Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/120

96 Doric, Aeolic dialects from the classical Attic, all dignified equally with it by the possession of literary monuments. But the modern dialect is something quite beneath the notice of the grammarians, and too vulgar and coarse for literary treatment. To it may well be applied the words of Comus to the Lady,—

The peasant lends picturesqueness to the canvas, but the literary artist must trick him out as the conventional Corydon and Thestylis. Spenser tried in his "Shepherd's Calendar" to make his peasants speak "in habit as they lived." But the experiment broke down when they proceeded to discuss ecclesiastical politics and the creed of Puritanism. Then their language ceased to be the dress of their thought. The diction of Spenser, indeed, is as ideal as his matter, hence his lack of a general vogue. His case shows the dependence, for vitality, of literature on the homely vernacular. In Scotland the persistence of a distinct vernacular with its human appeal has given universality to Burns and Scott, whereas in England the vernacular in post-Elizabethan literature has had but a local interest. It is dialect pure and simple.

Dialect as the humble patois or tongue shaped by the environment of locality, occupation, or manners, is in a sense equivalent to vernacular, both presenting speech in undress. The vernacular, however, is more correctly the mother-tongue, the speech to which we are born, and as much our inheritance as gait and features. "When we take heed, under the influence of education or example, our speech may approximate more or less to literary form, but it never quite reaches it. If this be so, one may well question the appropriateness of Mr. T. F. Henderson's title, "The History of Scottish Vernacular Literature," for the gist of the whole matter is that the vernacular is not literature, else should we all be talking prose and verse without knowing it. Now, the works of which he has to treat—those of Barbour, Douglas, Dunbar, Lindesay, and the rest—are as much literary monuments as those of their English contemporaries. Yet, would a "History of English Vernacular