to seek employment in London thus initiating the long tradition of Scots radicals forced South. Obviously extremely important in the Fencibles was the legal profession. Of a considerable number of lawyers, the most prominent was Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and brother of the even greater radical lawyer Thomas. It was Henry Erskine’s fall at the hands of the Robert Dundas faction in the election for Dean of Faculty in 1795 that Burns turned into, in January 1796, a bitterly witty song about the loss of the men of merit and worth to the reactionary loyalists.
In your heretic sins may live and die,
Ye heretic Eight and thirty
But accept, ye Sublime Majority,
My congratulations hearty.
With your Honors and a certain King,
In your servants this is striking—
The more incapacity they bring,
The more they’re to your liking.
This, then, was the intimate company Burns was keeping. Nor did he only wholly share their politics but was an active participant not only in terms of his contributions to the radical press, but in actually attempting to send carronades, captured from the smuggling brig Rosamund as part of his excise duties, to the French revolutionaries. It is little wonder that even during his first Edinburgh visit his relationships with genteel, conformist, pro-Hanoverian society were strained. How strained we can see, for example, in the fury of his riposte to Mrs McLehose when a Mrs Stewart had checked him over his seditious anti-Hanoverian lines on the Stirling window:
I have almost given up the excise idea —I have just been now to wait on a great person, Miss N—’s friend, Mrs. Stewart. — Why will great people not only deafen us with the din of their equipage, and dazzle us with their fastidious pomp, but they must also be so very dictatorially wise? I have been questioned like a child about my matters, and blamed and schooled for my Inscription on Stirling window. Come, Clarinda— ‘Come, curse me Jacob; come, defy me Israel!’
Yet he needed his enemy’s patronage. He did join the Excise. Blair and Mackenzie, with their mixture of lachrymose and evangelical values, expressed a faith not so much of a suffering Christ as a quiescently accepting Christ as exemplar to a politically similarly quiescent, hence an apolitical, common people. As Blake wrote: ‘Pity would be no more, if we did not make someone poor.’ They were, however, able to open doors to publishing connections and offer mainly ill-received poetic advice. In the name of rules and decency, they were always trying to get Burns to tidy up his, to them, unruly act. This had almost no effect other than to irritate the Bard. As he wrote to Greenfield:
… I stumbled on two Songs which I here enclose you as a kind of curiosity to a Professor of the Belle lettres de la Nature: which allow me to say, I look upon as an additional merit of yours: a kind of bye Professorship, not always to be found among the systematic Fathers and Brothers of scientific Criticism.
These tensions were also not confined to matters aesthetic and linguistic. Unlike Heathcliff, Burns was not the brute, sub-literate, threat, that dark erotic stranger, which haunted the bourgeois imagination of the period. They were faced with someone hyper-literate, fecundly allusive to a degree far beyond their powers in canonical literary and biblical tradition, who could not only talk their pants off but, it was feared, those of their wives and daughters too. Command of language was directly related to a fixed hierarchical social order; Burns threatened social anarchy by the very nature of his poetic, rhetorical potency. It offered them some security to classify him as a class-bound ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ rather than great poet.
REPUTATION: CRITICS, BIOGRAPHERS AND BOWDLERISERS Even more than Henry Dundas, Henry Mackenzie was probably the most sustained, malign influence on Burns’s reputation. He may initially have genuinely wanted to help the poet. He also almost certainly sensed a bandwagon that his self-importance would not allow him not to join. As Donald Low has remarked, however, the nature of Mackenzie’s praise was to be in the long term confining and destructive:
… his was a disastrously inaccurate essay in criticism which gave rise to endless distortion of Burns’s poetry. The whole tendency of Mackenzie’s encomium was to emasculate Poems. He paid lip-service to humour and satire, but found them too embarrassing to discuss: introduced a comparison with Shakespeare, only to withdraw it at once: repeatedly shrank from Burns’s characteristic self-expression and fell back on general-isations. He apologised for the language in which the poet did his best work, and concentrated on the poems of sentiment in English. This was to sacrifice truth, and therefore also Burns’s long-term interests as a poet, for instant acclaim.26
From the beginning Mackenzie’s deeply influential aesthetic strictures were socially and politically motivated. Hence Burns is turned into a safe sentimentalist rather than, like Pope or Swift, a turbulent, dissenting satirist of the established, corrupt order. He is a naïve exception rather than, in terms of both poetry and politics, the most knowing of men. Burns was as formally naïve in poetic tradition as Mozart was in musical tradition. They were both examples of creative pieces of ground, as Blake suggests, born spaded and seeded. It was socially unacceptable for Mackenzie to grant Burns such potency. As an extension of this, he had to define Burns as a naïve innocent, coming from peasant origins. Mackenzie also down-grades the actual vernacular language of that world with its elements which bespoke the raw pleasures, pains and, indeed, turbulent discontents of the common people. If there was genuine ambivalence in Mackenzie’s attitude to Burns at the beginning of their relationship, it did not survive the poet’s death. In his résumé of the careers of Scotland three great eighteenth-century poets, Ramsay,
Fergusson and Burns, the first is praised for his achievement of prudent respectability. The latter two are not: Fergusson, dissipated and drunken, died in early life, after having produced poems faithfully and humorously describing scenes of Edinburgh and somewhat of blackguardism. Burns originally virtuous, was seduced by dissipated companions, and after he got into the Excise addicted himself to drunkenness, tho’ the rays of his genius sometimes broke through the mist of his dissipation: but the habit had got too much power over him to be overcome and it brought him, with a few lucid intervals, to an early grave. He unfortunately during the greatest part of his life had called and thought dissipation spirit, sobriety and discretion a want of it, virtues too shabby for a man of genius. His great admiration of Fergusson showed his propensity to coarse dissipation. … How different was the fate of Burns compared with that of a Poet in birth, in Education, and many other circumstances like him, tho’ I do not arrogate to him so much creative genius, Allan Ramsay. He came into notice in a Station as mean as Burns, had no advantage over him in Birth, Connections, or any other circumstances independent of his own genius alas: it was the Patronage and Companionship which Burns obtained, that changed the colour of his later life: the patronage of dissipated men of high rank, and the Companionship of clever, witty, but dissipated men of lower rank. The notice of the former flattered his vanity, and in some degree unsettled his from an anecdote to be immediately mentioned he seemed to mingle with the most amiable feelings —but the levity of his Patrons and his associates Dwelt on the Surface of his Mind and prompted some of his Poetry which offended the serious, and lost him better friends than those which that poetry had acquired —Dugald Stewart who first introduced him to me, told me latterly, that his Conduct and Manners had become so degraded that decent persons could hardly take any notice of him.27
Given Fergusson’s sweet, convivial personality and the terrible nature of his incarcerated death, Mackenzie’s vicious pursuit of him beyond the grave beggars belief. In the history of poetic biographies, Ian Hamilton has remarked that Burns was the first poet to be character assassinated. Given Mackenzie’s treatment
