The Canongate Burns (127 page)

For commentary on the loyalist group, the Dumfries Loyal Natives, see notes to the earlier work
Ye True Loyal Natives
. The poet's known radical sentiments made him prickly to comments or jibes from loyalists in Dumfries, who often tried to provoke him to comment on the political situation. On at least one recorded occasion this almost led to him being challenged to a pistol duel with a Captain Dods (Letter 631) for toasting, ‘May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause'. Other toasts have been recorded such as ‘May the last King be hung in the guts of the last Priest'. Indeed, it appears that another complete song satirising the ‘Dumfries Loyal Natives' was discovered and sold in manuscript in 1861, but has never been recovered. In his printed sales catalogue of the greatest auction of Burns manuscripts to occur, Edward C. Bigmore records the first line of a song ‘Here are we Loyal Natives' and describes it as ‘Song in 8 verses. 2 pages folio, written in pencil and inked over in another hand, with two other Songs, all believed to be UNPUBLISHED' (p. 8).

It is not known who ‘Billy' refers to in these lines. Given the inevitably fragmentary knowledge about the poet's acquaintances during his years in Dumfries conjecture is futile. They reinforce the poet's own negative description of fragmented friendships in
From
Esopus to Maria
: ‘The shrinking bard adown the alley skulks', that he was being shunned by many people in Dumfries society.

Commissar Goldie, a legal official, was president of the Dumfries Loyal Natives.

Edmund Burke (1729–97), author of the famed and notorious
Reflections on the French Revolution
, became a leading member of the Tories under William Pitt, having abandoned his original Whig politics. Characteristically, Kinsley makes no comment on by far the most important of the Dumfries epigrams. Overtly (in an assumed voice) it is about Burke's obsessive pursuit of Warren Hastings concerning his fiscal corruption of the East India Company.
Reflec
tions
had, however, appeared in 1790 and it is hard not to believe that Burns was using the Hastings affair to assault the, for him, serpen-tine apostate.
The Dagger
is certainly the wittiest, perhaps the best, of the flood of anti-Burke poetry that
Reflections
provoked.

At the Election of Magistrates for Dumfries, 1794, John M'Murdo, Esq., was chosen Provost & a Mr Swan one of the Baillies; and at the entertainment usually given on the occasions, Burns, seeing the Provost's Supporters on the Bench, took his pencil & wrote the following:

The above introductory note is inscribed on the manuscript transcript, recording accurately that in September 1794 at the election of Magistrates for Dumfries, John M'Murdo was selected as Provost and James Swan, one of the Baillies. Witnessing their success, Burns wrote the above. Swan was elected a merchant councillor on 22nd September, 1794 and after his father's death was admitted a burgess and freeman of the town, then baillie on 29th September, 1794. He was re-elected to this post in September 1795, then ‘retained on Council' in October 1796, but was voted off the council in 1797 (See
The Burns Chronicle
, 1932, ‘Burns Epigrams', by Frederic Kent, pp. 19–23).

This is another anecdotal verse on Jean Lorimer (Chloris). The lines were collected by Stewart in 1802 from the Edinburgh newspaper. It has been rightly noted that these lines were erroneously attributed to Charles Dibdin, an English contemporary of the poet who, after the poet's death and the publication of these lines, took the original and turned them into a longer lyric (See Kinsley Vol. III, p. 1464, and Mackay, p. 534).

This was the poet's second attempt at writing this lyric, given that the original composition of October 1794 was deemed by Thomson
to have sexual overtones in the chorus. Burns took the opportunity to rework his original and sent the above to Thomson on 15th January, 1795. The Henley and Henderson and Mackay editions spoil the final rhyme by substituting the English ‘another' (rather than the Scots
anither
) which does not rhyme with ‘wither'.

The Tree of Liberty
appeared in 1838 with Dr Chambers' edition. In headnotes to the poem Chambers argues:

Dr Chambers was not likely to have been fooled by a forged manuscript, nor invent seeing one that did not exist. His work, still relied upon heavily by modern biographers, is generally robust, despite being top heavy with anecdotal reminiscence from anyone who knew Burns, a friend of Burns or the poet's family. There are no grounds to suspect that the manuscripts seen by Chambers was a forgery. It is thus peculiar that there should still be an ongoing debate over the authenticity of this political song, while many other songs without manuscript are readily accepted. The manuscript vanished or was destroyed during the nineteenth century.

Chambers estimated wrongly in 1838 when he remarked, ‘As
things now stand … there can be no great objection to the publication of any piece of the kind which may have chanced to be preserved' (p. 87). The grounds upon which the provenance of the song have been questioned, at least originally, are not scholarly. Scott Douglas blasted its sentiments, arguing that they:

This comment proves the manuscript still extant in 1877. Almost twenty years later, Henderson and Henley swept the poem aside by stating it was ‘trash' Burns did not write but gave no textually analytic defence of their case.

It is quite probable that the hysterical reaction to this song stems from the line about the King of France being exectuted, ‘Cut aff his heid an' a', man'. That Burns could be so casual about Louis' head being chopped off is clear from his letter to Mrs Dunlop in January 1795:

It is surprising that this letter, let alone the revolutionary song, survived the censorial flames or scissors.

Influenced unduly by this nineteenth century legacy and apparently mistaking politicial bias for literary expertise, Kinsley places
The Tree of Liberty
in his Dubia section (K625). He, too, accepts many works to the canon without extant mansuscript authority, but not this revolutionary work. Kinsley, though, does not wholly reject the song, but leaves its provenance open. On literary style he claims
the song does not truly sound like Burns: ‘the manner here is less firmly and finally expressive and less richly vernacular than that of Burns when he is fully engaged' (Vol. III, p. 1528).

Is this valid?
Scots Wha Hae
is certainly Scottish in theme but it is far less so in language. In fact, taking up Kinsley's key point, it is a revealing contrast to discover that the final verse of
A Man's a
Man
has only two Scots words. By such language criteria, readers should question the validity of many known works by Burns. The first verse of
The Dumfries Volunteers
contains one Scots word and the final verse contains no Scots words. If the number of Scots words occurring in
The Tree of Liberty
is compared to
The
Dumfries Volunteers
and
A Man's a Man
, the result for the first four verses is: 

The number of actual words per verse for these three songs is roughly the same. The score of Scots words for
A Man's a Man
is increased to a count of 8, 10, 11, and 10 for the first four verses if each occurrence of the repetitive ‘a” meaning
all
, as in ‘a' that and a' that' is included. The highest scoring verse in all three songs is the final verse of
The Tree of Liberty
which contains thirteen Scots words. Kinsley's main objection to
The Tree of Liberty
, that it is not densely vernacular enough to be from Burns, is, therefore, invalid. Indeed, our comparison shows the opposite to be true.

The ratio of Scots-to-English words is, of course, varied throughout the canon and cannot be employed as criteria to determine provenance. A more important aspect of language which Kinsley might have examined is the appearance of parochial words and regional spellings employed during the 1790s among other Scots poets, in examining the question of whether another poet might have written this song. There is considerable evidence to show that contemporaries of Burns like Alexander Wilson of Paisley, generally employ parochial spellings and words never found in Burns. Wilson's works are peppered with such spellings. There is no trace of parochial spelling, or non-Burns dialect words within
The Tree of
Liberty
. The poem displays a linguistic fluidity in changing from Scots to English and vice versa, precisely in the manner found in Burns.

There has been no investigation about the Mosesfield manuscript shown to Dr Chambers by Mr James Duncan. Who was the mysterious Mr Duncan who pops up in 1838 and then vanishes? Did Burns know anyone of that name? There is no James Duncan mentioned in the poet's letters, but a William Duncan comes out of the pages of the Burns story in a letter to Crawford Tait of Edinburgh, 15th October, 1790. Burns wrote of this young friend and courier of the letter to Tait:

There is another reference to William Duncan on 25th October, 1787 (Letter 146). It is, of course, purely speculative but it may be that the James Duncan who gave the manuscript to Dr Chambers was a relation, possibly the son of William Duncan.

Mackay accepts the poem into the canon but places its composition with chronological vagueness, declaring that it ‘accords with Burns's Jacobin sympathies in 1792–3' (p. 478). This contradicts his public statements to national newspapers during early 1996 when he argued that Burns would not have written ‘lost' radical poetry from the first week of January 1793 onwards, given his job in the Excise. But
The Tree of Liberty
refers specifically to the death of the French King in stanza 5, an event that did not occur until the end of January 1793, after the Excise enquiry into the poet's politics. So, Mackay should have argued that Burns did continue to write radical poetry after being chastised by his Excise employers.