THE MERRY MUSES
A Choice Collection of
Favourite Songs gathered from
many sources
by
Robert Burns
Say, Puritan, can it be wrong
To dress plain Truth in witty song,
What honest Nature says we should do,
What every Lady does or would do.
Privately Printed
(Not for Sale)
1827
Though it was generally known that Robert Burns had a simple liking for bawdy tales and verses, and nearly everyone had privily heard of his collection of such trivia, that he called The Merry Muses, few but those who had made a special study of his work had ever seen the book. In his student days Max had been shown a copy, but he remembered nothing of its contents. The title was all he knew of it — in Scotland the title was almost common property, a literary secret that unlettered labourers might share with earnest students — and like the majority Max had come to believe, or by a general and pervasive faith (perhaps only by the national wish) had been coerced into the belief that The Merry Muses was an anthology of prime and splendid wantonness, of the most elegant lubricity, with here and there, to give it the saving grace of pastoral honesty, a few stanzas deftly turned but frankly coprophilous.
When, therefore, he had recovered from his laughter, he opened the book with a very lively interest — and read a few pages with growing disillusion. The verses were bawdy enough, but strangely dull. It was schoolboy stuff and rural inanity that Burns had collected: hoarse and tedious jokes that might tickle an adolescent mind, or show a simple gaiety in the smoky light of a stable lantern — but nothing better than that. Or hardly anything. A great disappointment, thought Max; and remembered, with a sudden return of contempt for his late brother-in-law, that Charlie had told his wife the book was valuable. That it was worth enough to recompense her for the loss of his pension.
The old fool, muttered Max. It may fetch a few pounds: no more than that. Privately printed in 1827 — any were printed? Two or three hundred perhaps, and there may be other small editions. Few enough copies for it to be called a rare book; but a book of no value. This won’t bring her much comfort, he thought.
Idly he turned the pages, and at the back found eight leaves in manuscript that had been neatly sewn in. In this part the poems were short and epigrammatic. There were sixteen of them, one to a page, and all of a different quality from those in print. Here indeed was elegant lubricity, a wild and echoing wantonness. Here too was coprophily falling with a bang into a bucket of Roman form, a bucket that Horace might have tinkered; and bawdiness that cried with a broken heart. This was poetry indeed — not schoolboy sniggering or a ploughman’s lewd guffaw — but poetry, and all of it stark naked. Too naked for print, too shameless for daylight.
He read the written pages again. The handwriting was angular, bold, and legible. The ink was faded, and the paper of a better sort than the printed leaves. The first of the manuscript poems began: ‘“To you, deep-drinking, honest Smellie,”’ and concluded ‘“So here’s my hand,” says Rab the Ranter.’ The intervening lines were all unquotable.
Max leaned back in his chair, unbuttoned his waistcoat to scratch his ribs, and taxed his memory. One of the friends Burns had made in Edinburgh was called Smellie: he was almost sure of that. A schoolmaster, or some sort of untidy, dirty-habited, eccentric scholar? One or the other. And the handwriting might be Burns’s own. It looked very like it; or, to be accurate, it looked like his uncertain recollection of a Burns manuscript he once had seen. And if that were so — if these sixteen pages were in Burns’s own hand, if the poems were his own — not collected pieces, but out of the night of his own genius — and unknown to scholars but of such merit that the critics must acknowledge and acclaim them, however bitterly the moralists might condemn — why, then, old Charlie might have spoken truth, and the book, if properly handled and sold with due precaution in the richest market, could bring Jessie a small fortune. A capital sum worth a lot more than the remnant, though he had lived to eighty, of old Charlie’s pension.
But it would have to be handled with the greatest care. There was the matter of estate duty to be considered in the first place. In that preliminary accountancy the book would have to be valued at something under its true worth. Max shut it, fingered the rough, provincial binding, and thought: if it could be valued by someone who would not take the trouble to open it — say £7:10. — but what’s the chance of that? Very little. In Scotland there’s far too much interest in Burns: especially in his untrousered life and words. So whoever got hold of it would read it all through — and might recognize the handwriting, as I did. — Or did I? Perhaps it isn’t his. Perhaps that was the common form of writing in his day.
Caution seized him: the habitual, ingrained, disciplined caution of his profession. I must make sure, he thought. Before taking any steps to see that Jessie gets the full value of her property, I’ve got to satisfy myself, and be able to satisfy others, that there’s such a value in it. If it’s what I think it is, it might fetch £10,000 in America. If we could sell it there …
Max Arbuthnot was a lawyer of the highest repute: a Writer to Her Majesty’s Signet, a man recognized in Edinburgh as an example of the high traditions of his vocation. Though in his private life and his personal habits he was more liberal than the majority, professionally he had never deviated from the absolute probity that was the standard of his calling. His honesty, in business, was above criticism and beyond suspicion. But even he denied the propriety of paying death-duty on The Merry Muses. Would authority permit the book to be published or sold? Certainly not. But authority, if it could, would set a price on it and put half into its own pockets. It would be sheer folly to submit to that. Oh, worse than folly! It would be pandering to the sort of public dishonesty which of late years had infected every government and local authority throughout the world. The boundary between mine and thine had been obliterated, trampled into the mud of cynical expediency by official feet — by boots bought with the people’s money to tread on people’s rights — but Robert Burns won’t go down into the mire (so, with a grim thrust of his jaw, said Max to himself) and if Jessie’s interest in his dirty verses is worth £10,000, I’ll save that too!
He rose from his chair and went to the front door; where he found Jessie hotly denouncing Annie for her clumsiness in tearing the canvas curtain that had hung before it. Annie, full of good food and wine, had been so grateful to Max for the luncheon she had proudly eaten at The Wells that she had taken all the blame for the squall-torn canvas on herself; and now Max relieved her from further reproof by saying to Jessie, with a lawyer’s firmness, ‘I’ve made up my mind and formed my decision. Come in and hear what it is.’
She followed him meekly, and Max began by saying, ‘If the pages in manuscript can be verified as Burns’s own writing, and if the poems there written are accepted as his own composition, the book may be worth ten thousand pounds.’
Jessie, so far from showing the exultation he had anticipated, shed slow and sorrowful tears, and said, ‘It’s the very price that Charlie put on it! But should I let it be sold? Should I run the risk of letting it be known that Charlie had bought such a book, and had it in his possession for eleven years? Think of the harm it would do to him — the irreparable harm — if it became known that a dreadful book like that was his private property? It would ruin his good name, Max — and I think myself we ought to burn it.’
‘Burn it! Burn ten thousand pounds? What blethering nonsense are you talking?’
‘But his good name … ’
‘His name wasn’t as good as that. There are very few names worth ten thousand pounds. And the difference ten thousand pounds will make to your comfort … ’
‘I know, I know. But would it be right to sell it? At the risk of blackening Charlie’s reputation?’
The argument continued for some forty minutes, during which time Jessie’s faded eyes shed more tears, and her nervous fingers
drummed upon the table. But Max, with the splendid goal of £10,000 in prospect, bombarded her with adamantine logic, and finally persuaded her to let him take the book into his own possession — ‘Say nothing of it to that lawyer of yours, here in Peebles!’ he commanded — until he had assembled enough scholarly evidence to prove, in confidence, the authenticity of those last sixteen pages.
Again he assured his sister that all arrangements would be made, as soon as possible, for the sea-burial, that Charlie Youghal had desired, of his ashes; and for the disposal of his estate, he said — of the only true riches he had left for disposal — she must rely on his good faith and sense. He would take the book with him …
‘Not until you have given me a proper receipt for it,’ said Jessie with a shrill firmness in her voice. ‘Oh, no, Max. For I remember how you cheated me out of that picture … ’
‘I did no such thing!’
‘You did, and you know you did! You cheated me out of a great sum of money … ’
The ancient dispute was renewed, and continued for some minutes with all the rage that had attended its inception; until Annie, who had been listening outside the sitting-room door, began to sob and kick its panels in the violence of her dismay — whereupon Jessie suddenly grew calm and, with an appearance of perfect self-composure, said, ‘You must do nothing to upset poor Annie. Now, be sensible, Max, and write a proper receipt for the book, and with your signature on it — over a twopenny stamp: I have one here — I’ll trust you to do your best for us both. For Annie and me; for blood is thicker than water.’
‘And a damned sight nastier,’ said Max under his breath, as he wrote the receipt and scrawled his name over the wet stamp that Jessie stuck beneath it. He refused an invitation to go upstairs and see the body of his late brother-in-law, and after drinking a cup of weak China tea he kissed his two sisters good-bye — Annie clung to him and whispered incoherently her willingness to have lunch with him whenever he was in need of company — and with dignified composure, and The Merry Muses in their manila envelope under his arm, he seated himself in his shining new Daimler, and said to his chauffeur, ‘Home, Thomson. Let’s go home.’
Some twenty minutes later, after he had watched with mixed feeling the recession of Peebles and its neighbouring landscape, he recovered his natural ebullience of spirit, and withdrawing The Merry Muses from their covering read again the concluding poems that were — that must be, he now felt — the true expression, in Robert Burns’s own hand, of humanity’s deep indecency.
Such was his pleasure in their possession that he began to sing. It was his habit, when he was happy, to sing hymns in his motor-car; and Thomson, now accustomed to his employer’s peculiarity, would pay no attention to the sounds of rollicking devotion behind him. At a steady fifty miles an hour they returned to Edinburgh, and in the back seat of the car, in a devout and strident baritone, Max began to sing:
‘We plough the fields, and scatter
The good seed on the land,
But it is fed and water’d
By God’s Almighty Hand
His voice grew louder and deepened in the consciousness of gratitude:
‘All good gifts around us
Are sent from Heav’n above,
Then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord,
For all His love.’
IV
Sunday morning, and the clamour of bells stonily re-echoing in the mews behind St George’s Church. To-and-fro, insistently, they beat against the walls of Hector’s wincing head — and sometimes, as if they were knocking at opposing doors, the small invisible portals of memory would open to let the figure of a girl appear, now on this side, now on the other. In essence or in origin it was the same girl, but when she came to the door that was labelled 1945 she was quite different from the girl who showed herself under the lintel on which 1939 was carved. 1939 was the year of their marriage, when she and Hector were nineteen, and in the years of separation that followed, the image of her as she looked then — perhaps a true image of her youth — had become fixed in his mind. This was the image that inspired his poetry, and the printed pages of three volumes had given it substance. But when, in 1945, he came home from Italy in a hospital ship, and she flew back from Washington, she was a different being. A stranger in looks — though clearly a relation of her younger self — and in character wholly strange. And where was reality? In the image that memory preserved and the printed poems attested, or in the successful, briskly speaking woman who contradicted it?
Which was real, and what was reality? — If Hector had been sound in wind and limb, whole and healthy in his mind, he might not have gone butterfly-hunting that notorious impalpability. But when Hector came home from the war he was physically ill — rib-taut and emaciated, ulcered, chronically coughing — and mentally exhausted. He had spent himself too lavishly. His strength had been poured away, and already it seemed that the cause he had fought for was lost or forgotten. It was, then, in a state of double misery, of inanition and frustration, that he sought reality as if it were a competence: as if it could both feed and console him. But where was it? In the remembered face of his poetry and her youth, or in the mature, more beautiful, strange and harder lineaments of the woman who had come home from Washington? They could not both be real, he thought, and in the long weeks of convalescence they pestered and bewildered him with their alternate claims for recognition.
This old perplexity — which he had never subdued, but which had slowly been rubbed away by the fret of time, and then almost forgotten — had lately re-appeared because in several ways Jane reminded him of his wife. In some aspects she was younger than her years — when he provoked her impatience it spoke in the voice of youth’s impatience — and there were physical resemblances which he may have exaggerated because he had loved no other women, and was ignorant of their common likenesses. So a round chin, the look of her wrists, the liveliness in her eyes and the occasional schoolroom rebellion in her voice had let him fall in love, though uncertainly, with Jane — and then roused the ghost of an almost forgotten and most unhappy bewilderment.
The bells resounded, he rose and sat on the side of his dishevelled bed. ‘If you have the will to live,’ he said — speaking aloud, alone in his borrowed flat — ‘it’s easy to find an excuse for living. But if you have lost the will, the impulse, the desire for life, then why put yourself to the trouble of inventing excuses? When you know that there’s nothing left but the boredom of repetition? When you know that desire has failed?
‘But be honest,’ he said to himself, and on a quickened screen of memory projected the living picture of Jane. Jane Telfer with her pointed tits and milky sleek long thighs. Now Jane’s worth living for.
‘But is she? How long would she last? Not long, of course. But that’s no argument against her. Nothing lasts, but for a year or two, for seven years, the dove-wing softness would be there, the voice would peal true to emotion, and the lips would mutely speak, the eyes reflect … ’
But what would they reflect? Only her private view of a vulgar fulfilment. And should one countenance vulgarity, which is the distemper of the world? The vulgus has grown too large, there’s too much of it, and it dominates. It has sought, bought, and thought the same things, and thereby flattened them, spoiled their meaning, robbed them of reality. I conspue the vulgus.
But if I am against vulgarity, I have done with life, he thought. ‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘I have. All I want now is that cleansing of vulgarity which is called death. The winnowing, the separation of grain from chaff. When I was young and had no judgment — nothing but appetite — I fell in love with life; but now I have fallen out, and I’m in love with death.
‘The winnowing, the sieve, and the separation: that is what I want.’ — For a long time he sat on his tumbled bed, unmoving, and contemplated death. Then, with a rumble of his bowels, came hunger, and with no sense of incongruity in the transition he contemplated breakfast. He was prepared to die, but death was in no hurry for him. He had time
for breakfast.
He had long since learnt to look after himself. He was as neat and dextrous in a kitchen as at his writing-table. He poured a glass of orange-juice, and made coffee. He scrambled two eggs, and cut three slices from a well-cured ham. He made toast, found butter and honey, and to read while he ate propped against a loaf of bread John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.
He opened the book and read, slowly and with relish, his favourite biography: the life of Richard Stokes:
His father was fellow of Eaton College. He was bred there and at King’s College. Scholar to Mr W. Oughtred for Mathematiques (Algebra.) He made himselfe mad with it, but became sober again, but I feare like a crackt glasse: Edidit Mr Oughtred’s Trigonometrie. Became a Roman Catholique; maried unhappily at Liege, dog and catt, etc. Became a sott. Dyed in Newgate, prisoner for debt, April, 1681.
He grew more cheerful — in the life of Richard Stokes he saw the true pattern of human existence — and without impairing his resolution he thought he could safely put off his suicide for another day or two. He would rub shoulders with life for a little longer. He might even accept the invitation he had received, the night before, to dine with Mr Arbuthnot.
Thomson had delivered it, and he had asked Thomson to come in and have a drink. Thomson, he quickly discovered, was an earnest young man who had literary aspirations and a passionate interest in Scottish Nationalism. He was a young man with high principles: Mr Arbuthnot had told him to take the Daimler to deliver the invitation, and he never drank when he was driving, he said. ‘But when I do drink I like a proper skinful,’ he added.
He was pleased and flattered to find himself sitting in friendly conversation with Hector —for whom, as he ingenuously declared, he had long had the deepest admiration — and quickly following that admission came a lively and somewhat incoherent account of his own hope and endeavours. Hector made a pot of coffee for him, and for himself — to dissipate his gloom, because he did not want it to darken Thomson’s exuberance — he opened a bottle of whisky …
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