Free The Canongate Burns by Robert Burns Page B

prematurely, again imprisoned for debt, in Newgate in 1807.
    Along with the new factual evidence of the Mackenzie/Heron connection, it might have been deduced both from Heron’s slavish taking of Mackenzie tactics against Burns to a biographical extreme and his equally slavish eulogy to his patron’s critical prowess. This is Heron’s account of Mackenzie’s contribution, via his Lounger magazine article, to Burns’s initial Edinburgh success:
    That criticism is now known to have been composed by HENRY MACKENZIE Esq, whose writings are universally admired for an Addisonian delicacy and felicity of wit and humour, by which the CLIO of the Spectator is more than rivalled; for a wildly tender pathos that excites the most exquisite vibrations of the finest chords of sympathy in the human heart, for a lofty, vehement, persuasive eloquence, by which the immortal Junius has sometimes perhaps been excelled and often almost equalled! 36
    Heron’s biographical memoir was not the occasion of his first writing about Burns. In 1793 he published a travel book where he created a contrast on the poet’s not so much varied talents as antipathetic ones as expressed in the difference between The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Tam o’ Shanter . The latter is initially admitted as a masterpiece but this is then significantly qualified: ‘Burns seems to have thought, with Boccacce and Prior, that some share of indelicacy was a necessary ingredient in a Tale. Pity that he should have debased so fine a piece, by any things, — having even the remotest relation to obscenity’. This kind of Mackenzie-initiated sentimentalism was the seminal language of nineteenth-century political pietism which would become, mainly though Blackwood’s , the dominant mode of Scottish Toryism. Burns had to be converted into the pietistic poet of a quiescent common people. Whether they were properly reading its concluding stanzas, The Cotter’s Saturday Night became the Ark of the Covenant for the Scottish upper and middle-classes as, increasingly anxious about the fetid, brutal potentially insurrectionary common life of the new emergent industry-based (coal, iron, tobacco, weaving) towns, they sought the politically calming notion of pastoral, god-fearing peace reigning in the Scottish countryside. Heron is a seminal figure in the concoction of this fantasy:
    The whole books of the sacred scriptures are continually in the hands of almost every peasant. And it is impossible, that there should not be some souls among them, awakened to the divine emotions of genius, by that rich assemblage which these books present, of almost all that is interesting in incidents, or picturesque in imagery, or affectingly sublime or tender in sentiments and character. It is impossible that those rude rhymes, and the simple artless music with which they are accompanied, should not excite some ear to fond perception of the melody of verse. That Burns had felt these impulses will appear undeniably certain to whoever shall carefully peruse his ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’; or shall remark with nice observation, the various fragments of scripture sentiment, of scripture imagery , of scripture language, which are scattered throughout his works. 37
    Of course, Heron knew as well as anyone that the bulk of Burns poetry neither sociologically confirmed this view and expressed anything but personal or popular quiescence in the face of the established order. To deal with this what he did was sycophanticallyflesh out the bones of Mackenzie’s account of the dead poet. Apparently more in sorrow than anger, Heron constructed the myth of Burns as betrayer of his own earliest spiritual impulses because he lacked ‘that steady VIRTUE, without which even genius in all its omnipotence is soon reduced to paralytic imbecility, or to manic mischievousness’. Thus Burns’s life becomes a melodrama where he always surrendered to those