Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/84

60 dialect and follow the plot all the better. The French of the menu card has little effect on the digestion of the dishes. Take, by way of emphasising this point, Dr. William Alexander's "Johnny Gibb o' Gushetneuk," a story which, though very precious to the few who are in sympathy to appreciate it, is yet caviare to the general who dote on Thrums and all its kin. Here the charm of rusticity is perfect. The characters are as strong, original, and lifelike as any in the whole gallery of the "Kailyard." The "waesome element o' greetin' and deein'" is indeed absent, but the humorous aspects of Scotch thrift and pawkiness and all the lights and shades of minor morality in a country-side are there, and worked out on the lines of Galt and Ferrier and Mrs. Hamilton (the creator of Mrs. Maclarty). But the author handicapped himself by his devotion to the vernacular setting of his tale. He could not do otherwise, this attitude being part and parcel of his thinking. Pope doubtless knew as well as Shakspere what constituted a poet, but nature had built him for reasoning in verse, so he was didactic and ratiocinative at the risk of being refused some day the very name of poet. Similarly we have the real Burns in the vernacular poems. Wordsworth was right in his appreciation of these, while Tennyson followed the multitude in preferring the songs in which Burns devoted his lyrical gifts to the gathering up of the fragments of a fading vernacular and dressing them out in the sentimental fashion of the eighteenth century. This preference is the more surprising when we remember that Tennyson himself has raised his own dialect work to the dignity of a classic. Nowhere else has he struck a deeper or truer dramatic note. The truth is that literature cannot afford to overlook such vernacular as we have in Scotland; witness the great number of Northern words now used as English. But the best evidence of the value of this interdependence comes from Burns, Scott and Carlyle, who nursed their art on this humble soil, and thereby secured a position among the most vivid, human, and truly realistic masters of English. If the Scottish vernacular should pass from decadence to decay, the people will not only lose the education of their bi-lingual inheritance, but English itself will suffer. For, while the effect of education on the literary speech is to develop expression by the strict rules of conventional