FOOTNOTES:
[1] W. L. Mathieson: Scotland and the Union (Glasgow, 1905), p. 225.
Nevertheless the tides of changing ideas stirred even the strongholds of Calvinism. Before the seventeenth century ended Michael Wigglesworth in Massachusetts had found himself compelled slightly to modify the doctrine of infant damnation in the direction of human decency; in Scotland the ‘common sense’ doctrines of the Deists penetrated during the eighteenth century even among those who abhorred the name of Deism. From 1729 until his death in 1746 Francis Hutcheson, as professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, expounded to steadily growing classes his theory of the ‘moral sense’—an allegedly innate human capacity for distinguishing right from wrong. This concept of innate virtue as opposed to the idea of original sin rapidly gained ground among the laity and the younger clergy of the cities, despite bitter hostility on the part of the conservatives. Preaching began to stress conduct rather than the will of a cruel and capricious god as the way of salvation. A healthier and more prosperous nation was in fact rebelling against a harsh and depressing philosophy, and the clergy were following the lead of their congregations. By the third quarter of the century the liberal faction, the Moderates or New Lights, were in almost undisputed control in the metropolitan districts, though the fundamentalists, or Old Lights, still flourished in the smaller towns and in the rural parishes. The more rigorous extremes of kirk discipline began to relax. Though in 1757 John Home was compelled to resign his pulpit to escape the consequence of having written The Tragedy of Douglas—to witness the early performances of which a few of his more daring clerical brethren disguised themselves in the garments of the laity—the ban on the theatre gradually sank into desuetude. Even while the Edinburgh playhouse was still unlicensed, and dramas had to be advertised as concerts of music between the parts of which the play of the evening would be presented gratis, it became possible for ministers to attend the performances openly.
But the warfare of New Lights versus Old was not conducted wholly in the realm of ideas. The fact that the more influential laity were early converts to the new doctrines brought into the struggle politics in its most worldly form. In parishes where the local magnates exercised the right of presenting the minister, New Light candidates had the preference. Hence it was the New Lights’ interest to uphold the right of patronage against the congregation’s democratic claim to elect its own minister. The supporters of patronage triumphed in the election of William Robertson as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1763; the result made the church almost as much a part of the spoils system as the government was, and gave its leadership into the hands of supple ecclesiastical politicians. In consequence the spread of New Light doctrine went hand in hand with a steady decline in the moral influence of the clergy, while schisms and secessions sapped the organization. Because the Kirk was morally as well as intellectually bankrupt the laughter of Burns’s satires shook it to its foundations. To the church of John Knox such ridicule would have meant no more than a mosquito means to an elephant. Burns’s Edinburgh friends were right in maintaining that the conduct and doctrines which he attacked would have disappeared in another generation without his aid; what neither they nor he could foresee was that in 1843 it would be the Old Light clergy who would restore moral leadership to the ministry by daring to give up their livings for conscience’ sake.
Behind the New Light doctrines expounded by Hutcheson and his followers lay of course the ideas of such English Deists as Locke and Shaftesbury. Strong convictions on philosophical and theological questions were going out of fashion; like Franklin in America the New Light Scots had persuaded themselves that enlightened self-interest, sweet reasonableness and common sense, were attainable goals for mankind at large, and could be trusted to solve problems of morals and economics alike. And this English influence in the field of theology and philosophy was typical of the entire range of literary expression in Scotland. The national inferiority complex showed itself most plainly of all in the realm of words.
Historically the Scottish language is to English what Provençal is to French and Catalan to Spanish—an ancient and independent local dialect which had developed its own literature at least as early as had the more central region which afterwards took the lead. The speech of Lowland Scotland was the direct descendant of that Northumbrian dialect of Old English which Bede and Caedmon spoke. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance Scotland maintained amid her poverty as rich a literary tradition as England did. In fact, from the death of Chaucer until the beginning of the Elizabethan era the student of British literature must look north of the Tweed to find, in the writings of King James I, Robert Henryson, Gawain Douglas and William Dunbar, anything worthy the name of poetry. The decay of Scots as a literary language was started by the Reformation and finished by the Union. By introducing the Geneva version of the English Bible the Reformation made Southern English the language of the church, in idiom if not in pronunciation. The accession of James VI to the English throne made Southern English also the language of the court. King James himself wrote in Scots; his subject, William Drummond of Hawthornden, wrote in English. Drummond’s example was followed by all the prose writers and most of the poets of Scotland from his day to ours. After the Union even the poets who used Scots did so consciously and not because such expression was wholly spontaneous.
Of these poets, Allan Ramsay, whose productive period covers roughly the three decades from 1711 to 1740, was the most popular. And Scots poetry, as practised by Ramsay and by his friend and contemporary William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, tended more and more to what Samuel Johnson would have described as the easy and vulgar, and therefore the disgusting. Their work exhibits humour, and something of the conversational quality of the familiar essay, but dignity and deep poetic emotion are notably absent. Moreover, the dialect in which they wrote tended more and more to become a synthetic and standardized language, embodying words and idioms common to a large section of southern Scotland but without firm roots in any one region. The Aberdeenshire dialect used by Alexander Ross in his Helenore is almost the last fresh transcription of the speech of a definite section of the country. Written Scots was rapidly becoming what nineteenth-century English and American authors made other dialects—a semi-literary vernacular employed for humorous effect or for an affectation of colloquial ease. Even Burns himself at times gave artificial Scottish flavour to his verse by using English idioms in Scottish spelling. Since the end of the eighteenth century no writer of Scots verse has succeeded in introducing any new elements. At its best, such writing sounds like imitations of Burns; at its worst, like imitations of his imitators.
But when Burns came before the public even this conventionalized literary Scots seemed on the point of extinction. Though Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany—which included many purely English verses—was still popular as a song-book, the rest of his work was neglected. Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s recension of Blind Harry’s History of Sir William Wallace was no more than a story-book for children. The unhappy Robert Fergusson, starved and neglected, had ended his life in a madhouse, and fashionable Edinburgh, glancing askance at his satirical verses, said it served him right. Ramsay was a crude homespun figure of the generation in which Thomson by writing The Seasons had given his countrymen a poem which they could show to Englishmen without blushing; ‘The Daft Days’ and the rest of Fergusson’s work was little better than a national disgrace when set beside the beauties of James Beattie’s Minstrel. Nevertheless there still underlay the new fashions a literary tradition which most of the anglicizing gentry scorned or ignored. An oral Scottish literature was still alive, though it was soon to perish when its lovers smothered it by writing it down. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which first gave highbrow sanction to the popular ballads of Scotland and northern England, were not published until Burns was six years old, and even Percy only scratched the surface of this rich deposit. Throughout the century scores of ballads still circulated by oral tradition which had never been recorded in writing, and in these the genuine spirit of the Scottish language flourished without concession to fashionable English.
Even more important than the ballads for the training of a poet like Burns were the folk-songs. The Scots had always been a musical people, and despite the opposition of the stricter clergy traditional songs or airs for almost every human occasion were known to everyone, high or low. The tradition, moreover, was still very much alive. Scottish song gave the nation its revenge for the military humiliations of the ’45. The taunting lilt of ‘Hey, Johnie Cope, are ye waukin yet?’ could be relied on to remind English garrisons of the inglorious conduct of their fellow soldiers at Prestonpans, and all Scotland’s contempt for the Hanoverian kings and their mistresses went into the ribaldry of ‘The Sow’s Tail to Geordie’. Even so, only a fraction of the popular songs had any political bearing. More of them were convivial; many more of them erotic. Every phase of sexual love from the crudest bawdry to idyllic beauty found some expression in verse—the latter, it must be confessed, more rarely and less effectively than the former. Yet these crude songs, interesting mainly for the surprising variety and ingenuity of their erotic symbolism, were the raw material—raw in more than one sense—from which Burns wrought such lyrics as ‘My Love is like a red red rose’, ‘John Anderson’, and ‘Coming thro’ the rye’. While Burns was still a lad, David Herd, a retiring antiquary in Edinburgh, began the systematic collection of this folk poetry on so large a scale and with such a complete absence of prudery that it was not until the twentieth century that the whole of his manuscript collection was printed. He had himself published in 1776 two volumes of what he considered the best work. At the same time musicians like James Oswald and Neil Gow were collecting the airs of Highlands and Lowlands alike. The singing of the old songs, with or without instrumental accompaniment, was a favourite pastime in Scottish drawing rooms, and even unliterary folk would frequently feel moved to compose new words to some well-liked melody.
Alongside this honest love of native things, whether expressed in a girl’s singing at her harpsichord or in David Herd’s careful recording of old words, another literature was growing up of imitation, forgery, and ‘improvement’. It had become a literary convention for every composer of an imitation ballad to offer it to the public as a copy from an ancient manuscript. Though a few of these imitations, like the ‘Hardyknute’ of Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, were close enough to the spirit of folk literature to deceive even experts, the mass of them were so mawkish and verbose as to bring the term ‘Scottish poetry’ to the verge of contempt. Primacy in these qualities, as in popularity, belonged to James Macpherson’s alleged translations of the poems of Ossian—a work passionately defended by the Scots because it depicted their savage ancestors as a trifle more chivalrous and vastly more sentimental than Bayard or Sidney, admired on the Continent because it supported the current delusion about the nobility of man in a state of nature, and cherished by Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the simple pleasures which appeal to the enterprising burglar in his hours of relaxation.
But the harm done to traditional literature by imitations and forgeries was trivial compared with that inflicted by some of those people who professed to admire it. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the teaching of music in Edinburgh had passed largely into the hands of foreigners. Names like Domenico Corri, Pietro Urbani, and Theodor Schetki are as prevalent on title-pages as their owners were on the concert stage, and under this Italianate influence many traditional melodies were ‘harmonized’ and ‘improved’ until all their native vigour was lost in empty flourishes. And as with the music, so with the words. ‘Correct’ and sentimentalized lyrics were substituted for the sturdy old words, remained in use long enough to push the latter into oblivion, and then, their novelty gone, themselves sank into disuse and dragged the music with them.
This effort to refine the national heritage of music was merely one phase of the whole sense of provincial inferiority which afflicted Scotland. Italian music and English literature, speech, and manners, were the ideals towards which genteel Scots strained. National pride in James Thomson and John Home exulted more in the fact that they wrote English acceptable in England than in their use of Scottish materials. Even the devastating scepticism of David Hume was forgiven him because he had almost purified his language of Scotticisms. When Johnson ridiculed Hume’s English Boswell writhed in agony, and was correspondingly elated when the dictator praised Blair’s sermons and was moved to tears by Beattie’s Minstrel.
When Thomas Sheridan came to Edinburgh in 1761 to give a course of lectures on elocution, ‘he was patronized by the professors in the College, by several of the clergy, by the most eminent among the gentlemen at the bar, by the judges of the Court of Session, and by all who at that time were the leaders of public taste’.
Thenceforward, ‘correct pronunciation and elegant reading’ were reckoned ‘indispensable acquirements for people of fashion and for public speakers’. In other words, these people of fashion, like Francis Jeffrey on his return from Oxford, gave up the broad Scots in return for the narrow English. In the very year of the Kilmarnock Poems, Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, one of the most public-spirited Scots of his generation, brought out a two-hundred-page volume of Observations on the Scottish Dialect. His purpose was not to preserve but to destroy his native speech. His book is a comprehensive index expurgatorius of all the words, phrases, and idioms a Scotsman must avoid—many of them today a part of the standard speech of the United States, and even of England. Thus, ‘best man’ is a Scotticism for ‘bride’s man’; ‘hairdresser’ is to be preferred to ‘barber’; ‘sore eyes’ is a vulgarism; ‘whisky’ should be called ‘usquebae’ or ‘aquavitae’. ‘Heather’ and ‘peat’ and ‘bracken’ are condemned along with ‘mittens’ and ‘kindling’; it betrays provincial origin to ask if a friend is in, or if he has gone out walking. ‘It is, indeed, astonishing,’ says Sir John, ‘how uncouth, and often how unintelligible, Scotch words and phrases are to an inhabitant of London, and how much it exposes such as make use of them, to the derision of those with whom they happen to have any communication or intercourse.’ However, he adds, a Scot should choose carefully even from the speech of London. ‘Cockney phrases a Scotchman is very apt to get into when he makes his first appearance in London. And when he can easily and fluently bring out, this here thing, and that there thing, for this or that thing; I knode, for I knew; on it, for of it, as, I heard on it; grass, for asparagus; your’n and his’n, for yours and his, he fancies himself a complete Englishman.’
The anglicizing mania extended even to people’s names. David Malloch, when he crossed the Border, changed his name to Mallet; John Murray the publisher was originally M’Murray, as his predecessor, Millan, had been Macmillan; William Almack, the proprietor of the famous assembly-rooms in London, had started life as M’Caul. One of Burns’s own friends, James M’Candlish, dropped the prefix when he entered Glasgow University, and became simply Candlish. Even today, in spite of Burns, the anglicizing process continues: the visitor in Ayr, for instance, will find the street-signs pointing him to the ‘New Bridge’ and the ‘Old Bridge’.
By 1780 Scotland could afford to smile at Johnson’s dictum that her northern lights were only farthing candles. In literature at least she could face English competition on equal terms. James Thomson had become a classic; Adam Smith and Hume and Robertson had demonstrated that the north could more than hold its own with the south in history and philosophy; Mackenzie’s lachrymose Man of Feeling disputed with The Vicar of Wakefield the claim to be the most popular short novel of the century. In Edinburgh a Scots Magazine was emulating the methods and materials of the English Gentleman’s Magazine, though when Mackenzie and his friends tried, first in The Mirror and later in The Lounger, to produce a Scottish Spectator they found the city not metropolitan enough to support such an enterprise. Many people took anything sharp in the way of satire as a personal attack, but namby-pamby was not read, and so between poverty of material and poverty of support the journals’ straw-fire flickered and went out.
But while the poor relations of England were thus looking forward hopefully to the day when their speech and writing should no longer betray their provincial origin, the social life of the country changed more slowly. The gentry added silks and laces to their clothing, and tea and other luxuries to their tables, but felt no special urgency for greater cleanliness. George Dempster, fresh from a visit to Brussels in 1756, was shocked to find that a baronet’s son of his acquaintance had been calling on a lady of title ‘in a valet de chamber’s frock and an unpowdered brown greezy head’. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century the inhabitants of a Highland mansion, though they had got beyond the point where they were satisfied to give themselves ‘a “good wash” on Sundays, and make that do for the week’, found their domestic routine upset by a guest who not only insisted on a daily bath but refused to go to the river to take it. Servants in the better houses were provided with shoes and stockings, but the general standards of neatness were still so low as to make the cleanliness of Holland a constant source of wonder to the visiting Scot.
But the aping of English manners had not yet undermined the traditional Scottish democracy of intercourse. Though the barriers which divided gentleman from commoner were fully as strong in Scotland as they were in England, they were not so visible. If many of the gentry lacked wealth, they did not lack pedigree, and a plebeian could rarely hope to cross the boundary that excluded him from social equality. Nobles married with nobles, and lairds with lairds. Yet until the end of the century the sons of nobles, lairds, and ploughmen commonly began their education together in the village school, where boy-fashion they took each other at face-value without regard to rank. The result was an almost total absence among the lower classes of that servility which was bred into their compeers in England. Only as more and more of the sons of gentlemen were sent to English public schools did the old system decay, and some of the gentry begin to compensate for the inferiority they had been made to feel in the presence of the English by assuming a haughty air with their humbler countrymen.
In short, all that had distinguished Scotland as a nation was on the way to oblivion. Literature, language, manners, and institutions were being anglicized as fast as a people roused to uneasy self-consciousness could manage it. In 1786 it seemed evident that when the former things passed away it would be into the darkness in which men and nations prefer to bury the ruder and more discreditable features of their early days. That the memory of the discarded heritage should be embalmed as a precious possession, and that the old world should be forever surrounded by the romantic glory of a golden sunset was due more to Robert Burns than to any other person. He made the Scots conscious of the richness of their national tradition. He could not restore it to life, but he taught his people to cherish its ruins.