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.