Horace was an acute thinker and a frank speaker on the problems of life. This didacticism seems not to have harmed his artistic welfare, for he has undoubtedly been the most popular poet that ever wrote. Consider the magnitude and the enthusiasm of his audience! He has been the personal chum of everyone that ever read Latinity. But Horace, when not exalted with his inspired preachments on the art of life and the arts of poetry and love, was a bitter cynic redeemed by great self-depreciation and joviality. The son of a slave, he was too fond of court life to talk democracy.
Bobby Burns was a thorough child of the people, and is more like Mr. Riley in every way than any other poet. Yet he, too, had a vicious cynicism, and he never had the polished art that enriches some of Mr. Riley's non-dialectic poetry, as in parts of his fairy fancy, "The Flying Islands of the Night."
Burns never had the versatility of sympathy that enables Mr. Riley to write such unpastoral masterpieces as "Anselmo," "The Dead Lover," "A Scrawl," "The Home-going," some of his sonnets, and the noble verses beginning
"A monument for the soldiers!
And what will ye build it of?"
Yet it must be owned that Burns is in general Mr. Riley's prototype. Mr. Riley admits it himself in his charming verses "To Robert Burns."
"Sweet singer, that I lo'e the maist
O' ony, sin' wi' eager haste
I smacket bairn lips ower the taste
O' hinnied sang."
The classic pastoral poets, Theokritos, Vergandil, the others, sang with an exquisite art, indeed, yet their farm-folk were really Dresden-china shepherds and shepherdesses speaking with affected simplicity or with impossible elegance. Theokritos, like Burns and Riley, wrote partly in dialect and partly in the standard speech, and to those who are never reconciled to anything that can quote no "authority," there should be sufficient justification for dialect poetry in this divine Sicilian musician of whom his own Goatherd might have said:
"Full of fine honey thy beautiful mouth was, Thyrsis, created
Full of the honeycomb; figs Ægilean, too, mayest thou nibble,
Sweet as they are; for ev'n than the locust more bravely thou singest."
I have no room to argue the pro's of dialect here, but it always seems strange that those lazy critics who are unwilling to take the trouble to translate the occasional hard words in a dialect form of their own tongue, should be so inconsistent as ever to study a foreign language. Then, too, dialect is necessary to truth, to local color, to intimacy with the character depicted. Besides, it is delicious. There is something mellow and soul-warming about a plebeian metathesis like "congergation." What orthoepy could replace lines like these?:
"Worter, shade and all so mixed, don't know which you'd orter
Say, th' worter in the shadder—shadder in the worter!"