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.