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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] W. L. Mathieson: Scotland and the Union (Glasgow, 1905), p. 225.
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.