SOURCE: "The Language of Burns," in Critical Essays on Robert Burns, edited by Donald A. Low, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 54–70.

[In the following essay Murison outlines the history of the Scots dialect and examines the relationship between Scots and English in Burns's writing.]

No small part of a poet's business is the manipulation of words, and the great poets have usually been great creators also in the use of language. But even the greatest have to work within the general limits of the language they begin with, its vocabulary, its idiom and its rhythms, and Burns is no exception. In his case the picture is complicated by the fact that for historical reasons he had two languages at his disposal, whose relations to one another have to be understood before we can appreciate his technique and achievement.

Scots and English are essentially dialects of the same original language, Anglo-Saxon, and the differences between them are far outweighed by their similarities, and, for reasons that will appear, the differences, once marked and predictable, are becoming more and more blurred as far as Scots is concerned. But differences there are, not only purely linguistic but also stylistic and thematic. There is of course a large common vocabulary, but Scots has a considerable Norse element and some Dutch, French and Gaelic not shared with English; the vowel and to a lesser extent the consonant systems are different; the grammatical forms, especially in the verbs, vary somewhat; and there are a great many subtle distinctions in syntax and idiom. These differentiae had established and consolidated themselves by the late fifteenth century, and from then on it was as possible to speak of two distinct languages, as it was of two distinct nations. But, as is well known, a series of historical accidents inhibited the growth of the northern tongue and left the field open for the ultimate triumph of the other over the whole island. The Reformation of 1560 and the circulation of the English Bible, in default of a Scots one which never materialized, gave English a spiritual prestige as the language of solemnity and dignity, for the more serious affairs of life, while Scots remained the speech of informality, of the domestic, the sentimental and, significantly enough, the comic, a dichotomy well seen in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night'. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 took the Scottish court and the patrons of culture to London, and almost immediately the results were seen, not only in the language of literature in the works of the poets Drummond, Alexander and Mure, and prose-writers like Urquhart, but in the official documents of state and burgh, and the private papers of the nobility which become more and more anglicized as the century advances, so that English was now gaining also in social prestige at the expense of Scots.

The seventeenth century is in fact the period of transition from Scots to English, and the cope-stone to the process was put on by the Parliamentary Union of 1707, when thenceforth the laws of Scotland would be promulgated from London in the King's English and all administrative pronouncements and documentation would be in the official language of the legislature. It was the process of 1603 over again in a more thorough and final form. Scots prose now lost all status, was reduced to the level of a dialect, and in the eighteenth century hardly exists as a literary form.

In verse, however, all was not lost. The popular tradition of the Middle Ages that we find in 'Christ's Kirk on the Green', 'Peblis to the Play', 'Rauf Coilzear', 'The Wyf of Auchtermuchty', carried on through the seventeenth century, along with the ballad and folk-song and such genre pieces as Sempill's elegy on 'Habbie Simson', notable for its stanza form, the verse epistle, the testament poem, and much more of the sort that was republished by the Edinburgh printer James Watson in his Choice Collection of 1706–11. This undoubtedly inspired Allan Ramsay to carry on in the same vein both with anthologies of medieval and contemporary poems, the Ever Green and the Tea-Table Miscellany, and with a considerable volume of work of his own. And not only was this tradition, because it was of its nature popular, in the vernacular, but also Ramsay himself adopted Scots as the first language of his poems from his own strong nationalist sympathies, later seen in his preface (in Scots) to his collection of proverbs. So it was Ramsay who laid the trail and struck the keynote for this revival of Scottish literature and language as a kind of spiritual compensation for the political eclipse which had overtaken the nation. But it was not a full-scale revival of either. In the eighteenth century as compared with the early sixteenth there was no prose in Scots of a serious, philosophical or scientific nature—the day for that was past. Poetry and its language are on a more popular and less intellectual level; there is no epic, no metaphysical verse, nothing like Dryden or Pope. The vocabulary is much more restricted and personal, more realistic and down to earth, and hence, in Scotland, more regional, because, in the absence of a standard form of speech and of a national and literary centre, local dialects inevitably rise into prominence, as indeed happened in the north-east of Scotland with poets like Skinner, Alexander Ross and Robert and William Forbes, whose works are in some measure linguistic tours de force. The efforts to extend the scope and usage of Scots vocabulary, as with Gavin Douglas in 1513 and the Complaynt of Scotland in 1548, had long been abandoned, and of course there was none of the polishing and refining that went on in English under the Augustans.

After 1700 the unrestricted penetration of Scotland by English through the Bible and the Church, legal and bureaucratic usage, newspapers and the educational system, produced, especially among those most exposed to it, a kind of mixed informal language in which English words and forms could be grafted on to the vernacular in whatever degree the speaker or writer wished: a state of affairs not so very different from that of today, only the basic Scots vocabulary has become so much thinner and English has replaced it.

Every speaker has various 'registers' or modifications of speech, according to the company he is in or the topic he is discussing, or the atmosphere or manner in which he is discussing it, distinguishing the language of, say, sport from that of politics; though the more educated or socially exalted one is, the more the limits of variation tend to become restricted. In eighteenth-century Scotland the fluctuations were as between more or less Scots and less or more English, the beauties of American and Soho 'in-talk' not having yet struck us. In effect the Age of Enlightenment and Philosophy and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution were being superimposed on the old feudal and rural culture of Scotland, and in speech terms this corresponds roughly to the functional demarcation line between English as the language of abstract and formal thought and Scots as the language of immediacy and intimacy at a lower intellectual pitch.

The social prestige of English, besides, steadily increased throughout the century, and a mastery of it came to be the aim of at least the upper classes, not merely in writing, as in the case of David Hume, but also in speech, for the English of Scotland was still distinct enough from that of England to be only half-intelligible, as the Scots MPs found to their mortification when they took their seats in the new Westminster. This led later to the somewhat ludicrous elocution classes run in Edinburgh by an Irishman for the Select Society 'for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language' in 1761.

It was into this confused and unstable linguistic situation that Burns was born. Both influences, Scots and English, were at work on him from his earliest youth, for he himself was the child of two diverse characters who in themselves epitomize the history and culture of Scotland. It was his father who insisted on a good education for his sons; who represented the Scotland that had descended from the Reformation by way of the Kirk, that had had its wits sharpened and its philosophy deepened on the frozen logic of the Shorter Catechism; from John Murdoch, the dominie at Alloway, Burns came to know the great works of English literature, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and other Augustans, and was given a thorough drilling in formal English composition and style. William Burnes himself had written a short religious treatise for family use, in impeccable English.

But there was his mother too and her people and his old nurse, representing the native force in Burns, the element which is of the soil of Scotland, of the folk and their lore, their daily lives, their superstitions, their delight in the fields and woods of Ayrshire, in banks and braes and running water so characteristically Scottish, their shrewd mother-wit, their proverbs, all expressed in their pithy forceful Scots tongue. It is in fact in the blending of the two strains in the Scottish heritage, the intellectual and the traditional, that Burns and his poetry stand out as the voice of Scotland.

Besides the rigorous discipline of Murdoch's emphasis on style, we know from brother Gilbert that the young poet was reading the Spectator and Pope's translation of Homer¹ so that the influence of Augustan English was in full play, and there is an even more important note in his autobiographical letter to Dr Moore where he describes his close study of 'a collection of English songs'. 'I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour—song by song—verse by verse; carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian; and I am convinced I owe much to this of my critic-craft, such as it is.'² Undoubtedly Burns's uncanny flair for the right word in the right place was in part at least the outcome of this.

Another more immediate result was the production of the Mount Oliphant period, a particularly unhappy phase of his life when he developed teenage melancholia and wrote elegies and odes all in somewhat stilted English about 'fickle Fortune', and even attempted a tragedy, of which only the dismal fragment 'All devil as I am, a damned wretch' survives.

Fortunately, about this time he picked up a copy of Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany and tried his hand at song-writing in Scots, or rather in that half-Scots half-English form that goes back to the early eighteenth or even late seventeenth century, when there was a craze for Scots songs, in London as well as in Scotland. The very first piece he ever wrote, 'Handsome Nell', was in this vein, and also the clever 'Tibbie, I hae seen the day', which is in pretty straight Scots with an English rhyme here and there, as in stanza 2.

Meanwhile his formal if fitful education was progressing; he had read Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, attended a course in trigonometry and his reading³

was enlarged with the very important addition of Thomson's and Shenstone's Works. I had seen mankind in a new phasis; and I engaged several of my schoolfellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me. This last helped me much on in composition. I had met with a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Anne's reign, and I pored over them most devoutly.

All this goes to show the strict training Burns gave himself in language, the careful weighing up of each word, the ordering of the thought, the choice of imagery as in one of his next songs, 'The Lass of Cessnock Banks', which is self-confessedly an exercise in the use of similes, and above all in 'Mary Morison', which the indefatigable Ritter has shown to be full of echoes of Shakespeare, Pope, Thomson, Shenstone, Mackenzie among others,⁴ but these have been woven into a perfect conceptual unity and, what is more, rendered into Scots, despite one or two English forms like those, poor and shown, canst and wilt, and anglicized spellings like trembling, thought, and the -ed of the past participles. We see the same process at work again a little later in 'Corn Rigs' and much later in 'A Red Red Rose'. Both have motifs and phrases from earlier folk-songs both Scottish and English. 'Corn Rigs', though pitched at a lower and earthier level, is extraordinarily deft in its use of the plainest Scots, with the exception of the one line 'I lock'd her in my fond embrace'; the whole thing reads like an ordinary conversation, and yet by sheer word-music and the evocation of the harvest moonlight produces an almost magical effect. Well might Burns say of it himself, 'The best stanza that ever I wrote, at least the one that pleases me best, and comes nearest to my beau ideal of poetical perfection, is this—

I hae been blythe wi' Comrades dear; I hae been merry drinking;
I hae been joyfu' gath'rin gear; I hae been happy thinking;
But a' the pleasures e'er I saw, tho' three times doubl'd fairly,
That happy night was worth them a', amang the rigs o'barley.

It was about this time (1782), however, that the vital incident occurred in Burns's poetic career. 'Meeting with Fergusson's Scotch Poems I strung anew my wildly-sounding lyre with emulating vigour.'⁵ Later, in his Commonplace Book of August 1784, he links 'the excellent Ramsay and the still more excellent Fergusson' as between them inspiring him to concentrate on celebrating the scenery and life of his native Ayrshire, a theme he reiterates in verse in his 'Epistle to William Simpson'. Burns had in fact found himself as a dedicated Scottish poet.

It was out of this that the Kilmarnock edition sprang. The models are obvious, Fergusson's dialogue between 'Plainstanes and Causey' for 'The Twa Dogs'; 'Caller Water' for 'Scotch Drink'; 'Leith Races' for 'The Holy Fair'; and even more directly 'The Farmer's Ingle' for 'The Cotter's Saturday Night'. 'The Twa Dogs' is a remarkably successful experiment in social criticism in straight conversational Scots. Because of the restricted nature and scope of eighteenth-century Scots, there has to be a certain reduction in focus, the abstract has to be seen in terms of the concrete, the sophistication of an all-purpose language has to be forgone, but within these limits the vigour and vivacity of the concepts are hard to better and the humour adds to the verve:

There, at Vienna, or Versailles,
He rives his father's auld entails;
Or by Madrid he takes the rout,
To thrum guittarres an' fecht wi' nowt;
Or down Italian Vista startles
Whore-hunting amang groves o' myrtles;
Then bowses drumlie German-water,
To mak himsel look fair an' fatter,
An' clear the consequential sorrows,
Love-gifts of Carnival Signioras.

The last two lines from the Edinburgh edition, substituted for the original couplet, 'An' purge the bitter ga's an' cankers, / O' curst Venetian bores an' chancres', show a further improvement in linguistic polish and wit. 'The Holy Fair', one of Burns's greatest poems, shows the same masterly command of language, by turning the simplest and most natural of conversational prose into poetry. The marvellous evocation of a summer morning in stanza I in plain direct Scots, with just a nod of concession to the Augustans in the second line:

leads on to the well-conceived and concretely rendered vision of the three allegorical women, Superstition, Hypocrisy and Fun, and the utter naturalness of the half-recognition of the last:

And so on through memorable phrase and epigram, 'Screw'd up, grace-proud faces', 'Common-sense has taen the road, / An' aff, an' up the Cowgate', 'There's some are fou o' love divine, / There's some are fou o' brandy', to the broad chuckle at the end.

The same skill in manipulating colloquial Scots is seen at its best in the Epistles, modelled on the verse correspondence between Ramsay and Hamilton of Gilbertfield in the 'Habbie Simson' stanza, so well adapted to the sententious nature of folk-speech, with the frequent sardonic afterthought or phrase of finality conveyed neatly in the 'bob-wheel' at the end:

When we come to the 'Epistle to a Young Friend', we find a somewhat different type of Scots. The easy spontaneous style of the Epistles to John Lapraik or William Simpson is more formalized into a series of moral apothegms, still in Scots but in a strongly anglicized variety of it, a homiletic Scots such as must have been heard from many an early eighteenth-century pulpit from the old-fashioned school of preachers of the Moderate faction in the Kirk. It is not unlike Blair, and the poem probably contains more lines quoted from Burns than any other. 'Still keep something to yoursel, / Ye scarcely tell to ony'; 'The glorious privilege of being independent'; 'The fear o' Hell's a hangman's whip, / To haud the wretch in order'; 'A correspondence fix'd wi' Heav'n / Is sure a noble anchor'. The classic instance of this is in 'Tam o' Shanter'. The narrative proceeds with gathering speed in good rich Scots (and nowhere is Burns's facility with the language in better evidence), when at a natural pause in the story he introduces the series of similes 'But pleasures are like poppies spread', which has given critics such a time of it. But surely this is simply the moral homily once again, interpolated with a certain mock solemnity and the tongue well in the cheek, and of course in English, as such homilies were bound to be.

This style in fact in different contexts reappears in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' and 'The Vision'. In the former the language switches from Scots to English as the theme fluctuates between the descriptive and domestic and the stagy moralizing which the majority of critics delight in execrating. But linguistically the most significant part is when, 'the chearfu' supper done', the Scots of the chatter at table almost insensibly and by degrees slides into English as the father takes down the Bible and worship begins. This is essentially the matter of historical tradition, and the inveterate association of the Bible and liturgical language in general in Scotland with English. The setting of 'The Vision' is not dissimilar, having the same homely vivid vernacular description of the inside of the cottage and even of Coila in the first part, and a thoroughly classical English ode in the second when he meditates on the abstractions of the social order and the function of the poet, with some good lines in it, especially the succinct and profound 'But yet the light that led astray, / Was light from Heaven', which sums up in a few words the whole problem and matter of moral philosophy. But he said more or less the same thing in his Epistles to John Lapraik and Willie Simpson more directly and simply and unaffectedly in Scots, and they are worth, and will stand, comparison with 'The Vision' on this very point.

In 'Holy Willie's Prayer' the same technique is employed, but with a much more serious purpose; liturgical English and down-to-earth Scots are woven together and made to alternate with consummate skill in bringing out the two facets of Willie's character so that he is condemned out of his own mouth:

Again a comparison of the Scots 'Mouse' with the more Englified 'Daisy' reinforces the general judgment that Burns, in the words of Scott,⁶

never seems to have been completely at his ease when he had not the power of descending at pleasure into that which was familiar to his ear, and to his habits…. His use of English when assumed as a primary and indispensable rule of composition, the comparative penury of rhimes, and the want of a thousand emphatic words which his habitual acquaintance with the Scottish supplied, rendered his expression confined and embarrassed.

Scott, who was much in the same boat himself, knew the lack of uninhibited fluency that comes of using a stepmother tongue.

So much for the stylistics of the Kilmarnock edition, that mixture, in varying degrees, of Scots for the particular in description and narrative, in which the poet intimately participates, and English or Englified Scots for the more reflective and philosophical passages, when the poet steps back as a commentator and adopts a persona more remote from his subject. This becomes his general practice, and even his songs, in so far as the theme permits, present the same linguistic pattern, as we shall see.

But Burns's Scots itself is worth examining more closely. The poet himself, no doubt with a view to an audience of anglicized Scots, itself a recognition of the linguistic changes in eighteenth-century Scotland, provided to his first edition a glossary, which he much enlarged in his second, of the Scots words he thought needed explanation, and to these he added notes on the pronunciation which all reciters of Burns would do well to heed. He noted also that in Scots the present participle ends in -an (from an earlier -and) and the past participle in -t. The first must be based on the observation of his own ears, detecting a distinction between the participle and the verbal noun which was already dying out in the central dialects of Scotland, but is historically founded and still survives in the northern and southern peripheries of Scots, though long abandoned in literary Scots. He does not apply it rigorously in his own text, and gave it up in his later work. His Scots vocabulary is copious; in his complete works he employs over 2,000 peculiarly Scots words (the average Scots speaker today would have about 500 at the most); his definitions are accurate, and not without humour: blink, a glance, an amorous leer, a short space of time, a smiling look, to look kindly, to shine by fits; clachan, a small village about a church, a hamlet; fetch, to stop suddenly in the draught and then come on too hastily; hoddan, the motion of a sage country farmer on an old cart horse; houghmagandie, a species of gender composed of the masculine and feminine united; whid, the motion of a hare running but not frighted, a lie.

He has of course the vocabulary of the farmer in aiver, bawsont, fittie-lan, fow, icker, ket, luggie, outler, pattle, stibble-rig, stimpart, risk, throve, thack and raep; the 'Inventory' is in fact one of many such Scots poems in the tradition of the medieval 'Wowin of Jok and Jenny' where lists of words are versified for their own sake; 'Halloween' again is a richly dialectal catalogue of rustic folklore; the terminology of curling appears in 'Tam Samson's Elegy'. He had an interest in words as such, as his usage and the glossary show and as his few random notes on Border dialect during his tour by the Tweed in 1787 bear out; and to Robert Anderson he admitted the advantages in having 'the copia verborum, the command of phraseology which the knowledge and use of the English and Scottish dialects afforded him'.⁷

His native dialect was of course that of Kyle, which is in a debatable land between the dialect region of Strathclyde and that of Galloway, and there are a few words which are specifically from that area, words like crunt, daimen, gloamin shot, ha bible, icker, jauk, kiaugh, messan, pyle, raucle, rockin, roon, shangan, thummart, wiel, winze, wintle, all from the rural or local poems; but, by and large, his vocabulary is eclectic, avoiding the purely provincial, and so remaining in the broad stream of traditional literary, one might even say, metropolitan Scots, such at least as had survived the seventeenth-century break-up. For this he is considerably indebted above all to Ramsay, and in part to some others of his poetical predecessors, Sempill, Skinner, Hamilton of Bangour, Ross of Lochlee, whom he mentions several times, and of course Fergusson.

Ritter and others have painstakingly accumulated instances of borrowing and adaptation⁸ till one is tempted to wonder if Burns ever wrote an original line, and there is neither need nor space to detail these here. Furthermore, Burns's native command of Scots was such as to make it difficult to distinguish borrowings from spontaneous uses.

But Burns made no secret of his indebtedness to others in the free-masonry of poetry—and, of course, in the songs adaptation was his stated policy and practice—and in his use of some words the borrowings are plain and palpable. It is obvious that he knew passages of Ramsay and Fergusson by heart, and echoes of their phraseology are found in him. The rhymes 'awfu, unlawfu' and 'a winsome wench and walie' in 'Tam o'Shanter' are straight from Ramsay's 'Tale of Three Bonnets'; Ramsay preceded him with aspar, auld-farran, bellum, beet, Land o' Cakes, clishmaclaver, collieshangie, cooser, dink, donsie.fair fa', flewit, goave, grunzie, jockteleg, ripple, sculdudderie, shaul, whigmaleerie, wimple; in many cases the contexts are close enough to suggest direct borrowing. Fergusson had been at the same source himself and had passed on to Burns bughtin time, cheek for chow, drant, doylt, glamour, gloamin, hoddan gray, lyart, oergang, rowt. It is worth noting incidentally how the poetic quality improves with each borrowing.

Katharine Ogie (a seventeenth-century song) in Ramsay, Tea-Table Miscellany (1876), I, 69:

Fergusson Hallowfair, vi:

Burns The Lea-Rig, i:

To old Scots proverbs and traditional sayings Burns is indebted for 'the stalk o' carl help', 'to stand abeigh', 'sturt and strife', 'moop and mell', and rigwoodie from 'Tam o' Shanter' is attested in connection with witchcraft early in the eighteenth century. Another of Burns's sources must have been the Chapbooks which circulated over the south-west at this period, particularly the ever-popular broadly humorous sketches of Dougal Graham. To Dougal, Burns certainly owes clinkumbell as a nickname for a kirk-beadle, most likely fligmagairies, and possibly also bow-kail, and lallan. Fiere in 'Auld Lang Syne' is from the vocabulary of the ballads.

Burns then is a skilful adapter of the poetic language of his predecessors, another follower in the long if intermittent tradition coming down from the Middle Ages, of which echoes can still be heard among our moderns who write in Scots. For if there is any one quality more than another which characterizes Scottish literature it is the recurrent theme, the repeated metaphor and image, the resumed standpoint, due not only to the tenacity of the native strain in spite, or perhaps because, of alien pressure but also in no small measure to the limits imposed on it by the use of Scots. But within the tradition Burns made his own contribution to the poetic vocabulary of Scots, of which his innumerable imitators have made good use ever since, as agley, bethankit, blellum, burnewin, catch-the-plack, glib-gabbit, hogshouther, Johnny Ged, primsie, raible, redwatshod, of which Carlyle said, 'in this one word, a full vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art', run deil, skelvy, skinking, smytrie, snick-drawing, staumrel, not necessarily all Burns's own invention but first recorded in his works.

When we come to consider the question of the language of the later Burns, especially the Burns of the songs, we are considerably helped by Burns's own explicit statements. To Thomson he was quite emphatic,⁹

If you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an end of the matter…. These English verses gravel me to death. I have not that command of the language that I have of my native tongue.—In fact, I think my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotish.—I have been at 'Duncan Gray', to dress it in English, but all that I can do is deplorably stupid.—For instance—

Song—Tune, Duncan Gray—Let not woman e'er complain.

And most readers would agree with him.

Burns's argument, constantly repeated to Thomson, is that in the music of the songs there is a pastoral simplicity, pathos or liveliness which should be matched with a similar simplicity in the words, which he associates with Scots. Even 'a sprinkling of the old Scotish' is better than nothing. In the event this turns out something like 'Ae Fond Kiss' on paper, but when one reflects that it is in the simpler type of diction that Scots and English vocabulary coincide, and that if one follows Burns's instructions in his glossary to ignore the anglicized spelling and pronounce in the Scots manner, the poem is in effect a Scots poem with one or two Englishisms, like 'groans', rather than the other way round.

One must remember that Burns got his Scots orthography from Ramsay—one of his less happy borrowings, since Ramsay's spelling is haphazard, inconsistent and often so anglicized as to blur the distinction in phonetic values between Scots and English, as for instance in spellings like light for licht; poor, moon, coost, for puir, mune, cuist; down for doun; wrath for wraith; how for hoo; hours for oors; arm for airm; etc; -ed, more often than not, appears for -it, and -ing for the participle -in, or as Burns would have it, -an, but the English form is preferable to the Scots in the first verse of 'Ca' the yowes', to preserve the assonance with sang and amang reproduce the prolonged ringing echo of the bird's song through the woods.

In his refashioning of older songs Burns is guided by the language of the original and as many of his models were from the seventeenth century, English as well as Scots, the language is naturally mixed in varying degrees according to the prescription given above, with the seasoning of old Scots quantum sufficit. If it were too thickly Scots to his mind, then 'I will vamp up the old song and make it English enough to be understood' he says to Thomson in regard to the song 'Sleep'st thou or wauk'st thou'.¹⁰

But this is the exception with him rather than the rule. On one occasion at least he did the opposite by trying to write down the anglicized courtly or cavalier song of the seventeenth-century poet, Sir Robert Aytoun, 'I do confess thee sweet', with the usual involved epigrammatic style but a good song for all that, to the popular level by Scotticizing it. 'I do think I have improved the simplicity of the sentiments by giving them a Scots dress.' But here for once he misconstrued his model and his customary good taste in language failed him so that he comes second-best out of the comparison.

'Simplicity' was his motto, and in his long-protracted wranglings with George Thomson over the text as well as the music of his songs he had to tell him that he was apt to sacrifice simplicity for pathos, sentiment and point. To Thomson's constant niggling for more English, he answered bluntly 'I'll rather write a new song altogether than make this English. The sprinkling of Scotch in it, while it is but a sprinkling, gives it an air of rustic naïveté, which time will rather increase than diminish.'¹¹ In general he rings the changes freely within this mixed Anglo-Scots style, theme and mood being usually a determining factor. The gay extravert comic song, the social or community song, is, as one would expect, from its immediacy and concreteness, in Scots, like 'The Deil's awa wi' th' Exciseman', or 'Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut', or 'Willie Wastle', or 'Whistle an' I'll come to ye, my Lad', or 'Duncan Gray', or 'Contented wi' Little'.

The same colloquial dexterity of 'The Holy Fair' is reproduced in 'Tam Glen' and 'Last May a Braw Wooer', and to this he adds sprightly wit in 'Green grow the Rashes', 'There was a Lad', 'Whistle o'er the Lave o't, 'The Carle o' Kellyburn Braes'. All these are in good rich Scots. The 'pastoral simplicity' vein is worked in 'The Banks o' Doon', where the student of Burns's styles has the advantage of having three versions to compare, the first with the rather halting opening 'Sweet are the banks—the banks o' Doon'; the second trimmed in the direction of even greater simplicity with the starkness of the ballad in it and faint echoes of 'O waly, waly up the bank' and much the best version; and the third, the modern popular one, verbally spun out to suit a different tune from the original. It provides an object lesson in showing how Burns's taste was pretty unerring when he was left to himself, and it compares favourably too with the turgid English of 'To Mary in Heaven' where the poet is simply attitudinizing with the same general thought and imagery.

In this type of song, though it is more personal and reflective, good idiomatic Scots is still the medium, and universality is achieved by the simplicity, and this is true of many of his other great songs, 'John Anderson, son, my jo', 'My Luve's like a Red Red Rose', 'O a' the Airts', and 'Auld Lang Syne'. There is more English in the pensive melancholy or sentimental mood of 'Bonie Wee Thing', where the last verse wanders off into an Augustan conceit, or of, 'O, wert thou in the Cauld Blast', and the graceful and courtly ' A Rosebud by my Early Walk'. On the other hand, 'It was a' for our Rightfu' King' for all its cavalier and Jacobite overtones is in Scots, suggesting an intensity and spontaneity of feeling which made the mother tongue inevitable, when the particular human situation is posed against the general political background. This ability to fix in the vivid concrete terms of ordinary experience a universal truth is of course Burns's strongest suit and the essential secret of his genius and popularity. We have already seen it in 'The Twa Dogs'. In his songs it appears splendidly in 'A Man's a Man'. It is indeed 'prose thoughts inverted into rhyme', as Burns himself said—the prose thoughts of Tom Paine's Rights of Man, but out of the English prose Burns has made an immortal song in plain Scots. As Snyder points out, out of 263 words in the whole poem, 240 are monosyllables. The relationship of Scots and English and the potentialities of the one as against the other in the hands of Burns could hardly be better illustrated.

'Scots wha hae', which was written about the same time, has the same background in the ferment of the French Revolution and one can hear echoes of 'La Marseillaise' in it. Here Burns is striking the attitude of the patriot, and doubtless it was intended as a kind of national anthem of a nation that may even yet find the moral courage to sing it. It is a rhetorical address to the whole people; it deals with the abstractions of liberty, nationalism and tyranny, it demands dignity and solemnity, and, at this metaphysical level, one would expect English instead of Scots. In the event Burns has compromised according to his usual formula. The grammar is English, the rhymes are Scots, the forms are mixed, sae, for instance, but woe, foe; the usage in the first two lines is not the idiomatic vernacular, as Sir James Murray remarked;¹² yet there can be no question of its success as a poem and of Burns's skill in wedding the two linguistic traditions. On a larger canvas the two traditions appear again side by side and partly fused in 'The Jolly Beggars'. The recitativo, the intimate homely detailed description, is in Scots, the songs of the soldier and his doxy who had served so long abroad are in English; the wit of the Merry Andrew's song is conveyed in the Scots of that sort in which Burns excelled; the sentimentality of 'A Highland Lad' is in the mixed style he normally favoured; the fiddler and the tinker, as 'gangrel bodies' of no fixed abode, sing in different degrees of Scots, conditioned partly by the tunes prescribed for them. The bard's song is similarly attuned to his literary trade, with snatches of older songs and allusions to Castalia and Helicon, but in the main in Scots. But when the particular gives way to the general, when the individuals unite in a chorus of social criticism and formulate their philosophy of life, the language, as has often enough been noticed, turns to Augustan English in a kind of secular hymn.

Burns, like so many Scottish writers before him, took his traditions as he found them and worked within them, chiselling and polishing till his best reaches almost to perfection, and in his own line no one has ever surpassed him. His sound linguistic schooling, which was essentially classical, mediated through the Augustans, made him realize the weaknesses of a broken-down language, such as eighteenth-century Scots had become, deficient in a prose tradition and limited in abstract vocabulary. Yet, through his predecessors in both written and oral literature, he knew what it would still do and he chose it for himself because it was his own heritage. It was sound instinct in him that made him go for simplicity, and marry the language of feeling with that of thought by conceiving both in their most concrete terms. It is this that makes his language so vivid and quotable. No one has ever wrung so much humour, passion and beauty out of monosyllables as Burns, even at times magic:

And in so doing he gave the old Scots tongue a new lease of life, a new dignity and a renewed worth which even today and even in spite of the Scots themselves it has not altogether lost.

Notes

¹ In Chambers-Wallace, Life and Works of Burns (Edinburgh, 1896), I, p. 35.

² J. De Lancey Ferguson, Letters of Robert Burns (Oxford, 1931), I, p. 109.

³Ibid., p. 111.

⁴ O. Ritter, Quellenstudien zu Robert Burns 1773–1791 (Berlin, 1901), pp. 23–6.

⁵Letters, I, p. 113.

⁶ Scott, in Quarterly Review (February 1809), p. 35.

⁷Burns Chronicle (1925), p. 12.

⁸ Ritter, passim.

⁹Letters, II, pp. 122, 268.

¹⁰Ibid.

¹¹Ibid., p. 205.

¹² J. A. H. Murray, Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (London, 1873), p. 71n.