hazard of concealing;
But, Och! it hardens a’ within,
And petrifies the feeling!
To catch Dame Fortune’s golden smile,
50 Assiduous wait upon her;
And gather gear by ev’ry wile worldly goods, skill
That’s justify’d by Honor:
Not for to hide it in a hedge, not to be a miser
Nor for a train-attendant; not for showy wealth
55 But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.
The fear o’ Hell’s a hangman’s whip
To haud the wretch in order; hold
But where ye feel your Honour grip,
60 Let that ay be your border: always
Its slightest touches, instant pause —
Debar a’ side-pretences; consider no distraction
And resolutely keep its laws,
Uncaring consequences.
65 The great CREATOR to revere
Must sure become the Creature;
But still the preaching cant forbear,
And ev’n the rigid feature:
Yet ne’er with Wits prophane to range
70 Be complaisance extended;
An atheist-laugh’s a poor exchange
For Deity offended!
When ranting round in Pleasure’s ring, making merry/fun
Religion may be blinded;
75 Or if she gie a random-fling, give
It may be little minded;
But when on Life we’re tempest-driv’n,
A Conscience but a canker — peevishness
A correspondence fix’d wi’ Heav’n
80 Is sure a noble anchor!
Adieu, dear, amiable youth!
Your heart can ne’er be wanting!
May Prudence, Fortitude, and Truth,
Erect your brow undaunting!
85 In ploughman phrase, ‘GOD send you speed,’
Still daily to grow wiser;
And may ye better reck the rede, heed the advice
Than ever did th’ Adviser!
This was written for his friend Robert Aitken’s son Andrew and was finished in May, 1786. Robert Aitken is the legal hero of Holy Willie’s Prayer. Prudent counsellor is not the most probable of Burns’s multiple roles. The problems implicit in the poem are highlighted by a deeply cautionary letter sent four years later to his younger brother William who was moving from Newcastle to London to pursue his career as a saddler:
Now that you are setting out from that place, put on manly resolve, & determine to persevere; and in that case you will less or more be sure of success. – One or two things allow me to particularize to you. – London swarms with worthless wretches who prey on their fellow-creatures’ thoughtlessness or inexperience. – Be cautious in forming connections with comrades and companions. – You can be pretty good company to yourself, & you cannot be too shy of letting any body know you farther than to know you as a Sadler. – Another caution; I give you great credit for you [sic] sobriety with respect to that universal vice, Bad Women … – Whoring is a most ruinous expensive species of dissipation; is spending a poor fellow’s money with which he ought clothe and support himself nothing? Whoring has ninety-nine chances in a hundred to bring on a man the most nauseous & excruciating diseases to which Human nature is liable; are disease & an impaired constitution trifling considerations? All this is independent of the criminality of it (Letter 391).
This, from a man so addicted to women, should not be seen simply as massive hypocrisy. From as yet unpublished sources, Burns does seem to have suffered the venereal self-disgust of the so infected. More importantly, as in such Romantic libertine figures centrally present in the life and work of Mozart, Boswell, Byron and Pushkin, there exists, as a result of such serial fornication, a sense of self-punitive, guilty emptiness. Or, as it is brilliantly, vernacularly, put here:
I wave the quantum o’ the sin,
The hazard of concealing;
But Och! It hardens a’ within,
And petrifies the feeling.
R.L. Stevenson diagnosed this element in Burns and wrote him off because of it (Familiar Studies of Men and Books). G. K. Chesterton, more perceptively objective about the Scottish context, wrote in a brilliant foreword to A.A. Thomson’s profoundly bad The Burns We Love (London: 1931):
Nor is it true to say, as some have said, that this self-reproach was merely of the morbid or mawkish sort. So far from being mawkish and morbid, it could sometimes be both acrid and coarse. He really had a sense of something grotesque and even grovelling in his own orgies; of something of farce and bathos about the bad ending of so many of his love stories; a sense of being hooted from heaven with a sort of harsh laughter. In a word, he had a realistic as well as a romantic strain in him; and it is not altogether his fault that the national legend of his has become almost entirely romantic, to the extent of often forgetting how far his own view of himself was realistic (p. 5–6).
As well as the dangers, physical and moral, of sexual excess, Burns, in both the letter to William and in this poem, defines prudence as a necessary form of self-preservation in a world so variedly hostile. In a deeply perceptive essay, ‘The Dialectics of Morality’, Steven R. McKenna defines the question of necessary prudence as being a core problem in Burns’s writings. In support of this thesis he identifies ll. 33–40 as a vernacular paraphrase of Polonius’s cautionary speech to his son, Laertes in Hamlet, Act I, Scene iii. In extending these Hamlet parallels he finally reads the epistle as reaching for a kind of middle way of individual conscience, which avoids the one extreme of sadistically repressive conformity and the other of anarchic self-destruction. Burns himself appears to have understood how his repressed early life was partly responsible for his potentially self-destructive response to rigidly imposed order. As McKenna comments:
Honour and self-protection are the issues here, and they form essential elements of this scene in the play, for Laertes in his long-winded, cautionary advice to his sister Ophelia regarding her relationship with Hamlet tells her she ‘must fear’ Hamlet, his greatness and his will. Says he, ‘Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister …/ Be wary then; best
