for the benefit of those that find difficulty with words, phrases, idioms. The method will be familiar to those acquainted with the author's The Dialect of Robert Burns as spoken in Central Ayrshire; the present volume is an effective adaptation of the plan followed in the earlier book. Together the two constitute a splendid contribution to the scientific study of the vernacular, and an effective instrument for promoting a knowledge of one of its varieties. A. M. WILLIAMS. "Robert Burns, a Play," by John Drinkwater. (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1925, 3/6.) For some time Burnsians have known that Mr. John Drinkwater had in preparation a play or operetta dealing with Robert Burns. Dr. M'Naught often spoke to me about it, and wondered in a not unkindly way what it would be like: would Mr. Drinkwater reach to his subject, or leave it above him in the altitudes? Happily, Dr. M'Naught has been spared the production. None the less, and if only because of the position Mr. Drinkwater holds in letters, the play cannot be wholly ignored. It has now been published. Well staged, with good singing and music, with winsome impersonations of female coyness and rustic simplicity, it may pass muster, and even have a vogue of its own in any London play-house accustomed to light musical comedy and audiences innocent of literary feeling or knowledge of any idiom other than their own but even then, has not Mr. Drinkwater under-estimated the intelligence of a London audience? In any case the superb songs of Burns and the touching beauty of many of the old Scots airs will carry it along, for those airs at least are sure to be charmingly rendered. As a characterisation, however, of Scottish life, even with Scottish song irregularly wedded thereto, it is, to use the Scots Vernacular "a wheen blethers." In Biblical phraseology, Mr. Drinkwater has travailed, "and as it were brought forth wind." In his preface Mr. Drink water explains that, as an Englishman, he must express himself in "his own native idiom." How else could he express himself at all? The pity is that he did not confine himself to his native idiom throughout, instead of interjecting it among Burns's beautiful songs, mainly in the vernacular. The conjunction is unhappy and incongruous, for the author's English is not the English of the Poet, who in his letters touches a supreme altitude. But even then, the Poet's English was never equal to the power and tender beauty of his work in the vernacular; and to intersperse, as Mr. Drinkwater does, his own precise modern English idiom with another's earlier and diverse, but also native, idiom is surely foolish. What he has really done is to remove the poetic jewels of Burns from their own incomparable setting to one that is commonplace, and in the handling he has unfortunately destroyed much of the sweetness and beauty of many precious things. Moreover, by incongruous juxtaposition with material of his own, he has created a discord and marred much of their harmony and completeness. Mr. Drinkwater is himself obviously not altogether unconscious of this, for in his prefatory note he naïvely asks his Scottish readers to remember that "in the performance of this play the addition of local colour to the speech can safely be left to the actors." But these may not always be Scottish, or even Scottish with a knowledge of the vernacular; and if local colour is not safe in the hands of the author, is it likely to be more so in the hands of possibly alien players? That Mr. Drinkwater was conscious of his inherent limitations is also otherwise evidenced, and the wonder grows that he should have essayed this venture into the empyrean with so poor equipment, and not have left the quest to someone with at least a working knowledge of the vernacular, and a greater native sympathy with, and understanding of, Robert Burns and his vehicle. Much, if not all, of Mr. Drinkwater's modern English dialogue, although here and there carrying a certain sweetness of its own, is altogether out of keeping with the virile idiom of Burns, and this both in matter and form; but even Mr. Drink water's often fine English is but as a thread of lint, upon which he has sought to string Burns's jewels of song. Mr. Drinkwater has done many things of note, as well as things which lighten the passing hour, but it was surely unwise to make play with the Olympians. In his operetta he had evidently before his eyes the financial success of the Hammersmith production of the Beggar's Opera and, for the moment forgetting he is not Gay, essayed to revive the nefarious Macheath in Robert Burns, not as seen through the medium of "truth," but through that of the pay-box. For Robert Burns he has shown but little regard throughout. As a lesser instance of Mr. Drink water's maladroit appropriation, take the incident of the literary breakfast at Edinburgh— which he wholly misconstrues, as so much else in his operetta— where a clergyman attacked Gray's Elegy. With generous warmth Burns defended the dead and, begging the provoker of the foolish adventure to be at least specific, bore with forbearance but with growing irritation all the pedantic blundering of the aggressor till, goaded into indignant reply, with flashing eyes and burning contempt, he burst forth: "Sir, I perceive a man may be an excellent judge of poetry by square and rule, and after all be a damned blockhead." Fortunately Mr. Drink water has not yet himself apprehended the obvious application. The characterisation of Robert Burns is neither that of the Burns of truth or of manhood, nor that of charity. The presentment breathes of drink, wantonness, and posturing; and these form a trilogy which, if they are the author's conception of life and poetry, were assuredly not those of Robert Burns. To Mr. Drinkwater may be suggested a perusal of Dr. M'Naught's Truth about Burns. That is the work of a man careful and authoritative; of one, moreover, whose life-long study of the Poet is sympathetic and understanding; and if it has not the meed of Mr. Drinkwater's imagination, it has at least that reverence and knowledge which would have prevented intrusion into the banal. Not a single one of Mr. Drinkwater's characters is real; rather are they of stage tinsel and travesty, and one may even hear the sound of Bow bells. "Holy Willie" is a footlight "minister"; Gavin Hamilton an English attorney; Nelly Kilpatrick, Burns's boyhood sweetheart of the harvest field, is portrayed as something of a country lightskirts; and even "Bonnie Jean" herself is but a stiffly posed lay figure, which the artist has hardly even troubled sufficiently to drape. Mrs. Ferguson's Edinburgh drawing room of 1787 exhales more of the spirit of the suburban drawing room of to day than of that of the Edinburgh wits and scholars. For the dominant figure of Robert Burns he has compounded the wan shade of a Charles Surface, a posturing nonenity, and a self-conscious sentamentalist of drink and gallantry; which compound, when it is not the showman in tinsel and spangles beating the big drum, is obtruding the songs of Robert Burns upon the stage. The crowd may indeed walk up and pay their pennies, but the rest, as a Burns play, is void. The great blot, however-which Mr. Drinkwater's lack of the vernacular and knowledge of the idiom may in part excuse-is the irrelevant sequence and continuous intrusion of Burns's songs. In jumbling them together with but little regard to their time, place, or occasion, he dulls their music, soils their beauty, and by environment does his best or worst to make them commonplace and at times even ridiculous by irrelevant conjunction with his dialogue. Take "Scene II.-The Inn at Mauchline"-after the bacchanal. All have gone out save Burns, the Landlord, Nell, and the one remaining drunken sleeper on the floor, whom Burns awakes and proceds to convoy unsteadily home. Mr. Drinkwater names this figure "John Anderson." To wanton with and outrage Burns's most exquisite little lyric of wedded bliss and lifelong love, by inversion of qualities and transposition of meaning, into a drunken song voiced by two incoherent wayfarers, one of whom cheaply fears the tongue of an exasperated wife, is the debasement of literary chivalry, and, if not pure idiocy, is at best poor farce; in Mr. Drinkwater it is inexcusable. This disregard of meaning and incongruous interspersion of not only this lyric, but of much other matter, with a foreign and often fatuous dialogue, is so obviously a mistake that it should have been I apparent. In the last scene of all it reaches a climax. There, theatrically hearing the fictitious march away of his Dumfries volunteer comrades to the French wars, the worn and dying Burns raises himself from his bed to sing (from its martial nature one may assume stentoriously) his great war song, to-day the national anthem of the Scottish people, before "sinking back exhausted" into the arms of Gavin Hamilton and Bonnie Jean. And so the curtain falls. We have had Hamlet in plus fours; but why drag in Robert Burns? Had Mr. Drinkwater left out Burns's songs altogether, and, instead of making them a peg on which to hang his own dialogue, substituted songs of his own, the play would have stood as an English rendering of a Scots subject; as it stands it is like "the untimely birth of a woman that may not see the sun." Its author has evidently been drawn by the lure of Burns; but, as a Scottish play the work is as nondescript, as without atmosphere, drawing, or even local colour, as it is without truth and life. Any national play must be racial in its being and expression, or universal! This is neither. It is unfortunate that it has been published at a time when interest in the Scots vernacular is awakening, and when that vernacular is again coming into something of its own. Its renaissance will not perhaps be helped or hindered by Mr. Drinkwater's doubtless well intentioned contribution, but the time is unpropitious. To essay the Olympian is dangerous, even in a national and familiar idiom; in an alien it is futile, for in such foreign medium not only is an Olympian far removed beyond one's reach, but in such a vehicle it may even be that "An honest man's aboon his might- JAMES A. MORRIS. "The Scottish Tongue: A Series of Lectures on the Vernacular Language of Lowland Scotland," by W. A. Craigie, John Buchan, Peter Giles, and J. M. Bulloch. (London: Cassell & Co., Ltd., 1924, 6/-) These four lectures were delivered to the Vernacular Circle of the Burns Club of London, and are introduced by the Hon. Secretary of the Circle, Mr. William Will, in a "Foreword" which explains the origin and purpose of the movement. The lecturers have varied qualifications. Professor Craigie and Dr. Giles, the Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, are distinguished authorities, the one upon Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian tongues, and the other upon the philology of the ancient classical languages. Mr. Buchan and Mr. Bulloch are men of letters who have found time, among the other pursuits of two busy lives, to add to our knowledge of Scottish history, and are themselves vernacular poets. The deep learning which lies behind the lectures of Dr. Craigie and the Master of Emmanuel will be appreciated by careful readers, but neither in topic nor in treatment is their appeal directed to scholars. Professor Craigie states clearly and plainly "The Present State of the Scottish Tongue." He tells us that "the ideas of culture which prevailed in the second half of the eighteenth century are largely responsible for finally reducing our old Lowland tongue to the position of a dialect," and that, in spite of the literary work done in the nineteenth century, it has never recovered. Some of that work is excellent, but " a thin veneer of Scottish spelling" has frequently been allowed "to pass muster as a genuine representation of the popular speech." Further, in our own days, "the younger generation does not have the same hold upon the national tongue as their fathers had." Yet the outlook is not entirely gloomy, for "those old folks whose rich store of real Scottish words and phrases is so delightful did not acquire them all before they had reached the age of fourteen." "My own experience," Professor Craigie adds, "is that one goes on learning new Scottish words and phrases as long as one lives; and I have no doubt that this fact will continually operate to prevent the dialect from giving way so rapidly as the apparent symptoms would lead one to expect." Having diagnosed the disease, Dr. Craigie proceeds to suggest remedies. These are the teaching of Scottish in schools, the republication of Scottish classics, the study of the history of the tongue, and its employment in new and original literature, and on each of them this book contains suggestive comments and useful hints. Dr. Giles deals with the general place of "Dialect in Literature." Finding a similarity in the literature of Greece and a contrast in the literature of Rome, he deals with the fortunes of literary Scots since the Reformation, and, coming to our own times, points out the danger that the literature may "survive the dialect." Education is killing many of the old words in Scotland and in England alike, and "in time it is probable that our Vocabulary will be reduced almost to a dead uniformity and . . . beetle will have replaced not only clock and goloch in Scotland, but also straddlebob and dumbledore in England. Even then, however, there will remain some local peculiarities, and if at last the whole population is to speak with one voice, there is at least this comfort, that neither you nor I will be alive to hear it." Another and more comfortable comfort is to be found in the persistence of a local patriotism which can be guided into right lines. Dr. Bulloch illustrates with equal delight to himself and to his readers "The Delight of the Doric in the Diminutive," which, he says, "remains dominant to this day in the Scots mind." On the |