The Romantics and Us with Simon Schama

BBC2/iPlayer

****

HARRY Enfield once had a character who loved to dispense advice. Announcing himself with the cry, “Only me!” the bunnet-wearing pensioner would give chapter and verse on why someone “didn’t want to do that”.

I do not know if Simon Schama is familiar with the early Enfield oeuvre, but given the historian’s knowledge of everything from British and American history to Rembrandt and Donne, I would not rule it out.

In this third part of Schama’s series charting how the Romantics, though they lived and worked centuries ago, created modern life, he looked at nationalism. It was the Romantics, he argued, who conveyed an intense love for the nation, as opposed to monarchs and other rulers, through poetry, music and art.

There was a but coming. A pretty big one. “That same passion, flowing through almost a century of revolution and war, also produced something much darker. An angry twin, the hater of foreigners, the divider of us and them, and that tribal fury is very much with us today.”

Accompanying these words was a montage that began with Nazis and moved on to a National Front rally, an Orange Walk, the pro and anti Scottish independence demonstrations in Glasgow’s George Square after the 2014 referendum, and Donald Trump.

Cue Mr Only Me. “Simon,” he might have said, “lumping Yes supporters in with that parcel of rogues? You really didn’t want to do that ... ”

READ MORE: Burns continues to inspire, Letters

It was a rare misstep in a marvellous series that has looked at artists, musicians and writers from Chopin and Blake to Hugo and Wollstonecraft. This week Schama turned to Burns. Though enthusiastic about all his subjects, his admiration for Scotland’s bard was plain to see. He devoted a third of the hour to Burns, leaving the German and Polish Romantics to duke it out for the rest of the time.

The road to nationalism began more often than not with a sense of loss, argued Schama. In Burns’ case that could be dated to 1707 and the Act of Union.

“Burns knew the Union couldn’t be undone,” said Schama, “but what he could do was create authentically Scottish poetry and a songbook that could hold its own against the oncoming tide of English culture, and in his brilliant hands it worked like a dream.”

One of the strengths of the series has been the choice of performers to bring works alive. To the actor Harriet Walter, who featured in all three episodes, the producers added Eddi Reader (who else?) to sing A Red, Red Rose in Poosie Nansies (where else?).

Reader compared Burns to Bob Dylan and Johnny Rotten in the way he used the people around him, and how they talked, as material.

This was the cue for Schama to head to Mossgiel Farm where “Robert” – never Rabbie, and certainly not Robbie – farmed with his brothers.

An impressed Schama said: “You think of every kind of poet in the Romantic movement who hymns the beauties of nature, but none of them has to do the bloody hard lifting.”

After touching on what he called Burns’ “celebrity book tours” in 1787, Schama turned to the poet’s politics and the unrest spreading from France.

Burns’ politics were complicated, said Schama, but he was an instinctive Republican, and his reaction to the execution of a group of Scottish radicals led to his writing “his most politically charged” song, Scots Wha Hae. Its last verse, beginning Lay the proud usurpers low, “could have come out of the mouth of any French revolutionary, and the song as a whole amounted to “a kind of Scottish Marseillaise”.

“This is the anthem of Scottish freedom,” concluded Schama, saying the F-word in tones infinitely softer than any Mel Gibson brought to bear in Braveheart.

READ MORE: Violin to tour US as part of Burns celebration

The final word went to a patron in Poosie Nansies. “Burns saved Scotland," he said. "Scotland would have been northern Britain, but Burns saved every song, every poem, every word and made us Scotland again.”

The entire segment, polished, informed, rapturous, was enough to make an independence supporter forget all those uncomplimentary things they had said about the BBC. Well, maybe.