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Introduction
I have made this little
anthology with no other purpose than to please myself. It contains the
things which, as . a lover of Scots verse, I turn to most often and desire
to have in a compact form. Since there is no motive of instruction, I have
felt myself at liberty to arrange it, not chronologically, but according to
subject, and boldly to mingle old and new. Many Scots poems have a vogue
altogether independent of their poetic merit; these I have neglected, and
have confined my choice to pieces which in varying degree seem to me to be
literature, from a bottle song just redeemed from doggerel by some
quaintness of fancy to the high flights of Bums and Dunbar. If it is
complained that much has been omitted which was worthy of inclusion, the
reply must be that the book is not a Corpus Poeticum Boreale, but a
selection, and a selection governed by personal tastes.
The Ballads have been sparingly used, for they are accessible in many
editions. I have not scrupled to print a single verse or a group of verses
from a poem, or to omit a passage where it seemed desirable ; the notes in
the Commentary will show where the complete text may be found. The fantastic
spelling of the older pieces has in certain cases been very slightly
modified. With a little practice there is no difficulty in under-xix
standing the “makars,” even Gawain Douglas, providing they be read aloud.
There is a glossary at the foot of each page to vernacular words and idioms,
and to those accustomed to one dialect only, let me repeat the advice to
read aloud. “Aberdeen-awa” looks difficult to, say, a Lothian eye, but it is
simple enough to a Lothian ear.
The compiler of such an anthology as this makes by implication a claim of
merit for his exhibits. It is only by an effort that I can force myself to
judge these with any pretence to impartiality. The sweet old airs to which
the lyrics go have been in my ear since childhood. The speech with its rich
and vigorous idiom is so linked to memories that no other tongue can ever
seem to me so expressive. But since everybody has not this happy obsession,
I propose briefly to set forth what seems to me to be the reasonable claim
which can be made for the Scots vernacular and its literature.
The Teutonic speech of Northern England was brought into Scotland by the
first Anglian settlers, and acquired throughout the succeeding centuries
certain minor but clearly marked peculiarities. When Scots literature
begins, towards the close of the fourteenth century, it is written in a
tongue substantially the same as the Northern dialect of Early English,
which was the speech current north of the Humber. Gradually a literary
language was formed, akin to, but not the same as, the spoken tongue, and
this literary language was influenced by Chaucer and the poets of the South.
But presently the Midland dialect became the only literary language in
England, and the Northern dialect drew further away from it and followed a
path of its own. The early Scots writers, like Barbour and Wyntoun, wrote
what was virtually Northern English. The Kingis Quair of James I., though
written originally in Southern English, was northemized by the copyists;
Henryson’s language was little affected by the south; then, as the Middle
Scots period develops, we find Dunbar and Gawain Douglas and Sir David
Lyndsay using a language of their own —Northern English in stock, with a
slight French element, and a strong kinship with the spoken tongue of the
Lowlands, which had developed its own idiosyncrasies. But to every Scots
writer, however robust his patriotism, his speech was “English,” and Dunbar
calls Chaucer “of our Inglisch all the lycht.” Gawain Douglas, indeed,
claims to be a “Scottis” and not an “Inglis” poet, but he confessed himself
forced to use some “ Sudroun ” words, and his work, though it accepts more
from the spoken vernacular, is in the same tradition as that of the other “makars,”
so that Lyndsay could speak of him as “in our Inglis rethorick the rose.” A
stout Scots nationalist like Hume of Godscroft, who lived at the close of
the sixteenth century, might maintain that he wrote his Scottish
mother-tongue, and that he had “ever accounted it a mean study to learn to
read or speak English ... esteeming it but a dialect of our own, and that
(perhaps) more corrupt.” But his claim was a mere juggling with words.
Perhaps the process might be thus summarily and broadly stated. The Scots
speech was in its beginnings the Northern dialect of English, which, as a
spoken tongue, soon acquired minor local differences. When it came to be
written it was the language of Northern England, and, though influenced to
some extent by the South, it remained Northern. It was a literary speech,
coloured by French and Latin, but it kept its affinities with the spoken
vernacular and borrowed from it, being perhaps not much further removed from
it than any book language is from that spoken in street and ale-house. As
the Midland dialect became the literary language of England, Scots preserved
its Northern quality and drew farther apart, developing powers and beauties
of its own, though much clogged by an imperfect assimilation of its
borrowings. It called itself English, but it was a substantive national
speech, and its literature was a national literature, close enough to the
common people to be intelligible to them, and yet capable of treating of all
themes from the homeliest to the highest. Had circumstances been different
Scots might have developed into a true world-speech, “perhaps,” as Mr.
Henderson says, “more than rivalling literary English in fertility of
idioms, and in wealth, beauty, and efficacy of diction,” or Southern and
Northern might have united in one majestic stream.
But the sixteenth century brought a sharp fissure. The chief disruptive
agent was the Reformation, which in Scotland not only involved a more
violent breach with the past than elsewhere, but put secular literature
under a ban and cut at the root of vernacular art and song. It led to a
severance with France and a closer contact with England. It made the chief
reading of Scotland the Bible—in English; it gave her the metrical Psalms—in
English; and its great protagonists, like John Knox, had so many English
affiliations that they were accused by their enemies of being “triple trait
oris quha... knappis suddrone.” The making of verse ceased to be a pastime
of people strongly troubled about their souls, and the few who still
practised the art turned, like the poets of the Delicice Poetarum Scotorum,
to Latin, or, like Drummond of Hawthomden, Aytoun, and Alexander, to the
courtly muse of Edmund Spenser. The tongue which was spoken at kirk and
market went out of literature for a century and more, and when it returned
it was no longer as a national speech, but as a modish exercise. Politics,
theology, a little law, and less history held the boards in seventeenth
century Scotland, and their language was for the best part an ungainly
English.
There was a revival early in the eighteenth century at the hands of Allan
Ramsay, but its motive was antiquarian. The very men who laboured to expunge
any Scotticisms from their prose and polished their Augustan couplets as
their serious contribution to letters, turned a curious eye back to their
own sixteenth century, and Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany and Ever Green were
the consequence. We owe much to this antiquarian interest, for it preserved
the old poetry when it was in imminent danger of perishing. Thomson’s
Orpheus Caledonius appeared in 1725; and following on the publication of
Bishop Percy’s Reliques came a flood of invaluable miscellanies, such as
Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1769), Pinkerton’s two volumes of
Ballads (1781 and 1783), Johnson’s Musical Museum (1787), culminating in Sir
Walter Scott’s great Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3). The
vernacular had become a book tongue to be studied and annotated; but when
its students had anything to say, they said it in that English which was now
the common speech of the literate from Devon to Aberdeen.
But Scots had one season of flowering left to it so splendid that it is hard
to believe that the blossoms were the product of artificial tending and not
the indigenous growth of the fields. Burns is by universal admission one of
the most natural of poets, but he used a language which was, even in his own
day, largely exotic. His Scots was not the living speech of his countrymen,
like the English of Shelley, and—in the main—the Scots of Dunbar; it was a
literary language subtly blended from the old “makars” and the refrains of
folk poetry, much tinctured with the special dialect of Ayrshire, and with a
solid foundation of English, accented more Boreali. No Scot in the later
eighteenth century, whether in Poosie Nansie’s or elsewhere, spoke exactly
as Bums wrote. Perhaps the plain speech of a people can never be the
language of poetry, but a speech so limited and specialized as the spoken
vernacular of eighteenth century Scotland could scarcely suffice for the
needs of a great poet. Burns, as he was bound to be, was retrospective and
antiquarian in his syntax and vocabulary. He created a noble poetic diction,
but it was a creation, not the reproduction of a speech still in the ears of
men.
A century and a half have passed since Burns wrote, and the vernacular,
confined to an ever-narrowing province, has suffered a further detrition.
Old words and constructions have lapsed from use; modes of speech which were
current so late as thirty years ago among the shepherds of Ettrick and
Galloway are scarcely intelligible to their successors; in the towns the
patois bids fair to become merely a broadened and dilapidated English; and
though the dwellers north of Tweed will be eternally distinguishable from
their neighbours by certain idiosyncrasies of speech, these idiosyncrasies
will be of voice and accent, and not of language. The Scots vernacular
ceased in the sixteenth century to be a language in the full sense, capable
of being used on all varieties of theme, and was confined to the rustic and
the parochial; capable, indeed, in the hands of a master of sounding the
depths of the human heart, but ill suited to the infinite variety of human
life. Even from this narrowed orbit it has fallen, and is now little more
than a robust rendering of colloquial English. The literary Scots which
Burns wrote is more than ever a literary tongue, far removed from any speech
in common use. It is understood by many, not because it is in their ears
from hearing, but because it is in their memories from reading. To restore
the Scots vernacular is beyond the power of any Act of Parliament, because
the life on which it depended has gone. Thirty years ago I learned in the
Tweedside glens to talk a Scots, which was then the speech of a people
secluded from the modern world; to-day if I spoke it at a Tweeddale clipping
I should find only a few old men to understand me. Scots can survive only as
a book-tongue, and it is to that purpose that I would bespeak the efforts of
my countrymen. The knowledge of the book-tongue is still fairly common, and
if, in the mill of a standardized education, it should ever be crushed out,
we shall lose the power of appreciating not only the “makars,” but the best
of the Ballads, Burns, and Sir Walter Scott— that part of our literary
heritage which is most intimately and triumphantly our own.
It follows that the Scots poets since Burns have been retrospective, as he
was. They are all of them, from the minor bards of Whistle Binkie to
Stevenson and Mrs. Jacob and Mr. Charles Murray, exponents of a literary
convention and not singers in the speech of the common day. That is not to
say that their art is not fresh and spontaneous, for art may work through
conventions and yet be free. Poetry, composed with infinite pains from a
thousand echoes, may have the sound of the natural voice, and to this virtue
I think some of our modern Scots verse attains. It is always an exercise,
the fruit of care and scholarship, and since the literary tongue is so nobly
pedigreed, it will preserve (so long as it has an audience to understand it)
a flavour and a grace which make it the fittest medium for a Scot to express
certain moods and longings. It will be least successful when it is too
antiquarian and becomes a mere clot of coagulated dialect, or when it
attempts to reproduce phonetically a spoken word which is too disintegrated
for literature. It must always be in a sense a pastiche, but that is not
inimical to artistic excellence. Nevertheless—let us regretfully face the
fact — the pastiche is not a growth of enduring vitality, and it has the
further drawback that its appeal is circumscribed owing to the lack of any
canon of vernacular Scots. Every shire has its variant. If we call Sir
Walter Scott’s version the classic standard, what are we to make of Burns ?
And if the Border speech is metropolitan, is Mr. Charles Murray provincial?
There is a sentence in a letter of Burns to George Thomson1 wich seems to me
to point a way to the true future of Scots in our literature. “There is a
naivete,” he wrote, “a pastoral simplicity in a slight admixture of Scots
words and phraseology which is more in unison — at least to my taste, and, I
would add, to any genuine Caledonian taste—with the simple pathos or rustic
sprightliness of our native music, than any English verses whatever.” He was
speaking only of songs to be set to old airs, but the words have a wider
application. It is to be noted that in some of the greatest masterpieces of
our tongue, in the Ballads, in Burns’s Ae Fond Kiss, in Scott throughout— in
Proud Maisie, in Wandering Willie’s Tale, in the talk of Jeanie Deans— the
dialect is never emphasized; only a word here and there provides a Northern
tone. I can imagine a Scottish literature of both verse and prose based on
this “slight admixture,” a literature which should be, in Mr. Gregory
Smith’s admirable phrase, “a delicate colouring of standard English with
Northern tints.” In such work the drawbacks of the pastiche would disappear;
because of its Northern colouring it would provide the means for an
expression of the racial temperament, and because it was also English, and
one of the great world-speeches, no limit
From what has been written it follows that Scots poetry after the sixteenth
century has not the width and variety of a national literature, covering all
the moods of life and thought. Judged by his scope, Dunbar is its greatest
figure. He has been differently estimated: Mr. Russell Lowell thought him a
bore— “He who is national enough to like thistles may browse there to his
heart’s content”; Mr. Andrew Lang is tepid in his praise; Sir Walter Scott,
on the other hand, thought him the greatest Scots poet before Burns; and the
friends of the late W. P. Ker will remember with what gusto he used to
declare, “Dunbar is my poet.” To me he seems to rank with the Ballads,
Burns, and the Waverley Novels as one of the four of Scotland’s main
contributions to letters. In any case it will not be disputed that the
“makars alone essayed and succeeded in the grand manner—alone attempted
(with varying success) the full circle of poetic material. Since their day
vernacular poetry has had its wings clipped, and though it has soared high
the latitude of its flights has shrunk.
Defects have followed from this circumscription of area, this absorption in
too narrow a world. The most notable is a certain provincialism of theme,
which is always in danger of degenerating into a provincialism of thought.
Scots poetry is apt to be self-absorbed, to become the scrupulous chronicle
of small beer, to lack the long perspective and the “high translunary
things” of greater art.
“Tiny pleasures occupy the place Of glories and of duties: as the feet Of
fabled fairies, when the sun goes down, Trip o’er the grass where wrestlers
strove by day.”
This in itself is no blemish, and, indeed, a confined outlook could scarcely
have been avoided in the literature of a speech diverted from the larger
uses of life and forced back upon one class and environment. But it means
that it does not enter for the greater contests of the Muses, since a
cameoist can never be a Pheidias, or a Teniers a Rembrandt.
From this inevitable provincialism spring two faults which are the prime
weaknesses of Scots verse. One is a distressing facility, a preference for
easy cadences and trite epithets and tedious jingles, a lack of the classic
reticence and discipline. Bums is a supreme example to the contrary, and he
remains a miracle in the Scots tradition. He has the sureness and the
rightness of the antique, but much Scots verse is marred by a cheap
glibness, an admiration for the third or fourth best, which is due to the
lack of a strong artistic canon. It is a defect which is found in popular
songs and popular hymns, the price which poetry must pay for popular
handling. Scott said that a “vile sixpenny planet” looked in at the window
when James Hogg was born, and that planet has not lost its baneful
influence. The second defect is sentimentality, which is a preference for
the inferior in feeling as the other is a preference for the inferior in
form. A study of Whistle Binkie and the immense body of minor Scots verse in
the last century shows us writers painfully at ease in Zion, who gloat over
domestic sentiment till the charm has gone, who harp on obvious pathos till
the last trace of the pathetic vanishes, who make so crude a frontal attack
upon the emotions that the emotions are left inviolate. Whether it be
children, or lost love, or death, or any other of the high matters of
poetry, there is the same gross pawing which rubs off the delicate bloom.
Heaven is as frequent and as foolish a counter in such verse as in bad
hymns, and there is a perpetual saccharine sweetness which quickly cloys.
Instead of Burns’s “stalk of carle hemp,” there seems to be in such writers
a stalk of coarse barley sugar.
The misfortune is that these faults are found not only in trumpery verse,
but in work of real and often of high merit. Burns is free from them, but
they are rampant in Hogg, Tannahill, Allan Cunningham, and most of their
successors. They are the result of the provincialism into which the
vernacular speech fell, and the consequent “in-breeding” of vernacular
literature. But the same cause has produced qualities which may well be held
to redress the balance. They are qualities, too, which belong to the whole
literature from Henryson to our own day. Vernacular poetry is in a peculiar
degree the reflex of the Scots character, and, like that character, combines
within itself startling anomalies. It has on one side a hardy and joyous
realism, a gusto for close detail, a shrewd, observing intimacy with the
natural world. Even in conventional work there will come pieces of sharp
concrete experience which give it a rude life, and at the best there is a
constant sense of the three dimensions of space,‘of men and women moving in
a world riotously alive. The other side is within hearing of the horns of
Elfland—a paradox from the point of view of art, but complementary when seen
in relation to the national character, which is founded on these opposites.
Romance is always at call, an airy, diaphanous romance, so that Scots poetry
is like some cathedral of the Middle Ages, with peasants gossiping in the
nave and the devout at prayer in side chapels, carved grotesques adjacent to
stained-glass saints, and beams of heavenly light stealing through the
brooding upper darkness. The Hogg of the Shepherd’s Calendar can claim with
justice to be a “king of the mountain and the fairy school.” The combination
is found in every literature, but in Scots the transition from the
commonplace to the fantastic and back again is especially easy, since each
mood has its source in the history and character of the race. Our Muse is
like the Gifted Gilfillan in Waverley, who turned readily from the New
Jerusalem of the Saints to the price of beasts at Mauchline fair, or like
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, who can pass from banter with a peasant to a rnood
of sublime soliloquy. Romance in the North has always some salt of the
pedestrian, and the most prosaic house of life has casements opening upon
fairy seas.
J. B.
The
Northern Muse
An Anthology of Scots vernacular Poetry arranged by John Buchan (1924) (pdf) |
