The Canongate Burns by Robert Burns

Bible. No story affected him more deeply than that of Job’s.
    Liam McIlvanney, one of a tiny minority of the legion of Burns commentators to have sympathetic knowledge of Burns’s true politics, traces in a particularly fine article, ‘Presbyterian Radicalism and the Politics of Robert Burns’, a similarly long tradition of radical political gestation from a more distinctively Scottish pointof view. He highlights the ambivalence at the heart of Burns’s relationship to Presbyterianism thus:
    â€¦ it remains unfortunate that Burns’s run-ins with the kirk have obscured the extent to which his own political philosophy is grounded in his religious inheritance. His politics are shaped by two complimentary strands of Presbyterian thought: on the one hand, the New Light, with its subjection of all forms of authority to the tribunal of individual reason: on the other, the traditional contractarian political theory long associated with Presbyterianism. These influences are evident in Burns’s repeated avowal of ‘revolution’ principles in his support for the American Revolution and, above all, in his satirical attacks on political corruption. The whole framework of assumption on which Burns’s political satires rest recalls the contractarian principles of Presbyterian thought: that authority ascends from below; that government is a contract, and political power a trust; and that even the humblest members of society are competent to censure their governors. That Burns deplored certain aspects of Calvinism —its harsh soteriology, its emphasis on faith over works— should not blind us to his sincere identification with the Presbyterian political inheritance:
    The Solemn league and Covenant
    Â Â  Now brings a smile, now brings a tear.
    But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs;
    Â Â  If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer. 22
    Burns, of course, was not the only Scotsman to embrace such radical ideals. We cannot properly understand his life and much of his poetry if we do not understand the degree to which his personal relationships and affiliations were directed towards and driven by seeking out similarly politically sympathetic groups and individuals. It was the Lodge friends and patrons who eased his path towards Edinburgh; that so politically riven city which was to prove so disastrous to him in both life and death. Without, as all his generation, fully understanding the political causes of what happened in the capital, the ever astute Edwin Muir put his finger on the events of his sensational first extended visit to the capital as the cause of Burns’s subsequent accelerating decline:
    It was after his first trip to Edinburgh that his nature, strongly built and normal, disintegrated. He had hoped, in meeting thefirst shock of his astonishing triumph in the capital, that an escape was at last possible from the life of hardly maintained poverty which as a boy he had foreseen and feared. He left Edinburgh recognising that there was no reprieve, that hardship must sit at his elbow to the end of his days. Fame had lifted him on the point of an immediate pinnacle; now the structure had melted away and, astonished, he found himself once more in his native county, an Ayrshire peasant. Some fairy had set him for a little in the centre of a rich and foreign society; then calmly and finally, she had taken it from under his feet. There is hardly another incident in literary history to parallel this brief rise and setting of social favour, and hardly one showing the remorselessness of fortune in the world. The shock told deeply on Burns, working more for evil than the taste for dissipation which he was said to have acquired from the Edinburgh aristocracy. 23
    Given Muir’s lack of knowledge of the covert political forces operating on Burns, this is well said. It does, however, under-estimate the extraordinary degree to which Burns, in the midst of his Edinburgh triumph, was