VI
SONG
Burns never wrote a ‘Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, and left only a few fragments of his projected satire on ‘The Poet’s Progress’. Yet his letters and journals, as well as the poems themselves, so definitely describe his moods and methods of composition that his poetic psychology can be studied almost as fully as Wordsworth’s own.
Conscious pleasure in poetry read or heard first came to him in boyhood through one of Addison’s hymns; mingled with martial and patriotic sentiment he found it also in ‘The History of Sir William Wallace’ and the Life of Hannibal. This latter, he said, ‘gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up & down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier, while the story of Wallace poured a Scotish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.’ But this, like the similar thrills from all the odds and ends of English poetry and Scottish song which came his way, was commonplace boyish emotion. The need and desire to write poetry of his own did not awaken until his adolescent blood was warmed, in his ‘fifteenth autumn’, by the first consciousness of sexual attraction in the company of Nelly Kilpatrick.
‘I never expressly told her that I loved her.—Indeed I did not well know myself, why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly, why my pulse beat such a furious ratann when I looked and fingered over her hand, to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.—Among her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly, and ’twas her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme.—I was not so presumtive as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small country laird’s son, on one of his father’s maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he, for ... he had no more Scholarcraft than I had.’
‘Thus’, Burns summed up, with a juxtaposition of ideas never far separated in his mind, ‘with me began Love and Poesy.’ In all respects save one the episode was the commonest experience of calf-love. But that one difference was decisive. When a girl roused him to lyric fervour, Burns did not sit down and merely string his emotions together in rime. Another element went to make the song; an element that ultimately would mean more, poetically, to Burns than any girl—namely, a tune. His mind did not work from emotion directly to words; it worked from emotion to music, and the music brought the words which expressed its mood. Herein Burns was almost unique among modern poets. Fully to appreciate his lyrics one must hear them sung to the airs which evoked them. To read many of them in bare print is like reading the libretto of an opera. Even in his satires and epistles the process of composition was usually the same, though another man’s poem, instead of music, fired the train. Acquaintance with his models is almost as illuminating as acquaintance with his tunes.
His first effort at song-writing led to a conscious study of the poet’s craft. The elaborate criticism appended to ‘Handsome Nell’ when Burns copied the poem into his Commonplace Book is too obviously a bravura piece to merit consideration; more noteworthy is his account of how he studied his collection of English songs: ‘I pored over them, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation and fustian.—I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft such as it is.’ But these were English songs, and their effect on his early work shows mainly in such things as ‘My father was a farmer’ and ‘Man was made to mourn’, which latter in the Commonplace Book is entitled, ‘A Song: Tune, Peggy Bawn’. Even his most doleful lines came to him in music.
But lugubrious notes were not the only ones. It was as inevitable that a young Scot should try his hand at metrical paraphrases of the Psalms as that a young Etonian of the same century should paraphrase Horace. The results in both cases are equally negligible. Youth has to repeat the stale patterns of its predecessors before it can find its own. It was much more important that ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ was written in the same way. This is an epigrammatic song in the Restoration manner, and as English in language as in style. But it was written to a Scottish air, ‘Gillicrankie’. The innate Scottish culture of the poet was beginning, as early as 1781, to assimilate and adapt the alien materials of Restoration England.
Though Burns failed to act on Richard Brown’s suggestion that he send some of his early verses to a magazine, the idea stuck. The yeasty stirrings of a still immature mind which had led him in 1780 to plague his friends with pompous discourses on Pride and Courage were slowly giving place to more personal thinking on topics which he better understood. His customary chronological vagueness in referring to his early manhood makes it uncertain whether he began his Commonplace Book before he discovered the poems of Robert Fergusson, or after. The internal evidence indicates the former. So does the elaborate title-page:
‘Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, &c., by Robt. Burness; a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature—rational or irrational. As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but, as I believe they are really his own, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human-nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety, Grief, with the like cares and passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life, operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all the Species.
“There are numbers in the world who do not want sense to make a figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities, to put them upon recording their observations, and allowing them the same importance which they do to those which appear in print.”—Shenstone.
“Pleasing when youth is long expir’d to trace,
The forms our pencil, or our pen design’d.
Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face!
Such the soft image of our youthful mind.”
Ibidem.’
Burns was already conscious of something more in himself than there was in the average young peasant; as an escape from worries over his own health and the family’s future he was undertaking to leave a record of himself to edify some hypothetical future reader. Whatever tinge of humility there might be on his title-page was, like the pretence at third-person reporting, assumed. He meant to prove that a peasant youth shared the feelings of his betters and could rime and moralize to as good effect as they. But the title-page, the quotations from Shenstone, and the opening paragraph about Love all announce a programme he soon abandoned. When he began the book he was still thinking in the terms of his first letters about Pride and Courage; before he ended it he was thinking in poetry.
Though he might continue to assert that he rimed for fun, the fact was that from the day in April, 1783, when he commenced the Commonplace Book he was composing for publication, though not necessarily for print. His earliest verses were either the expression of a personal emotion, social jeux d’esprit, or conventional exercises in versification, with no purpose beyond the momentary and personal one; the ‘Observations, Scraps of Song, &c.’, were to be his legacy to the world. Not by chance did the Commonplace Book and its successor survive the general destruction of his private papers when he supposed himself on the eve of flight to Jamaica. Even though by that time the best of his verse had escaped the hazard of manuscript and was safely enshrined in the good black print of the Kilmarnock volume, he could not bring himself to destroy these records. It was well that he saved them. The Commonplace Book remains the sole record of what Burns was doing, intellectually and poetically, between April, 1783, and October, 1785. Commencing with self-conscious commentaries on life and on his own first efforts at writing, it reveals before its close his steady growth in artistic competence.
Not that it resembles the notebooks of Keats and Shelley, with their evidence of how poems grow in the poet’s mind. Burns’s poems stayed in his mind until they were mature. His poverty and his method of composing to music combined to prevent his committing half-formed ideas to paper. Paper was scarce and expensive; often in his early days he failed to write down his poems even when they were complete. Sometimes he forgot them entirely; sometimes he managed to reconstruct them long afterwards, as he did when he recalled ‘The Mauchline Wedding’ for Mrs. Dunlop’s amusement. One of the few poems composed on paper is the disastrous ‘Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair’, which Burns drafted in his Border journal. Here he was working with an English verse-form for which no melody existed. It took him three different sittings painfully to wring out the first seven stanzas. Again in 1791 he reported that he had ‘these several months been hammering at an Elegy’ on Miss Burnet of Monboddo, but found elegy ‘so exhausted a subject that any new idea on the business is not to be expected’; the original manuscript of the ‘Lament for James Earl of Glencairn’ reveals similar struggles. When no tune sang itself in his head, composition was labour and the results were wooden. The ‘Lament’, with a more lyric stanza and with stronger personal feeling at its root, came nearer than the others to success, but even it cannot be ranked among the great elegies. Declining Cunningham’s suggestion of a theme, he once said, ‘I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish, rather than from the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose.’ In commemorating Lord Glencairn, wish and impulse combined, yet even here he did not wholly succeed because the tune was lacking.
Poetic expression with Burns was not, as with Wordsworth, the fruit of emotion recollected in tranquillity; it was the fruit of emotion expressing itself to music. Though as he grew older the emotion no longer needed to be so strongly personal as when he wrote his earliest songs, the dependence on music became correspondingly greater. How he composed in his later years he told George Thomson in the autumn of 1793:
‘Until I am compleat master of a tune, in my own singing (such as it is) I never can compose for it.—My way is: I consider the poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then chuse my theme; begin one stanza; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now & then, look out for objects in Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy & workings of my bosom; humming every now & then the air with the verses I have framed: when I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, & there commit my effusions to paper; swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes on.—
Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way.—What damn’d Egotism!’
Though it would probably be impossible to overstress Robert Fergusson’s influence on Burns’s development, the elder poet’s primary service was to clarify and confirm ideas already present but as yet inarticulate in Burns’s mind. He knew what he liked, and what his own poetic impulses were; the discovery of Fergusson enabled him to define both his method and his objective. To realize how much he matured intellectually between the beginning of the Commonplace Book in 1783 and its conclusion in 1785, one need merely read the strutting, self-conscious, and essentially empty criticism of ‘expletive phrases’ of ‘too serious sentiment’, and ‘flimsy strain’ which he appended to ‘Handsome Nell’, or the pseudo-devotional passage about the grand end of human life being ‘to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life’. These things of 1783 are juvenilia. The following, written in September, 1785, is adult:
‘There is a certain irregularity in the Old Scotch Songs, a redundancy of syllables with respect to that exactness of accent and measure that the English Poetry requires, but which glides in, most melodiously with the respective tunes to which they are set. For instance, the fine old song of “The Mill Mill O,” to give it a plain prosaic reading, it halts prodigiously out of measure; on the other hand, the song set to the same tune in Bremner’s collection of Scotch Songs which begins “To Fanny fair could I impart,” &c., it is most exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic, one above the biasses of prejudice, but a thorough Judge of Nature, how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely methodical, compared with the wild-warbling cadence, the heart-moving melody of the first. This particularly is the case with all those airs which end with a hypermetrical syllable. There is a degree of wild irregularity in many of the compositions and fragments which are daily sung to them by my compeers, the common people—a certain happy arrangement of Old Scotch syllables, and yet, very frequently, nothing, not even like rhyme, or sameness of jingle at the ends of the lines. This has made me sometimes imagine that perhaps, it might be possible for a Scotch Poet, with a nice, judicious ear, to set compositions to many of our most favorite airs ... independent of rhyme altogether....’
With nothing except mother-wit and a sure ear to guide him, Burns had reached conclusions regarding poetic rhythm at complete variance with the critical theories of his century and beyond the practice of even nineteenth-century orthodoxy. He had recognized that the real charm of folk-poetry lies in the fact that it is musical rather than regular. In an age when the essence of poetry was thought to abide in the accurately counted syllables of the heroic couplet such an opinion would have seemed not merely heresy but sheer insanity. Compared with it, Coleridge’s supposed innovation of hypermetrical syllables in Christabel is timid conventionality. Blake alone among Burns’s contemporaries had bolder theories of rhythm, and his work, which the Scotsman never saw, had to wait more than half a century for recognition. Burns later expended much time and ink in trying to persuade George Thomson that a song could be poetry even if all its lines did not count up the same number of syllables, but he was never optimistic enough to offer that silly body a lyric which dispensed with rime.
So, too, in regard to the physiology and psychology of composition, Burns, before he ever published a line, had reached closer to fundamentals than an academician like Hugh Blair could ever go. Like Milton he had recognized from his own experience that there is in many poets a seasonal rhythm of creativeness. In himself it usually began in August, and continued for several months. That month, he said in his autobiography, was always a carnival in his bosom; in 1793 he told Thomson, ‘Autumn is my propitious season. I make more verses in it, than all the year else,’ and at the beginning of the next summer he repeated the assertion: ‘Now, & for six or seven months I shall be quite in song.’ In other words, it took all the scanty sunshine of the Scottish summer to bring him physically to that level of well-being at which creation was possible.
The psychology of composition, moreover, which he explained in prose in 1793 he had defined in poetry in the epistle to William Simpson of Ochiltree, composed in May, 1785, and published in the Kilmarnock volume. It is surprisingly like A. E. Housman’s, who recorded that some of his best poems came to him spontaneously while walking on Hampstead Heath and thinking of nothing in particular, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon. Burns’s formula is precisely similar:
The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himself he learn’d to wander
Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
An’ no think lang.
In these circumstances, when his emotional pressure was high enough, lines and stanzas would come unsought to his mind, and it was to this experience he referred when he repeatedly called himself ‘a Bard of Nature’s making’. Burns knew as well as Housman did that this spontaneous birth was only the beginning and not the end of composition. Gilbert reported the process without realizing its significance:
‘Robert often composed without any regular plan. When anything made a strong impression on his mind, so as to rouse it to any poetic exertion, he would give way to the impulse, and embody the thought in rhyme. If he hit on two or three stanzas to please him, he would then think of proper introductory, connecting, and concluding stanzas; hence the middle of a poem was often first produced.’
It suited with the role of inspired ploughman which Burns assumed among the Edinburgh gentry to give the impression that the finished poem also was spontaneous, but he knew better. His poetry was often born under the open sky, with the physical rhythm of his farm-work supplying the muscular accompaniment he later sought in strolls on the banks of Nith, but it was matured and revised by concentrated study of the implications of his theme. As the piper has to walk his measure, so Burns’s body moved to the rhythm of the tune which was in his mind, and the rhythm brought the words which expressed his mood.
It was only Scots music that saved Burns in the end from complete subjection to the false elegance of his century. Though he was better read than most of his ‘patrons’ ever realized, he had the self-educated man’s diffidence in the face of established reputations. His ear, so quick to distinguish ‘the true tender or sublime’ from ‘affectation or fustian’ in a lyric, failed him in the reading of more pretentious works. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is shot full of verbal echoes of English poets; what is worse, it echoes their sentiments, in such a passage as Stanza X, to an extent which divorces the thought from all the realities of peasant life. He never acquired the degree of sophistication which would have enabled him to use the current English conventions freely and originally, yet he was too sophisticated to use old folk conventions when they were not reinforced by music. Thus he never—with the possible exception of ‘John Barleycorn’—wrote a serious ballad. His political verses, and above all such an uproarious parody as ‘The Ballad of Grizzel Grimme’, show that he had all the ballad conventions at his tongue’s end; he had collected numerous old ballad texts, of which Dr. Currie named more than a dozen to Sir Walter Scott, though without thinking it worth while to preserve them; yet he could employ the ballad only in satire or burlesque. Thanks to music, he was able in all seriousness to sing a song in the old folk style, but he could not tell a story.
Even his Scottish vocabulary was more literary and derivative than his contemporaries realized. It was not so much a direct transcript of Ayrshire speech as it was a generalized vernacular pieced together from Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and the anonymous folk lyrists and ballad writers. He was genuinely interested in the variations of dialect—on his Border tour, for instance, he jotted down definitions of local words which were new to him—but his poetic use of it was chiefly due to its pithiness, its humour, and, above all, its flexibility. This was what he had in mind when he admitted to Robert Anderson ‘the advantages he enjoyed ... from the copia verborum, the command of phraseology, which the knowledge and use of the English and Scottish dialects afforded him’. He habitually alternated between Scottish and English spellings of the same word, as the exigencies of rime and measure required, thereby achieving a more flexible expression than was possible in either dialect by itself. His vernacular writing, in short, was nearer to Lowell’s New England speech or Kipling’s Cockney than it was to Gawain Douglas’s or William Dunbar’s single-minded expression in his native tongue. Even Robert Fergusson’s dialect, with its strong infusion of Fifeshire elements, is closer than Burns’s to being a direct transcript from life.
In one sense the poems in the Kilmarnock volume which were written under Robert Fergusson’s influence are a divergence from Burns’s deepest impulses, even though his method of composing them was fundamentally the same as in his song-writing. Instead of a tune to which he could set his own words Fergusson supplied a pattern or a theme to be adapted to his own experience. The parallels between ‘The Plane-stanes and the Causey’ and ‘The Brigs of Ayr’, between ‘The Daft Days’ and ‘Hallowe’en’ or ‘The Holy Fair’, between ‘Caller Oysters’ and ‘Scotch Drink’ or ‘To a Haggis’ are too obvious and have been too often mentioned to need reiteration. Burns borrowed, but he did not copy; even borrowed phraseology he made his own. His imitations almost invariably surpassed their originals both in poetic fire and in the epigrammatic quality essential for quotability. Yet in these forms of verse he showed no inventiveness. His own phrase that Fergusson had roused him to emulating vigour is literally true. That Fergusson’s impetus failed to sweep Burns on to discover similar themes of his own reveals him as after all on foreign ground. Nevertheless, by demonstrating that poetry could still be written in the vernacular, Fergusson had done inestimable service. Beyond that his influence brought Burns to a dead end. The unhappy young lawyer’s clerk had no music in his soul.
Allan Ramsay rather than Fergusson showed the way to the sort of poetry without musical setting in which Burns found his genuine freedom and inspiration. The imitations of Fergusson end with the lines ‘To a Haggis’, written in December, 1786; Ramsay supplied the models for the vernacular epistles which Burns never wholly ceased to write until a few months before his death. And between the poetic epistle as Burns wrote it and the dramatic monologue in which he also excelled there is little basic difference. The writer of a poetic epistle is usually dramatizing himself. Like the professional humorist, he assumes a role which is a projection or exaggeration of one phase of his own temperament, but which is not really himself as the working-day world knows him. For Burns to pass from such self-dramatization as marks the epistles to Lapraik, Simpson, Rankine, and Smith to the pure drama of ‘The Auld Farmer’ or even ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ involved merely an extension of imaginative scope and not a different technique.
To put it another way, Burns could either talk or he could sing. When he was not writing to music he was at his best only when he was speaking, either for himself as personified bard or humorous spectator, or as he identified his own personality with another’s. Nothing in the poems composed in 1786 more clearly shows his maturing artistic powers than does the dramatic character of ‘The Auld Farmer’ and ‘Holy Willie’ when contrasted with the lyrics of ‘The Jolly Beggars’, composed the year before. In these last, magnificent as they are, the reader can seldom forget that it is Burns who is speaking through the mouths of the vagabonds. The lyrics are only half dramatic, and perhaps it was realization of this that made the poet in 1793 tell George Thomson that none of the songs pleased him except the last—in which Burns himself is speaking as the ‘Bard of no regard’. In ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Auld Farmer’, on the other hand, the poet has identified himself with the character whom he is portraying as completely as Browning ever did with Fra Lippo Lippi or the Duke of Ferrara.
Less than adequate notice has been taken of the fact that Burns had mastered the art of the dramatic lyric and the dramatic monologue more than half a century before Browning gave the forms their names. His own statement that all his early lyrics had a personal basis has both led biographers on wild-goose chases after autobiographical elements in songs which possess none, and has been used to give false emphasis to many poems really based on personal experience. Such interpretations ignore the very foundation of creative art. That the impulse to write a lyric comes from personal emotion does not mean that the finished poem is literal history. Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne helped to make ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ what it is, but not even Mr. Middleton Murry has been fatuous enough to call Madeline a portrait of Fanny. Rose Aylmer was not necessarily as perfect as Landor’s elegy upon her; William Douglas may have had no real intention of laying him down and dying for Annie Laurie. Yet the whole Highland Mary legend, for instance, rests on precisely this sort of treatment of a handful of Burns’s songs, in obstinate disregard of the plain fact that the woman who inspires a love-lyric no more needs to be herself a lyric woman than the model for the Victory of Samothrace needed to be a woman with wings. Everyone has recognized Burns’s unsuccess in his effort to dramatize himself for Clarinda’s benefit as the pure man of sentiment; his true achievement could be better understood by recognition of his success in dramatizing his real self in many of his best ‘personal’ poems. From the ‘Mary Morison’ of his youth to the ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’ of his last illness, his best songs display not Burns himself but a dramatic projection of one aspect of his mind.
Commentators from Henry Mackenzie onward have regretted that Burns never carried out his plans for writing a drama. Yet his triumph in the dramatic monologue is the best reason for believing that the attempt would have failed. His numerous references to the drama and dramatic writing never so much as hint that Burns had grasped the elements of theatrical technique. For him a play was merely a vehicle for declamatory speeches and the expression of ‘sentiments’ which would make neat quotations; a cobbling together of purple patches and of scattered episodes supposed to depict ‘originality of character’. If it ever occurred to him that a good play is a unified structure in which a single impression is built up through a series of artfully contrived climaxes, he never put the idea on paper. But even had he understood the technique he had not the right psychological approach for dramatic writing, any more than Browning had. The true dramatist stands apart from his characters and develops them from without; the writer of dramatic monologues identifies himself for the moment with another individual and develops the character from within. The two temperaments are seldom united in one man, and Burns in turning away even from the pastoral drama which Mackenzie had urged him to undertake was once again instinctively following the bent of his own genius. In the light of what he accomplished in his chosen forms, Mackenzie’s suggestion was almost as inept as John Moore’s proposal that he try something like Virgil’s Eclogues.
Before he went to Edinburgh Burns had explored his own capacities, but had not yet realized more than half of them. Fergusson had shown him how to write satires and descriptions in the vernacular; Ramsay had revealed the possibilities of the poetic epistle. But his interest in the folk-songs of which the words and melodies haunted him, still seemed a rustic or even childish survival. So far as he knew, it was like taking nursery rimes seriously as poetry. Though he must have been aware that scholars of repute were beginning to collect old ballads, he had not yet discovered that they were turning also to the words and music of folk-songs. In this respect at least, his Edinburgh sojourn was of incalculable benefit. Apparently he never met David Herd, the greatest collector among his contemporaries, but he soon became acquainted with Herd’s published work and learned that even some university professors esteemed such things. Sending a couple of songs, ‘the composition of two Ayrshire Mechanics’, to the Rev. William Greenfield a few weeks after arriving in the city, he hailed that eloquent but incontinent clergyman as ‘Professor of the Belles lettres de la Nature’; in the following summer he told William Tytler that he had once a great many fragments of traditional literature, but as he had no idea that anybody cared for them, he had forgotten them. And his next remark showed that he already possessed the essential qualification of the collector: ‘I invariably hold it sacriledge to add anything of my own to help out with the shatter’d wrecks of these venerable old compositions; but they have many various readings.’ Yet not even then, not even though the singing of old melodies was one of the commonest amusements both in Edinburgh drawing rooms and at convivial meetings at taverns, did he realize immediately the task and the opportunity before him.
The convivial meetings at first meant much more to him than the drawing-rooms. The jolly gentlemen who made up the Crochallan Fencibles had probably as a group little interest in pure poetry, but they had a very lively interest in brisk songs. If the songs happened to be improper, that was no handicap among a club which included Charles Hay and William Smellie and Robert Cleghorn, and to whom Alexander Cunningham used to sing ‘charmingly’ one of the most indecent of Irish ditties. Burns’s memory was already well stored with such gems, and in this congenial company he added to his stock, enriched old songs with new stanzas of his own, and occasionally composed original verses of the same type, as he had often done at Mauchline. As a means of enhancing the pleasures of male company over a bowl of punch such song-writing amused him and delighted the Fencibles.
Not until after his Edinburgh Poems were off the press did it begin to dawn upon him that he might also win new fame in the drawing-room and—what meant much more to him—do a patriotic service to Scotland. In the last weeks of April, 1787, he made the acquaintance of an engraver named James Johnson, who was just bringing out the first volume of a work which he called The Scots Musical Museum. Johnson was known to Smellie, Dunbar, and others of Burns’s friends, but he cannot have been in the inner circle of the Crochallans, or Burns would have met him sooner. He was almost illiterate—his picturesquely bad spelling is notable even for the eighteenth century—but he was an enthusiast for the collection and preservation of the traditional music and songs of his country. He had invented a process for printing music by stamping the notes on pewter plates instead of the steel or copper engraving then generally employed. Though the result was a mean and smudgy page, the process was much cheaper than the old one and encouraged Johnson to try his hand at publishing. His enthusiasm, however, far exceeded his knowledge. He had had difficulty in gathering the hundred songs which made up his first volume, and had even eked it out with a few English pieces. His meeting with Burns not only remade the Museum, but, poetically considered, was the most important event of the poet’s life in the capital.
Writing to Johnson on the eve of his Border tour Burns regretted that they had not met sooner: ‘I have met with few people whose company & conversation gave me more pleasure, because I have met with few whose sentiments are so congenial to my own.’ But though he contributed a song or two to the collection, the idea that he might take an active part in the work was still far from his mind. The fantastic Earl of Buchan, as early as February, had advised Burns to ‘fire [his] Muse at Scottish story and Scottish scene.’ Burns had replied, in language even more inflated than the Earl’s: ‘I wish for nothing more than to make a leisurely Pilgrimage through my native country; to sit & muse on those once hard-contended fields where Caledonia, rejoicing, saw her bloody lion borne through broken ranks to victory and fame; and catching the inspiration to pour the deathless Names in Song.’ Unfortunately, added the poet, he had instead to go back to working for his living. Nevertheless, the Border tour offered a chance to fulfil part of the Earl’s suggestion—according to Burns’s real tastes, if not the Earl’s. His greatest pleasures on the journey were not the civic receptions and the elaborate hospitality of the gentry, but the sight of Gala Water, Leader Haughs and Yarrow, the Bush aboon Traquair, Elibanks and Elibraes, and other spots celebrated in song. It made no difference whether the song was singable before ladies or before Crochallans, so long as it was Scottish, and old.
The Highland tours added so effectively to his stock that in 1793 he was able to say that he had made pilgrimages to every spot commemorated in Scottish song except Lochaber and the Braes of Ballenden. Presumably on his passages through Edinburgh in August and September he talked with Johnson, but not until late October, after his return from Ochtertyre, did he really begin to put his energies into the work. Johnson obviously had solicited his help, and the poet’s first move was to write to all his friends who possessed words or music which might be usable. Nor did he confine himself to his own circle of acquaintance. Learning to his chagrin that he had unwittingly passed near the home of the Rev. John Skinner without calling to pay his respects to the author of ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John o’ Badenyon’, he seized the opportunity given by receipt of a poetic epistle from Skinner to beg the venerable clergyman’s support for Johnson’s enterprise. He soon started also to fit words of his own to fine melodies which either lacked them or had unsuitable ones—at first with a personal motive, in order to publish the complimentary verses he had written to Margaret Chalmers and Charlotte Hamilton, but soon with no purpose except that of supplying his favourite music with words which could be sung. Moreover, he commenced to gather all available publications of Scottish songs and song music. How thoroughly he went into this search is revealed by his quiet remark to George Thomson five years later: ‘Let me have a list of your airs, with the first line of the verses you intend for them.... I say, the first line of the verses, because if they are verses that have appeared in any of our Collections of songs, I know them & can have recourse to them.’ He had in fact ranged so widely in the old song books that even yet his editors have been unable to identify the originals of some of the songs he altered and adapted for the Museum, and later on for Thomson’s Select Collection. But though in 1787 he realized better than Johnson did the magnitude of the task and the opportunity before them, he was still unaware of its true scope. He conjectured that there would be three volumes of a hundred songs each. The completed work filled six.
From October, 1787, onwards Burns was in fact though not in name the chief editor of the Museum. He collected words and music, wrote prefaces for the successive volumes, and helped to enlist the aid of a competent musician, Stephen Clarke, organist of the Episcopal chapel in Edinburgh, in harmonizing the airs. Johnson willingly submitted to the poet’s leadership, which he needed. The surviving correspondence shows Burns carrying on a struggle which nothing except his enthusiasm for the work could at times have made endurable. Johnson required constant supervision even in such elementary matters as spelling; Clarke’s carelessness and indolence were maddening. The work sold slowly and Johnson, under the pressure of other affairs, inclined to procrastinate. ‘Why,’ Burns asked in 1793, and the passage is typical of many, ‘did you not send me those tunes & verses that Clarke & you cannot make out? Let me have them as soon as possible, that, while he is at hand, I may settle the matter with him.’ Clarke, ‘with his usual indolence’, was worse. More than once he mislaid or lost whole sheafs of songs which had been entrusted to him. ‘“The Lochmaben harper”’, said the poet in 1795, ‘I fear I shall never recover; & it is a famous old song.—The rest are, I doubt, irrecoverable.—I think it hard that, after so much trouble in gathering these tunes, they should be lost in this trifling way.—Clarke has been shamefully careless.’ Yet Burns’s enthusiasm kept him going, however negligent or incompetent the partners on whom he had to depend. The time-table of the work is sufficient proof of his influence. Volume II, prepared while he was in Edinburgh, was ready six months after Volume I; the next two volumes, for which the poet’s contributions had to be made by correspondence, took two years each. Volume V was prepared while Burns was working also for George Thomson; it was four years on the stocks. The final volume, prepared by Johnson’s unaided efforts, took six years, even though he had still on hand a considerable quantity of Burns’s verse for which space had been lacking in the earlier numbers.
Burns’s preface to the second volume, published in February, 1788, in the very midst of the Clarinda imbroglio, shows how completely, in the fifteen months since his first arrival in Edinburgh, the poet had awakened to the literary importance of folk-song. ‘Ignorance and Prejudice’, he wrote, ‘may perhaps affect to sneer at the simplicity of the poetry or music of some of these pieces; but their having been for ages the favourites of Nature’s Judges—the Common People, was to the Editor a sufficient test of their merit....’ He was no longer apologetic for his interest in popular literature. If the highbrows could not appreciate it, so much the worse for the highbrows. He was determined, moreover, that no poet of the people should lack recognition if it were possible to give it. ‘Wherever the old words could be recovered, they have been preserved; both as generally suiting better the genius of the tunes, and to preserve the productions of those earlier Sons of the Scottish Muses, some of whose names deserved a better fate than has befallen them—“Buried ’mong the wreck of things which were.” Of our more modern Songs, the Editor has inserted the Authors’ names as far as he could ascertain them.’ The passage is almost a direct transcript, even to the hackneyed quotation from Blair’s Grave, of what Burns had written in the Commonplace Book two and a half years before, when he added that it had given him ‘many a heart-ake’ to reflect that the names of such glorious old Bards were clean forgotten. No more of them should be forgotten if he could do anything to prevent it. The ‘communal’ theory of ballad-composition still slumbered in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land; Burns was sure that somewhere at the source of every old song was an individual poet of like passions with himself, and such as he himself might still be but for the accident of print.
His one exception to the rule of publishing authors’ names was his own contributions. He told Mrs. Dunlop that the songs signed ‘R’, ‘B’, or ‘X’ were his own, and those signed ‘Z’ were old songs he had altered or enlarged. But no one can go through the volumes with this simple key and identify all of Burns’s contributions. His own negligence and Johnson’s omitted his initials from numerous songs unquestionably his own, and the verses signed ‘Z’ have puzzled the ingenuity of editors ever since. Burns admitted that ‘of a good many of them, little more than the Chorus is ancient; tho’ there is no reason for telling every body this piece of intelligence.’ Sometimes his own annotations or the survival of earlier texts show the extent of his contributions, ranging from eking out a too-brief song with an extra stanza of his own to composing a whole lyric to fit a fragment of traditional chorus. Public opinion unanimously credits Burns with ‘Auld Lang Syne’, yet he never claimed it. He declared that it ‘had never been in print, nor even in manuscript’, until he took it down from an old man’s singing. Three different times, for people as unlike as Mrs. Dunlop, Robert Riddell, and George Thomson, he wrote out the words without even an indirect claim to their authorship. Nevertheless, no trace of the song in anything like Burns’s form has ever been found in earlier records, and the public has refused to believe that a poem of such appeal could have been current without being noticed. On the other hand, every stanza of ‘A Red Red Rose’ has been traced to some older poem; yet Burns’s skill in selecting the one good image in a mass of commonplace and weaving his cento of borrowings into a single compact and vivid lyric makes the song his own, as Macbeth is Shakespeare’s and not Holinshed’s.
In such lyrics as these and scores of others Burns had achieved a sort of dramatic impersonation which far surpassed even the best of his earlier monologues and dramatic lyrics. Guided always by the spirit of the music, he had so identified himself with the thoughts and feelings of the anonymous and half-articulate folk poets whose songs he was rescuing from oblivion that the most critical eye cannot be certain where their work ends and Burns’s begins. Again and again he took fragments of old work and not only reunited them into coherent wholes but gave the restored poem the lyric elevation its original author had felt but could not express. Emerson said that an institution was the lengthened shadow of a single man: Scottish song as the world knows it today is the lengthened shadow of Robert Burns. What he did not actually write is so coloured by his influence that it could not exist without him. With the exception of Lady Nairne’s, his was the last poetry written in the old folk tradition. The romantic sentimentality which tinges Burns’s songs at their weakest, overspreads many of Lady Nairne’s; Scott’s masterpiece, ‘Bonnie Dundee’, is glorious, but it is not a folk-song. Most of what has been written since 1800 is merely imitation Burns.
The Museum was Burns’s opportunity to combine his poetic inclinations with his fervent patriotism. But it was more than that. By enlisting the poet’s help in his enterprise, Johnson unwittingly furnished him the means of sustaining his creative life amid his toil as farmer and Exciseman. After 1788 extended composition was probably impossible for Burns. He could scarcely hope to be revisited by the almost continuous excitement under which he wrote the greater part of his first volume, and without emotional excitement he could not create. He had plenty of leisure for writing during his Edinburgh days, but the urge was lacking. His whole sojourn there produced less poetry than a single month at the beginning of 1786. Removal to Ellisland, with all the strain of its ‘uncouth cares and anxieties’, brought his creativeness to a still lower ebb. Repeatedly he complained that the Muses had deserted him; during his first two years on the farm the ‘Lines in Friars Carse Hermitage’ were almost his only serious attempt at non-musical composition, and in the revision of the poem he wavered between versions in a manner wholly unlike the vigour of 1786. The frequency, indeed, with which he circulated both versions among his friends suggests at times a bankrupt’s clinging to the last relic of his prosperity. But thanks to the Museum he had work to do which could be shaped to music as he followed his business, and be committed to paper in his snatches of free time.
Meanwhile, under Burns’s leadership, the whole plan of the Museum had been altered. The original scheme had been merely to collect the existing songs. For this task—at least for all the songs that were printable—Johnson’s first estimate of two volumes was not a serious understatement. Burns, ransacking the collections of instrumental music, and stealing time from his farm work to listen to a fiddler playing over the pieces that had interested him, discovered, however, that Scottish music was teeming with good tunes to which no words had ever been set. The reels and strathspeys which fiddlers and pipers played as dance tunes had just as much lilting charm as the airs of traditional songs. His plan now was nothing more nor less than supplying words to every cottage melody which was capable of vocal interpretation. He was also making musical experiments in tempo, finding that gay tunes played in slow time might be transformed into ‘the very language of pathos’. The name ‘Museum’ was growing steadily more inappropriate; the work was becoming an experimental laboratory in both poetry and music. Probably Burns never fully defined, even to himself, the scope of the ambitious project he did not live to achieve, but the more than three hundred songs he left are evidence that if anyone could have achieved it, he could.
Not that all these songs are masterpieces. Burns had no illusions on that score. His contention was always that the music was the important thing, and that a good air might better have mediocre words than none at all. Nevertheless when he was composing Scottish words to tunes of his own choice the percentage of the commonplace was small and the range of themes extraordinarily large. The critics who read autobiography into every love poem pass lightly over the fact that in some of the best love lyrics, such as ‘Tam Glen’, ‘An’ O for ane-and-twenty, Tam’, and ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad’, the speaker is a woman, and that such wholly dramatic lyrics as ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ and ‘John Anderson’ have a more sustained intensity of emotion than the admittedly autobiographic ‘Ae fond kiss’. When Burns’s lyrics were commonplace it was usually because he was composing them to tunes not of his own choice; above all when such assigned composition demanded English words. Music which worked downward from the intellectual to the emotional centres could never give the same creative release as when the engagement of the emotions came first. Such was the case with the last of his major poetic projects—supplying lyrics for George Thomson’s Select Collection of Scotish Airs—but before turning to that work something must be said of the last and finest of the poems which he did not write to music.
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is not only Burns’s greatest single poem but one of the finest short poetic narratives in all literature. It is the only one of Burns’s works of which it may truly be asserted that he opened a new field wherein he never had the chance to reveal the full range of his powers. In the satire and the epistle, as in the lyric, he had abundantly displayed both his strength and his limitations. In the versified folk-tale ‘Tam’ stands alone; it is, as he said, his ‘standard performance in the Poetical line’. Though he was doubtless right in concluding that it showed ‘a force of genius & a finishing polish that I despair of ever excelling’, he might in happier circumstances have equalled it. But here, as in the satires and epistles, his inspiration came from without, and the stimulus was never repeated.
The story of its composition is too familiar to need rehearsing in detail. In 1789 Francis Grose the antiquary arrived at Friars Carse in the course of a collecting tour. He had successfully published an elaborately illustrated work on the antiquities of England and Wales, and was now gathering material for a companion volume on Scotland. The fat and jovial captain, whose encyclopædic knowledge ranged from ancient arms and armour, costume, and ecclesiastical and military architecture, to the ribald slang of his day, was as unlike Sir Walter Scott’s bookish Jonathan Oldbuck as any man could well be. Beside his vast erudition and ardent spirit the amateurish antiquarianism of Robert Riddell faded away. Grose was one of the most stimulating men Burns ever met, and the friendship which sprang up between them had the double basis of community of interest and congeniality of spirit. Burns saw in Grose’s projected book an opportunity to glorify his own birthplace, and suggested that the ruins of Alloway Kirk were a good subject for an illustration. Grose, no doubt mentally comparing the scrubby little church with the glories of Melrose and Arbroath, hesitated. Alloway had neither grandeur of architecture nor richness of historical association. The latter, however, might be supplied. Burns had been telling some of the tales of the supernatural which he had heard in his boyhood, and Grose agreed to include the picture of Alloway if Burns would furnish a witch-legend to accompany it. Thus casually his greatest poem was born.
Burns’s qualifications for writing this tale of witchcraft were analogous to his qualifications for writing folk-songs. In each instance he belonged by education to a world where such things were no longer alive. But his childhood and youth had been spent among people to whom they were still real. Intellectually he had no more belief in witchcraft than Benjamin Franklin had, but he knew the minds of the people who did believe. Hence the blend of broad humour and real terror which makes the poem unique. To an Elizabethan audience there was nothing humorous about the witches in Macbeth; they were real beings inspiring fear and hatred. To Washington Irving or Charles Dickens a tale of the supernatural was purely an excursion into the Land of Make-Believe. It is only when a belief is fading but not yet dead that it can be handled with the mixture of humour and conviction which Burns used. Ghost stories suffered the same fate about a century later, as scepticism regarding personal immortality became more widely prevalent. And ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is as perfect in structure as it is unique in tone. Custom cannot stale it. To read it or hear it read for the hundredth time is still to be swept along by the rush of the narrative and to realize more clearly the artistry which balances each increasingly wild episode with its introductory paragraph of humorous philosophizing. A few of its early readers, Mrs. Dunlop among them, thought the poem scandalously indecent; to the rest it was an artless effusion of the Heaven-taught ploughman. If any early reader realized that besides being a merry tale it was a consummate work of art the opinion was not committed to print. In 1791 literary art still connoted eighteenth-century ‘elegance’.
Could Burns have had more of the society of a man like Grose, had even young Walter Scott of Edinburgh, who in the intervals of his legal studies was already steeping himself in the ballads and legends of the Border, thought it worth while occasionally to ride as far as Dumfries to visit the man whom he had once seen in an Edinburgh drawing-room, the world might have more poems like ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. But there was no one in Dumfries to provide the necessary stimulus. Robert Riddell took much but had little to give; his sister-in-law Maria belonged too much to the world of fashion to have any enthusiasm for folk-tales; John Syme’s taste ran more to satirical epigrams than to narrative poetry. And these three represented the best intellectual companionship Dumfries had to offer. As for Edinburgh, the influences dominating the literary life of Scotland at the end of the century were better represented by George Thomson than by Francis Grose.
In September, 1792, Burns received a letter from a friend of Alexander Cunningham’s, asking aid in a poetical and musical venture. George Thomson, clerk to the Board of Trustees in Edinburgh, was two years the poet’s senior and possessed all the elegance of taste which Burns’s education had protected him from. Thomson enjoyed Scottish music in his ultra-refined way, but was irked by the crudity of the traditional songs. Baldly stated, his proposal was to collect a hundred of the best Scottish melodies, to get a professional musician to dress them in all the frills necessary for concert performance, and to provide them with tidy English lyrics which would disguise their provincial origin. In writing to Burns, however, he did not express himself so bluntly. After explaining that Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, ‘the most agreeable composer living’, had been engaged to arrange the music, he continued:
‘To render this work perfect, we are desirous to have the poetry improved wherever it seems unworthy of the music; and that it is so, in many instances, is allowed by everyone conversant with our musical collections. The editors of these seem in general to have depended on the music proving an excuse for the verses; and hence some charming melodies are united to mere nonsense and doggerel, while others are accompanied with rhymes so loose and indelicate as cannot be sung in decent company. To remove this reproach would be an easy task to the author of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”.... It is superfluous to assure you that I have no intention to displace any of the sterling old Songs: those only will be removed which appear quite silly or absolutely indecent....’
The publication, in short, was to be a sort of Golden Treasury of Scots music, and Burns’s share in the work was to be ‘writing twenty or twenty-five songs, suitable to the particular melodies’ which Thomson selected. The editor said nothing, in this first letter, about his preference for English words.
No literary salesman ever received more enthusiastic response than Thomson got from Burns. The poet promised whole-hearted co-operation, but he had detected enough of Thomson’s temperament to make certain reservations. In order of importance they were these. His share in the work was to be a patriotic labour of love, and he would accept no compensation. For the time being at least his participation was to be anonymous—perhaps because he did not wish his official superiors to think he was neglecting his Excise duties; perhaps because he feared that Johnson might conclude that he was deserting the Museum. He was not to be asked to compose unless he could do so spontaneously, and Thomson was to have free editorial authority to take or reject his contributions. Finally, ‘If you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an end of the matter.—Whether in the simplicity of the Ballad, or the pathos of the Song, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue.’ English verses were precisely what Thomson was for, ‘because the English becomes every year more and more the language of Scotland,’ but he hastened to disavow any wish to confine the poet to English—preferring to wait and argue it out later, poem by poem.
Greater enthusiasm, knowledge, and art were never enlisted under more incompetent leadership than in Burns’s alliance with Thomson. It did not take the poet long to discover that the elaborate plan which Thomson had outlined in his first letters was really as vague as an Edinburgh fog. The editor had not yet decided on the list of airs he intended to include; he had not succeeded in getting the co-operation of the English poetaster, John Wolcot (‘Peter Pindar’), to write English songs; Pleyel, who was supposed to be handling the music, soon departed on a visit to Germany and found his return route to Britain closed by the armies of the French and the Allies. James Beattie was to have been asked to furnish an introductory essay on Scottish song, but Beattie was old and ill and not really interested in the subject. In consequence of all this, Burns, who had begun on the understanding that he was to furnish only a few lyrics, shortly found himself saddled with the entire burden of the literary end of the work. Even so his position, though laborious, would not have been difficult had Thomson been merely muddle-headed. But as soon as the editor had furnished the list of the twenty-five airs he meant to include in the first number of his collection, and Burns had sent in his first group of lyrics, Thomson revealed himself as a literary tinker. He was constantly proposing amendments in phraseology—which always meant substituting banal English expressions for racy Scots ones. At times his niggling criticism was too much even for Burns’s enthusiasm and good nature. One letter, for instance, began with the abrupt outburst, ‘That unlucky song “O poortith cauld,” &c. must stand as it stands—I won’t put my hand to it again.’ In later years Thomson, to sustain his pose as whole-hearted admirer of all Burns’s work, carefully inked over that sentence in the manuscript. But he was guilty of worse than that. Burns, as always, was steeping himself in the rhythms of the airs to which he was composing; Thomson had to display his own musical knowledge by suggesting that the proffered song be set to another tune. The fact that to Burns the words and the tune were always inseparable never penetrated his mind.
Occasionally Burns came forward with a lyric written to an air not on Thomson’s list, and at such times the editor’s taste and tact were most fully displayed. For instance, Lady Elizabeth Heron, wife of Patrick Heron, from whom Burns hoped for political favours, had composed a little tune called ‘Banks of Cree’ and asked Burns to supply it with words. Burns told the lady he would like her permission to publish the song, and sent the words to Thomson, saying that ‘the air I fear is not worth your while,’ but evidently hoping that Thomson would ask for it. Thomson instead proposed setting the words to an air on his own list, ‘Young Jockey was the blithest lad’. Burns replied sharply: ‘My English song, “Here is the glen & here the bower” cannot go to this air; it was written on purpose for an original air composed by Mrs. Heron of Heron.’ But after the poet’s death Thomson erased the vetoing phrase and published the words to the tune, ‘The Flowers of Edinburgh’, thereby leaving Burns under the imputation of having lied to Lady Elizabeth in promising to publish her music.
Another time Burns found himself haunted by the old lilt of ‘Hey tutti taitie’, which a wholly unreliable tradition declared to have been Bruce’s march to Bannockburn. At the end of August, 1793, his impotent fury over the Edinburgh sedition trials, combined with his enthusiasm at the news of the French levy en masse for the repulse of the Allied invasion, found an outlet in composing ‘Scots wha hae’ to this air. Historically the song is an anachronism. The ideas underlying it are those of Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson and not of the feudal Middle Ages; its very language is Scoticized English rather than the true vernacular—Sir James Murray pointed out, for instance, that in real Scots the opening phrase would be ‘Scots that has’. The song owes its enduring popularity largely to the perfect union of the words with the music they were composed to. But when Burns sent it to Thomson, that worthy thought the music vulgar, and suggested that lengthening the fourth line of each stanza would fit the words to another tune, ‘Lewis Gordon’, which he liked better. This time Burns yielded, accepted the silly changes, and thereafter circulated the song always in the weakened version. Thomson published it in this form after the poet’s death, but the appearance of the original version in Currie’s edition showed the music-loving public the immense superiority of Burns’s first thought. Thomson bowed to public opinion, and consigned his ‘improvements’ to the oblivion they deserved.
In most instances, however, the public had no chance of checking up on Thomson’s disregard of Burns’s wishes, and by destroying his own end of the correspondence, after furnishing Dr. Currie with some carefully edited extracts from it, the editor sought to cover up the extent of his nagging criticisms. Inasmuch as his vandalism stopped short of destroying Burns’s letters the ultimate publication of their complete texts exposed the nature of his fault-finding almost as clearly as if he had preserved his own originals. He nevertheless inked out a number of passages in which Burns was too outspoken in comment on his taste, or seemed to deny his claim to the copyright of the poet’s contributions. Thomson was intensely jealous of Johnson’s Museum, disliked Johnson personally, and resented Burns’s continuing to help the rival work. Again and again in the letters Burns would say that if a song did not suit, Thomson was to return it, and Burns would send it to the Museum. To keep the material out of Johnson’s hands, Thomson never definitely rejected anything. He carefully docketed the letter in which Burns said that he had given Johnson no permanent copyright in his songs, but inked over passages which indicated that Burns was contributing to the Select Collection on precisely the same terms as to the Museum.
When Burns’s health was failing in the spring of 1796 Thomson sought to frighten him by a report that a pirated edition of the songs was being planned, and enclosed for the poet’s signature a legal document assigning him the whole copyright. Burns, ill though he was, and careless as he had always been of his literary property, refused to sign, and sent instead ‘a Certificate, which, though a little different from Mr McKnight’s model, I suppose will amply answer the purpose,’ adding that ‘when your Publication is finished, I intend publishing a Collection, on a cheap plan, of all the songs I have written for you, the Museum, &c.—at least of all the songs of which I wish to be called the Author.’ This was tantamount to telling Thomson that he had a claim on the first serial rights only, and though Thomson later published two different texts of what he alleged was Burns’s deed of assignment, he never produced the original holograph, and it was not preserved among his papers. In after years Thomson tried the same trick on Sir Walter Scott and Sir Alexander Boswell. He had succeeded in making Burns’s executors believe that he owned the copyrights and was generously waiving them for the benefit of the subscription edition, but Scott and Boswell were lawyers and saw to it that where their own work was concerned he got no more than the serial rights.
Burns ought to have treated Thomson as Beethoven did in 1813, when the editor demanded changes in the airs which the great musician had undertaken to harmonize:
‘I regret that I am unable to oblige you. I am not accustomed to tinker my compositions. I have never done so, being convinced that every partial modification alters the whole character of the composition. I am grieved that you are out of pocket through this, but you cannot lay the blame on me, for it was your business to make me more fully acquainted with the taste of your country and the meagre abilities of your performers.’
But such blunt truth-telling was more than Burns was ever capable of to a man who claimed taste and education. He said what he thought about his songs, but said it gently and deferentially, and left them in Thomson’s hand to be mangled or misapplied.
To go into such detail of Thomson’s misdoings would be pointless had he been merely a thick-headed and thick-skinned editor who failed to appreciate what Burns was doing for him. But Thomson was much more than that. He represented the whole Anglicizing tendency of the Scottish gentry and bourgeoisie who were seeking to destroy the language and individuality of their country. ‘Now let me declare off from your taste.—“Toddlin hame” is a song that to my taste is an exquisite production of genius.—That very Stanza you dislike
“My kimmer & I lay down to sleep”
is to me a piece of charming native humour.—What pleases me, as simple & naive, disgusts you as ludicrous & low.—’ So said Burns in one of the passages which Thomson tried to obliterate. But Thomson’s opinions were shared by most of his educated countrymen, including some of Burns’s most intimate friends. Where earlier criticism of the poet’s vernacular work had failed to break down his Scotticism by the very absurdity of such suggestions as imitating Virgil, Thomson tried to accomplish it by the more insidious means of minor verbal changes which individually seemed to amount to little but which in their cumulative effect would emasculate the poetry. It is generally recognized that Burns’s contributions to the Select Collection include a much larger percentage of the conventional and the commonplace than does his work for the Museum; the marvel is that in the circumstances he achieved so much that was not second-rate. He was composing to order, frequently sending off by return of post the lines to a particular tune which Thomson had asked for, and his efforts were constantly hampered by his consciousness that certain themes and methods would never please the silly editor’s taste. It was no wonder that many times he had to induce a synthetic emotional thrill in himself—either by putting himself through a course of admiration for a handsome woman, or by the help of a bowl of punch—in order to be able to compose at all.
His power of poetic response to music and emotion nevertheless did not fail with his failing health. A few weeks before his death he asked Jessie Lewars, sister of one of his best friends among the Excise officers of Dumfries, to play him her favourite tune. She responded with the roguish little air, ‘The robin cam to the wren’s nest, and keekit in, and keekit in’. Burns, humming the tune to himself and altering the tempo, produced almost extemporaneously the beautiful ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’. From his earliest lyric to his latest, music was the catalyst which transformed emotion into poetry. Yet for more than a century after his death the dominating influence of music on his art went almost unrecognized; and George Thomson, the man who of all others among Burns’s contemporaries had had the best opportunity to realize the nature and the power of his lyric expression, wrote an obituary which, besides inaugurating the legend of mental and moral deterioration in the last years at Dumfries, summed up its author’s appreciation of the wit, critical acumen, and real erudition of Burns’s letters by saying that probably the poet ‘was not qualified to fill a superior station’ to the humble one he held in the Excise. Of all the Holy Willies who eyed Burns askance during his life and after his death, he would probably, had he realized his true character, have despised Thomson most. The others were merely trying to blacken Burns’s own character. Thomson was trying to destroy the vitality of Scottish song.