We like to think of Burns as one of us. He isn't.

The
Birthday
Boy I
Kenneth Roy

Visitors' book at Mossgiel, once home of Robert Burns

After several years of attending and addressing Burns Suppers in Ayrshire, the myth underpinning these annual rituals slowly occurred to me.
     The myth could be partially obscured by erudition. One year at the Alloway Burns Supper, in a village hall a few yards from the birthplace, my fellow speakers were the Kilmarnock dominie and Labour politician Willie Ross, variously known as the Hammer of the Nats and Old Basso Profundo, and the bow-tied poet and broadcaster Maurice Lindsay. Boy, did they know their stuff. I felt like an imposter.
     The myth could be partially obscured by whisky. I drank rather a lot of it then. In the village of Barr, I delivered the toast to the Immortal Memory and sat back well satisfied, determined to enjoy the rest of the night. A few hours later, the chairman whispered in my ear. 'You do know,' he said, 'it's a tradition here that the main speaker proposes another toast at the end?' I did not. I was driven home in time for breakfast by one of the local double-s Fergussons; perhaps the one who is now the presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament, perhaps not. Anyway, he had a beard. I remember the beard.
     The myth could be partially obscured by character. I surveyed the massed ranks of the male population of the village of Dailly; there could have been few absent. I neither enjoy nor approve of all-male gatherings, but this was an exception. As I delivered the speech – yet another Immortal Memory – I suddenly felt moved, almost to tears, by the rapt attention of these men with their Ayrshire faces, in their formal, old-fashioned suits. It seemed that they had stepped from the pages of Robert Burns's collected works. I sensed strongly for the first time that, in this workaday village, I had reached the heart of Scotland. It is not an emotion I have experienced since, but it was deeply affecting for the hour or so it lasted.
     Yet, although it could be partially obscured in these or other ways, there was no denying the existence of the myth or its hold on the national consciousness. In our collective imagination Robert Burns has ceased to be what he was and has been transformed into a caricature. It is significant that at the average Burns Supper, the most anticipated turn, the highlight of the occasion, is the toast to The Lassies, a knockabout affair often entrusted to some coarse local comic. It is during this speech that the caricature emerges in all its disfiguring horror: 'Rabbie' (never Robert) as the typical Ayr United supporter, constantly on the pull (wink-wink), knocking it back big time after the gemme (nudge-nudge), generally A Bit Of A Lad. Suddenly, once a year, there is somewhere to put all that national guilt about sex, faithlessness and booze; someone to hang it on; a forgiving recipient of all our excuses. 'Rabbie' is worth celebrating because 'Rabbie' eases the pain.
     But that is the least of the myth. We then go further and try to pretend, because it suits our shallow vanity to do so, that Robert Burns was – is – one of us. He isn't. To understand why, we need to de-construct the reputation of Burns as an ill-educated peasant; and then we need to take a hard look at ourselves.

Though it suits our purposes to imagine otherwise, Burns was brought up in a family environment of culture and learning. His father, William, highly intelligent, well-read, deeply serious, would have loathed the typical Burns Supper, repelled as he was by all forms of ribaldry; nor was he an admirer of the Scots vernacular, insisting that English be spoken in the home.
     He was so concerned for his sons' education that he removed them from the village school, whose standards he considered lax, and set up a small independent school for Robert, his brother Gilbert and a few others, hiring an idealistic teacher, John Murdoch, then still in his teens. Murdoch, despite his youth, was no pushover; his regime was disciplinarian, his curriculum demanding. At the age of six, Robert Burns was 'substituting synonyms', 'supplying ellipses', turning verse into prose, paraphrasing, and learning passages from Shakespeare by heart. When he failed to sing the Psalms to Murdoch's satisfaction, he was thrashed with the tawse.
     Out of school, Robert and his brother were given books for their further enlightenment. They included – it is worth naming them, if only in the cause of destroying the myth – 
     Salmon's 'Geographical Grammar'
     Dorham's 'Physico- and Astro-Theology'
     Hervey's 'Meditations among the Tombs'
     Ray's 'Wisdom of God and the Creation'
     Taylor's 'On Original Sin'
     At night, Robert's father took from the shelf a book of geography, theology or natural history for the instruction of his children. As Catherine Carswell wrote in her definitive biography of Burns: 'To him [Robert], the nature of a book had been made so very sacred that to the end of his life he could never surely discriminate between a good book and a bad one.'
     By the age of 14 he was teaching himself the rudiments of Latin, though it bored him. France excited him a great deal more.
     This, then, was the early life of Robert Burns.

What of ourselves – the Burns idolaters – and our own lives 250 years on? The reverence for books has largely disappeared. In the Ayrshire town of Irvine, where Burns was introduced to the Scots ballads by the local bookseller, it is no longer possible to buy a book – there is no commercial source. Here in Kilmarnock, where I write this, the town in which Burns had his first edition printed, W H Smith hangs on, promoting the usual collections of cookery recipes, but there is no proper bookshop. It is drearily the same in most Scottish towns. Meanwhile, the public libraries, many created by philanthrophy, including the Carnegie Library in Burns's home town, have been starved of resources and present a sad sight. Such thirst for knowledge as we have seems to be satisfied by the anarchic internet, not by the object considered sacred by the child Robert.
     Despite our many privileges, the reverence for learning seems also to have gone. R F Mackenzie, whose book 'A Search for Scotland' should be a standard text in every secondary school (but I am sure isn't), promoted the heretical belief that it was the policy of successive governments not to educate children. In tenacious pursuit of this policy, successive governments have built a national network of monstrous prison schools, some housing as many as 2,000 inmates, who are expected to pass as many exams as possible in the ludicrous belief that this will somehow equip them for 'real life', whatever that is. We no longer belt them for failing to sing the Psalms to their teacher's satisfaction. The cruelties are subtler now.
     They then proceed, most of the inmates of the prison schools, to some form of higher education, producing at the end of the experience a 'dissertation' full of received wisdom, or lack of it, and from which all original thought has been excised in advance.
     Call this education? Burns was the lucky one.

Robert Burns, then, is not one of us. He is not wandering around Irvine or Kilmarnock looking in vain for a bookshop. He is not surfing the web. He is not condemned to one of the prison schools. He is not writing a dissertation. He is not a product of the Scottish educational 'system'. He is not watching reality TV in a darkened living room. He is not in a pub, staring dully at a screen. He is not addicted to football. He is not attending Burns Suppers. For all these reasons, and thousands more, he is not one of us. He is worth rather better than us. He is that free spirit we should dare to call an artist.