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.