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Karyn Wilson-Costa The Poetry of Robert Burns: “A Melancholy not unallied to Mirth.” by Karyn Wilson-Costa When Allan Cunningham concluded his 1834 Life of Burns with this critical judgement of Robert Burns’s poetry he was in fact summing up the schizophrenic nature of the Scottish character and identity. Scottish duality is still prevalent in the Highland-Lowland divide, the Catholic- Protestant rivalry, the linguistic differences Scots versus Gaelic, the English and Scottish competition for power, the past battling with the present in the search for a national identity free from myth and a sense of failure. In Burns’s day Scotland was trying hard to come to terms with a concentric nationalism within the Union, created in 1707. Burns’s poetry and songs are an attempt to forge a new Scotland, its diverse facets united in an all-embracing identity. Well before Hugh MacDiarmid, Burns imagined an idealised Scotland in which the duality and integrity of Scottish poetry was highlighted in relation to that of its more prestigious neighbour. He was, however, to be tarred with the brush of the historical melancholy of the Highlands and the radical, dissenting Lowlander disappeared from view. Burns’s melancholy is arguably as much, if indeed not more of an affected literary pose as the poetical expression of a passing mood. The choice of “Mirth” as a close associate of “Melancholy”, a happy alliterative pairing subsequently adopted also by Professor John Wilson in his 1843 essay On the Genius and Character of Robert Burns and which provided the professor with many occasions to wax lyrical about Burns’s mirthful or melancholy moods, was perhaps incorrect. Burns triumphed over the temptation of melancholic self-absorption by subverting the genres most closely associated with melancholy and adopting an ironic, often satirical stance and a mocking tone, more akin to an impish sense of Fun than Mirth , for it is the sound of Burns’s own laughter , exorcising his demons, that echoes through his poems. Enlightenment theories which sought to fix strong links between an author and his text established biographical investigation as a primary critical methodology. Jerome McGann underlined the flourishing of a literary cult of personality in the eighteenth century and cited Burns as the classic example of the personal poet among the pre-Romantics. McGann saw in Burns’s own introductory comments to the poems a desire for the reader to perceive what he called “a larger, psychological unity.” (7) However, unfortunately for Burns, these comments and to an even greater extent, the poet’s personal letters and notes were used by Burns’s first biographer, Dr James Currie, to impart a skewed view of the bard, one which out of motives of piety and prejudice totally distorted the life and aims of Burns. As a Freemason, he thought it his duty to help the widow and orphans with a book that would pull at readers’ heartstrings and loosen those of their purses. Burns lived in an era when great men were revered and Currie was convinced of Burns’s genius. The Aristotelian doctrine of Melancholy, according to which all great men were by definition melancholic was very much in vogue, so there was nothing more natural for Currie to assume that Burns had automatically suffered from melancholia: “Indeed the complaint of “melancholy” or “low spirits” appears to be the general attendant of men of genius…occasioned by that exquisite sensibility which proceeds from refined taste.” (xxii) The personal spleen element in the poet’s life and works obscured the other, much more prevalent satirical side for almost two centuries, since Currie’s edition was seminal in establishing the critical heritage of Burns critics. Where Burns was concerned, it was the biography which framed the understanding of the poetry. Furthermore, as Andrew Noble has cogently pointed out, Burns also fell foul of Francis Jeffrey’s quite deliberate attempt to separate him from the politically dangerous and very contagious English Romantics, whose concerns with man’s disregard for his fellow man and the environment along with a certain sympathy with the French Revolutionary cause, Burns shared. By denying any possible aesthetic or linguistic connection between the two poets, Jeffrey, Andrew Noble argues, denied a radical Scottish poetry. By dismissing Burns as either a satirical or erotic poet Burns was turned into a sentimental national icon of the very values he detested and sealed inside a “shortie” tin, to misquote Don Paterson. Wilson-Costa, Karyn. “ The Poetry of Robert Burns: ‘A Melancholy not unallied to Mirth.’ ”. EREA 4.1 (printemps 10 2006): 10-15. <www.e-rea.org> Dr. Currie did, however, have a good deal of help from Burns himself in constructing the frame. The poet’s much-quoted reference to his Hypochondria or “confirmed melancholy” in March 1784 was widely held as proof of his depressed spirits. Even more conclusive evidence was found in his correspondence, notably in a letter sent to his father William on December 27th, 1781 during what has come to be known as his “Irvine” period. In it the poet paints himself in very gloomy hues, making barely-veiled hints at a desire to have done with his miserable and disgraced life on earth. The references to the Book of Revelations were taken by biographers as evidence of a suicidal tendency. Burns’s letters are, it must be said, consistently insincere and are characterised by a certain tendency to pose in the manner in which Burns manipulated the emotions and affections of each of his correspondents by astutely choosing the best form of address in which to do so. In a series of epistles to Robert Graham of Fintry, he talks of what Andrew Noble terms “the psychological and economic incompatibility of the poetic personality with the world.” (249) When Burns writes , “It is not easy to imagine a more helpless state than his whose poetic fancy unfits him for the world,” (Letter 61) Noble sees not only self-indulgent Romantic agony slightly before the event but also a spiritually derived agony derived from his powerlessness to help those who suffer. Burns’s letters abound in self-analysis of what Noble terms “his eccentric, agonised creative relationship with the world.” (698) Rainer Emig has noted the proximity of the notion of eccentricity to melancholy, how the outsider is thus freed from the surrounding authority that he wishes to challenge. Nothing could be truer of Robert Burns who used his spleen rather than suffer from it to denounce, from the margins of society and culture, the bigotry and identity crisis present in late-eighteenth century Scotland. Contemporary critics did not appreciate the extent to which Burns was a master of voice and persona. His poetry was taken at face-value, as an expression of his own life. His so- called lack of poetic imagination has dogged criticism of his works for two centuries ever since Currie first talked of Burns’s “lack of imaginative power”. Carol McGuirk has perceptively remarked that “the notion that Burns is always autobiographical, however much it inflates his personality, greatly deflates his art”. The five poems written during the winter of 1780-81 spent in Irvine, where Burns had been despatched to learn the art of flax-weaving, all have a very gloomy stamp on them, as he was indeed suffering from depression the cause of which was an overwhelming sense of guilt at the failure of this enterprise and subsequent self-reproach. Burns was still, at this stage in his life, very much under the influence of his father and the Calvinist doctrine which the latter had always sought to impose on his children. Burns gave voice to the anxiety created by being literally hemmed in by his father’s righteousness in this series of poems. As Liam McIlvanney perceptively points out, “The Weltschmerz which pervades these poems is partly a response to personal disappointments, but it has also deep roots in Protestant culture.” (146) The doctrinal side of Calvinism does indeed stress the sinfulness of human creatures and Burns acknowledges the justice of his fate. Such sentiments are the subject of Despondency: An Ode: O Life! Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches such as I! Dim-backward, as I cast my view, What sickening Scenes appear! What Sorrows yet may pierce me thro', Too justly I may fear! (4 – 10) One of the causes of the rise of a literary cult of melancholia in sixteenth century England is believed to have been a reaction to the attention paid to the issues of sin, damnation and salvation after the English Reformation. Burns’s keen sense of his own worthlessness reflects the guilt and resignation inherent in eighteenth century Scottish Presbyterian culture. As Ian Pears put it when referring to Scottish sin in his novel The Portrait: “There is so much of it (...) you’re doomed before you’re even out of the cradle anyway.” (33-34) The personal disappointments McIlvanney was referring to most certainly included a sense of frustrated ambition, again linked to Calvinism, but here to its cultural side which Wilson-Costa, Karyn. “ The Poetry of Robert Burns: ‘A Melancholy not unallied to Mirth.’ ”. EREA 4.1 (printemps 11 2006): 10-15. <www.e-rea.org> stressed material success and personal freedom in deciding the course of one’s life, even if one’s final state is pre-determined. David Daiches sees Burns’s melancholy during this period as resulting from his lack of a wider stage. He was alternatively gay and morose, resentful of the fact that his condition of peasant would prevent him from gaining the audience he craved.
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