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The core of these services involved his exploitation of a relationship built up with Burns in Edinburgh. Worse, on the poet’s death he rushed to print with a memoir of the poet which was to prove ruinously influential for both Burns and his poetry.
Heron was too talented to be a mere hack. When he was the Rev. Hugh Blair’s assistant he had met Burns in Edinburgh. Heron maintained the relationship and en route to his native Galloway made a point of visiting the poet. The often prescient Bard recorded a visit from Heron to Ellisand thus:
The ill-thief blaw the Heron south!
And never drink be near his drouth!
He tald myself, by work o’ mouth,
He’d take my letter;
I lippened to the chief in trough,
And bade nae better.—
But aiblins honest Master Heron
Had at the time some dainty Fair One,
To ware his theologic care on,
And holy study:
And tired o’ Sauls to waste his lear on,
E’en tried the Body.—
Burns got the scale of the betrayal wrong; it was infinitely in excess of a non-delivered letter to Dr Blacklock. The devil of his political enemies really had blown Heron south. Behind Heron’s black-gowned clerical front, Burns also keenly observed his capacity for chronic alcoholic and sexual dissipation. A familiar of the debtor’s prison, Heron was to die prematurely, again imprisoned for debt, in Newgate in 1807.
Along with the new factual evidence of the Mackenzie/Heron connection, it might have been deduced both from Heron’s slavish taking of Mackenzie tactics against Burns to a biographical extreme and his equally slavish eulogy to his patron’s critical prowess. This is Heron’s account of Mackenzie’s contribution, via his Lounger magazine article, to Burns’s initial Edinburgh success:
That criticism is now known to have been composed by HENRY MACKENZIE Esq, whose writings are universally admired for an Addisonian delicacy and felicity of wit and humour, by which the CLIO of the Spectator is more than rivalled; for a wildly tender pathos that excites the most exquisite vibrations of the finest chords of sympathy in the human heart, for a lofty, vehement, persuasive eloquence, by which the immortal Junius has sometimes perhaps been excelled and often almost equalled!36
Heron’s biographical memoir was not the occasion of his first writing about Burns. In 1793 he published a travel book where he created a contrast on the poet’s not so much varied talents as antipathetic ones as expressed in the difference between The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Tam o’ Shanter. The latter is initially admitted as a masterpiece but this is then significantly qualified: ‘Burns seems to have thought, with Boccacce and Prior, that some share of indelicacy was a necessary ingredient in a Tale. Pity that he should have debased so fine a piece, by any things, — having even the remotest relation to obscenity’. This kind of Mackenzie-initiated sentimentalism was the seminal language of nineteenth-century political pietism which would become, mainly though Blackwood’s, the dominant mode of Scottish Toryism. Burns had to be converted into the pietistic poet of a quiescent common people. Whether they were properly reading its concluding stanzas, The Cotter’s Saturday Night became the Ark of the Covenant for the Scottish upper and middle-classes as, increasingly anxious about the fetid, brutal potentially insurrectionary common life of the new emergent industry-based (coal, iron, tobacco, weaving) towns, they sought the politically calming notion of pastoral, god-fearing peace reigning in the Scottish countryside. Heron is a seminal figure in the concoction of this fantasy:
The whole books of the sacred scriptures are continually in the hands of almost every peasant. And it is impossible, that there should not be some souls among them, awakened to the divine emotions of genius, by that rich assemblage which these books present, of almost all that is interesting in incidents, or picturesque in imagery, or affectingly sublime or tender in sentiments and character. It is impossible that those rude rhymes, and the simple artless music with which they are accompanied, should not excite some ear to fond perception of the melody of verse. That Burns had felt these impulses will appear undeniably certain to whoever shall carefully peruse his ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’; or shall remark with nice observation, the various fragments of scripture sentiment, of scripture imagery, of scripture language, which are scattered throughout his works.37
Of course, Heron knew as well as anyone that the bulk of Burns poetry neither sociologically confirmed this view and expressed anything but personal or popular quiescence in the face of the established order. To deal with this what he did was sycophantically flesh out the bones of Mackenzie’s account of the dead poet. Apparently more in sorrow than anger, Heron constructed the myth of Burns as betrayer of his own earliest spiritual impulses because he lacked ‘that steady VIRTUE, without which even genius in all its omnipotence is soon reduced to paralytic imbecility, or to manic mischievousness’. Thus Burns’s life becomes a melodrama where he always surrendered to those elements in himself which inevitably took him into increasingly bad company.
The bucks of Edinburgh accomplished, in regard to BURNS, that in which the boors of Ayrshire had failed. After residing some months in Edinburgh, he began to estrange himself … from the society of his graver friends. Too many of his hours were now spent at the tables of persons who delighted to urge conviviality to drunkenness, in the tavern, in the brothel, on the lap of the woman of pleasure. He suffered himself to be surrounded by a race of miserable beings who were proud to tell that they had been in company with BURNS, and had seen Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves. He was not yet irrecoverably lost to temperance and moderation, but he was already almost too much captivated with their wanton rivals, to be ever more won back to a faithful attachment to their more sober charms. He now began to contract something of new arrogance in conversation. Accustomed to be among his favourite associates … the cock of the company, he could scarcely refrain from indulging in similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even in presence of persons who could less patiently endure his presumption.38
Here the suppressed rage of sentimental, genteel Edinburgh wells up. The people’s poet had no right to his creative superiority of language. Hence is evolved the fiction of the unstable genius who falls away from his prudent, real friends and into evil company and, by his sinful depravity, betrays not only his better self but the sanctified common people whom he represents. In Burke’s great shadow, a Scottish conservatism is forged which converts the dialectic of opposing secular political systems to one which, on the conservative side, has divine sanction as embodying the inherent nature of reality. By definition, opposition to this is implicitly evil. Burns is a sinner (he suffers but for the wrong things), with even a hint of anti-Christ. As with Mackenzie’s account, the speed of Burns’s descent accelerates in Dumfries. He has crosses to bear, admittedly, but they are not properly borne:
In the neighbourhood were other gentlemen occasionally addicted, like Burns, to convivial excess, who, while they admired the poet’s talents, and were charmed with his licentious wit, forgot the care of his real interests in the pleasure in which they found in his company, and in the gratification which the plenty and festivity of their tables appeared evidently to afford him. With these gentlemen, while disappointments and disgusts continued
