The hair-splitting particularity of Burns’s defence of his conduct is in itself proof of the real basis of the charges against him. He revered the King, he declared, in his public capacity as ‘the sacred Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution’, but George’s ‘private worth, it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate.’ (On the report of the King’s first admitted insanity in 1788 he had said, ‘I am not sure whether he is not a gainer, by how much a Madman is a more respectable character than a Fool.’) He had joined no party for revolution or reform; his contributions to the radical Edinburgh Gazetteer had been only a couple of non-political verses. But he did not mention that in subscribing to the Gazetteer he had urged its editor, William Johnston, to ‘lay bare, with undaunted heart & steady hand, that horrid mass of corruption called Politics & State-Craft!’ and to ‘dare to draw in their native colours these “Calm, thinking Villains whom no faith can fix”—whatever be the Shibboleth of their pretended Party.’ Oddly enough, the Rosamond’s carronades had not been brought up against him. Hence he naturally did not mention them, but he took occasion to avow that though he had been an enthusiastic votary of France at the beginning, he had changed his sentiments since the Revolution had embarked on a career of bloodshed and military aggression.
Here Burns was making a Galileo recantation. On the same day on which he thus denied to Robert Graham that he any longer supported the Revolution he was using French in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop and adding that he hoped it was correct, for ‘much would it go against my soul, to mar anything belonging to that gallant people: though my real sentiments of them shall be confined alone to my letters to you.’ Despite her repeated warnings to drop the subject, he continued to talk about his devotion to Liberty, his friendship with Dr. Maxwell, and his approval of ‘the delivering over a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled Prostitute to the hands of the hangman’ until the offended lady broke off the correspondence. Seething, as he had said of his feeling in 1788, with the impotent ‘madness of an enraged Scorpion shut up in a thumb-phial’, Burns had to express himself to someone. He had lied about his sentiments, and though the lie was to save his family rather than himself, its taste was bitter in his mouth. Nor was he helped by the realization that all Scotland was equally cowed and that if he had not made his recantation he would have shared the fate of four other citizens of Dumfries who were imprisoned for drinking seditious toasts. Once before he had challenged authority in the shape of the temporal power of the Kirk, and had come off not unscathed but undefeated. Now he had challenged much less openly the State, and had learned the difference in strength between a vital institution and a moribund one. The realization of defeat shook his self-confidence as nothing else had ever done, and helped to drive him to such unmanly conduct as that which followed his quarrel with Maria Riddell. He who had refused to sell his songs for money had sold his independence for bread. That it was his children’s bread and not his own might salve his conscience, but it could not heal his pride.
The Man of Feeling had bruised himself against a harsher reality than anything Harley had found in London or Bedlam; the idealist in politics had learned the substance of which politicians are made. Brimming with New Light theories about the Moral Sense, convinced by primitivists like Rousseau that ‘mankind are by nature benevolent creatures’ whom mere stress of hunger and poverty makes selfish, Burns had come naked to battle against the forces of alarmed conservatism and privilege. Like thousands of others he had taken seriously the slogans of ‘Liberty’ and ‘the Rights of Man’, and had seen in the French Revolution the signs that the world’s great age was beginning anew. His disillusionment went deeper than mere realization of his own unsafe position as a government employee. He was watching the ancient forces of selfishness and aggression capture the movement from which he had hoped so much. His enlistment in the Dumfries Volunteers was not wholly from dread of further jeopardizing his livelihood by holding aloof. He still believed in the principles of the Revolution, but that belief did not commit him to endorsement of its practices, and so, like many another pacifist, he found himself, still hating war, nevertheless engaged in supporting it.
Though he dared no longer give direct utterance to revolutionary sympathies, he could, and did, express his detestation of war in a song like ‘Logan Braes’, and couple the ideas of his generation with the patriotic tradition of medieval Scotland. The low estate of contemporary Scottish liberty threw into more glorious relief the traditions of Bannockburn and the lost cause of the Stuarts. His patriotism accepted without question the legend that ‘Hey tutti taitie’ had been Bruce’s battle-march, as it accepted the romantic interpretation of Mary Queen of Scots. Burns might call himself an unprejudiced inquirer and a sceptic, but his nature had no kinship with the cool remorseless scepticism of a man like David Hume. Hume’s was the keenest Scottish mind of his century; Burns, at least in the height of his rebellion against the Kirk, might have been expected to find the philosopher congenial. But Burns could endure destructive criticism only of things he hated. Hume did not confine his scepticism to religion, and when he brought his devastating intellect to bear on the romantic traditions of his country Burns turned away in anger. He might endorse Hume’s demolition of the supernatural sanctions of the church, but he was disquieted by the application of the same scepticism to the belief in immortality, and infuriated when it was turned upon Queen Mary. Hume was mentally akin to Voltaire and Samuel Butler; Burns to Rousseau and Dickens.
In repudiating Hume’s treatment of Mary, Burns was unconsciously illustrating the force of Johnson’s ruthless dictum, which even the loyal Sir Walter Scott could not wholly deny, that ‘a Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth: He will always love it better than inquiry; and if falsehood flatters his vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it.’ Few men have lived more honest than Burns. He would not willingly lie, nor endorse a lie; but if offered choice between a romantic story which appealed to his patriotism and an unromantic one which did not, his choice was never in doubt. His own followers, in their hostility to anything like dispassionate investigation of the picturesque legends surrounding him, continue to illustrate the same attitude. Nor, indeed, have the Burnsians monopolized this aversion to inquiry. It remained for an Irishman and an American to set forth the true details of the life of Allan Ramsay, and for another American to write the only complete and scholarly study of Henry Mackenzie and his times.
Many Scotsmen besides Burns shared his passionate defence of Queen Mary; not so many shared his general patriotism. Here Burns, very Scot of very Scot, belonged to a generation which had passed, though he prepared the way for one to come. He had much in common with Claverhouse, Lochiel, or Fletcher of Saltoun; nothing in common with Bute, Wedderburn, or Henry Dundas. In so far as the patriotism of Sir John Sinclair sought the improvement of his country by collecting and tabulating her resources, Burns was with him, but when Sinclair tried to eradicate the national speech he struck at something Burns held precious. True, Burns was like his contemporaries in snatching at everything that seemed like proof that the Scots could equal or surpass the English at their own games. He applauded the Mirror and the Lounger because they looked like successful rivals of the Tatler and Spectator; he admired Thomson and Beattie and Blair the more because even the English had to admit that these men wrote well in the southern tongue. But he deeply resented the willingness of his countrymen to sink their national identity in the Union.
‘Alas! have I often said to myself,’ he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop in 1790, ‘what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her Independance, and even her very name! I often repeat that couplet of my favorite poet, Goldsmith—
“——States of native liberty possest,
Tho’ very poor, may yet be very blest.”
Nothing can reconcile me to the common terms, “English ambassador, English court,” &c. And I am out of all patience to see that equivocal character, Hastings, impeached by “the Commons of England.” Tell me, my friend, is this weak prejudice?’