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:

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

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.