Ye are na Mary Morison,
or where shall a parallel be found for the terrific concision, the vertiginous speed, of Tam o’ Shanter? The future of the Scots spirit may depend upon the issue of the great struggle going on in all the arts between the dying spirit of the Renaissance and the rediscovered spirit of nationality. To-day there is a general reaction against the Renaissance. Observe the huge extent to which dialect is entering into the stuff of modern literature in every country. Dialect is the language of the common people; in literature it denotes an almost overweening attempt to express the here-and-now. That, in its principle, is anti-Renaissance. Basil de Sélincourt[1] and many others observe that modern English shows signs of fatigue in comparison with Chaucer’s. Chaucer was a poet with this power of plain speech. He never flinched from the life that was being lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its dung, its cocks and hens is not, some people have thought, a poetic subject; Chaucer knew better. Dunbar with the aid of Scots achieved effects beyond Chaucer’s compass with an utterance even more simple and straightforward. It has been said that Dunbar had for his highest quality a certain unique intensity of feeling, the power of expressing that passionate and peculiar force which distinguishes and differentiates us people of the North from our Southern neighbours. What is this unique intensity of feeling, this power of direct utterance, but the pre-Renaissance qualities of which I am writing? Braid Scots is a great untapped repository of the pre-Renaissance or anti-Renaissance potentialities which English has progressively forgone.
[1] See his Pomona: or the Future of English, in this series.
In days when mankind were but callans
At grammar, logic, and sic talents,
They took nae pains their speech to balance
Or rules to gie,
But spak’ their thoughts in plain braid lallans
Like you or me.