local schools of writing and dynasties of local authors.  These localized literatures rarely become known to the outside world; the national literature takes little account of them, though their existence and probably some special knowledge of one or other of them is within the experience of most of us.  But every now and again some one of their authors transcends his local importance, gives evidence of a genius which is not to be denied even by those who normally have not the knowledge to appreciate the particular flavour of locality which his writings impart, and becomes a national figure.  While he lives and works the national and his local stream turn and flow together.

This was the case of Robert Burns.  All his life long he was the singer of a parish—­the last of a long line of “forbears” who had used the Scottish lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their neighbours and their scandals, their loves and their church.  Himself at the confluence of the two streams, the national and the local, he pays his tribute to two sets of originals, talks with equal reverence of names known to us like Pope and Gray and Shenstone and names unknown which belonged to local “bards,” as he would have called them, who wrote their poems for an Ayrshire public.  If he came upon England as an innovator it was simply because he brought with him the highly individualized style of Scottish local vernacular verse; to his own people he was no innovator but a fulfilment; as his best critic[5] says he brought nothing to the literature he became a part of but himself.  His daring and splendid genius made the local universal, raised out of rough and cynical satirizing a style as rich and humorous and astringent as that of Rabelais, lent inevitableness and pathos and romance to lyric and song.  But he was content to better the work of other men.  He made hardly anything new.

[Footnote 5:  W.E.  Henley, “Essay on Burns.”  Works, David Nutt.]

Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his readiness to use up the work of others or take a large hint from it “as if he had some difficulty in commencing.”  He omits to observe that the very same trait applies to other great artists.  There seem to be two orders of creative writers.  On the one hand are the innovators, the new men like Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, and later Browning.  These men owe little to their predecessors; they work on their own devices and construct their medium afresh for themselves.  Commonly their fame and acceptance is slow, for they speak in an unfamiliar tongue and they have to educate a generation to understand their work.  The other order of artists have to be shown the way.  They have little fertility in construction or invention.  You have to say to them “Here is something that you could do too; go and do it better,” or “Here is a story to work on, or a refrain of a song; take it and give it your subtlety, your music.”  The villainy you teach them they will use and it will go hard with them if they do not