The fundamental fact is that for him Scots was the natural language
of the emotions, English of the intellect. The Scots poems are in
general better, not chiefly because they are in Scots but because they
are concerned with matters of natural feeling; the English poems are
in general poetically poorer, not because they are in English but
because they are so frequently the outcome of moods not dominated by
spontaneous emotion, but intellectual, conscious, or theatrical. He
wrote English sometimes as he wore his Sunday blacks, with dignity but
not with ease; sometimes as he wore the buff and blue, with buckskins
and top-boots, which he donned in Edinburgh--"like a farmer dressed in
his best to dine with the laird." In both cases he was capable of
vigorous, common-sense expression; in neither was he likely to exhibit
the imagination, the tenderness, or the humor which characterized the
plowman clad in home-spun.
_The Cotter's Saturday Night_ is an interesting illustration of these
distinctions. The opening stanza is a dedicatory address on English
models to a lawyer friend and patron; it is pure English in language,
stiff and imitatively "literary" in style. The stanzas which follow
describing the homecoming of the cotter, the family circle, the
supper, and the daughter's suitor, are in broad Scots, the language
harmonizing perfectly with the theme, and they form poetically the
sound core of the poem.
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