y at any one time there are in all probability not one
but several literatures flourishing. The main stream flowing through
the publishers and booksellers, conned by critics and coteries,
recognized as the national literature, is commonly only the largest of
several channels of thought. There are besides the national literature
local literatures--books, that is, are published which enjoy popularity
and critical esteem in their own county or parish and are utterly
unknown outside; there may even be (indeed, there are in several parts
of the country) distinct 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