The Press SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 1959. Burns Bicentenary

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28802, 24 January 1959, Page 12

The Press SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 1959. Burns Bicentenary

Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, was born 200 years ago tomorrow. Each year on the anniversary of his birth, Burns Night is celebrated by Scotsmen at home and abroad. The immortal memory has been regularly toasted at gatherings without number. And so it follows that the speaker who insisted upon saying something original when proposing the toast would be a contradiction I of a Burns Night orator—he | would be speechless. But if thel disqualification is not removed j entirely this year, it is at least | weakened by the bicentenary I which will give orators the| chance to emphasise that it is l an occasion that expresses the permanence of Burns. To be remembered after 200 years with affection and respect, as Burns is, is indeed testimony to greatness. Various explanations are given for the permanence of Bums. Some of the most devoted admirers of Burns’s writings insist that he is extolled not for qualities, which most merit appreciation, but for lesser literary qualities, and for his amours. But the literary critic perhaps fails to see the wood for the trees when he complains that the Burns cult, as the popular adoration of Burns is often called, obscures the true nature of Burns’s literary achievement and perpetuates an unreal and preposterously sentimentalised picture of the man and the poet. However much one may agree that indiecriminating worship is an unsure basis for judgment, the fact remains that Burns is not only national poet, but national figure without peer to Scotsmen. He is not as Shakespeare is to Englishmen, who worship Shakespeare as a literary genius, but who do not make a national figure of him as the Scots do of Burns. The 'man who is probably the best of the modern Burns scholars. Dr. David Diaches, holds that there are two principal reasons for the special place Bums has in the affections of the ordinary folk of Scotland. The first is his humble origin. He was the aon of a small tenant farmer, and was a working farmer for

most of his life. The second reason is the way in which Burns in his songs identified himself with the Scottish folk tradition, and by rescuing, completing, refurbishing, rewriting or recreating hundreds of items from the vast but fragmentary mass of Scottish popular songs came to symbolise the popular voice of Scotland. There are other reasons, too, why the popular instinct should turn to I a figure such as Burns, and so endow him with the affection and respect that are as strong I today as ever. But the literary critic is also seeing something ] satisfying. He is .seeing the man whom he regards as the greater Burns receiving increasing notice. Dr. Diaches observes that the real Burns is coming back. Modern readers recognise more and more that Burns is neither a minor figure in the English Romantic Movement nor a Heaven-taught ploughman artlessly warbling under the stress of his simple emotions, nor a naive idealiser of rustic life, nor a harmless rhetorical exhibitionist whose works are a storehouse of pious platitudes to be quoted from platform and pulpit. “The real Burns”, Dr. Diaches says, “ Burns when he “ operated with his full strength “and genius as a poet, was Ihe “heir of Henryson in his ‘ humorous tenderness and of ‘ Dunbar in his technical bril- “ liance; the heir of the six- “ teenth-century Scottish poet “ such as Montgomery in his “ feeling for the shape and “ movement of a stanza, of Ram‘say in his relish of humanity “ caught in the act, of Fergusson “in his ability to render the “ colour and absurdity of human “ behaviour. And he was also “ the heir of the people, of the “ lost authors of Scotland’s folk- “ songs, whose fragments he “ gathered in, like a god gather- “ ing the remnants of a shattered “ world to recreate them and “send them abroad again with “ new life and meaning ”. Thus, on the bicentenary of Burns, it is most satisfactory to see among the discerning what amount to beliefs that foundations for the permanence of Burns are deeper and stronger than have readily been perceived.