BURNS IN ENGLISH

WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON

"By his English poetry Burns in general belongs to the eighteenth century, and has little importance for us. . . . He tells us himself: 'These English songs gravel me to death. I have not the command of the language that I have of my native tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch. I have been at Duncan Gray to dress it in English, but all I can do is desperately stupid.' We English turn naturally, in Burns, to the poems in our own language, because we can read them easily; but in those poems we have not the real Burns. The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems."

Thus Matthew Arnold, whose feeling for "the real Burns" left something to be desired. But in the opinion expressed in the foregoing sentences he does not stand alone. "There can be no question," says Henley, "that when Burns wrote English he wrote what, on his own confession, was practically a foreign tongue-a tongue in which he, no more than Fergusson or Ramsay, could express himself to any sufficing purpose. . . . To compare these two [Corn Rigs and Green grow the Rashes] and any two of Burns's songs in English, or pseudo-English, is to realise that the poet of these two should never have ventured outside the pale of his supremacy." And Burns's countryman, Dr. Service, speaks of "that English tongue of which he never attained any mastery in verse."

It is hardly worth while to cite further evidence of a critical opinion which has achieved almost the dignity of a dogma. The purpose of the present note is to show, first, that the case against Burns's poetical capacity in English has been greatly overstated; and, secondly, that the explanation of what truth there is in the belief that his English poems are inferior is to be found in a cause quite distinct from that usually assigned. In the face of Burns's own plea of guilty this might seem a hopeless attempt; but Burns is the last poet who should be allowed to give evidence against himself.

First, then, Burns showed, not once, but again and again, that he was capable of more than adequate poetical expression in English; and this can be proved by the judgment of critics, of other poets, and of the general public. The Jolly Beggars, "that splendid and puissant production," in Arnold's own phrase, consists of eight hilarious songs set in a broad dialect "recitativo." More than half of the songs are in English, almost, if not quite, pure; and

these contribute as much as the others to the poetic vitality of the piece. McPherson's Farewell, the favorite of Carlyle, has not three words of dialect, outside of the borrowed chorus. The lines so highly praised by Byron, and considered by Arnold to "have in them a depth of poetic quality such as resides in no verse of Byron's own,"

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met- or never parted—
We had ne'er been broken-hearted,

can hardly be regarded as owing their quality to the sole use of sae for so; and even this proportion of Scots is scarcely maintained through the poem. The lines from A Bard's Epitaph which Wordsworth called "a confession at once devout, poetical, and human," are entirely English. Scots wha hae owes much of its popularity outside of Scotland to the fact that it is all English except the first two lines (and in them the dialect is false). The poem To Mary in Heaven has no dialect, and the equally familiar Highland Mary only the merest shading of it. The same is true of the delicate and musical Sweet Afton, of A Red, Red Rose, a highly characteristic love song, of My Heart's in the Highlands, of The Gloomy Night is gathering fast, with its passionate melancholy. Even poems which we are apt to think of as pure Scots, Of a' the Airts, for example, and The Silver Tassie, will be found on examination to contain very little dialect, and to depend on it for their effect not at all. I do not deny that the great majority of Burns's successful poems are in his native tongue. I merely insist that he did write some of his best poetry in that southern speech which he is supposed to have been unable to master. The works I have cited seem to be sufficient proof of this, as they are at the same time sufficient to dispose of the remark that "by his English poetry Burns in general belongs to the eighteenth century," unless a disproportionate amount of saving grace be granted to "in general." Nothing could be farther from these pieces than the note of neoclassicism.

If, however, notwithstanding the evidence just given, it be granted that Burns was more frequently successful in Scots than in English, the underlying conditions will be found not simply in an imperfect mastery of a foreign tongue, but in facts much more significant for a true criticism. The root of the matter lies less in the peculiar equipment of Burns than in the nature and social history of the Scottish speech.

For two centuries or more before the Scottish Reformation, the language of the country north of the Tweed had been developing on a line that diverged from English, so that the speech of Dunbar, Douglas, and Lindsay was more remote from that of Skelton than the speech of Barbour was from that of Chaucer. Not only was Scots increasingly different from English, but it was growing independently in range and power, and it served for purposes of the

law, of the court, of the Church, of literature and learning, as well as for familiar intercourse. This growth was suddenly checked by the religious changes of the sixteenth century, and the Union of the Crowns practically stopped it altogether. The affiliation of the Scottish reformers with Protestant England rather than with Catholic France led to an interchange of preachers with the south, and so to an Anglicizing of the speech of the pulpit, which was carried farther by the fact that no translation of the Bible into the northern vernacular issued from the press, and the English of the Geneva version early became familiar to Scottish ears. Henceforth the dialect in Scottish religious expression is less and less pronounced, and as early as 1566 we may note that the language of John Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland is northern in spelling rather than in vocabulary.

As a common Protestantism tended to subdue the differences between the religious speech of the two peoples, a common sovereign, and one who held his court in London, tended to produce the same effect on the speech of polite intercourse and public affairs. And as the bonds joining the two countries drew tighter, the influence spread to legislation, to learning, and to formal literature; until, by the eighteenth century, English - or something as near English as could be managed - had become the normal means of expression in Scotland for all cultured and ambitious people, while the native speech had withdrawn into the homes of the humbler classes and the dwellers in the country. This narrowing of use was inevitably accompanied by a shrinkage in vocabulary and a growing unfitness for the treatment of themes that are not habitually discussed by the fireside. It retained, however, its colloquial suppleness and an extraordinary capacity for the expression of intimate personal feeling, of tenderness, of conviviality, of natural description, of characterization, of humor satirical and droll. There had survived, too, a vernacular literature of song, of satire, of lament, and of description, moulded in a variety of characteristic forms, which offered Burns's generation a collection of models, limited in range, but still with very considerable possibilities.

The explanation of the nature and degree of Burns's success in his native speech will now begin to appear. It will be seen that it was neither by accident nor by premeditation that in The Cotter's Saturday Night the opening dedication is in pure English, since there was no Scottish tradition of this kind of writing, and it was always in English that a Scottish peasant strove to address a social superior; that the description of the landscape, of the family supper, of the rustic wooing, are all in broad dialect, since it was in such matters that the native idiom had persisted; that in the account of the family worship and in the closing pious and patriotic apostrophes English is again employed, since for two hundred years Scottish Protestantism had found the southern speech more reverent. To address the Almighty in broad Scots would have savored of blasphemous familiarity.

The discrimination illustrated by the different parts of this poem can be discerned equally in the separate poems. The love poems to Jean Armour in Mauchline are prevailingly Scots, those to Highland Mary in heaven or Clarinda in Edinburgh are English. Addresses to various country gentlemen, prayers, repentances, moralizings, odes, and other forms not found in the vernacular tradition, songs like The Lass of Ballochmyle, where the sense of social inferiority to the lady is patent- all show little or nothing of the peasant speech; while it is used in all its richness and force in the love songs to girls of his own class, in the satire of his contemporaries, in descriptions of local scenery and manners, in humorous narratives like Tam o' Shanter (but not in its literary similes), and in drinking songs.

If Burns had written all his poems in English or all in Scots, their rating according to their relative poetical merit would probably be much nearer the present one than the critics imply. It would not have been identical, for he has done things well in Scots that could not have been done by any one with precisely the same quality in English, as he has done in English things that Scots even in his hands would have spoiled. His fortunate choice of a medium is often an important factor in his success; but the more fundamental truth that I have sought to establish is that Burns's success is most frequent in his own dialect not because he was at home in that dialect only, but because the subjects which he instinctively treated in that dialect were those most suited to his poetic genius.

In the application of this view to the criticism of Burns's poems, one further consideration should be borne in mind. His native speech, like the dialect of the Scottish peasant to-day, was not a definite and fixed thing. In spite of the clear-cut contrast to be observed in poems such as The Cotter's Saturday Night, Burns did not habitually speak or write now Scots, now English. It would be nearer the truth to say that he always used more or less Scots, more or less English. That very shrinkage of the Scottish vocabulary of which I have spoken rendered what had once been a separate language more and more dependent on English as a source to borrow from whenever the vernacular proved inadequate, until it became little more than a dialect of English, as it had been in the days of Wallace and Bruce. Yet a native speaker of Scots retains a subtle sense of different values according as the northern accent falls more or less heavily, and this sense Burns uses with admirable skill. It was not merely that he used English, as Stevenson says, "when the rhyme jibbed"; in his finest productions there is a delicate change in modulation, in the way in which a thing is thought or felt, indicated by the shift to a more or less marked degree of dialect. In Duncan Gray we hear the full-throated utterance of the Ayrshire peasant, and it was surely an ill-judged attempt and one destined to failure when he tried to turn that song into English. Its situation, its atmosphere, obviously would not go in any other medium. It was not that

his ideas in general were "more barren in English than in Scotch," but that these particular ideas would not "voluntary move harmonious numbers," to use Milton's pregnant phrase, in any language but their own. In O, wert Thou in the Cauld Blast or in My Nanie's awa it is a matter of a subtle flavoring of dialect deepening the tenderness yet not destroying a certain elevation of tone which would have been hopelessly lost in the broader accent of Willie brew'd a Peck o' Maut. No foreigner can fully discern all these shadings, though many more of them could be made perceptible to the ear than to the eye, if the songs were well read or sung. The countrymen of Burns, by their idolatry and indiscriminate eulogy, have perhaps forfeited the right to be heard among cosmopolitan critics on the question of their poet's final rank; but those of them who have been born and bred to the northern speech have a heritage which may still be used for a criticism of his work more subtle and penetrating than has yet been made.