 Felly, mae'n gweithio'r perthyniol bernidog i ddechrau yn Ffredinigfa, sydd wedi ei ddaw'r drosol gyda'r ddysgol gyda'r ddysgol gyffredinigfa. Mae'n fwyaf i'n gwneud gyda'r perthyniol, mynd i chi i ddysgol gyda'r ddysgol, mae'n ddod i'n bwysig ei ddysgol gyda'r ddysgol. Mae'n bwysig eich adeg i ddysgol, mae'n gweithio i ddweud y prifediadau a'r leirio ar gyfer Llywodraeth Cymru yn gyfrydol. Felly mae'n gweithio ar gyfer Bwyl Llywodraeth a'r parwyr o'r drwylliant. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. Can you hear me at the back? Can good, and thank you Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow. Mae'r amlwg amser yn dda yn 1901, y mae'r ddefnyddio yfodol, Llywodraeth Blywydd, ddydaf am Ymgellfa Llywodraeth Cymarren, ddweud â'r ystafellaeth a derbyd hynny. Mae'n amlwg yw'n ddod y gallu bod ddweud yn ddweud byddai'r amlwg amlwg yn Gareth Hamilton, bydd yn fwy o hwyl i gael, sy'n gwybod i'r bobl yma. Rwy'n gwaith chi'n gweithio'r gwaith o Robert Burns i ddechrau 18th, a bod i gydag y cwrs o gweithio'r sgwr i mi gael. Rwy'n gweithio'i gweithio i gael. Rwy'n gweithio'i gweithio'r sgwrs, science to a small extent and also religious and cultural politics because none of these things are unrelated. I'm childishly proud to be the Francis Hutchison chair of literature at the University of Glasgow and I'll say a wee bit about Hutchison presently too but he is a great enlightenment figure and one of the first things I'm going to say here that occasionally people find me a bit suspect over is that Robert Burns is an enlightenment poet and I want to start by bringing to mind a painting done in 1893 by CM Hardy and this is the painting of the one and only meeting of Robert Burns and a young Walter Scott in one of the salons of Edinburgh surrounded by the great and good the literati, the enlightenment figures of Edinburgh and it's quite interesting that this painting is done in 1893 at a time when Scotland unashamedly likes Burns, unashamedly likes Scots and also is very proud of the enlightenment as one of the golden epochs in its cultural history. The Scottish Enlightenment though isn't named as a thing until 1900s when a man called W. R. Scott coins the term in his biography of the aforementioned Francis Hutchison. Within a couple of decades of that painting being made, that painting celebrating Scott Burns and Enlightenment, all of these things begin to lose stock to some extent and the Enlightenment especially as the 20th century wears on in some quarters is seen as Anglo-centric on Scottish and some people in literary criticism who talk about Robert Burns say we get the Enlightenment on the one hand, the posh bit of Scottish culture and we get Burns the folk bit sort of on the other side and never between shall meet and that is a ludicrous over simplification as I'm going to suggest tonight so I want to hold that painting in mind and perhaps come back to it. So the Scottish Enlightenment the context in which Robert Burns is born essentially in 1759 at the high point of the Enlightenment in many ways it's the very year in which he's born that one of his favourite books is published to which we'll return Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments but I want to begin a wee bit with Francis Hutchison who becomes chair of moral philosophy here in 1729 he's an Irishman and he's seen as the father of the Scottish Enlightenment in gender terms that we probably wouldn't salute these days but Hutchison is seen as the man who opens up Scottish education to Enlightenment so some obvious points he's one of the first people instead of lecturing in Latin at this university as we did in the good old days he lectures in English and that is seen as one of the enlightened enabling gestures undertaken by Hutchison. Hutchison also develops a philosophy of the inner sense the idea that inherently through it very generally we have an instinctive sense of right and wrong we know this from our conscience or our souls and Hutchison was a presbyterian clergyman but the Glasgow Presbytery attempted to have him done for heresy for these views because they wanted the idea centre stage that we rely on faith alone that hardline Calvinist idea so it doesn't matter whether you're good or bad it doesn't matter about your morality that wishy washy liberal nonsense it's all about faith but the charges against Hutchison are kicked out and that tells us that to some extent things were changing although not completely because I've get some good things to say about hardline Calvinism you weren't expecting that on a a january evening but Hutchison's idea of the inner sense the idea that we apprehend from the soul that we know goods and bads and we've got an inherent sense of rights Hutchison is foundational in the modern discourse of rights of human rights although the the term human rights really is a 20th century invention but the idea that we know instinctively about things being right and wrong and it doesn't matter whether we're a Christian or a Hindu or an atheist or where we are in history according to Hutchison and the Calvinist really didn't like this we all have that instinctive inner sense of goodness and this Hutchisonian philosophy which is imparted to the likes of Thomas Reed's who develops common sense philosophy which is a bit similar I'm not going to say too much with that and also his pupil Adam Smith this is part of the soup in which Robert Burns swims and if we were to take a very small example of that we might turn for instance to his epistle to Davy written in 1785 where he says the heart's eye the part eye that Max is right to rank we know instinctively when things are right or wrong each of us has that individual moral agency and Burns is very much pushing that philosophical idea of inner sense or common sense part that one for just now the bet noir of the Scottish church much more than Hutchison was the atheistical philosopher David Tum the greatest philosopher ever produced in the British Isles and normally was an atheist Tum for complicated philosophical reasons was skeptical about our ability to apprehend reality we think what we see is real we think we observed for instance cause and effects but David Tum deconstructs all of these things and he says to put it crudely very often our senses our perceptions a bit unlike Hutchison are things we can't rely on and very often we approach things with prejudices or through previous associations and that idea of prejudice which becomes a big matter of debate in the Scottish enlightenment is something that Burns picks upon which I'm going to return to and again it's channeled through one of Burns's favourite favourite levels the greatest Scottish novel of the 18th century the bias mott expedition of Humphrey clinker 1771 and this is a novel that riffs on humane skepticism and says that very often we see the world wrongly my favourite example in the whole book is a bunch of maids are skinny dipping in Loch Lomond's and the lair comes along almost twirling his moustache enjoying what he's seeing and the girls are embarrassed and so they run out of the law covering their own eyes and this is a kind of joke on by small it on Tum's idea that often we perceive wrongly and this is an idea that Burns is very aware of credurist perception the most stupid character in the novel is traveling from england's and she doesn't want to go to scotland because she's heard that all you have to eat there are sheep's heads and it takes her 20 pages to work out where there are sheep's heads there must also be sheep's bodies she's also scared that she's going to drown on the journey to scotland she doesn't realise that scotland and england are not separated by a sea and the serious points apart from ideas about prejudice or related to prejudice being made by smaller is after the union of 1707 if we are to live together in the united kingdom then we need to understand one another's cultures and again we can do something on this with Burns because that prejudice of its sheep's heads takes us all the way to Burns's to a hagas which is a comical poem to a large extent but there's also a serious point being made by Burns that hagas simple foods is what makes scotland great he says hagas and forage even though he didn't much eat hagas oops i've said it um what Burns is interested in when he writes oed to hagas a bit like smaller and Humphrey Clinker is the idea of primitive conceptions of culture and civilisation and what Burns is responding to like smaller is a kind of English prejudice that the jocks eat byl muck and Burns turns this on its head and says it's simple foods that makes us healthy and robust and in a way he's quite right because the 18th century is a time when we're beginning to mass produce breads for instance and make it artificially white it's the beginning of mcdonaldization and mass consumption of foods so Burns's point about keeping it simple keeping it real is quite a kind of healthy point and it comes out of these enlightenment debates now my usual joke about sympathy is that Oprah Winfrey did not invent it it was invented in fact by Adam Smith in the aforementioned theory of moral sentiments 1759 a book that Burns often reads and he reads also uh Burns also reads Smith's wealth of nations so if you get through the correspondence you can find him writing to his bosses in the exercise and saying i'm been a very good boy i'm boring up on my economics i'm boring up in the economy i'm reading the the wealth of nations so this is a man a poet steeped in enlightenment reading but the theory of moral sentiments the book that invents sympathy most ideas are inventions we tend to think that all kinds of things are natural almost nothing is natural everything is is invented if we want to be quite skeptical almost in a humane way the idea of putting ourselves in the place of one another that idea of empathising or being sympathetic towards another individual this is big in the enlightenment and you get bits of this in Francis Hutchison and Adam Smith is the man who really brings it together as a theory now one of the reasons that sympathy becomes a big enlightenment theme in scotland and elsewhere is big broad brushrock here but the 18th century enlightenment to some extent was a reflex against the 17th century where what had we done across Europe we were all ripping each other's guts out over religion over scriptural words we were fighting over abstractions over what a comma might mean um in the bible or where a comma should go and the 18th century to a large extent if we want to explain the enlightenment in very broad term says can we please put away some of that abstract sectarian thinking can we begin begin to develop universal ideas this is why the enlightenment studies um all kinds of things in encyclopedic fashion the encyclopedia is an 18th century invention first of all in France by the likes of Dennis Ditherall Voltaire Rousseau in Scotland the Encyclopedia Britannica is an invention of the Scottish Enlightenment and it's about bringing knowledge out into the open systemising it publishing it and saying that everything can be studied rationally so let's have reason rather than the slaughter of the 17th century where my god were we being unsympathetic to one another and so again sympathy has to be seen against that background I think that's the Valentine's Day uh massacre in France but it makes the point so the 18th century it says can we look at a simpler way of life in some ways a less abstract life of the mind uh where we get debate over religious ideas and this partly explains why Robert Burns presents himself as a rustic or pastoral poet the good life the simple life the straightforward life so it's not just a folk or a popular concept it actually has deep philosophic roots that rusticity and also the verse epistle which I've mentioned already the verse epistle to Davie Burns writes a number of these to individuals where he's talking about politics the weather all kinds of things and poor old Ayrshire thinks they invented the verse epistle that's what farmers always did they wrote verse epistles they were no they did not the verse epistle comes out of literature and more than anyone it comes out of the work of Alexander Pope who at the beginning of the 18th century is saying can we do away with fanaticism can we be urbane can we write verse epistles polite conversational poetry that ranges widely over a number of topics that's the Augustine verse epistle and that's what Robert Burns gets from Alexander Pope in spades and there we might notice nothing wrong with this a strong english influence in literary terms on Burns Burns is as influenced by Alexander Pope as he is by his scott's language predecessor um Alan Ramsey so the theory of moral sentiments by Adam Smith advocating universal sympathy um we're coming up to a lot of commemoration of Adam Smith professor at this university in coming months so you know do look out for that and if we want to apply the idea of sympathy to or within Burns's work we go to one of the most canonical poems to a louse and my usual my usual way of setting this up is to talk about the central character in the poem Jenny who's a babe she's a genuine babe and she knows she's a babe and she knows that all the men in the church are looking at this babe but what she doesn't realise is that she the babe has got an insect crawling on her notice what's going on in the poem no one's paying attention to the minister or gods everyone is looking at something they shouldn't be and no one is quite understanding what's going on that's the essential comedy and Burns in a sense is saying that's the way we all are we're all a bit like Homer Simpson we all get too easily distracted we say yeah I'm going to I'm going to go to this lecture I'm going to listen intently for 50 minutes or I'm going to go to church and I'm going to extract every bit of the the marrow of the preacher's sermon and we don't we don't do it but Jenny's standing there not aware of the male gaze and what it represented yeah they fancy her but they're seeing something else going on and Burns is suggesting in that poem as he berates the louse why would you berate a louse it's a dumb creature he's saying we should remember as human beings that we are part of nature what do we do says Burns or he's narrator in that poem we make up clothes to wear we make up ranks and class distinction we take on airs and graces as he says we get above our station and we should remember sometimes that we're part of the animal kingdom that's part of the message and that's part of the enlightenment material science if you like going on in the poem the end of the poem those famous lines or wood some power the gifted ears to see ourselves as others see us is Burns riffing on Adam Smith Adam Smith says it's good to put ourselves in the place of one another and it's good for other people to see us and Burns is saying wouldn't it be good that if we could see ourselves through other people's eyes and implicitly the answer is no not really because we wouldn't like what we see so he's influenced by Adam Smith but he takes that and he makes a joke so to a louse Scotch's language poem to be out of various native traditions certainly one of those native traditions is Scottish enlightenment philosophy and especially the influence of Adam Smith now one of the ironies of Robert Burns is that very often people say there's the real Robert Burns or I know what Robert Burns represents he would have been a nationalist now he would have been a unionist he would have been a Brexit here now he would have been a remainder etc etc etc and people are desperate to find the solid Robert Burns and there's a kind of irony in that because Burns's promiscuity stay with me on this also included a promiscuous sympathy it's the Adam Smith influence again and that promiscuous sympathy meant that on the one hand he could sympathise with and write a song about Mary Queen of Scots a lot of controversy in a film a few years ago where she's speaking in scots Burns is the first person to make her speak scots Mary Queen of Scots a despotic Stuart Catholic Queen a woman and Burns is sympathising with her at one end of the spectrum and at the other end following the French Revolution Burns writes the solemn league and covenant a small poetic squib that says don't mock the Covenanters down to the enlightenment period the Covenanters there was harsh 17th century Calvinists who said we're not going to let the king or anyone tell us how to worship we before our conscience they were written off as fanatic enlightenment historians begin to revise that and say let's let's look at let's get inside their mind let's be a bit sympathetic and Burns in the solemn league of covenant writes about these guys and gals and says I'm following the French Revolution these also were people who represented freedom and conscience so the Covenanters at one end Mary Queen of Scots at the other Burns knew there was more than one way of being Scottish historically and otherwise promiscuous any sympathy to different parts of historic Scottish identity now I want to take just a wee deed to her for a moment to exemplify again Burns's enlightenment scientific thoughts what we get and even a seemingly very simple song like a red rose is the influence of the pioneering geologist James Hutton and the lines that have been noticed by a number of people where it's quite clear that Burns has been aware of Hutton who's been around for a while but especially from 1785 is publishing in various periodicals and academic proceedings his idea about the earth Hutton especially is interested in deep time he is a forerunner of 19th century geological thought that says the world wasn't made just a few thousand years ago Hutton thinks that the the processes that have shaped the earth continue to shape it and are ongoing even though we can't really see these with the naked eye and he suggests more or less that the earth is constantly changing geologically and otherwise and it's quite clear that Burns picks up in this idea when he talks about his love enduring the law the seas gang drama here and the rocks melt with the sun it's a kind of joke because then that will never happen but he knows it will happen but I won't be around to see it and you can't come back and say you didn't love me long enough but that Huttonian idea is another small example of where Burns is appropriating the thinking of the Enlightenment we get a bit of this again in one of his most famous texts never published in his lifetime sort of and I'll come back to that holy willies prayer and holy willie who is supposedly ostensibly praying to gods but is actually kind of praying to himself saying how great he is says you know how come I'm so great you know one point he says why is it that you're making me a sinner why is it you're making me a fornicator and a drinker I'm a bit puzzled by this because I'm so good I know where it is it's in case I get too proud I've got my sins as well so lucky old willie gets to know that he's superb he's one of the elect he's maybe saved and also he can enjoy his sins and obviously there's a broad comedy but also a subtle psychology in this text and at one point speaking to god willie says what was I or my generation that I should get such exultation I who deserve most just damnation for broken laws 6000 years are my creation for Adam's cause and this is the received wisdom worked out by an Anglican Bishop from his reading of the Bible that the world had been created about 6000 years ago and what Burns is doing here because he knows that Hutton is beginning to suggest that much be much older than that he's got willie being all smug I keep up with developments I know the world is 6000 years old I'm on it I'm a modern man and of course Burns is taking the pee out of that idea you know the supposedly learned willie is not learned at all so again enlightenment ideas being deployed within his poetry now I want to say a wee bit more about holy willies prayer in a specific context vis-à-vis Scottish thought and with regard to what I mentioned at the outset the commander condition poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect published on the 31st of July 1786 612 copies are made and a very good copy these days would be worth anywhere between probably 50 and 80 000 pounds there are 84 copies remaining in the world as far as we know and as I mentioned your previous president from a century and a bit ago owned one of the most sensational copies poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect is very important for not containing holy willies prayer holy willies prayer is written by Burns in 1785 and it's a party poem Burns is acting on behalf of the airshire enlightenment that's a praise whenever I use that I've got a friend who shouts call winning at me as if to just prove there could be any such thing but I'll pass over that holy willies prayer is a poem that according to Burns in manuscripts goes around the country and people use it read it and laugh at the hardline Calvinists the holy willies because the holy willies had pursued some of Burns's friends Gavin Hamilton the lawyer a man to whom one of the poems in the commandant edition is dedicated had been accused of lax church ascendants and perhaps also financial misappropriation by elders like William Fisher and Burns also drags William Alt as minister into it as an example of old-fashioned thinking holy willies prayer is about the old fashioned Calvinists who are not knowledgeable and who are vindictive and nasty and rely on predestination rather than the morality that is advanced by Francis Hutchison and that line of philosophy so there's a kind of composite willy that's a phrase I really shouldn't utter them to talk about Robert Burns there's a composite willy in the poem who stands as the old lick or old light hardline Calvinist and Burns holy willies prayer it's a big hit in the countryside and as a reward for defending men like Gavin Hamilton and Robert Aiken to whom the volume overall is is dedicated these guys take out over a hundred subscriptions themselves out of the 612 to make poems chiefly in the scottish dialect happen if we look at what happens with that subscription list it's the airs of enlightenment it's shopkeepers it's lawyers it's teachers it's whisper it's middle class folk you're making that book happen and Robert Burns is grateful to that moderate middle class airsure enlightenment and the payoff is you know for his service in holy willies prayer and some of the other Kirk or religious satyrs the Freemasons also claim I think with some justification that they're involved there was a lot of overlap between these middle class guys in Freemasonry they say that you know contributions were taken up at lodges and so on but whenever I ask Freemasons about this they can never actually give me the evidence or maybe they don't want to give me the evidence but Freemasonry is also important in Burns's life as part of 18th century thought and I'll say a couple of things about that presently so we've got the Kilmarnock edition a product of the moderate airsure enlightenment and the other thing that we should say which is quite interesting about Burns and here I'm going to be a bit heretical again although actually the facts are quite plain in 1786 one of Burns's Kirk satyrs is the ordination and in the ordination he berates the Kirk Kilmarnock wabsters or leavers who want to elect their own minister and he says of these weavers there are a rough lot they're drunk on brandy and they're also drunk on scripture they're fanatics how dare they want to elect their own minister now this might seem odd to a lot of people who are into Burns because this is Burns at this point quite far away from being the poet of the people he's the poet against the people in some senses and the ordination which again like holy willies prayer lambasts the hardline Calvinist mentality is actually a piece of propaganda and like a lot of propaganda it's unfair and I'll tell you precisely why because these weavers in Kilmarnock and Irvine in that area we now know are at the forefront of abolitionism they're among the first in Scotland to protest against slavery in other words these weavers yeah they're quite hardline Calvinist but progressive politically what was Burns objecting to he was objecting to them electing their own minister in other words Burns as part of the middle class moderate airs and enlightenment we'll get the moderate party we'll get the popular party the popular party of the hardline Calvinist the moderates are the guys that Burns throws his lot in with the moderates believe in the 1712 patronage act which says we're not leaving it to the hoi paloi to appoint ministers it's the landowners and the heritors because they've got the education and they've also got the property and they've been taxed and that's one way in which you kind of frame representation if you're a property owner which 19th century seemed like common sense the 1712 patronage act you know i'm going to be very controversial is more important than the 1707 act of union to everyone bangs on about people are still fighting over the patronage act down to at least the 1920s Burns at this point is very much in favour of the patronage act don't leave the people to appoint their ministers so what changes that attitude to some extent i'll try and tell you that shortly but before we do that i want to say a bit more about religious controversy and the very dark history of this institution in which we're now sitting thank god the principles on tomorrow night and not tonight William McGill is a minister in air and in 1786 the same year that Burns produces his poems chiefly in the scottish dialect William McGill produces a book called practical essay on the divinity of jesus christ and the hardline calvinist gobyn nanos because according to them he doesn't say enough about salvation and the sacrifice on the cross it's all wishy washy morality and so on and the hardline calvinists actually raise an action against McGill for heresy and this rumbles on to at least 1790 and McGill is a great friend of Robert Burns and in a number of places Burns defends uh William McGill who really is you know he's being pursued by quite a vindictive pack of hardline calvinists um as late as 1789 his song the kirks alarm um satirical song refers to a man called William Peebles that's poet willy poet willy gi the doctor of ollie because William Peebles the other minister in air too clergyman fighting who would have thunk it William Peebles is one of the pack who are out for the blood of William McGill for his 1786 heresy supposedly and Burns satirizes William Peebles in the kirks alarm William Peebles is the man who in 1811 publishes a pamphlet called Burnomania and everyone thinks it's like beatomania um Peebles is just talking about the fanaticism of Burns well there's some truth in that that the reason that Peebles publishes this he wants to say to Scotland don't you remember this poet he's a moral he's a drunkard don't celebrate him that went well um but Burnomania is precisely 15 years or so after 14 years after Burns's death the hardline calvinists remember this and they're pursuing him and a lot of this was over the McGill case William Peebles the other minister at mayor at air and his colleagues produced pamphlet after pamphlet and the course against McGill goes through different stages in the church of Scotland until eventually more or less in 1790 the general assembly kicks it out and a wee interesting thing just to put a wee bit of heresy in there I discovered a couple of years ago the lawyer the main lawyer for those looking to prosecute William McGill was Thomas Muir of Hunters Hill the supposed apostle of democracy and um Alex Salmond in the past is not like me saying this because he wants Burns and Muir to be two peas in a pod whether or not because Muir is popular party and Burns is moderate party but both sides in some ways are enlightened Thomas Muir is genuinely interested in democracy he's sent to botany bay for 14 years in the 1790s is progressive in all kinds of ways but religiously he's quite conservative so there's more than one enlightenment there's a hardline Calvinist enlightenment attacking slavery um foregrounding the case for democracy and there's the moderate enlightenment which is conservative politically but morally less uptight and that's the bit that Burns belongs to at least to begin with the thing I always say just to really irritate people that if we do a wee bit of counterfactual history Burns in 1795 joins the Dumfries militia because he's fearful as others are that the French might invade and Thomas Muir was in France eventually in the late 1790s and if Burns had lived a couple of years longer and if the French had invaded and their intention was to invade and to install Thomas Muir as the first first minister of Scotland then Burns would have been shooting at Muir we shouldn't be scared of these different aspects of Scottish culture these different aspects of enlightenment indeed these different aspects of religious identity so that religious controversy over how we see ourselves morally how we couch theological and moral thought is very much part of the fabric of Burns's poetry and that's an enlightenment debate and it gets very vicious here at the University of Glasgow I'm probably going to draw a veil over that one of the one of the biggest nutters in this whole thing is John Anderson the professor of natural philosophy who quite rightly is seen as the founder of the University of Strachlide I better be very careful at this point. Anderson leaves money for what becomes the Andersonian Institute which comes to University of Strachlide and the University of Strachlide quite rightly points to a phrase in Anderson's well that says this will be a place of useful learning great what's not to like the phrase that they never boast about is that Anderson also says and the new place is going to be a sound seminary it's not going to be one of those backsliding moderate presbyterian places with the University of Glasgow it's going to be hardline Calvinist the Strachlide never ended up like that but that was kind of what Anderson was looking for those the days when the professor he was professor of divinity at one point as well as professor of natural philosophy and he had a square go with two other professors and he attacked one of these students with a spike these would these would be HR issues these days but in the 18th century things were much more lax. John Anderson is a big influence on Thomas Muir and Anderson and these professors at University of Glasgow don't might much like burns for those reasons of religious thoughts. Now I'm sure you have I'm going to do some book history very briefly let's get really boring about it. I showed you before very briefly the title page of poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect published by John Wilson the printer in Kilmarnock and it was only recently the American scholar who told me about your president in 1901 he's got a great nose for sniffing out things this man discovers that the one version of holy willies prayer that appears in burns his lifetime a chatbook version in 1789 which we all thought was unofficial was pirated was almost certainly licensed by burns how do we know this because the ornament on the chatbook version of holy willies prayer is an upside down version you're going to see this very well of yeah it's really quite familiar to see of the Kilmarnock edition in other words this is from burns his own printer we now know this was printed by John Wilson ergo it comes with the imprimatur of Robert Burns himself why does it appear in 1789 burns once his poem back out there he's greatest back out there but it's not new to me but it's out there he wants out there because 1789 is when Thomas Muir and the others are at the high point of prosecuting William McGill so these religious wars are there for a long time it's not just that burns is attacking religious hypocrisy that's how we tend to read burns these days stripped of that full historic context of religious history we should realise that burns is a party poet on one side that might not always be completely right so just to bring that back into view in terms of 18th century stories there's Muir of Hunters Hill there's Anderson I've argued recently with a colleague that um there's the famous story of burns sending cannons to France which is highly improbable for all kinds of reasons but we found a letter where Anderson is offering the French a cannon and we think what's happened is that Anderson scientists the gun maker among other things that legend of Anderson sending guns to the French has been stripped off him and sellotaped onto burns because that's the kind of thing that happens with burns uh the superman or as my friend Donnie Erop says the superman um this these are these are the way in which kind of myths are creeped and uh are sellotaped to people now just to move towards an end in terms of thought in the 18th century what is it that sort of changes burns his ideas and I've mentioned this already his celebration of the Covenanters as representatives of freedom and conscience in a sense of egalitarianism brotherhood it's the French revolution and there is a burns before and after 1789 burns was to some extent not all that much influenced by Thomas Payne who's on the screen when Payne is the architect of the American revolution Payne is one of the giants of 18th century thought in providing the under felt both for the American and the French revolutions his pamphlet common sense not to be confused with work on common sense by Thomas Reid is mass produced 100 000 copies go to George Washington and his troops and others around it's part of the propaganda that allows the Americans to take heart against the Brits the Americans are told by Thomas Payne among other things no taxation without representation nor that he meant that Thomas Payne says you don't need a king or a queen or monarchy basically what you need is a kind of democracy and you don't need property either I prefer the early part of the discussion Payne in other words is at least a proto and before long a full republican and it's that republicanism also that allows him when he writes the rights of man in 1791 to respond to and further the intellectual context in the French revolutionaries who killed their king and Payne is blowing them up in general terms we're saying you don't need royalty everyone is royal the royalty of man which is a phrase that comes up again in burns and in one of the most famous songs is there for honest poverty a man's a man for all that in 1795 we see some clever stuff coming together that sums up where burns is in terms of 18th century scottish and indeed western thought in general he's very clever because he's an excise man at this point he works for the British crown he needs to be careful and the poem appears in newspapers and it's set to a Jacobite tune so you can say it it's a Jacobite tune it's not revolutionary it's also couched in freemasonic terminology that man to man the world or so brothers not me go freemasonic song it's not a political song it's a Jacobite freemasonic but it's quite clear that the vocabulary of Payne is inside there about each individual being all the royalty that you need it is burns his hyn to democracy following the French revolution it is the point when noticeably or even a wee bit before this he is less hardline in his ideas about patronage he believes much more in democracy before 1789 he didn't have the vocabulary of the French revolution and of Payne that's what he gets so whisper it isn't just his innate scottish populist demotic common sense because the scots are just like that on our english et cetera et cetera these stupid myths that we get a lot of this is coming from the republicanism of Thomas Bayne was burns a republican we can discuss that potentially a moment there's a lot of complicated debate around that but certainly burns is expressing democratic borderline republican ideas which means that we've gone all the way from the 17th century internet sign religious wars civil war including and ideas about patronage all the way to the end of the 18th century where burns is very much the modern man and quite rightly as he's often acclaimed to be a poet of democracy and of individual rights and I'll leave it there thank you now wasn't that fascinating in a moment or two we're going to start the Q&A so if you have your questions ready could you be raising your hands please do we have any questions hello could you say a bit more about burns and slavery is it the case that he almost took a job in the Caribbean and how would that fit in with the Enlightenment views I'll need to be very careful I'm doing GB news on this on Tuesday and I see that Sir Tom was going off on in the Herald yesterday I say that with affection about this issue um it is indeed the case that burns thought about going to be a bootkeeper and sometimes people say that gets them out of jail it doesn't in a letter in 1787 burns proves that he knew exactly what he's going to say that I was going to be a negro driver so burns at a certain point when he felt his prospects here were diminished like many well educated reasonably well educated young Scottish men saw the possibility of making a fortune in the western news that's the naked version of it and in a sense there's no excuse for that except to say that everyone in that society and arguably down to the present day is one now saying is complicit one way and another in that slave economy so he certainly thinks about doing that but the great thing that annoys the people that really want to nail on this he didn't go why didn't you go there's a lot of mystery around this but again it's 1786 when he seems to be thinking of going there with Mary Campbell Highland Mary and there's a lot of controversy and mystery around that he keeps booking his passage and never showing up for the ship I'm not sure he really wanted to go for various reasons but again 1786 this is when his political ideas are still maturing and he hasn't yet had the french revolution you look at the french revolution and the period after that that's when we begin to get burns his interest in songs like the slaves lament so we see something that's clearly sympathetic towards the plight of the slaves that says I think we would also say objectively in some ways burns isn't huge in the interested nation maybe he's not all that well informed he doesn't go there as much as some other writers including some writing writers the one of the ones that I always quote is a little known poet William Campbell who hates the french revolution who publishes in the Glasgow herald in the 1790s who's party to the building of the infirmary very charitable very active citizen of Glasgow he writes against slavery much more fully than burns does so that's where we are with burns and you're right it doesn't fit in with his radical CV all that well certain other things don't either to be honest but he certainly thinks about going to the plantations as many others did including for a time the first editor of his work James Currie who publishes the first collected burns in Liverpool Currie had been part of that and Currie became quite a radical figure in favour of the rights of prisoners of war and other kind of lefty pinko causes so people can change their attitudes and the other thing where we get into quite deep water is we all think we know we're in the right side of history we're quite smug in the 21st century what we've got to realise in the 18th and 19th centuries down to the development of German higher criticism of the Bible blackness was a problem for white folks because they took it as red that some disaster must have happened to make people black and they read this in Old Testament terms so even some of the people who were against slavery still saw black folk as lesser human beings that's the that's a rather horrible reality but one we shouldn't shy away from and it's when German higher criticism comes on says don't read the Bible literally that people begin to say yeah thank god we're free from all that racist and other nonsense but the whole idea of racism and of developing idea or right ideas about kicking racism out these in many ways are only becoming fully fledged in the 20th century and to a large extent it's even a post holocaust phenomenon what's happening in here tomorrow night the commemoration of the horrible holocaust we held on as western civilisation to the most disgusting racist ideas for a long time and we still haven't got rid of them so we need to be careful about judging historical figures in the 18th century we face up to the truth works and all but we should always be aware of the kind of the dodgy thinking that lurks and all of us are even down to the present day and the Enlightenment was interested in that too the Enlightenment knew that we could be civilised and also very primitive very visceral the Enlightenment said more often than being rational we're emotional but that can come with a price it comes with the price of prejudice of racism sexism all of those kind of things so i think we should be very careful about our own place in history i want to read history not judge it or at least i don't want to judge it definitively is absolutely good or bad not least when we never know the full circumstances so that's not an attempt to get burns off the hook he doesn't deserve to be off the hook but we need to see burns and his attitudes in the round when i wrote an essay on this more than 10 years ago i get quite a bit of the anonymous bone abuse tell me what an effing via was for for act daring to to raise this topic and at that point i'm on doing my job properly to help us a simple but difficult question if you were to recommend just one book to cover this period what would it be oh my goodness there are different tests and different things you you might look at but i would i would recommend if you want to go in uh to some depth um the Cambridge history of the Enlightenment edited by alexander brody but there are many other books that you can that you can follow on from from that there are studies of smith than touches and and others but yeah i would i would start with the the work of brody lovely man that he is and a dear colleague other other other versions are available this is a gentleman over there with his hand up but not his arms oh sorry a woman sorry i thank you for your talk um i'm probably showing up my complete ignorance of my there's the church i was brought up in but in his poem epitaph to a friend no there's lovely last two lines there if there's another world he lives in bliss if there is none he made the best of this was that kind of a common would would he be unusual in saying if there's if there's another world he lives in bliss one of the reasons that robert burnes is able to say to that is able to say that is because his successful career as a poet and even as an exciseman to some extent allows him cultural mobility had he stayed in the one place in ersia that would quite dodgy to say because that expresses the possibility that god doesn't exist now i think that burns sincerely believed in god i think the evidence points towards that but he has these moments where reading david tomb or adam smith he was probably an atheist or others he entertains doubts and in a way that's quite an optimistic poem because it says if there's gods a god it's a benign god and again that's part of his he's kicked back against the hardline illness if there isn't a god things are still worthwhile because there's love etc so he's expressing views there that are not entirely typical but have the roots in a book produced by his father william burness for him and his brother gilbert when they're young boys a manual of religious belief william burness was not a hardline calvinist although he really didn't like his son going dancing he thought that would lead to no we're not doing that joke uh or the other way or anyway you know what i'm going um but what what william burness thought was that um basically you couldn't pin faith down absolutely that was a wee bit heretical you know you couldn't get everything from the good book the good book was the good book and it was useful but very often you had to interact with the world and judge it and that's kind of what burns is saying there and they are rather lovely thoughts now you know i think great you know if there's if there's god if there's a god i want him to be a good god and if there's not a good god i want humans to be good to be good that's essentially what he's saying there uh the gentleman here who's that thanks on thanks very much great talk short question did burns change his attitudes towards the french revolution given the way it played out yeah well i think what you're probably rightly referring to there is some of the controversy over what burns believed during world war one william will who was the president of the london burns club rediscovered an important document and that document was the minute book of the dimfries volunteers and the long-standing idea that you still get by the the most hard line lefties apropos burns is he'd never really wanted to be in the militia he only went in there to as a as a kind of cover um but what the minute book revealed was that burns was one of the few guys who was never fine for misbehaviour he was always on time his buttons were always well polished he liked being a soldier because it was quite a good look with the lassies for one thing and during world war one this was very emotive because william will says here we have definitive proof that burns was a true patriot now you need to unpack that a wee bit this is during world war one uh the carnage involving britain germany and all these other countries and people are losing relatives all the time and william will well he publishes it just after world war one amid this very emotional context he's saying don't doubt that burns was a true patriot but what does that mean and burns was used in recruiting posters at world war one and beyond well what he was patriotic about in the dimfries volunteers was protecting britain from invasion by from france but i don't think his ideas had changed he's still basically believed in the basic tenets the french revolution but a very basic truth is that invasions are never a good thing even the good guys come in to invade is a bit scary when i was a member of student cnd many years ago i remember having a recurring nightmare i was in queen street and suddenly soviet troops would come down each side and it was a really scary dream and i've kind of wondered what that was about but this kind of relates to that i mean i was never particularly pro-soviet but the idea that just because you agree with certain foreign politics you like them to come in and start marching all over you is is a different reality and also what burns was aware of edmund burk in many ways got it right edmund burk called the french revolution out not long after it happened and said this is going to lead to madness and carnage and fanatical violence and in some ways it did so there are all these complexities around that and burns when he was in the excise service and again people he was he never wanted to be in there burns at a great time in the excise service he was with a bunch of like-minded men who all as we all do let me be very careful here think their bosses are idiots i don't think my bosses are idiots um and they would ride around the country he'd be collecting songs spoiling the folk of the the fun of the common folk he wanted to distill illicit beer or spirits or whatever and you look at those excise guys many of whom joined with them freeze volunteers they're all political lefties so just because they're in there doesn't mean they don't retain a progressive political mentality so that's the kind of thing we get going going going on there there's this sort of false thing about oh when he joined them freeze volunteers era canty no he didn't but equally he wasn't welcoming the french to invade interestingly the elster scots poets uh protestant protestants and catholics who are part of the united irishman that end up in the failed rebellion in 1798 when the the freeze volunteers song gets into the elster press they'll take the view our boys sold us out burns was their poster boy and at that point they don't like him but remember how did them freeze volunteers ends although we'll sing god save the king will never forget the people and that word the people was synonymous with the friends of people founded by errol gray in the 1790s as a movement for nonviolent reform and so for burns to signal that word people even though it was a nonviolent movement by the time we get to the 1790s the british government are terrified of the people that's a french idea it stands for democracy democracy and the people these are words almost like al-qaeda so far as the 1790s british authorities are concerned so the elster radicals who were usually quite smart men and good poets they didn't quite read that carefully enough again as with a man's a man it's coded burns is often very coded and that's where the idiots that want burns to give us you know straightforward political polemic he's a poet he's not really a polemicist and often he is subtle and coded so we need to read him with a bit of nuance both in his lifetime and in the text that he produces just a lady up here yes she's got a hand up just now and you started off here and lecture with that and 78 93 picture right sorry you started off your lecture with that 1893 painting of burns and so water scott allegedly meeting her and water scott was 50 years old but the term the whole purpose of the picture was to place them both within the same enlightenment movement and you said that um burns his reputation after that had changed into more of a poet you did say you would say a bit more about that later but i'm not sure that i'm not sure that you did and and how much of that is due to us you know you just gave an example of him being used on a recruiting poster and i'm being you know there is a representation of patriotism in the first world war but how much of the change in his reputation from that what that picture tells us is due to the way that we're looking back and reinterpreting history by the ideas of our times okay thank you for that um so the what the painting shows as you say is burns and scott together and one of the points we might make about that is that burns and scott are very similar and again the bampock version of scottish cultural history doesn't want to know this burns good scott bad nationalist unionist man of the people tory but both burns and scott are doing the same thing they're both antiquarians they're both disinterring folk culture folk song which in itself is an enlightenment project and at the time that painting is made in 1793 scottland is proud of all that later on as some critical narratives evacuate the enlightenment as a good thing they want something more authentically folk and that is part of the reason that burns becomes ever more seen as a folk poet but the other thing i might throw in here is something i alluded to burn mania in 1811 burns in many ways was unpopular in his lifetime certain circles like him but your your lots of these calmness congregations hated him and with some justification and it's only really when we get into the 19th century and beyond and the burns movement largely sculpted by the moderate presbyterian the reverend hamilton paul and burn celebration takes on quasi masonic forum down to what we have in the present day it's in the 19th century that burns begins to become the poet of scottlands in a way that he never was in his lifetime suddenly he's seen as a poet for all scots and that's kind of justified but in his own day the hardline calvinist who were perhaps in the majority really didn't fancy him much so burns his popularity increases through the 19th century and for instance our great Mitchell library acquires a burns collection in the 1880s and if you look at burns collecting burns becomes a respectable subject for collecting round about the 1870s onwards and that accelerates through into the 20th century and you can see the construction of burns the poet of the people burns the folk poet but also it's a wee bit complicated burns the masonic poet burns the other thing so the reputation does shift and you're right we read burns through the lens of our own ideas this happens time and time again he was a jacobite why was he a jacobite people puzzle over this what they don't notice is that being a jacobite in favour of the catholic charles edward stewart that was so guaranteed to go up the noses of the hardline calvinist that's part of the reason there's a jacobite and it's also he quite liked the romantic naughty boy reputation and he liked to parade again his promiscuous sympathy in inventing the jacobite folk song the jacobites like mary queen of scots they were losers they were fanatics about what the covenanters they were out the picture what we got today jacobite culture was at the mainstream hearts of scottish folk culture and even political culture so that the smp and not only the smp will refer to jacobite songs so all these bits of marginalised history are brought in from the cold by burns and burns himself over time he didn't just arrive and everyone went hooray it's robert burns they arrived they went on not not him we don't like him and over time his popularity increases and also changes and we're coming full circle now where people are making asinine comparisons with sex pests and claiming that it was a rapist and they do this on the basis of the horse litter letter i may as well go for this one now and that's the one where he boasts about having sex with his wife gene armer on the barn floor and people say that was rape because he's so joyous well the question i've got for the people that claim that is rape is he also says in that letter we did it until she cried out for joy are these people terminally is that rape victims enjoy being raped because that's the logic of that piece of evidence if they want to claim that rape this is modern day overzealous sexual morality taken to the extent of bullshit and we need to call that out and do the history properly avoid that one in gb news i think precisely bit precisely because they love it do we have an online question question at the very back thank you um that was uh an excellent talk um a very cheeky and actually two questions one is on the enlightenment where we focused obviously in the uk and they're looking at west but in my experience um uh just talking to russians and indeed ukrainians that i know i mean barns has had a huge influence over there probably jettisoning some of the local moderate and populist cavalier stuff enroute and i any comments you have on that i would appreciate the other is maybe slightly more technical but lord kinds uh who was also a big scottish um uh figure at that time wrote this book called equity because he's a jurist i think a lot of people think it's about equity as an english law which is irrelevant but it was a lot about social justice and i'd be interested in how you think that it needs and sunburns yeah i think i caught the first part of that i'm not sure about the second but you can you can maybe kindly reprise that um one of the interesting things about bunzi's popularity in russia is a it's genuine but b it's a bit bent and i'll tell you how we know from the translations by the likes of samuel marsak who was a great translator in all kinds of ways once we look at what was actually being said we get bunzi's folk songs about maybe the scots against the english and the russians do not like that especially under stalling so the terms are changed instead of scots in english because the russians are scared of nationalism they don't want any national dissent given the nature of their soviet empire instead of scots in english it becomes proletariat and landlords they end up distorting the text in many ways and bunzi's amazing in having a reach in soviet russia in fact a popularity in russia before the soviet period on the one hand and on the other held up as a great example by republicans and i mean modern day republicans in america as an example of the kind of guy if you get the talent you can make it happen held up as a version of the american dream and i suppose the point i'm simply making there is that bunzi's very portable is very malleable according to whatever politics you might want and part of that then is making him an international indeed a world writer which he truly is and some of that is a bit accidental some of it is because of the greatness of his writing uh old lang sign is a good example of that becoming synonymous with new year and especially new york it's because the guy lambardo dance band adopted these things happen accidentally and because in the age of radio the technology is there to make him a world writer so this great poet that i would say is indeed a great poet we have to be aware of the accidental contingencies of history that transmit reputation and work it'd be a good enlightenment thing to think about genius the enlightenment was very interested in genius and kind of believed in that to some extent but also the enlightenment you that genius could be smothered or that things might suddenly become all their age even though they're not worth investing in so the enlightenment begins to pioneer ideas of civilisation and what we value in civilisation and some of the stuff we don't value in burns at certain points was a wee bit uncomfortable as a celebrity and of course celebrity culture is all the rage these days and the enlightenment really was a bit sceptical about celebrity and their poor old burns and enlightenment finds himself a celebrity one of the first celebrities and that curious thing where he's a celebrity in some circles and as i mentioned earlier he's unpopular and everything is a bit mixed i'm not sure i caught the second part would you try using the microphone please very much sorry i mean i was talking about a lot of times who is quite a significant jurist in the mid 18th century i think he's my view his biggest work was called equity and because that can be regarded as a legal concept it's sometimes just brushed aside as you know old law but it was actually much more in my view about well what we would now call social justice and equity among human beings i mean i have no knowledge of whether burns was influenced by it and i just wondered if you had any uh yeah my one response to that would be burns is very interesting when he satirizes ecclesiastical as well as civil courts in for instance the fornicator's court in poems like the court of equity he is fascinated by legal vocabulary and when he gets to Edinburgh in his first flush of fame he is lionized by men from the faculty of advocates including William Erskine so he's imbibing their argo he's listening to their ideas he is encountering a lot of lawyers so church law university all that stuff is up for grabs and burns is like a wee boy in a sweety shop especially when we get to Edinburgh he wants to think about all of that and the other thing about burns which you know no one ever says it but it's patently obvious burns is an intellectual and he's good at taking ideas and expressing them creatively on like most writers dinner now did i say that i fear i did did we have another question from anyone oh yes we do should we go on to spec service i am not a burns fan and i came along tonight to learn and i have learned and thank you very much but the thing that fascinates me is really related to the first question at the back why do the russians admire burns so much in fact they appear to admire more than we do and they have quite a different culture they have a xarist culture and they need a strong leader and burns wasn't really in favour of either was he no i think the basic reason and this goes back to xarist russia it's pre-soviet russia burns so obviously wrote about peasant themes and russia was such an overwhelmingly peasant country and was always a bit fearful um and you know we get down to the enlightenment and time of kathryn the gray and times when russia is mimicking western enlightenment it's very aware of itself as a peasant culture as a backward culture and the west pre-soviet could often be quite racist towards russia as a backward peasant society a bit a bit like the way in which britain is treated island historically and i think those peasant themes make burns of interest and very portable and that really explains why in the 19th century we begin to get translations of burns' peasant folk songs basically and then of course when we get to the soviet era he is reinvented as the proletarian poet par excellence and we can see with poems like a man's a man the way in which those anti monarchical ideas as with the french revolution suit those who have overthrown uh the romanovs etc xarist russia so that's the broad outline of what's going on there and a lot more could be said the russians have him on a stamp before we do and there is a kind of different cult of burns there there's more than one cult of burns and there is sincere interest in burns i did quite an interesting moment where i've been very good terms with um burns his chief chinese translator and i accidentally hit an earth because he was explaining to me the 10 translators in china since 1945 and what they did i said they're clearly taking all this from the the soviet transit not at all the chinese we've done it all ourselves we have not looked at all to russia and it's kind of interesting the way in which different cultures think that they to some extent with justification are producing their own version of burns and one of the hotspots just now i know this because pre-pandemic i was literally touring china giving talks on burns china is the place where burn studies is really taking off at the moment and there's going to be a lot more on that in future now if we're to be slightly sentimental and sloppy about it which occasionally i can be i would say this is because of a kind of innate brilliance in burns which i believe is there an innate attractiveness but a lot of this is driven by predetermined reputation and the notion that his politics are next door to communism so that the indian communist party the indians struggle against the brits um down to the 1940s burns has a lot of traction in bangladesh burns has attraction in their war against pakistan he's quite an easy off the peg poet of national protest protest against injustice because he did write about these things so it seems to be that he is the most portable poet that we've got because those political ideas even though in the 18th century burns knew about republicanism but he'd no access to modern ideas of nationalism or socialism so again we need to be very careful no problem with using things for almost whatever you want almost but again we need to keep them in this historical context and actually people will use and abuse things and we can't legislate for that and we'll see where else burns pops up because they're going to pop up in other places in other cultures and other nations in the future and it keeps me in a job so i'm not complaining right now we've got a final question from the man writes at the back hello uh just to follow on from your your last answer is there some relation between tegor and burns i not not really um except the people that follow to goer want to make a connection and they're entitled to do that and again it's the idea of poets of the people and let's uh look at them together for a while in this city we had the nasral burn centre celebrating that Bengali poet and there's been several poets from the indian subcontinent who've been compared to burns and again you see the burns effect writing about subsistence peasantry writing about supposedly primitive societies which burns did with scotland because right there wrong it was often seen as primitive especially compared to england so that portability again of the peasant theme works quite naturally in the context of poets like the goer and the natural and others now i'm sure you will all wish to join with me in thanking jerry for this absolutely fascinating talk i'm sure we've all learnt something and i think yes even those people who knew a lot about burns before they arrived will have learned from this experience so if we could thank jerry in the usual way please