to blacken Burns’s own character. Thomson was trying to destroy the vitality of Scottish song.
VII
THE SCOT
Not merely in his struggle for livelihood and in the poetic art which immortalized him was Burns a Scot of the Scots. He was equally so in his religion, his politics, and, above all, his patriotism. Only in this last was he untypical of his generation. Yet such statements are misleadingly simple. All they can safely mean is that Burns, like all men in all ages, was influenced in thought and conduct by the environment in which he lived. Nevertheless, in a nation so small and self-contained as Scotland in the eighteenth century the pressure of environment was felt to a degree unrealized in larger and more cosmopolitan communities. In England during Burns’s manhood the social and literary worlds of Burke and Sheridan and Horace Walpole, of Cowper, of John Wesley, of Godwin, of Blake, touched each other only lightly and tangentially; in the rising generation of Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Lamb, and Byron the separations would be even wider. Scotland by comparison was all of a piece. Even her greatest philosophers, Adam Smith and David Hume, even the much-travelled and Anglophile Boswell, retained their national stamp.
Though in their final form Burns’s religious ideas differed little, if at all, from the sentimental ‘common sense’ deism of England and France, the process by which he reached them was Scottish. The rigidity of the doctrines to which he was subjected in his youth determined the vigour of his reaction from them. As David Hume would scarcely have been so militantly sceptical if he had been reared in a milder faith, so Burns might have been less sentimental. His earliest teachings, it is true, did not stress the more rigorous themes in Scottish Calvinism. The preaching of Dr. William Dalrymple of Ayr, whose church the Burnes family attended during the years at Alloway and Mount Oliphant, was notably mild and gentle; William Burnes’s own little ‘Manual of Religious Belief’, though it gave a reasonably orthodox definition of the Fall of Man, was silent on such doctrinal points as predestination and the Four-Fold State. Undoubtedly, therefore, the Old Light tenets of Daddy Auld of Mauchline made a deeper impression on Burns’s eighteen-year-old mind than they would have done had he been exposed to them from infancy. Yet Burns had encountered The Man of Feeling before he left Mount Oliphant; the doctrines of sentiment and deism were in the air he breathed; his emotional nature would have brought him to them sooner or later, regardless of other stimuli. The most that can be attributed to Auld is a little hastening and intensifying of the process of revolt.
Despite his constant citing of Young’s exhortation, ‘On Reason build Resolve’, Burns’s approach to life and ideas was always emotional and not intellectual. When he described himself in 1786 as having little of divinity ‘except a pretty large portion of honour and an enthusiastic, incoherent Benevolence,’ his self-analysis had his customary accuracy. To him, as to the New England Unitarians and to a man like Mark Twain, escape from the orthodoxy of his youth had come as a relief and not as a loss. Calvinism had erected a system of thought as rigidly deductive as the science of geometry. Starting from certain ‘self-evident’ axioms like the omnipotence and omniscience of God, the fall of man, and the literal authority of the Scriptures, it had created a religious philosophy from which all emotion except fear had been removed. Through the sin of Adam all men had earned damnation, but the inscrutable mercy or caprice of God would choose a remnant minority for salvation—for His merit, not theirs. Human faith and human righteousness were filthy rags.
This cold determinism outraged Burns’s sense of fairness and justice, as it outraged Channing’s and Emerson’s and Holmes’s. It seemed to him that the New Lights were ‘squaring Religion by the rules of Common Sense, and attempting to give a decent character to Almighty God and a rational account of his proceedings with the Sons of Men.’ But in investing their deity with human benevolence and loving-kindness, the New Lights were also, again like the New England Unitarians, more or less unwittingly surrendering the supernatural sanctions of religion and assimilating their ideas to those of the Deists. God was the ‘Great First Cause, least understood’; Christ tended to sink from Godhead to merely an inspired human teacher; personal immortality became a pious hope instead of a divine promise. If man were indeed immortal, the surest passport to salvation was righteous living rather than adherence to a particular creed. And the guide to righteous living was the still small voice of conscience, the Moral Sense which Francis Hutcheson had taught was an innate human faculty.
In his attitude towards these doctrines, Burns was a man of his century and a Scot of his century. The rigidity of the Kirk, so unlike the comfortable looseness of Anglican theology, left him no place within its pale, even though he never openly severed his connexion. As a youth he had, along with most of his countrymen, read popular works of divinity like Boston’s Four-Fold State, Fisher’s Marrow of Modern Divinity, and Cole On God’s Sovereignty. In 1791, when his rural neighbours of the Monkland Friendly Society insisted on adding these and other books to their co-operative library, Burns obediently ordered them from Peter Hill, and lumped them all together as ‘damned trash’. Though he told James Candlish in 1787 that after having ‘in the pride of despising old women’s stories, ventured in “the daring path Spinoza trod”; ... experience of the weakness, not the strength, of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion,’ it was not the revelation of the Kirk. Not even his infatuation for Clarinda, though it made him momentarily qualify his admiration for Milton’s Satan, could compel him to bow the knee to Calvin. ‘Mine’, he told her when she undertook to preach orthodoxy to him, ‘is the Religion of the bosom.—I hate the very idea of controversial divinity; as I firmly believe, that every honest, upright man, of whatever sect, will be accepted of the Deity.—If your verses, as you seem to hint, contain censure, except you want an occasion to break with me, don’t send them.... “Reverence thyself” is a sacred maxim, and I wish to cherish it.’
His fullest statement approximating to orthodoxy was written to Mrs. Dunlop in 1789:
‘I have just heard Mr Kirkpatrick preach a sermon. He is a man famous for his benevolence, and I revere him; but from such ideas of my Creator, good Lord, deliver me! Religion ... is surely a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich. That there is an incomprehensible Great Being, to whom I owe my existence; and that He must be intimately acquainted with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and consequent outward deportment, of this creature which He has made; these are, I think self-evident propositions. That there is a real and eternal distinction between virtue and vice, and, consequently, that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay, positive injustice, in the administration of affairs both in the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of justice beyond the grave; must, I think, be allowed by every one who will give himself a moment’s reflection. I will go farther, and affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of His doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, though, to appearance, He Himself was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species—therefore Jesus Christ was from God....’