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A
Toast to the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns
January 25, 2011
[These
remarks were prepared and delivered by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island
University. This text is in the public domain,
released January 2011]
We
now come to the serious portion of tonight’s program, a tribute to the memory
of the man whose name graces these proceedings. When I was first asked to give
this address, I was very reluctant, largely because, like almost everyone here,
although I was very familiar with Burns’ name, I had relatively little
knowledge of his work (apart from a few favourite poems). So I tried refusing,
but, as those who know him will attest, Bill McColl does not take no for an
answer. He pursued me so fiercely that soon I felt like Tam O’Shanter’s
mare, Maggie. No matter how much I charged away, the fiends were still nipping
at my rear end, and I was in the danger of losing some vital part of my anatomy,
unless I conceded. Since there was no bridge I could charge across to end the
pursuit, I gave up, and here I am.
In
celebrating “Rabbie” Burns we are, of course, also celebrating Scotland or,
more accurately, what we scattered people of Scottish heritage would like to
think of Scotland in those moments when we remember the place as our sentimental
homeland. And so it is customary on these occasions to pay tribute to our
ancestry by providing a detailed list of Burns’ great virtues, supplemented by
a judicious selection of his verse, to remind us of our distant homeland’s
greatest hero, the perfect Scotsman, who embodies all the finest qualities of
the noble inhabitants of that country and their scattered family members.
I
would like to try something a little different tonight, because it strikes me
that what makes Burns worth remembering and celebrating is not his unalloyed
virtue but his contradictions. Like most of us, he was not a paragon of all that
is best and brightest in the human character. Instead he was a complex mixture
of contrasting characteristics, often at war with each other. And these
contrasts make him remarkable and far more interesting than the figure created
by so many years of chauvinistic canonization. Yes, he was a fierce spokesman
for equality and justice (who could pen the oft quoted words, "Man's inhumanity to man
makes countless thousands mourn!"),
but he also accepted a position as an administrator for a slave plantation in
Jamaica (a career from which he was saved at the last minute by the overnight
fame his first published book of poetry brought him, a work which, ironically
enough, was supposed to earn money to pay for the ship’s passage). He despised
hypocrisy, denounced it repeatedly, and wrote scathing satiric poems attacking
those who practised it, and yet he willingly (if somewhat guiltily) participated
in a process which falsified who he was and what he believed in, so that he
could become famous. He wrote stirring verses about the rights of women, but his
treatment of them invites us to wonder if he understood the very principles he
was urging us to adopt (he himself paid tribute to himself more than once as a
fornicator, and he left several pregnant young women in his wake); he was a man
of the people, an avid republican, who could purchase the guns from a
confiscated French smuggling ship, send them to the revolutionary government in
Paris, and fiercely applaud the execution of the king and queen of France (“the
deserved fate of . . . a perjured Blackhead & an unprincipled
prostitute”), but he could
also toady to the aristocrats to give him a patronage job as a tax collector; he
was a wonderful companion to his friends (many of whom admired his conversation
more than they did his poetry), but was capable of drunken behaviour so
disgusting (like re-enacting the rape of Lucrece with his hostess) that close
friends refused to speak to him again. Above all, he was a self-proclaimed poet
who, rather than devoting his time assiduously to producing his own work, spent
the last ten years of his life collecting and editing the work of others (in
fact, his best known work, “Auld Lang Syne,” a product of this activity, is
hardly an original Burns’ creation). There is enough, even in this short list,
to raise a few questions about the picture of Burns commonly presented on nights
like this one.
But
these ambiguities help to explain his greatness as the national hero of the
Scottish people, for if there is one adjective more commonly applied to them
than any other, that word is contradictory. Throughout its history, from the
very beginning to the present day, the country has had to deal with apparently
insoluble contrasts, especially about the true character of its inhabitants: Are
they Gaelic or Pict; highlander or lowlander; Catholic, Protestant, or secular
rationalist; royalist, republican, nationalist, Covenanter, or Briton. What is
our language: Gaelic, Scots (whatever that is exactly), English, or some
combination? Even today, there is still a continuing argument over the national
dress: Is one is permitted or obliged to wear anything underneath a kilt? No
wonder, as Alan Bold has observed, the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could
have been written only by a Scotsman.
Scotland’s
history is punctuated with valiant attempts which seem to lead inevitably to
dismal defeats. Even the country’s greatest political triumph over its
strongest adversary, England, turned out to be a hollow victory, for when James
VI assumed the crown of England after the death of Elizabeth I, he rode south,
and Scotland ended up being ruled from Westminster, more firmly under the thumb
of England than before.
It
should come as no surprise, therefore, that the Scottish people have some
curious customs. The national flower is a weed, the thistle, and the animal
celebrated on the royal coat of arms is an imaginary one, the unicorn. This
creature may be almost invincible, but it can be conquered by a young virgin, a
fact which may help to explain why Burns spent so much time trying to reduce the
number of virgins in his part of the country. The national Scottish cuisine
features, at one extreme, the most sublime of liquors, malt whisky, and, at the
other, the culinary excrescence of the deep-fried Mars bar (Where haggis fits on
this spectrum I leave to the judgment of each member of the audience). People
with a Scottish heritage seem to have a bizarre tendency to spend a lifetime
working hard, saving money, and shrewdly increasing their fortunes, so that in
their later years they can bankrupt themselves on building in some distant land
an enormous stone castle (like Craigdarroch or Casa Loma), the design of which,
one assumes, comes from the deep recesses of the Scottish imagination. In the
world of sports, Scotland has given us one of the most bizarre contests ever
devised, the stern psychological test of the game of golf and, at the other
extreme, they have come up with the physical challenges of curling and the
Highland Games. Given the delight the Scottish people take in throwing unusually
heavy objects like curling stones, hammers, and cabers, it is no wonder that one
milestone in the history of medical treatments for hernias is named after a
Scotsman (the Ferguson Method).
However,
the most curious thing about this paradoxical country is its adoption of a poet
as its national hero. So far as I know, Scotland is the only land which has so
honoured the poetic profession. And this is all the more curious when one
reflects on the quality we most immediately associate with the Scottish people:
a hard-working, inventive philosophical, scientific, and business spirit which
has contributed so much to commerce, to the intellectual achievements of Europe,
and to practical inventions used all over the word—everything from the steam
engine, logarithms, and radar to marmalade, Maxwell’s equations, and Dolly the
cloned sheep. Scottish people, so we believe, have an unusual genius for making
money (or at least not spending it carelessly). Canada’s political,
commercial, and intellectual history is a tribute to these qualities, for it
littered with Scottish names—Fraser, Mackenzie, Eaton, MacDonald, Bell,
Fleming, Dunsmuir, and on an on—so that here, more than anywhere, we associate
a Scottish heritage with hard work, scientific genius, and practical success,
not with scribbling unprofitable verses.
In
Burns’ own time, the ironies of Scotland’s culture were very much in
evidence. In the century before his birth, Scotland had witnessed a series of
disillusioning and disastrous defeats. The Covenanters’ attempt at a distinct
Scottish constitutional monarchy with the Kirk given a commanding role had
failed and Scotland had been occupied by Cromwell’s army. The Act of Union in
1707 had united England and Scotland, to the dismay of most Scottish people. The
last gasp of the Jacobites was snuffed out when Bonnie Prince Charlie was
defeated in 1745, and the Highland clans had been devastated at Culloden in 1746
(after which wearing a tartan became illegal). And yet parts of Scotland were
the envy of Europe. Edinburgh was a centre of Enlightenment progressive thinking
and well-reasoned public policy (which produced, among other things, the first
public education system in Europe). Many civilized Europeans regarded Scotland
as the most enlightened country in the world: “We look to Scotland for all our
ideas of civilization” declared Voltaire.
In
this strange time, Burns’ first volume of verse in 1786 (at age 27) arrived as
an announcement to those people who wished to promote a stronger sense of a
truly Scottish identity that their Messiah had arrived. Here they saw clear
evidence of a poetic spirit uncontaminated by any foreign (especially any
English) influence. Here was, as one critic put it, our “Heaven-taught
ploughman,” whose work confirmed the genius of the people and apparently
justified the cry from a decade before, “Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?”
Burns was immediately offered to the public as proof of the health and strength
of the Scottish national character, which had no need for anything but a purely
Scottish environment. Conveniently forgotten in the fabrication of this myth was
that Burns had received an excellent education, not merely from Heaven but also
from his father (an education which included Classical, European, and English
literature), and that if Heaven indeed had taught Burns to plough, then it had
not done a very good job, for Burns’ career as a farmer was a disaster.
Burns
became famous very quickly, and the experience left him feeling uneasy. Much as
he enjoyed the popularity and willingly participated in the process which made
him a household name in cultural circles, a part of him resented being seen, not
first and foremost as a poet, but rather as the saviour of Scotland.