Celebrating Burns: The mausoleum, the Muses and how Burns lost his head …

Whether they dined on haggis, neeps and tatties – or whether any of the worthies present proposed an Immortal Memory – is not recorded; but the mausoleum which was now nearing completion was going to prove significant, if not indeed hugely symbolic, both for the status and reputation of Robert Burns and for the Scotland he represented.

The original grave of 1796, marked by a plain stone slab in a corner of the churchyard, was so obscure that visitors such as William Wordsworth in 1803 had found it difficult to locate.

Something had to be done, and in 1813 the local mausoleum committee was formed to raise public subscriptions. But the nominal appointment of figures such as the Marquis of Queensberry to the committee a year later suggests that the radical poet was already being “co-opted” by the ruling classes to undergo a posthumous transformation. With Sir Walter Scott helping to spearhead the respectable and globalise the campaign even the Hanoverian Prince Regent – later George IV – joined the world-wide subscribers to make a contribution.

Had this descendant of the Wee German Lairdie [George I] actually read any Robert Burns – for example, the following lines?

The injured Stuart line is gone, A race outlandish fills their throne; An idiot race, to honour lost; Who know them best despise them most.

Or was it the case that the rebellious Scot, the democratically-minded admirer of the French Revolution was now – once and for all – to be buried in another kind of obscurity and shrouded in North British “respectability”? And can it be truly said that we have ever allowed the figure of Burns to emerge fully from this obscurity?

Significantly, during a refurbishment in the 1930s, the mausoleum with its crowning dome was painted white to distinguish it further from the red sandstone of the surrounding monuments. If this is a case of a “whited sepulchre”, to borrow that barbed and cutting phrase of Christ’s, the corruption within, in this case, was merely physical. The real rottenness was already apparent in the hypocrisy of what was by 1817 fast becoming an inglorious misrepresentation of Burns and what he actually stood for: a fledgling Scottish democracy independent of royal honours, imperial ambitions, corrupt political placements and the oppression of the commons of Scotland and the commonweal of the world.

As his bones were being transported to their new resting place, Burns’s significance as a well-read, well-educated poet of world-class order, hailing from a hard-working tenant-farmer background, was being transmogrified. The mausoleum officially confirmed him as the “heaven-taught ploughman” that Henry (“The Man of Feeling”) Mackenzie had patronisingly christened him in 1786 – also calling him “unlettered” – as if he were a mere vessel into which the Muses had simply poured their inspiring elixir.

This is, indeed, how Burns is depicted in Peter Turnerelli’s famous monument within the mausoleum which shows the poet with one hand clutching his hat to his breast, the other resting on his plough while he gazes up rather vacantly at the supposed Muse Coila.

But how else, in the early 19th century, were the powers that be to explain (or “celebrate”) the genius of Robert Burns in a Scotland now more or less thirled to the Union he had so abhorred? A Scotland which, in the name of Empire, had for some time now (in the words of Hamish Henderson) “fought England’s wars to the dreepin’ knife, sir!” A Scotland now being heavily schooled in denial of both Burns’s (political) Jacobin and (sentimental) Jacobite sympathies; and whose frontline Highland regiments had helped bring Napoleon to his knees; a Scotland now being forced to forget those dangerous democrats (and comrades of Burns), the United Scotsmen and the Friends of the People.

A Scotland which in recent times had been so trammelled down that the Hanoverian regime, which had hounded Burns himself, had also found no problem in managing the rigged show trial of 1793 which viciously sentenced Thomas Muir of Huntershill to 14 years transportation for daring to suggest that “The cause of The People ... a good cause .... shall ultimately prevail … shall finally triumph”.

The authorities, along with their cohorts of the Unco Guid, could hardly locate Burns’s genius in his struggle with the social conditions he had had to face, far less accept him as a representative and exponent of a potentially revolutionary “democratic intellect”. Rather, Burns had to be explained away as a class aberration; an accidental, solitary phenomenon. It really had little to do with him, you see. It was the Muses what done it!

In essence, what the mausoleum signifies is that the historical Burns was not to be celebrated. He was to be memorialised in “pure” sentiment, now that he was safely dead.

And, so, from that mausoleum emerged the couthy wee Rabbie and his field mouse; the Burns of The Cottar’s Saturday Night so beloved of the Victorians (and Presbyterians); with its flip-side: the Burns who loo’ed the lassies sae weill; and Burns the “blustering, drunken blellum” as if he were himself the mock-heroic Tam o’ Shanter.

Of course, there was a sentimental side to Burns in an age which valued sentiment – and he knew how to play to that gallery. Of course, he was un homme célèbre whose libertarian sexual exploits were easily traced (and stigmatised) in an age before contraception. And, of course, he did take a drink; though, in fact, he had rather a weak stomach and his drinking habits were much exaggerated – another way, surely, of keeping him in his place: an embodiment of the English/Unionist caricature of the drunken Scot (still useful, of course, as cannon fodder).

The “sentiment” was certainly safe. It was essentially apolitical and could be easily valorised alongside the overtly populist promotion of Burns the Lover and Burns the Reveller which proved more than successful as distractions from any politically (or historically) intelligent appraisal of the poet.

His patriotism (never nationalism) was then just as easily smoored in sentiment as if he too were no more than a figure in Walter Scott’s Romanticisation of Scottish history and culture. His nationalistic songs could certainly then be sung by loyal North Britons as belonging to a bygone age as, haggis-bloated and rheumy-eyed, they sang of Chairlie, Bruce and loyal Wallace but only once a year in “a night of befuddled bard-buggering” (to borrow once more from Hamish Henderson). Little wonder then that even the mild-mannered Edwin Muir, in his poem Scotland 1941, envisioned Burns and Scott together as “mummied housegods in their musty niches” and as “sham bards of a sham nation”; while Hugh MacDiarmid surely sliced the haggis with some surgical precision when he wrote: “Historically, Burns is to be discerned as a safety-valve – a means of ‘working off’ Scottish sentiment amenably to the tendency to progressive Anglicisation which had set in so strongly by his day.”

As the new mausoleum was under construction, the disinterment of Burns also proved to be gruesomely symbolic as the head of the poet became detached from the body which “with the exception of the bones, crumpled into dust”.

Naturally, the head was put back in place for re-burial within the mausoleum. But can it be truly said that, through the countless Immortal Memories Scotland has tholed since then, we have really given Burns back his head? It’s not simply that the “immortalised” Mausoleum Burns of Regency, Victorian and post-Victorian Scotland is still very much with us today in its praise for the heart above the head, in its disregard for the man’s Enlightenment intelligence and in its failure to promote (what George Elder Davie called) the “democratic intellect” of the Scotland which he represented. For even where Burns’s head has come into play it has often become little more than a political football.

Discarding the notion of a Unionist/British Burns for the self-shaming, unhistorical, propagandist nonsense it is (yes, he was pressurised by poverty and terrorised by power into saying and doing a few things against his own beliefs), we have the Burns of Scots Wha Hae and A Parcel of Rogues whom many traditional nationalists hold dear; and we have the allegedly “other” internationalist Burns of A Man’s A Man and The Slave’s Lament; the proto-socialist Burns much beloved by leftists of every hue – as if the twain could (or should) never meet; as if you could build an internationalism, socialist or otherwise, while denying Scotland its fully independent role; and as if Burns was a fatally divided self rather than a man of moral reason as well as a man of moral sentiment; a much put-upon man of independent mind whose values were deeply democratic and, for their time, deeply dangerous.

If there’s one thing the mausoleum in St Michael’s should teach us, it is that it’s time to stop colonising Burns and learn to respect him for the man and the poet he was. We might argue till doomsday whether or not he was ahead of his time. But, one thing’s for sure: here in Scotland we still have a way to go to catch him up.

The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns? For those who like that sort of thing, as Miss Jean Brodie said, that is the sort of thing they like. It’s an essentially meaningless toast, in any case; a pious vacuity of secular sainthood in denial of flesh and blood.

Better to keep our feet firmly on the ground and our eyes on the road ahead; and if we really seek companionship in his poetry and songs as forward we move, we should not only accord him his rightful and hard-won place in the Republic of Letters but also build the only monument to him that matters – and the only monument that would have mattered to him: a fully democratic, fully independent Scotland.