Men like Boswell and Sinclair would have answered without hesitation that it was. The Union had admitted Scotland to as much share as she could grasp of the wealth of the British Empire; commerce and industry were increasing year by year; the poor relation was beginning to live like the prosperous branch of the family. For such profits, the change of name from ‘Scotland’ to ‘North Britain’ seemed a small price. To those who shared in the new prosperity, the suggestion of a nationalist movement would have seemed rank folly or even downright treason. So long as the prosperity continued, indeed, the ‘practical men’ had the overwhelming majority of their countrymen with them. The emergence of Scottish nationalism as a political force to be reckoned with had to await the collapse of Scottish industry which followed the World War. With the loss of material prosperity, the Scots have begun to question the value of the system which transfers to Westminster the control of their local affairs. Scottish poverty and Scottish pride are seemingly interdependent. Removal of the one will make the nation more willing to swallow the other.

Even if Burns had shared the material prosperity resulting from the Union, instead of helping, as tenant of rack-rented land, to pay for it, his feelings would have been the same. In every fibre of his being he shared the spirit of those Scots who, in contradiction of every proverbial association of pawky caution with their race, have been among the greatest soldiers, explorers, and idealists of modern history. Montrose and Livingstone, Admiral Duncan and Mungo Park, expressed in action the national traits which he expressed in song. His calling, consciously accepted, was that of national poet; his other activities merely the ‘sweat, that the base machine might have its oil’. He refused payment for his songs, because the task of supplying words to national melodies was a patriotic service, embalming and treasuring up these relics of his country’s spirit to a life beyond life.

Without Burns’s share in the work of gathering old Jacobite songs, for instance, and composing new ones, it may be questioned if such a halo of romance would have surrounded, in the next generation, the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745; without that halo, Sir Walter Scott would have been less readily attracted to them; without Sir Walter, the romantic vision of Scottish history would never have conquered the world. No Scottish writer of the eighteenth century, except Burns, passed on the torch of national pride. Without him, the fact that Hume and Boswell were Scotsmen, that Thomson was born on Tweed instead of Thames, would mean no more to the ordinary reader than does the fact that Swift was born in Ireland or Wordsworth in Cumberland. Without him, Ramsay and Fergusson would be forgotten minor poets who wrote in a difficult and obsolete dialect. He gathered together in his own work all that was vital in the work of his predecessors, infused it with the fire of his own personality, and sent it out again to keep Scotland alive.

Burns came at the last moment when a national poet could succeed in his task. A few decades later, and the vernacular would have sunk too low for preservation. Even as it was, he could only embalm it and not renew it as poetic speech. Except for Lady Nairne’s, scarcely any vernacular poetry written in Scotland since 1800 deserves higher ranking than the Barrack-Room Ballads. As a poetic influence, Burns’s work was weak. As a national influence, its force is not yet spent. He revealed the richness and colour of Scottish life, and in revealing it gave direction and vitality to the long and noble line of novelists which began with Sir Walter Scott and John Galt, and continued through Stevenson to John Buchan and the late Neil Munro. Through these men the Scotland which was no longer, politically, a nation became more enduring than anything which depends on rulers and boundaries—a nation of the mind and heart, a home of lost causes, of impossible loyalties, of high romance and simple faith. It is not Scott’s kings and ladies and nobles who keep his books alive; it is people like Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans, Meg Dods, and Dandie Dinmont—in other words, the characters who are part and parcel of the world which Burns depicted and glorified. Steenie Steenson, like Thrawn Janet and Tod Lapraik, carries on the great tradition of Tam o’ Shanter. Without Burns the Scottish novel as we know it would never have been; without the Scottish novel, the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be as much the poorer as seventeenth-century poetry would be without the Cavaliers.

In tracing the continuing tradition of sentiment from Henry Mackenzie through Burns himself to ‘Ian Maclaren’ and Sir James Barrie, Professor Thompson made perforce a grave omission. The difference between the dynamic romanticism of England at the beginning of the last century—the romanticism of the young Wordsworth and of Shelley—and the insipid prettiness of the same movement in America at the same time, lies in the invigorating power of the French Revolution. By giving a fighting edge to romance, the Revolution raised it above mere fancifulness and sentimentality. His patriotism did the same thing for the influence of Burns. Without it he might today be only a minor Man of Feeling. Even as it is, he is neglected and misunderstood. The strength, the humour, the fighting edge are there, but few people care to find them.

He saved Scotland; himself he could not save. Five years after his death a group of admirers in Greenock organized a Burns Club, and Paisley and Kilmarnock quickly followed suit. The fashion spread through Scotland, and among Scotsmen in the rest of the English-speaking world, bringing in its train the erection of more, and worse, statues and monuments than have been reared to the memory of any other British individual with the possible exception of Albert, Prince Consort. Soon the movement acquired the characteristics of a minor religious cult, complete with ritual meals and a thriving traffic in relics, genuine or spurious, of its hero.

In itself this establishment as hero of a national cult might be harmless. After all, if any writer was to fill the role, Burns was the inevitable candidate, for he alone of the great Scottish writers was truly a man of the people. Not the existence of the cult, but the direction it took, is the tragedy of Burns. The sentimentality which lies, like the soft core of an over-ripe pear, at the heart of writers like ‘Ian Maclaren’, Sir James Barrie, and A. A. Milne, is widespread in Scotland. In the Burns cult this softness yearns to the answering softness of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘To a Mouse’, and ‘To a Mountain Daisy’, extols its hero as the Bard of Humanity and Democracy, and rejoices in the bathos of Clarinda and Highland Mary. Meanwhile the ribald magnificence of ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Jolly Beggars’ is neglected, the homely realism of satires, epistles, and dramatic monologues goes unread. Worst of all, the splendid treasury of more than three hundred songs, Burns’s most truly patriotic work, lies almost untouched on the shelves. Radio and concert stage alike ignore them. And choice of the few that are known to the public at large runs true to the same form as with the longer poems. Probably a hundred people know ‘Sweet Afton’ for one who knows ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ or ‘Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin’.

The flattery of being a national hero would delight Burns. If his followers were only mealy-mouthed where he was outspoken, they would merely amuse him. He would not mind if they slobbered over his sins, for the unco guid were old acquaintance of his. But at the thought of his worshippers exalting his weakest work and ignoring his best, his very soul would scunner. The real Burns was not the dropper of tears over ploughed-under weeds but the man who brought in the neighbours for a kirn-night and kissed the lasses after every dance; the man who sat by farmers’ ingles and on ale-house benches listening to the racy earthy talk of his people and storing his mind with folk sayings and old songs. He was not ashamed of being a Scottish peasant, the heir of all the picturesque and frequently bawdy tradition of Scots folk literature. Neither was the man who wrote, ‘But yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven’, ashamed of his human nature. But his worshippers are ashamed of the best part of his nature and his work. And nobody else reads him at all.

INDEX