II.—IN DECADENCE
1. The Decadence of the Scottish Vernacular
Henry Cockburn, writing more than sixty years ago, regretfully contrasts his own sustained interest in Burns and growing love for the frequent reading of him with the pronounced lack of interest which his children evinced. For them the language of Burns had little meaning, and this blocked the way to appreciation. The huge development of a Burns cult since those days would seem to imply the removal of this obstacle to intimacy. Facts, however, do not bear out this inference. While no "common Burnsite" would pass uncondemned such a misquotation of a well-known couplet as that with which a recent writer favoured his readers in a magazine, to wit,—
"Oh wad the laird the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us!"
it would not be difficult to puzzle him as to the meaning, inner or otherwise, of half a dozen lines selected almost at random from the non-lyrical and strictly vernacular poems.
Nor is the remarkable vogue of the Scots story inconsistent with the real decadence of the vernacular. The interest here would have been much the same apart from the local colour of the language. To take the "Window in Thrums" as representative of the high-water mark of the Scots story, its consummate art is essentially the revelation in fiction of the spirit of the Lyrical Ballads, a Wordsworthian interest, that is, in the inherent beauty and pathos of common things and people, the interplay of human strength and weakness under simply human conditions. The situation is vernacular, whereas the language is not. Its imitators strain after its vernacular colour-effects by a liberal dash of dialect words, but their success is factitious. The reader can quite afford to skip the
