DR ANDY WELSH presented the following paper at

Burns’ Supper held at The Corinthia Palace Hotel

and Spa last week, on 25 January

I am much honoured to be standing here proposing the toast to the immortal memory. We all have had connections with Burns, poetic, convivial, from many speeches over the years, and I thought I would use this opportunity to brush up my Burns know-how, so to speak. I read several books and memoirs, starting with that of Robert Heron, published in 1796, the year after Burns died, and going on to the latest, The Tinder Heart, by Hugh Douglas, published in 1996. I might mention that the one I found best, curiously enough was written by a German, Professor Hans Hecht of Göttingen University, just before the First World War. However, each writer presented a different slant on Burns, and while one would expect Burns' poetry and songs to chime with universal sentiments, I was left wondering exactly who Robert Burns was i.e. what kind of a person he really was.

Should he come now through the door you would see a well set up young man of 5' 9", slightly bowed through following the plough, looking fairly similar to the well-known portraits, with dark brown curling hair, brushed forward to mask the broad forehead he inherited from his mother, and a rather coarse complexion and dark glowing eyes which engaged you straight away. Despite the joy and humour of his songs you would see a serious, proud character, but with an underlying insecurity which made him overly sensitive to rebuffs. Criticism he could not take and would immediately reject or avenge. His speech, as you would imagine, was broad Ayrshire dialect, and it remained so all his life – he rather revelled in being called “the Ploughman Poet”. Burns was clean-shaven, he wore a fashionable ponytail, and he was a natty dresser. To quote him:

My coat and my vest,

they are Scotch o the best

O pairs o good breeks

I hae twa man

And stockings and pumps

to put on my stumps

And neer a wrang steek

in them a man

My sarks are they few,

but five o them new

Twal hundred an white

as the snaw man

A ten shilling hat,

a Holland cravat

There are no monie poets

sae braw, man.

Now, who was he? I see three Burnss, and if you will indulge me I will outline them and then try and resolve his character.

Firstly, Burns was a farmer. His father was a farmer, he was born on the smallholding at Alloway, brought up on the farm at Ochiltree, then Lochlee, then with his brother Gilbert, he became tenant of Mossgiel, and finally Ellisland on his own account. Most of his life he was farming, and to quote him:

“At the plough,

scythe or reap hook

I feared no competitor”

But the life of undercapitalised tenant farmers on poor farms is even now a struggle and then it required hard physical work from dawn to dusk and a great slice of luck - which the Burns family never had. None of their farming enterprises were very successful and in this respect Burns considered himself a failure, though he rejoiced in the sobriquet of the Ploughman Poet. He gave up Ellisland, his final farming venture in disgust after three years, having taken employment in the Excise to help make ends meet. He did well in the Excise, and his employment – a sort of 18th century version of a VAT inspector – provided his living for the last four years of his life.

So that was my first Burns – a hardworking farmer and breadwinner. The Second Burns we see would make straight for one or more of the lovely lasses in the room. From his teens he had a reputation for womanizing, and he was quite open about his amours, and would assist his friends in theirs. We know that he fathered eight illegitimate children, and it would seem that Burns would turn to any available girl and try to get her into bed at the earliest opportunity, if not sooner. After a day’s work in the fields Burns said that he spent the evening to quote him, “in the way after my own heart”. This included hard drinking, hellraising with his friends, bawdy jokes and songs and I gather that Burns was somewhat of a ringleader in his circle. Burns senior was a strict Calvinist and his eldest's exploits disappointed him though he had troubles enough of his own, but as important, was the disapproval of the Kirk and Burns soon got into trouble – trouble compounded by his relationship with Jean Armour. Jean's father did not want Burns as a son-in-law and sued him for damages. Serious trouble which led him to sign over to Gilbert his share in Mossgiel and the copyright of his poetry and to plan to emigrate to the West Indies.

Burns was quite a social person –he had many friends at all levels – and was a good talker with of course a fund of songs and poems at his grasp. Virtually all his works are about people and their relationships (particularly of course women).

My third Burns is a literary figure. Burns father was literate, reading the Guid Book and leading the singing of psalms as in the Cottar's Saturday Night – he wrote a religious manual for his children –and he recognised his son's ability and made sure he had a good basic schooling, including surveying, some French and a little Latin. Robert became a voracious reader, devouring The Spectator, Pope's Homer, Thompson, Shenstone, Ossian, Sterne, and Scottish writers such as Allan Ramsay. Burns himself was writing from the age of 15, and learned from being a member of debating clubs and a mason, and from more sophisticated acquaintances met during his brief and disastrous time in Irvine, then the chief town in Ayrshire, where he went to one of his mother's relations to learn the art of flax dressing. (Flax at that time attracted a government subsidy and the idea was for Burns to be able to process the flax and obtain higher prices for it).

Burns father died in the February of 1784, Robert Burns then became head of the family, and they moved to Mossgiel, which Robert and his brother Gilbert had leased. Suddenly it all came together and a great creative burst of poetry was the result, leading to the publication of the first book in 1786. Most of Burns' best poetry was written in 1785, and though he never stopped writing the muse was less in evidence, perhaps Tam O Shanter excepting. Burns produced 30 or so major poems, but the great work of his later years was songs – more than 400 – these were not always original, for what Burns did was to edit traditional songs or fragments and marry them to appropriate traditional tunes. The object was to put together all the songs in the Scottish dialect, adding to them wherever he could, so that there would be a compendium and they would be saved for posterity. Two publishers shared the work with him, but it has to be said that this was a labour of love. Burns put a great deal of time and effort into this work but he was not paid – in fact he never asked for any payment. Burns was paid for his poetry, and at the end of the Edinburgh period he had about £450 – part of which went to brother Gilbert to help with Mossgiel and the rest was used up in setting up Ellisland. At the end of the Ellisland period Burns was broke, and although he was quite well paid in his Excise work, he died broke. After his death public subscription was raised and ensured that Jean Armour and the family could live on in comfort.

Burns kept a diary, and he was a prolific letter writer. Not all his letters have survived as there was some very heavy editing after his death, but there are enough to show that he could and did write perfect and expressive English. Burns wrote his best poems and songs in the vernacular, but he wrote also in English – the English of a very literate man, a man very sure of himself in that respect, even if not in others. In Edinburgh after the first publication of his poems he was lionized as the national bard of Scotland, a crown which he wore easily and was at home with the literary society of the day, knowing how to disport himself in the drawing rooms of the better classes. Burns knew his place in the scheme of things and never allowed fame to go to his head – he was always the ploughman poet – of course on rare occasions he could behave impatiently or rudely – but he knew what he was doing as far as poetry and songs were concerned. Burns did not invent poetry or song in the Scottish dialect for he was part of a popular movement which started before he was born and continued after his death and down to the present day. What Burns did was not unique, but what it was was better –better at its best than anyone else before or since, and what this did for Scottish life and culture is incalculable. Thomas Carlyle said that Burns found a tone and words for every mood of a man's heart. Burns touched on almost every emotion, manhood, nationhood, patriotism, politics, conviviality, bawdiness, joy, satire, companionship, friendship and love, especially love. In simple rhyme he chimed with the nobler feelings of mankind and made you feel better for reading him – his work is good to read or hear.

So, and obviously in the space of a few minutes I have covered Burns very briefly, we saw a farmer, a womanizer and social man, and a responsible and talented literary figure. It could have been very different. At 15 his schooling was successful enough for him to have gone on and become a doctor or lawyer – to have pursued a professional career, but the family had just moved to Lochlee, and Robert was needed on this much larger farm. His father's health was failing and immediately two bad harvests landed them in financial trouble. Robert and Gilbert got the family out from under, as it were by secretly taking on the lease of another farm, Mossgiel. There was not the time or money for Robert to have continued studying but he had all the unused intellectual capacity fermenting inside him. He drank and womanized as a relief, though sometimes he would also go off by himself, doubtless storing up feelings and frustrations which later flowed back from his pen. Burns always worked hard, and he played hard, and eventually his constitution paid the price; from his early 20s he was subject to bouts of illness and depression, and he died at the age of 37 – not helped in his final years by the drinks parties of the local Dumfries gentry who (as did everyone) admired his achievements – the Dictionary of National Biography says that after one such occasion he fell off his horse and spent the rest of the night in a ditch, contracting the rheumatic fever from which he died.

Well, what was he really like? I would like to read you a short quotation: “He was a handsome well shapt man; very good company and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit.” I liked this description, the only problem being that it is of William Shakespeare, England's major poet and playwriter. We know very little about Shakespeare, but he and Burns are two of the best wordsmiths ever, and maybe they had something in common. Burns was a man who burned the candle not at both ends but in three places at once, and pretty brightly at that, and yet became one of Scotland's heroes. Burns spoke of himself as having a tinder heart, and it was certainly a great heart and we must be thankful for it, and as for always drink to the immortal memory of a very great Scotsman.

Copyright Dr A. N. Welsh - 23.01.08