The Canongate Burns (74 page)
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Authors: Robert Burns
An Occasional Address Spoken on her Benefit Night,Â
Nov. 26th, 1792, at Dumfries, by Miss Fontenelle
First published in
The Edinburh Gazetteer
, 30th Nov. 1792
WHILE Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,
The fate of Empires and the fall of Kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
doctors
And even children lisp, The Rights of Man;
5
Amid the mighty fuss, just let me mention,
THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN merit some attention. â
  First, in the Sexes' intermix'd connexion,
One sacred Right of Woman is PROTECTION.
The tender flower, that lifts its head, elate,
10
Helpless, must fall before the blasts of Fate,
Sunk on the earth, defac'd its lovely form,
Unless
your Shelter
ward th' impending storm.
  Our second Right â but needless here is caution â
To keep that Right inviolate's the fashion:
15
Each man of sense has it so full before him,
He'd die before he'd wrong it â' tis DECORUM!
There was, indeed, in far less polish'd days,
A time, when rough, rude Man had naughty ways:
Would swagger, swear, get drunk, kick up a riot,
20
Nay, even thus invade a Lady's quiet. â
Now, thank our Stars! these Gothic times are fled;
Now, well-bred men â and you are all well-bred â
Most justly think (and we are much the gainers)
Such conduct neither spirit, wit, nor manners. â
25
  For Right the third, our last, our best, our dearest:
That Right to fluttering Female hearts the nearest,
Which even the Rights of Kings, in low prostration,
Most humbly own â' tis dear, dear ADMIRATION!
In that blest sphere alone we live and move;
30
There taste that life of life â Immortal Love!
Smiles, glances, tears, sighs, fits, flirtations, airs;
'Gainst such an host, what flinty savage dares â
When awful Beauty joins with all her charms,
Who is so rash as rise in rebel arms?
35
  But truce with Kings, and truce with Constitutions,
With bloody armaments and Revolutions;
Let MAJESTY your first attention summon:
Ah! ça ira! THE MAJESTY OF WOMAN!!!
thus shall it go/let it go
This was printed anonymously in
The Edinburgh Gazetteer
, 30th November, 1792 next to a political essay written by Robert Riddell. The text is from the Edinburgh newspaper. The original publication contains a minor spelling error, giving Miss Fontenelle's name as Foftenelle. Miss Louisa Fontenelle was a London actress who moved to the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh and played provincial theatres in Scotland. She was a favourite of Burns's (
See Occasional
Address
, December 1794 and
On Seeing Miss Fontenelle in A
Favourite Character,
same date). This, superficially, is an equally light-weight, even frivolous piece. Its implications are, however, of deeper political import and its performance and reception were to have far-reaching consequences for Burns.
Burns was fascinated by the actress as this belt and braces compliment suggests: âTo you Madam, on our humble Dumfries boards, I have been more indebted for entertainment, than ever I was in prouder Theatres.âYour charms as a woman would insure applause to the most indifferent Actress, and your theatrical talents would secure admiration to the plainest figure ⦠Will the forgoing lines be of any service to you on your appearing benefit night? ⦠They are nearly extempore â¦' (Letter 519). The poem was revised and sent to Mrs Graham of Fintry on 5 January, though Burns still describes it as âthis little poem, written in haste on the spur of the occasion, & therefore inaccurate; but a sincere Compliment to that Sex, the most amiable of the works of God â¦' Kinsley, while noting this, fails to remark that Mrs Graham received this a mere five days after Burns's semi-hysterical denial of revolutionary tendencies to her husband in which he had denoted
The Rights of
Woman
as quite apolitical. This was evidently the frivolously anodyne evidence being offered to Fintry by way of his wife. Certainly the references in it to (l. 4) Paine's enormously popular
Rights of Man
(1792) and Mary Wollstonecraft's
The Rights of
Woman
(1793) seem merely playful. There was correspondence between Wollstonecraft and Burns which, like so much else, has vanished forever. Certainly if Mary Wollstonecraft had read this poem she would have loathed it as it is replete with the kind of condescension to women that prevented them from occupying a creative, professional and intellectual level with men. Thus, for example, she could write: âTaught from their infancy that beauty is
woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison (
Vindication of the
Rights of Woman
(London, 1975), p. 197). The fact that the sexually predatory âGothic' age is passed would have been small consolation to her. Burns may also have been politically ironic in asserting this. Kinsley notes that âBurns's lines are an ironical allusion to the annual saturnalia of the Caledonian Hunt at Dumfries' (Chambersâ Wallace, iii.361). Cf Burns to Mrs Dunlop, 29 October 1794: âWe have had the Caledonians here for this bypast fortnight; and of course, we have the roar of Folly and Dissipation' (Letter 645).
The notion that the priapic Burns, the only rooster in the barn-yard, would have any affiliation to women's rights seems not credible. He was, however, more complex than that. His friendship with Maria Riddell was based on a common radicalism. Part of the extreme tension within that relationship derived from the fact that, because of her social position, she was able to articulate political ideas about which he had to keep his mouth shut. Through the Riddell connection, however, he met another young, apparently radically inclined Welshwoman, Deborah Duff Davies. Writing to her on April 6th, 1793, less than a year after the Dumfries performance we get this tormented letter written in the wake of the Sedition Trials as Burns rages at the impotence not only of his own radical values but the cost to this for even more depressed and suppressed women. Catherine Carswell, politically empathetic to Burns, believed that he was, because of his non-appearance in Edinburgh among The Scottish Friends of the People, guilt-driven as well as manifestly confined by his office and his alert enemies. Thus he writes:
Good God, why this disparity between our wishes & our powers!â ⦠I know that your hearts have been wounded by the scorn of the Proud whom accident has placed above you, or worse still, in whose hands, perhaps, are placed many of the comforts of your life: but, there! ascend that rock of Independance, & look, justly, down on their littleness of soul.âMake the Worthless tremble under your indignation, & the Foolish sink before your contempt; & largely impart that happiness to others which I am certain will give yourselves so much pleasure to bestow!
⦠Why, amid my generous enthusiasm, must I find myself a poor, powerless devil, incapable of wiping one tear from the eye of Misery, or of adding one comfort to the Friend I love!â Out upon the world! say I; that its affairs are administered so
ill!âThey talk of REFORMâMy God! what a reform would I make among the Sons, & even the Daughters of men!
Down, immediately, should go FOOLS from the high places where misbegotten CHANCE has perked them up, & through life should they sculk, ever haunted by their native insignificance, as the body marches accompanied by its shadow.âAs for a much more formidable class, the knaves, I am at a loss what to do with them.âHad I a world, there should not be a knave in it: & on the other hand, Hell as our Theologians paint it, particularly an eternal Hell, is a deeper damnation than I could bear to see the veriest scoundrel in earth plunged into.â But the hand that could give, I would liberally fill: & I would pour delight on the heart that could kindly forgive, & generously love.â
Still, the inequalities of life are, among MEN, comparatively tolerable: but there is a DELICACY, a TENDERNESS, accompanying every view in which one can place lovely WO-MAN, that are grated & shocked at the rude, capricious distinctions of Fortune.â Woman is the BLOOD-ROYAL of life: let there be slight degrees of precedency among them, but let them be all sacred.â
Whether this last sentiment be right, or wrong, I am not accountable: it is an original, component feature of my mind.â I remember, & 'tis almost the earliest thing I do remember, when I was quite a boy, one day at church, being enraged at seeing a young creature, one of the maids of his house, rise from the mouth of the pew to give way to a bloated son of Wealth & Dullness, who waddled surlily past her.â Indeed the girl was very pretty; & he was an ugly, stupid, purse-proud, money-loving, old monster, as you can imagine (Letter 556A).
This is marked by the trauma of failure of revolutionary anticipations, reiterated cries of despair found in the late Burns comparable in quality and intensity to those prevailing in William Hazlitt's prose. In 1792 all still seemed possible so that the actual performance of
The Rights of Woman
in the agitated Dumfries theatre, as reported by Scott Douglas, seems quite probable:
At the Dumfries Theatre, under the management of Mr. Sutherland, a pretty young actressâMiss Fontenelleâformed one of the company during the winter of 1792, and also of the
year following. The local newspapers announced her benefit-night for 26th November, 1792, and that after the playâThe Country Girlâshe would âdeliver an occasional address, written by Mr. Robert Burns, called
The Rights of Woman
.' At that period the government of this country was in great alarm regarding the spread of what were termed liberal or revolutionary opinions. Paine had produced his âRights of Man,' and Mary Wollstoncroft was advocating the âRights of Woman,' and many thought that the line, âTruce with kings, and truce with constitutions'â the fourth from the end in this Address, was by far too bold, and that the finishing-stroke,
ça ira!
was intolerable.
Chambers records, that a lady with whom he once conversed, âremembered being present in the theatre of Dumfries, during the heat of the Revolution, when Burns entered the pit somewhat affected by liquor. On God save the King being struck up by the band, the audience rose as usualâall except the intem-perate poet, who cried for
ça ira!
A tumult was the consequence, and Burns was compelled to leave the house.' (Vol. II, p. 156)
Burns's denial that the words of the great, inflammatory song of the Revolution (âÃa ira,/La liberté s'établira,/Malgré les tyrans tout ré ussira') ever exclusively left his lips in his letter to Fintry is a mini-masterpiece of self-defensive comic irony:
I was in the playhouse one night, when Ãa ira was called for.âI was in the middle of the pit, & from the Pit the clamour arose.â One or two individuals with whom I occasionally associate were of the party, but I neither knew of the Plot, nor joined in the Plot; nor ever opened my lips to hiss, or huzza, that, or any other Political tune whatever.âI looked on myself as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a Riot; at the same time, as a character of higher respectability, than to yell in the howlings of a rabble.âThis was the conduct of all the first Characters in this place; & these Characters know, & will avow, that such was my conduct (Letter 530).
He repeats this denial to Mrs Dunlop with another variation of what happened in the theatre with the audience divided over the English national anthem and the French song of revolution but implies his poem was not that night's cause of disturbance:
We, in this country, here have many alarms of the reform, or rather the Republican spirit, of your part of the kingdom.â Indeed, we are a good deal in commotion ourselves, & in our Theatre here, âGod save the king' has met with some groans and hisses, while Ãa ira has been repeatedly called for.âFor me, I am a
Placeman
, you know; a very humble one indeed, Heaven knows, but still so much so as to gag me from joining in the cry.âWhat my private sentiments are, you will find out without an Interpreter.âIn the mean time, I have taken up the subject in another view, and the other day, for a pretty Actress's benefit-night, I wrote an Address, which I will give on the other page, called
The Rights of Woman
(Letter 525).
Even if Burns believed that Mrs Dunlop lived in a ârepublican' Ayrshire, it is extraordinary that he could, given she had sons fighting the French, have so misjudged her political sympathies as to believe she would continue to act as his political confidante. In fact, she broke off all connection with him till just before his death as a consequence of his revealed revolutionary sentiments to her. This reaches its climax in his extraordinary letter to her of December 31st of 1792 of which two three-quarter-page sections have been cut away as part of the largely unsystematic but catastrophic destruction of political evidence that has been such a curse for subsequent understanding, scholarly and otherwise. This is the real situation about both his beliefs and the tormentingly hostile environment in which he held them:
âI have corresponded with Commissr. Graham, for the Board had made me the subject of their animadversions; & now I have the pleasure of informing that all is set to rights in that quarter.âNow, as to these inquisitorial Informers, Spies, Persecutors, &c. may the d-vil & his angels be let loose toâ but hold! I was praying most fervently in my last sheet, & I must not so soon fall accursing in this.â
Alas! how little do the wickedly, or wantonly, or idly, officious, think what mischief they do by their malicious insinuations, indiscreet impertinence, or thoughtless blabbings.â What a difference there is, in intrinsic worth; Candour, Bene-volence, Generosity, Kindnessâin all the Charities & all the Virtues; between one class of human beings & another!â[
three
words deleted
] For instance, the amiable circle I so lately mixed with in the hospitable hall of Dunlop,âtheir gentle, generous hearts; their uncontaminated, dignified minds; their informed&
polished understandings what a contrast, when comparedâif such comparing were not downright sacrilegeâwith the prostituted soul of the miscreant wretch, who can deliberately & diabolically plot the destruction of an honest man who never offended him; & with a hellish grin of satisfaction can see the unfortunate man, his faithful wife, & prattling innocents, turned over to Beggary & Ruin.âCan such things be? Oui! telles choses se font! Je viens d'en faire une épreuve maudite.â(By the way, I don't know whether this is French; & much would it go against my soul, to mar anything belonging to that gallant people: though my real sentiments of them shall be confined alone to my [letters (
deleted
)] correspondence with you.) (Letter 529)