Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/141

Rh The Great Exhibition and the horrors and heroisms of Sebastopol must mark, to those of us who are now middle-aged, the first note from the external world that came to disturb the placidity of what seems now an idyllic youth, spent in the far back fifties in many a Sleepy Hollow with which the bicycle is now enabling us to renew a pleasant acquaintance. It must have been then when such pen-artists as Mr. Barrie and "Ian Maclaren" were "making themselves." The demands of fiction as "the warp and weft" of human passion lie outwith my present quest, which is indeed a much less ambitious task, no other than the attempt to recall the local colour of the village story, the manners and customs of the rustic mind as revealed in its vernacular, and especially the amusements of youth "when all such sports could please." Like the cognate attempt at reminiscence in the "Deserted Village," the task has its limitations as a genuine bit of realism. Most dealings of this kind with rustic life and its vernacular have a tendency to give a false impression to the superficial reader. Firstly, the very shallow suggestion of vulgarity as inherent in the vernacular has to be discounted. Further, such vernacular is really often more old-fashioned than it seems. Much of Burns, not in diction alone but in matter, was half-consciously archaic in his day, and fully intelligible only to the old people whose sympathies with a familiar past he aroused. If we are to believe his biographer, Currie, Burns himself used but little of what now passes for the dialect of the "Kailyard." Of course the accent remained in his case as in that of Scott and Carlyle, though such an unfriendly critic as Samuel Johnson admits that even that may be got rid of "wi' a fecht." "There can be no doubt that Scotsmen may attain to a perfect English pronunciation if they will. We find how near they come to it" [nearer in his day than now, however, for English is more changed relatively than Scots]; "and certainly a man who conquers nineteen parts of the Scottish accent may conquer the twentieth." Pity companies that tour in Scots plays could not act up to Johnson's conviction, and come enough the ultra-Tweed accent to spare us Rab Dow ("The Little Minister") in a tone that rhymes to "now," instead of near