INHERITANCE: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
Three forms of speech were current in Scotland in the time of Burns,
and, in different proportions, are current to-day: in the Highlands,
north and west of a slanting line running from the Firth of Clyde to
Aberdeenshire, Gaelic; in the Lowlands, south and east of the same
line, Lowland Scots; over the whole country, among the more educated
classes, English. Gaelic is a Celtic language, belonging to an
entirely different linguistic group from English, and having close
affinities to Irish and Welsh. This tongue Burns did not know. Lowland
Scots is a dialect of English, descended from the Northumbrian dialect
of Anglo-Saxon. It has had a history of considerable interest. Down to
the time of Chaucer, whose influence had much to do with making the
Midland dialect the literary standard for the Southern kingdom, it is
difficult to distinguish the written language of Edinburgh from that
of York, both being developments of Northumbrian. But as English
writers tended more and more to conform to the standard of London,
Northern Middle English gradually ceased to be written; while in
Scotland, separated and usually hostile as it was politically, the
Northern speech continued to develop along its own lines, until in the
beginning of the sixteenth century it attained a form more remote from
standard English and harder for the modern reader than it had been a
century before. The close connection between Scotland and France,
continuing down to the time of Queen Mary, led to the introduction of
many French words which never found a place in English; the proximity
of the Highlands made Gaelic borrowings easy; and the Scandinavian
settlements on both coasts contributed additional elements to the
vocabulary. Further, in its comparative isolation, Scots developed or
retained peculiarities in grammar and pronunciation unknown or lost in
the South. Thus by 1550, the form of English spoken in Scotland was in
a fair way to become an independent language.
This process, however, was rudely halted by the Reformation. The
triumph of this movement in England and its comparative failure in
France threw Scotland, when it became Protestant, into close relations
with England, while the "auld Alliance" with France practically ended
when Mary of Scots returned to her native country. Leaders like John
Knox, during the early struggles of the Reformation, spent much time
in England; and when they came home their speech showed the effect of
their intercourse with their southern brethren of the reformed faith.
The language of Knox, as recorded in his sermons and his _History_, is
indeed far from Elizabethan English, but it is notably less "broad"
than the Scots of Douglas and Lindesay. Scotland had no vernacular
translation of the Bible; and this important fact, along with the
English associations of many of the Protestant ministers, finally made
the speech of the Scottish pulpit, and later of Scottish religion in
general, if not English, at least as purely English as could be
achieved.
The process thus begun was carried farther in the next generation
when, in 1603, James VI of Scotland became King of England, and the
Court removed to London. England at that time was, of course, much
more advanced in culture than its poorer neighbor to the north, and
the courtiers who accompanied James to London found themselves marked
by their speech as provincial, and set themselves to get rid of their
Scotticisms with an eagerness in proportion to their social
aspirations. Scottish men of letters now came into more intimate
relation with English literature, and finding that writing in English
opened to them a much larger reading public, they naturally adopted
the southern speech in their books. Thus men like Alexander, Earl of
Stirling, and William Drummond of Hawthornden belong both in language
and literary tradition to the English Elizabethans.
Religion, society, and literature having all thrown their influence
against the native speech of Scotland, it followed that the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the progressive disuse of
that speech among the upper classes of the country, until by the time
of Burns, Scots was habitually spoken only by the peasantry and the
humbler people in the towns. The distinctions between social classes
in the matter of dialect were, of course, not absolute. Occasional
members even of the aristocracy prided themselves on their command of
the vernacular; and among the country folk there were few who could
not make a brave attempt at English when they spoke with the laird or
the minister. With Burns himself, Lowland Scots was his customary
speech at home, about the farm, in the tavern and the Freemasons'
lodge; but, as we have seen, his letters, being written mainly to
educated people, are almost all pure English, as was his conversation
with these people when he met them.
The linguistic situation that has been sketched finds interesting
illustration in the language of Burns's poems. The distinction which
is usually made, that he wrote poetry in Scots and verse in English,
has some basis, but is inaccurately expressed and needs qualification.
The fundamental fact is that for him Scots was the natural language
of the emotions, English of the intellect. The Scots poems are in
general better, not chiefly because they are in Scots but because they
are concerned with matters of natural feeling; the English poems are
in general poetically poorer, not because they are in English but
because they are so frequently the outcome of moods not dominated by
spontaneous emotion, but intellectual, conscious, or theatrical. He
wrote English sometimes as he wore his Sunday blacks, with dignity but
not with ease; sometimes as he wore the buff and blue, with buckskins
and top-boots, which he donned in Edinburgh--"like a farmer dressed in
his best to dine with the laird." In both cases he was capable of
vigorous, common-sense expression; in neither was he likely to exhibit
the imagination, the tenderness, or the humor which characterized the
plowman clad in home-spun.
_The Cotter's Saturday Night_ is an interesting illustration of these
distinctions. The opening stanza is a dedicatory address on English
models to a lawyer friend and patron; it is pure English in language,
stiff and imitatively "literary" in style. The stanzas which follow
describing the homecoming of the cotter, the family circle, the
supper, and the daughter's suitor, are in broad Scots, the language
harmonizing perfectly with the theme, and they form poetically the
sound core of the poem. In the description of family worship, Burns
did what his father would do in conducting that worship, adopted
English as more reverent and respectful, but inevitably as more
restrained emotionally; and in the moralizing passage which follows,
as in the apostrophes to Scotia and to the Almighty at the close, he
naturally sticks to English, and in spite of a genuine enough
exaltation of spirit achieves a result rather rhetorical than
poetical.
Contrast again songs like _Corn Rigs_ or _Whistle and I'll Come To
Thee, My Lad_, with most of the songs to Clarinda. The former, in
Scots, are genial, whole-hearted, full of the power of kindling
imaginative sympathy, thoroughly contagious in their lusty emotion or
sly humor. The latter, in English, are stiff, coldly contrived,
consciously elegant or marked by the sentimental factitiousness of the
affair that occasioned them. But their inferiority is due less to the
difference in language than to the difference in the mood. When,
especially at a distance, his relation to Clarinda really touched his
imagination, we have the genuinely poetical _My Nannie's Awa_ and _Ae
Fond Kiss_. The latter poem can be, with few changes, turned into
English without loss of quality; and its most famous lines have almost
no dialect:
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met--or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
Finally, there are the English poems to Highland Mary. For some
reason not yet fully understood, the affair with Mary Campbell was
treated by him in a spirit of reverence little felt in his other love
poetry, and this spirit was naturally expressed by him in English. But
in the almost English
"Ye banks and braes and streams around
The Castle of Montgomery,"
and in the pure English _To Mary in Heaven_, he is not at all hampered
by the use of the Southern speech, Scots would not have heightened the
poetry here, and for Burns Scots would have been less appropriate,
less natural even, for the expression of an almost sacred theme.
The case, then, seems to stand thus. Burns commanded two languages,
which he employed instinctively for different kinds of subject and
mood. The subjects and moods which evoked vernacular utterance were
those that with all writers are more apt to yield poetry, and in
consequence most of his best poetry is in Scots. But when a theme
naturally evoking English was imaginatively felt by him, the use of
English did not prevent his writing poetically. And there were themes
which he could handle equally well in either speech--as we see, for
example, in the songs in _The Jolly Beggars_.
Yet the language had an importance in itself. Though its vocabulary is
limited in matters of science, philosophy, religion, and the like,
Lowland Scots is very rich in homely terms and in humorous and tender
expressions. For love, or for celebrating the effects of whisky,
English is immeasurably inferior. The free use of the diminutive
termination in _ie_ or _y_--a termination capable of expressing
endearment, familiarity, ridicule, and contempt as well as mere
smallness--not only has considerable effect in emotional shading, but
contributes to the liquidness of the verse by lessening the number of
consonantal endings that make English seem harsh and abrupt to many
foreign ears. Moreover, the very indeterminateness of the dialect, the
possibility of using varying degrees of "broadness," increased the
facility of rhyming, and added notably to the ease and spontaneity of
composition. Thus in Scots Burns was not only more at home, but had a
medium in some respects more plastic than English.
Language, however, was not the only element in his inheritance which
helped to determine the nature and quality of Burns's production. He
was extremely sensitive to suggestion from his predecessors, and
frankly avowed his obligations to them, so that to estimate his
originality it is necessary to know something of the men at whose
flame he kindled.
As the Northern dialect of English was, before the Reformation, in a
fair way to become an independent national speech, so literature north
of the Tweed had promise of a development, not indeed independent, but
distinct. Of the writers of the Middle Scots period, Henryson and
Dunbar, Douglas and Lindesay, Burns, it is true, knew little; and the
tradition that they founded underwent in the latter part of the
sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries an experience in
many respects parallel to that which has been described in the matter
of language. The effect of the Reformation upon all forms of artistic
creation will be discussed when we come to speak particularly of the
history of Scottish song; for the moment it is sufficient to say that
the absorption in theological controversy was unfavorable to the
continuation of a poetical development. Under James VI, however, there
were a few writers who maintained the tradition, notably Alexander
Montgomery, Alexander Scott, and the Sempills. To the first of these
is to be credited the invention of the stanza called, from the poems
in which Montgomery used it, the stanza of _The Banks of Helicon_ or
of _The Cherry and the Slae_. It was imitated by some of Montgomery's
contemporaries, revived by Allan Ramsay, and thus came to Burns down a
line purely Scottish, as it never seems to have been used in any other
tongue. He first employed it in the _Epistle to Davie_, and it was
made by him the medium of some of his most characteristic ideas.
It's no in titles nor in rank:
It's no in wealth like Lon'on Bank,
To purchase peace and rest.
It's no in makin muckle, mair, [much, more]
It's no in books, it's no in lear, [learning]
To make us truly blest:
If happiness hae not her seat
An' centre in the breast,
We may be wise, or rich, or great,
But never can be blest!
Nae treasures nor pleasures
Could make us happy lang;
The heart aye's the part aye
That makes us right or wrang.
_The Piper of Kilbarchan_, by Sir Robert Sempill of Beltrees
(1595?-1661?), set a model for the humorous elegy on the living which
reached Burns through Ramsay and Fergusson, and was followed by him in
those on Poor Mailie and Tam Samson. The stanza in which it is written
is far older than Sempill, having been traced as far back as the
troubadours in the twelfth century, and being found frequently in both
English and French through the Middle Ages; but from the time of
Sempill on, it was cultivated with peculiar intensity in Scotland, and
is the medium of so many of Burns's best-known pieces that it is often
called Burns's stanza.
Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,
Wi' saut tears tricklin' down your nose;
Our Bardie's fate is at a close,
Past a' remead;
The last, sad cape-stane o' his woe's--
Poor Mailie's dead!
The seventeenth century was a barren one for Scottish literature. The
attraction of the larger English public and the disuse of the
vernacular among the upper classes already discussed, drew to the
South or to the Southern speech whatever literary talent appeared in
the North, and it seemed for a time that, except for the obscure
stream of folk poetry, Scottish vernacular literature was at an end.
In the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, interest began to
revive. In 1706-9-11 James Watson published the three volumes of his
_Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems_, and in the third
decade began to appear Allan Ramsay's _Tea Table Miscellany_
(1724-40). These collections rescued from oblivion a large quantity of
vernacular verse, some of it drawn from manuscripts of pre-Reformation
poetry, some of it contemporary, some of it anonymous and of uncertain
date, having come down orally or in chap-books and broadsides. The
welcome given to these volumes was an early instance of that renewed
interest in older and more primitive literature that was manifested
still more strikingly when Percy published his _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_ in 1765. Its influence on the production of vernacular
literature was evident at once in the original work of Ramsay himself;
and the movement which culminated in Burns, though having its roots
far back in the work of Henryson and Dunbar, was in effect a Scottish
renascence, in which the chief agents before Burns were Hamilton of
Gilbertfield, Ramsay himself, Robert Fergusson, and song-writers like
Mrs. Cockburn and Lady Anne Lindsay.
Of this fact Burns was perfectly aware, and he was not only candid but
generous in his acknowledgment of his debt to his immediate
predecessors.
My senses wad be in a creel, [head would be turned]
Should I but dare a hope to speel, [climb]
Wi' Allan, or wi' Gilbertfield,
The braes o' fame; [hills]
Or Fergusson, the writer-chiel, [lawyer-fellow]
A deathless name.
He knew Ramsay's collection and had a perhaps exaggerated admiration
for _The Gentle Shepherd_. This poem, published in 1728, not only
holds a unique position in the history of the pastoral drama, but is
important in the present connection as being to Burns the most signal
evidence of the possibility of a dignified literature in the modern
vernacular. Hamilton and Ramsay had exchanged rhyming epistles in the
six-line stanza, and in these Burns found the model for his own
epistles. Hamilton's _Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck_--a favorite
grey-hound--had been imitated by Ramsay in _Lucky Spence's Last
Advice_ and the _Last Speech of a Wretched Miser_, and the form had
become a Scottish convention before Burns produced his _Death and
Dying Words of Poor Mailie_. As important as any of these was the
example set by Ramsay and bettered by Burns of refurbishing old
indecent or fragmentary songs. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was
regarded by Burns still more highly than Ramsay, and his influence was
even more potent. In his autobiographical letter to Doctor Moore he
tells that about 1782 he had all but given up rhyming: "but meeting
with Fergusson's _Scotch Poems_, I strung anew my wildly-sounding,
rustic lyre with emulating vigour." In the preface to the Kilmarnock
edition he is still more explicit as to his attitude.
"To the poems of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor,
unfortunate Fergusson, he, with equal unaffected sincerity,
declares, that, even in the highest pulse of vanity, he has not
the most distant pretensions. These two justly admired Scotch
Poets he has often had in his eye in the following pieces; but
rather with a view to kindle at their flame, than for servile
imitation."
To be more specific, Burns found the model for his _Cotter's Saturday
Night_ in Fergusson's _Farmer's Ingle_, for _The Holy Fair_ in his
_Leith Races_, for _Scotch Drink_ in his _Caller Water_, for _The Twa
Dogs_ and _The Brigs of Ayr_ in his _Planestanes and Causey_, and
_Kirkyard Eclogues_. In later years Burns grew somewhat more critical
of Ramsay, especially as a reviser of old songs; but for Fergusson he
retained to the end a sympathetic admiration. When he went to
Edinburgh, one of his first places of pilgrimage was the grave of him
whom he apostrophized thus,
O thou, my elder brother in misfortune,
By far my elder brother in the muse!
And he later obtained from the managers of the Canongate Kirk
permission to erect a stone over the tomb.
The fact, then, that Burns owed much to the tradition of vernacular
poetry in Scotland and especially to his immediate predecessors is no
new discovery, however recent critics may have plumed themselves upon
it. Burns knew it well, and was ever ready to acknowledge it. What is
more important than the mere fact of his inheritance is the use he
made of it. In taking from his elders the fruits of their experience
in poetical conception and metrical arrangement, he but did what
artists have always done; in outdistancing these elders and in almost
every case surpassing their achievement on the lines they had laid
down, he did what only the greater artists succeed in doing. It is not
in mere inventiveness and novelty but in first-hand energy of
conception, in mastering for himself the old thought and the old form
and uttering them with his personal stamp, in making them carry over
to the reader with a new force or vividness or beauty, that the poet's
originality consists. In these respects Burns's originality is no whit
lessened by an explicit recognition of his indebtedness to the stock
from which he grew.
His relation to the purely English literature which he read is
different and produced very different results. Shakespeare he
reverenced, and that he knew him well is shown by the frequency of
Shakespearean turns of phrase in his letters, as well as by direct
quotation. But of influence upon his poetry there is little trace. He
had a profound admiration for the indomitable will of Milton's Satan,
and he makes it clear that this admiration affected his conduct. The
most frequent praise of English writers in his letters is, however,
given to the eighteenth-century authors--to Pope, Thomson, Shenstone,
Gray, Young, Blair, Beattie, and Goldsmith in verse, to Sterne,
Smollett, and Henry Mackenzie in prose. Echoes of these poets are
common in his work, and the most frigid of his English verses show
their influence most clearly. To the sentimental tendency in the
thought of the eighteenth century he was highly responsive, and the
expression of it in _The Man of Feeling_ appealed to him especially.
In a mood which recurred painfully often he was apt to pride himself
on his "sensibility": the letters to Clarinda are full of it. The less
fortunate effects of it are seen both in his conduct and in his poems
in a fondness for nursing his emotions and extracting pleasure from
his supposed miseries; the more fortunate aspects are reflected in the
tender humanity of poems like those _To a Mouse_, _On Seeing a Wounded
Hare_, and _To a Daisy_--perhaps even in the _Address to the Deil_. He
had naturally a warm heart and strong impulses; it is only when an
element of consciousness or mawkishness appears that his "sensibility"
is to be ascribed to the fashionable philosophy of the day and the
influence of his English models.
For better or worse, then, Burns belongs to the literary history of
Britain as a legitimate descendant of easily traced ancestors. Like
other great writers he made original contributions from his individual
temperament and from his particular environment and experience. But
these do not obliterate the marks of his descent, nor are they so
numerous or powerful as to give support to the old myth of the "rustic
phenomenon," the isolated poetical miracle appearing in defiance of
the ordinary laws of literary dependence and tradition.
If this is true of his models it is no less true of his methods.
Though simplicity and spontaneity are among the most obvious of the
qualities of his work, it is not to be supposed that such effects were
obtained by a birdlike improvisation. "All my poetry," he said, "is
the effect of easy composition but laborious correction," and the
careful critic will perceive ample evidence in support of the
statement. We shall see in the next chapter with what pains he fitted
words to melody in his songs; an examination of the variant readings
which make the establishment of his text peculiarly difficult shows
abundant traces of deliberation and the labor of the file. In the
following song, the first four lines of which are old, it is
interesting to note that, though he preserves admirably the tone of
the fragment which gave him the impulse and the idea, the twelve lines
which he added are in the effects produced by manipulation of the
consonants and vowels and in the use of internal rhyme a triumph of
conscious artistic skill. The interest in technique which this implies
is exhibited farther in many passages of his letters, especially those
to George Thomson.
GO FETCH TO ME A PINT O' WINE
Go fetch to me a pint o' wine,
An' fill it in a silver tassie; [goblet]
That I may drink, before I go,
A service to my bonnie lassie.
The boat rocks at the pier o' Leith,
Fu' loud the wind blaws frae the ferry, [from]
The ship rides by the Berwick-law,
And I maun leave my bonnie Mary. [must]
The trumpets sound, the banners fly,
The glittering spears are rankèd ready;
The shouts o' war are heard afar,
The battle closes thick and bloody;
But it's no the roar o' sea or shore
Wad mak me langer wish to tarry;
Nor shout o' war that's heard afar,
It's leaving thee, my bonnie Mary.