The Canongate Burns (7 page)

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:

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,

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 of Fergusson, however, we would have to grant Fergusson unhappy precedence. Mackenzie tainted, wrongly, both their reputations with, at best, alcoholic tendencies. This alleged addiction was then implied to lead to other forms of licence where, certainly in Burns's case, sexual promiscuity was on the charge sheet.

This demonisation of Burns is not to be understood, however, without it being placed in its proper political context. The Mackenzie who penned these personal attacks was the same man who was writing fervid anti-revolutionary polemics in
The Edinburgh
Herald
during 1790–1 under the pen name ‘An Old Tradesman' and again in 1793, in
The Caledonian Mercury
, under the pen name ‘Brutus' to prove that all was for the best in the best of all worn torn, economically distressed Hanoverian worlds. As spokesperson for the old regime he believed that strong government would ‘save the people from that worst enemy of purely democratic states – the people themselves'.
28
The pinnacle of his loyalty is the 1792 A
Review of the Principal Proceedings of the Parliament of 1784
, a defense of William Pitt, when Pitt's pro-reformist views of 1784 were being thrown back in his face by radicals. Retrospectively referring to that pamphlet Mackenzie described the ideological clash
of the 1790's as an ‘epidemic insanity … which set up certain idols, under the names of Liberty, Equality and The Rights of Man'.
29
Pitt personally thanked Mackenzie for his loyal defence, and basking in such praise, he replied ‘My Opinion, Sir, of you as a Minister I hold only in common with the Millions around me.'
30
(Letter 93, To William Pitt, March 1792). These ‘millions' were not so loyal, as Mackenzie informed George Home on 26th March 1792:

Theatre goers, as Mackenzie records, were among this swelling radical ‘enemy' and in one incident he tells Home, open conflict erupted between radicals and loyalists at London's Haymarket theatre when the revolutionary song ‘Ca Ira' was demanded by reformers, but chanted down by loyalist calls for ‘God Save the King'. Similar tensions spread to the provincial theatres, including Dumfries and an unidentified informer reported to the Excise that Burns was in the reformist mob. Mackenzie goes on in the same letter to condemn Scottish academics: ‘From my Communication with Men of Letters here, I can perceive that they are generally on the side of the Malcontents'.
32
Fanatically partisan, status obsessed, politically scared, Mackenzie so hated his reforming and radical political enemies that he could not speak their names. To do so would give them a credibility he utterly sought to deny. For Mackenzie the radical was equivalent to the bestial. This is why in Mackenzie and the subsequent Tory criticism he inspired always described Burns as surrounded by destructive groups of unnamed degenerates in Edinburgh and, even worse, Dumfries.

It should further be understood that Burns was not a unique case for such treatment. The heavily subsidised, reactionary literary, magazine and newspaper culture put together by Pitt and Dundas specialised in trashing the radical literary enemy by varied forms of abuse based on the relationship of personal licentiousness to consequent political anarchy if these people were to succeed. For
example, Mary Wollstonecraft with whom Burns corresponded received treatment even worse than his, as a promiscuous woman she was even more reprehensible than a randy ploughman. Engrossed in destroying the careers of any radical sympathisers, Mackenzie boasted to the ultra-loyalist George Chalmers, in March 1793:

An ever-willing anti-reform propagandist, Mackenzie helped organise the Scottish distribution of a vicious attack, printed by the same George Chalmers, on Tom Paine as a degenerate, dangerous individual. The black art of character assassination, well established before the death of Burns, won rich patronage for the loyal Mackenzie, appointed Comptroller of Taxes in Scotland in 1799.

The degree of Mackenzie's vindictiveness and his stress of the later Dumfries years, also alert us to one of the most pervasive and politically wilfully misconceived of myths surrounding Burns. Indeed, so pervasive that it has even penetrated the normally sceptical consciousness of Professor T.M. Devine who has recently written of ‘the public recantation of such celebrated supporters of the radical cause as Robert Burns'.
34
This alleged recantation stems from one misinterpreted, truncated song,
The Dumfries Volunteers
. It avoids all the substantial poetic evidence of the Dumfries years to the contrary; not least
Extempore
[on the Loyal Natives'
Verses
]:

The poem catches perfectly both Burns's contempt for the British cause under the war-mongering Pitt and the political company he was keeping in the bitterly politically factionalised little town from which he kept sending out not only radical poems to politically sympathetic London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers, but, as
his doctor William Maxwell had, weapons to the French. All this, of course, at ferocious risk to, at best, his Excise position as he was scrutinised by his rightly suspicious masters. This, too, accounts for his attempts in the last years to get free of the claustrophobic cockpit of Dumfries to the relatively safer, because larger Glasgow area where, even more than Edinburgh, Scottish history has still chronically underestimated the depth of a radical opposition to Pitt's war policy so great that Burke brought it up in the House.

If Burns had made any public recantation, Mackenzie and his ilk would have shouted it from the house-tops. That there was none accounts not only for the intensity of Mackenzie's malice but also for what we now know about his activities not only as literary propagandist but practically on behalf of the government. The nature of Mackenzie's key role in the government's scrutiny of Burns and the subsequent creation of a literary, psychological context by which to sanitise the poetry we now know from the archives of Edinburgh University. Here we have discovered letters from Robert Heron requesting payments from Robert Dundas via Henry Mackenzie for espionage services rendered:

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: