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.