Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/133



vernacular is, properly speaking, the language of the verna or "household slave." In all old societies the ruling and propertied class entrusted the infant to a foster-parent, and the work of the household to a crowd of famuli, and in both cases these were drawn from the lower and dialect-using classes. All, even moderately civilised, peoples were, and in a sense are still, bi-lingual. The "clerk and the lewed man" are equally required for the business of life. From the dawn of literature it must have been so. Whenever expression is consciously artistic it becomes selective and creative. The first to use verbal embroidery must have been the first stylist. One of the many indirect effects of printing has been to emphasise and fix this duality. The schoolboy, a keen observer of character, like the natural man, has a just horror of "the fellow that speaks like a book." His own diction is never recklessly original, being largely a medley of coterie words, as "horrid," "awful," "cheeky," "beastly," caddish," "dashed mean," with an occasional "jolly" or "bally." More striking is the effect of hearing the average man, schoolboy, or even preacher read aloud. At once all naturalness is lost in a monotonous, high-pitched sing-song. To these the art of using book language is an acquired taste, and retains scare a feature of that tongue which gives to social intercourse its perennial charm.

Macaulay argued that as civilisation increases poetry declines. It would be easier to maintain that as reading and education spread, a true vernacular must gradually disappear. It loses historic continuity, and becomes a mixture of malapropisms and slang. Fashion, worst of all, taboos it as vulgar. Like divination, and poor relations, and last season's millinery, it keeps in the background. Mrs. Calderwood, a grand lady of the old