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.
VII
THE SCOT