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Title: The Unspeakable Scot

Author: T. W. H. Crosland

Release date: December 18, 2017 [eBook #56204]

Language: English

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                                   THE
                            UNSPEAKABLE SCOT

                                   BY
                            T. W. H. CROSLAND

                             [Illustration]

                         LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS
                      NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

                                  1902

                           Copyright, 1902, by
                            T. W. H. CROSLAND

                          Published, July, 1902

                    The Knickerbocker Press, New York




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                   PAGE

       I. THE SUPERSTITION                       1

      II. PREDECESSORS                          23

     III. THE POW-WOW MEN                       42

      IV. THE SCOT IN JOURNALISM                57

       V. THRUMS AND DRUMTOCHTY                 76

      VI. BARBIE                                92

     VII. THE BARD                             101

    VIII. THE SCOT AS A CRITIC                 117

      IX. THE SCOT AS BIOGRAPHER               142

       X. THE SCOT IN LETTERS                  153

      XI. THE SCOT IN COMMERCE                 163

     XII. THE SCOT AS A DIPSOMANIAC            172

    XIII. THE SCOT AS CRIMINAL                 179

     XIV. THE SCOT BY ADOPTION                 186

      XV. THE SCOT AND ENGLAND                 194

     XVI. THE WAY OUT                          204

    XVII. ADVERTISEMENT                        212




The Unspeakable Scot




I

THE SUPERSTITION


This book is for Anglo-Saxons. It is also in the nature of a broad hint
for Scotchmen. My qualification to bestow broad hints upon the politest
and most intellectual of the peoples is that I possess a large fund of
contempt for the Scottish character. Also, I had the misfortune to be
born on a day which is marked, sadly enough, in the calendars, BURNS
DIED. So that, one way and another, I appear to have been raised up for
the work before us, even as Dr. J. M. Barrie[1] was raised up to assist
the fortunes of a certain brand of smoking mixture.[2]

Of course, if a man speak of the Scotch in any but the most dulcet tones
he invites the onslaught of a thousand witty pens. The bare title of
the present essay is pronounced by good judges to be uncomplimentary
to Scotland, and I can well imagine that since its announcement Drs.
Lang, Archer, Robertson Nicoll, Ross, and Hamish Hendry, together with
a base residuum of anonymous reviewers, have made a point of sleeping
in their clothes in order that they might be “ready, aye ready,” to
deal faithfully with the haughty Southron at the earliest possible
moment. I like to think, however, that Dr. Lang, who, with true Scottish
shrewdness, avowed himself but yesterday a convinced crystal-gazer,[3]
has had due prevision of the friendliness of my intentions. Were I
disposed to bloody battle, I might have opened fire by remarking in hot
type that if you scratch a Scotchman you will find a very low person
indeed. Or I could have thrown from my pompom that shining projectile:

    False Scot
    Sold his king
    For a groat.

But who, that has a feeling for warfare, would fight with a Scotchman?
Such a one, I hope, does not breathe; the plain fact being that if a Scot
beats you, he beats you; whereas, if you begin to beat a Scot, he will
assuredly bawl, in the King’s name, for the law. “Hech, sirs, rin for the
polis. Ah’m gettin’ whupped!” Let us therefore continue our discourse
amicably.

Your proper child of Caledonia believes in his bones that he is the salt
of the earth. Prompted by a glozing pride, not to say by a black and
consuming avarice, he has proclaimed his saltiness from the house-tops
in and out of season, unblushingly, assiduously, and with results which
have no doubt been most satisfactory from his own point of view. There
is nothing creditable to the race of men, from filial piety to a pretty
taste in claret, which he has not sedulously advertised as a virtue
peculiar to himself. This arrogation has served him passing well. It has
brought him into unrivalled esteem. He is the one species of human animal
that is taken by all the world to be fifty per cent cleverer and pluckier
and honester than the facts warrant. He is the daw with a peacock’s tail
of his own painting. He is the ass who has been at pains to cultivate
the convincing roar of a lion. He is the fine gentleman whose father
toils with a muck-fork. And, to have done with parable, he is the clumsy
lout from Tullietudlescleugh, who, after a childhood of intimacy with
the crudest sort of poverty, and twelve months at “the college” on
moneys wrung from the diet of his family,[4] drops his threadbare kilt
and comes South in a slop suit to instruct the English in the arts of
civilisation and in the English language. And because he is Scotch, and
the Scotch superstition is heavy on our Southern lands, England will
forthwith give him a chance; for an English chance is his birthright.
Soon, forbye, shall he be living in “chambers” and writing idiot books.
Or he shall swell and hector and fume in the sub-editor’s room of a
halfpenny paper. Or a pompous and gravel-blind city house shall grapple
him to its soul in the capacity of confidential clerk. Or he shall be
cashier in a jam factory, or “boo and boo” behind a mercer’s counter, or
“wait on” in a coffee tavern, or, for that matter, soak away his chapped
spirit in the four-ale bars off Fleet Street. Hence, as an elegant writer
in one of the weekly reviews puts it, the Englishman “is painfully aware
that it is the Scot who thrusts him aside in the contest for many of the
best prizes.”

When one turns to the intimate study of the Scotch character as limned
by Scotch authority, one finds oneself confronted with the work of two
schools of artists, which, for the sake of convenience, we will dub the
Old and New Schools. The Old School—of which, by the way, every Scotchman
save one is either a member or a supporter—has had a tremendous vogue
and has accomplished superhuman things for the country and people of its
love. To this school the Scotch superstition owes its origin and its firm
grip on the imagination of the average white man. It is a forthright,
downright, thorough sort of school, not in the least diffident or
mealy-mouthed, not in the least ambiguous, not in the least infected
with that “proud reserve” which is understood to be Scotland’s noblest
heritage. Among the choice exemplars of the art of the Old School—and it
has thousands of choice exemplars—we may reckon Dr. George Lockhart, who
wrote the _Memoirs_ and thereby earned for himself imperishable fame.
Lockhart was a “Scotland-for-ever” man of the first water. “As for the
[Scots],” he says, “none will, I think, deny them to have been a Brave,
Generous, Hardy People.… As the Scots were a Brave, so likewise were
they a Polite People; every Country has its own peculiar Customs, and
so had Scotland, but in the main they lived and were refined as other
Countries; and this won’t seem strange, for the English themselves allow
the Scots to be a Wise and Ingenious People, for say they to a Proverb,
‘_They never knew a_ Scots _Man a Fool_.’ And if so, what should hinder
them from being as well bred and civilised as any other People? Those of
Rank (as they still do) travelled Abroad into foreign Countries for their
Improvement, and vast numbers, when their Country at home did not require
their services [mark the fine sophistry] went into that of foreign
Princes, from whence after they had gained immortal Honour and Glory,
they returned home; and as it is obvious that at this very time (which
must chiefly proceed from this humour of Travelling) the Scotch Gentry
do far exceed those of England, so that in the one you shall find all
the accomplishments of well-bred gentleman, and in your country English
Esquires all the Barbarity imaginable.”[5] Thus Dr. George Lockhart,
two hundred years ago. ’Tis a fair picture and a winning, if a trifle
overstated. There stands your brilliant, and at the same time unassuming,
figure of a Scotchman—“brave,” “generous,” “hardy,” “polite,” “refined,”
“not a fool,” “well bred,” “civilised,” “travelled,” “wise,” “ingenious,”
and immortally “honourable” and “glorious.” Who can withstand him? Who
would deny him the look of love, the patriot glow? Certainly not the
men of his own blood, who have their livings to get. Certainly not the
Scotchman, who perceives, by favour of Dr. Lockhart, his own impeccable
sonsie self done to the life. To this day the artists of the Old School
continue to paint the same inspiring portrait, and if you look into the
latest replica, by no less judicial a hand than that of Dr. John Hill
Burton[6] you shall discover the undying lineaments, bespeaking the
undying virtues, and composed sweetly to the purposes of the undying
advertisement.

So much for the Old School. As for the New School, I take credit that it
is a discovery of my own. It consists of one man only. He is a Scotchman,
and his name is William Robertson Nicoll. Dr. Nicoll is the editor of
the _British Weekly_. He also edits the _Bookman_, and lounges round
letters in a paper called the _Sketch_. Some time ago this great and good
Scotchman was accused of indulging in too many literary aliases. We were
then informed by a _protégé_ of his that it would be well for us to lift
reverent eyes and behold in Dr. William Robertson Nicoll “a force in
letters”—“the only force, some of us think,” added the incense-breathing
_protégé_. We looked and beheld. Also we read, in _Who’s Who_, that Dr.
Nicoll was the author of _The Lamb of God_, _The Key of the Grave_,
_The Incarnate Saviour_, _The Return to the Cross_, _The Secret of
Christian Experience_, _Songs of Rest_, and _Sunday Afternoon Verses_,
all, no doubt, excellent and exciting works, but obviously sealed to
a department of letters in which we have not specialised. Therefore,
we took “the-force-in-letters” notion for granted. Our own idea of Dr.
Robertson Nicoll’s relation to letters will be set forth duly in another
chapter. Meanwhile, it is necessary to say that Dr. Nicoll is one of
those delightfully irresponsible literary forces who babble of “Mr. S. R.
Crockett’s _great_ novel _Joan of the Sword Hand_,” in one breath, and
with the next pray to be delivered from “a misuse of words.”

But let us give honour where honour is due. There are white marks even
on the editor of the _British Weekly_. For quite two years past his
dropsical pennyworth has been our constant solace in times of darkness
and difficulty. Each week it contains a lengthy and helpful letter by
one “Claudius Clear.” Many young Scotch writers have told us in many a
useful paragraph that they do not think they are breaking a confidence
when they say that “Claudius Clear” is one of the pen names of Dr.
Robertson Nicoll. So that on the whole “Claudius” is a Scotchman,
despite the circumstance that he dates his correspondence from Basil
Regis, Middlesex, and masquerades in a name which is about as Scotch
as “Schiepan.” For that matter, anybody might have guessed it from his
syntax. And being a Scotchman, “Claudius” is, of course, omniscient
and infallible. That is where the absurd beauty of him comes in. That,
Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, is why one reads the _British Weekly_. Do
you wish to know how to run the _Times_? Would you care to be instructed
in “the art of conversation”? Are you anxious to learn what is really
meant by “good manners”? Would you be advised on “Order and Method,”
“Brilliance,” “Overwork,” “Handwriting,” “Publishing as a Profession,”
“Editing as a Profession,” “The Keeping of Old Letters,” “How to Remember
and how to Forget,” “The Art of Life,” “The Art of Taking things Coolly,”
“Turning Out the Fools,” or indeed on any other matter under the sun—from
“Vanity” to “Samuel”?—why, you just turn up “Claudius,” and there you
are; two columns which settle the question swiftly and for ever. What
wonder, then, that in my anxiety to get at the truth about Scotchmen, I
should turn up “Claudius”? Nor have I turned him up in vain, as witness
the following admirable words:

“In the first place, the Scotsman is a son of the rock. The circumstances
of his birth and upbringing are as a rule very stern. He is cradled in
the storm; he has to fight for life in a rough climate, in a huddle of
grey houses. The amenities of life are by no means plentiful. As a rule,
money is scarce. There are few demonstrations of affection; one is made
to feel that he must trust himself, that man is a soldier, and life is a
fight. [Here, Scot-like, the worthy “Claudius” breaks off to indulge in
a little pathetic personal reminiscence.] When I look back to my early
years it seems to me that the whole atmosphere was laden with care, that
the strain on the hearts of the people was so tightened by the material
needs of those who depended on them that life was a taut rope on which
only a trained acrobat could keep his balance. The result was a feeling
of constant anxiety, a dread of the future. It was haunted by fears which
could hardly be measured, and as the years went on their difficulties
seemed to increase. [Which, to say the least, is clumsily put.] In this
way young Scotsmen were taught to take things seriously. They knew that
their right arms must serve them, and they did not lean upon others.
They were thus fiercely independent. They asked nothing from those about
them—the asking would be vain. As they sought nothing they would give
nothing. Acknowledgment of superior position they resolutely refused;
and they were ready to resent every assumption of superiority. They knew
well that the door of opportunity opens but seldom, and were eager to
enter it when it did open. They knew that success in any form was to be
paid for, and they were willing to pay. They would work hard without
complaining, and they were willing to sacrifice, and ever came to disdain
the pleasures and amusements of life. They had been taught that it was
of no use to complain, and they did not complain. But they made amends
for this by refusing to be gracious, by a reserved and proud manner.
They knew that competition was the law of life, and they were none too
gentle in dealing with their competitors. Those who achieved positions
were objects of criticism, and the criticism was pitiless enough. For a
fight they were in constant readiness. ‘Touch me gin you daur,’ was the
national motto, and there never was one more expressive of character. The
Scotsman as a rule does not take the offensive, but those who meddle
with him must take all the consequences.”[7]

Clearly, as one might say, a Daniel come to judgment! “Claudius Clear,”
the New School, struts and roisters and swaggers as your Scot must do,
or perish; but, on the whole and out of the honesty of his heart, he
will modify. Perhaps he was not in the best of humours when he wrote
the foregoing. Anyway it rather disposes of the gallant and debonair
vision conjured up for us by the glowing pencils of the Old School.
The generous, polite, refined, well-bred, civilised, and immortally
honourable and glorious Scotchman of Dr. George Lockhart becomes,
under the brush of Dr. Robertson Nicoll, another and a distinctly less
beautiful personality. He is born on the rock. The amenities of life
are not for him. He is haunted by constant fears. He will give nothing.
He refuses to be gracious. He is none too gentle in dealing with his
competitors. And instead of saying “_Nemo me impune lacesset_,” as you
might expect of a young man who has been to college, he whoops “Touch me
gin you daur,” like any common rowdy. When I come to think of it, I am
much obliged to the New School.

On another matter—a very big matter, indeed, with your common
Scotchman—Dr. Nicoll is equally frank. “I think I may also say,” he
remarks, “that the Scottish people cared very much for education and
knowledge, far more in my opinion than the average Englishman. They
thought about learning as the New Englanders did in the days of Emerson.
The learned man was much more respected than the rich man. Perhaps
there was an intuition that in the end of the day knowledge is the
key to everything. But thirty years ago, at all events, knowledge was
regarded as an end, and its possessor was profoundly esteemed. The
_summum bonum_[8] of the best Scottish youth in those days was to be
a professor.” _Summum bonum_ is scarcely the phrase, but that and the
New Englanders may pass. Scotland, admittedly, enjoys a reputation for
learning of a sort. Once, I visited Edinburgh with a Scotchman. It was
a rash thing to do, yet I did it. On the road north my Scotchman filled
me with tales of his country’s culture. “You are not going into a dirty
English city,” quoth he, “but into a centre of light and leading. Every
man, woman, and child in ‘aud Immemour’ can at least read, and every
publican in the place keeps a set of _Chambers’s Encyclopædia_, a copy of
Fox’s _Book of Martyrs_, and plenty of back numbers of the _Nineteenth
Century_, just as an English publican keeps for the use of his customers
the _Post Office Directory_ and _Whitaker’s Almanack_.” And the first
thing I noticed when we got into Edinburgh was a fruiterer’s sign, upon
which was written in startling letters:

FRUITS IN THERE SEASON

All the same, I concede that the Scotch really do love learning. I
gather, too, from unbiassed sources that they starve their mothers and
make gin-mules of their fathers to get it. And when it is gotten, what a
monstrous and unlovely possession it usually turns out to be. For your
Scotchman always takes knowledge for wisdom. His learning consists wholly
of “facts and figures,” all grouped methodically round that heaven-sent
date, A.D. 1314,[9] and if you cannot tell him off-hand the salary of
the Archbishop of Canterbury, the population of Otaheite and the names
of the fixed stars, he votes you a damned ignorant Southron, and goes
about telling his friends that he shouldn’t wonder if you never went to
“the schule.” It may rejoice him to know that his readiness to answer
all manner of questions involving book learning is in point of fact the
beginnings of a species of idiocy. Persons of whom this idiocy has got
properly hold are styled by the medical profession “idiot _savants_.”
“In all asylums,” says Professor Vivian Poore, “you will find idiot
_savants_.… There used to be at Earlswood—and I saw him when I visited
Earlswood—an idiot quite incapable of taking care of himself, but who had
a most extraordinary memory. When I went to the asylum the superintendent
said to me: ‘Ask that man anything you like.’ It was rather a strange
thing to be told to do; I said: ‘What kind of thing shall I ask about?’
And he said: ‘Any ordinary bit of knowledge.’ I said: ‘Tell me about
Socrates.’ The idiot then drew himself up like a child would who was
about to repeat a lesson, gave a cough, and told me about Socrates.… He
knew a great deal more about Socrates than I did; he knew when he was
born, why he was condemned, the name of his wife, and everything that
was essential to be known. This he repeated without difficulty. The
superintendent gave a grin and said: ‘Would you like to ask him anything
else?’ I was afraid that the man might ask me something. I said: ‘What
do you know about comets?’ Immediately he gave me—I presume correctly—all
the facts about the chief comets, their periods of revolution, the names
of the best known, and so on. Nothing that had ever been read by this
patient did he seem to forget. The words which had been read to him
seemed to have stuck to the cells of his brain like so much superior
glue, and nothing would eradicate it.”[10]

How very, very, very Scotch! Who has not met just this idiot _savant_ in
a newspaper office, at the meetings of absurd societies, at the houses
of uncultivated people? And always, always, he is Scotch. And always,
always, he has that sententious trick of drawing himself up to launching
into his subject by way of the self-satisfied cough of conscious
knowledge.

And now, to make a handsome end for a brilliant chapter, let us remember

      I. THAT HADRIAN HAD THE EXCELLENT SENSE TO BUILD A WALL FOR THE
         PURPOSE OF KEEPING THE SCOTCH OUT OF ENGLAND.

     II. THAT FOR A THOUSAND YEARS THE SCOT WAS ENGLAND’S BITTEREST
         ENEMY, AND PLOTTED AND MADE WAR AGAINST HER WITH FRANCE.

    III. THAT THE SCOTCH DESERTED THAT LARGE LAME WOMAN (AND,
         ACCORDING TO THE SCOTCH, THAT PARAGON OF ALL THE VIRTUES),
         MARY STUART, IN HER HOUR OF DIREST NEED.

     IV. THAT IT WAS THE SCOTCH WHO SOLD CHARLES I. (AND A STUART)
         TO THE PARLIAMENTARIANS FOR £400,000.

      V. THAT THE STUARTS WERE THE WICKEDEST AND STUPIDEST KINGS
         EUROPE HAS EVER KNOWN.

     VI. THAT THE SCOTCH ARE IN POINT OF FACT QUITE THE DULLEST
         RACE OF WHITE MEN IN THE WORLD, AND THAT THEY “KNOCK ALONG”
         SIMPLY BY VIRTUE OF THE SCOTTISH SUPERSTITION COUPLED WITH
         PLOD, THRIFT, A GRAVID MANNER, AND THE ORDINARY ENDOWMENTS OF
         MEDIOCRITY.

    VII. THAT IT WAS A SCOTCHMAN WHO INTRODUCED THISTLES INTO
         CANADA, AND THAT, VERY LIKELY, IT WAS A SCOTCHMAN WHO
         INTRODUCED RABBITS INTO AUSTRALIA.




II

PREDECESSORS


From the day he first clapped eyes on him, the Englishman has felt that
there was something wrong about the Scotchman. And this feeling rapidly
crystallised itself into literature. Many early ballads against the
Scotch are to be found by him who cares to look for them. That Chaucer
did not love Scotchmen is pretty certain, though there is nothing in his
writings to prove it. The same holds true of Spenser. But when one comes
to Shakespeare the case is very much altered. There can be no getting
away from the circumstance that Shakespeare knew his Scotchman through
and through. Any Scot who is feeling a desire to be particularly humble
and to learn the real truth about himself and his compatriots should
read and read again the tragedy of _Macbeth_. Of course, Shakespeare does
not count much in Scotland. Whenever a Scottish writer of the old school
has to speak of him, he does so with a grumbling grudgingness as who
should say, “The man was a genius, but not a Scot, what a peety!”

“Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plant,” warbled Burns. Think
of it! And I have seen a Scotch reviewer complain that a certain author
was cursed with a “Shakespearean smartness.” This antipathy for the Bard
of Avon has often created much wonderment in the mind of the Englishman,
and the cause of it, one may guess, is that Shakespeare wrote _Macbeth_.
There is scarcely a line in that tremendous drama which does not mean
bitter reading for Scotchmen. About the first person named is one
Macdonwald:

    The merciless Macdonwald
    Worthy to be a rebel for to that,
    The multiplying villainies of Nature
    Do swarm upon him.

In a neighbouring passage we are given a beautiful insight into Scottish
views of warfare. Ross is made to say:

    Sweno the Norway’s King craves composition,
    Nor would we deign him burial of his men
    Till he disbursed at Saint Colmes’ inch
    Ten thousand dollars to our general use.

“Ten thousand dollars to our general use”! From the beginning of time
Scotch fighting men have been mercenaries, and Scotch armies have
insisted upon fining a vanquished foe. They did it in France; and they
did it in their own country. And, after Naseby, the Scotch army in
England, coming to the conclusion that there was nothing more to be
done, straightway demanded a sum of money in the way of solatium for
leaving the country. “Nor would we deign him burial of his men till he
disbursed,” hits them hard. Shakespeare, as was his way, understood. Then
one comes to the celebrated scene on the blasted heath. Here enter three
witches, and to them Macbeth and Banquo. Macbeth, bloated with pride and
devoured with ambition, falls an easy victim to Shakespeare’s trinity of
hags.

    All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
    All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
    All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter!

The man swells visibly as a Scotchman should, and stalks off heroically,
full of the consciousness of his own bigness. And mark how arrant a
Scotchman he becomes in the result. In his castle he has for guest a king
who has trusted him and bestowed honours and dignities upon him. “Conduct
me to mine host,” says the unsuspecting monarch. “We love him highly, and
shall continue our graces towards him.” And all the time the excellent
Macbeth and his excellent lady are plotting murder. When it comes to the
point of actual killing, the gentleman’s Scotch spirits fail him; he is
really not sure, don’t you know, whether after all it ought to be done.
Then the lady very naturally grows disgusted and shrill:

                            Was the hope drunk,
    Wherein you dress’d yourself? hath it slept since?
    And wakes it now to look so green and pale
    At what it did so freely? From this time,
    Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
    To be the same in thine own act and valour,
    As thou art in desire? Would’st thou have that
    Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
    And live a coward in thine own esteem;
    Letting I dare not wait upon I would,
    Like the poor cat i’ the adage?

And what a deliciously smug Scotch answer is immediately forthcoming!
Says the faint-hearted traitor:

    I dare all that may become a man;
    Who dares do more, is none.

Here we have the moralising scoundrel in which Scotland is so prolific
turned out to the life. Right through the play Shakespeare pitilessly
holds up to our gaze the low and squalid cunning, treachery, the
hypocrisy, and the devilry which have always been and always will be at
the bottom of the Scotchman’s soul, and Macduff puts the coping stone on
the structure of opprobrium by calling his countryman a hell-hound and a
bloodier villain than terms can give him out, and assuring him that he
will live to be the show and gaze o’ the time:

    Painted upon a pole and underwrit,
    Here may you see the tyrant.

From Shakespeare it is an easy jump to Jonson, who helped to write a
play which put the Scot in such bad plight that it had to be suppressed
by the authorities. Then, of course, there is Samuel Johnson, LL.D., who
hated the Scotch at large and by instinct. Johnson has enjoyed no little
reputation for his animadversions upon Scotland. In bulk they are slight,
but they are decidedly to the point. Boswell treasured them and put them
into his book, and to Johnson was the glory. Boswell, it is true, was
a Scotchman himself, and the fact that he has given us one of the most
entertaining pieces of biography ever written is allowed to redound to
the credit of Scotland. I never read the life, however, without feeling
that Johnson must have written Boswell and that Boswell wrote Johnson’s
poems.

The next good hater of your Scotchman is Charles Lamb. Lamb, need one
say, was Lamby, even in his hatreds. He had a gentle heart and he never
exerted himself to put down aught in malice, so that he called his
feelings of contempt for Scotchmen an imperfect sympathy, and this is
what he wrote:

“I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to
desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me—and, in
truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is
something more plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know
one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects
(under which mine must be content to rank) which in its constitution
is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties I
allude to have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have
no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas or in their
manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess
fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and
scattered pieces of truth. She presents no full front to them—a feature
or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at
a system, are the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game
peradventure—and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions,
to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but
mutable and shifting; waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is
accordingly. They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and
be content to let it pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak always
as if they were upon their oath—but must be understood, speaking or
writing, with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposition,
but e’en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart
their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their
full development. They are no systematisers, and would but err more by
attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. The
brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon
quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never
admitted to see his ideas in their growth—if, indeed, they do grow, and
are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. You never
catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but
unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings
his total wealth into company and gravely unpacks it. His riches are
always about him. He never stoops to catch a glimmering something in
your presence, to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be
true touch or not. You cannot cry _halves_ to anything that he finds. He
does not find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of
a thing. His understanding is always at its meridian—you never see the
first dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings of self-suspicion.
Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousness,
partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place
in his brain or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon
him. Is he orthodox?—he has no doubts. Is he an infidel?—he has none
either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border
land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or
wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You
cannot make excursions with him, for he sets you right. His taste never
fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise or understand
middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is
as a book. His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak
upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in
an enemy’s country. ‘A healthy book!’ said one of his countrymen to me,
who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle—‘did I catch
rightly what you said? I have heard of a man in health and of a healthy
state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied
to a book.’ Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a
Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily
blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print
of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off
to Mr. ⸺. After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how
he liked ‘my beauty’ (a foolish name it goes by among my friends)—when
he very gravely assured me that ‘he had considerable respect for my
character and talents’ (so he was pleased to say), ‘but had not given
himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions.’ The
misconception staggered me, but did not seem much to disconcert him.
Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth—which
nobody doubts. They do not so properly affirm as annunciate it. They do,
indeed, appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were
valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether
the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is
impossible to become a subject of disputation. I was present not long
since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; and
happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I
wished it were the father instead of the son, when four of them started
up at once to inform me that ‘that was impossible, because he was dead.’
An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift
has hit off this part of their character, namely, their love of truth, in
his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the
passage to the margin.[11]

“The tediousness of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they
ever tire one another! In my early life I had a passionate fondness
for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate
myself with his countrymen by expressing it. But I have always found that
a true Scot resents your admiration of his compatriot, even more than
he would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your ‘imperfect
acquaintance with many of the words which he uses’; and the same
objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire
him. Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither
forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of Rory and his companion upon
their first introduction to our metropolis. Speak of Smollett as a great
genius, and they will retort upon you Hume’s _History_ compared with
_his_ continuation of it. What if the historian had continued _Humphrey
Clinker_?”[12]

I reproduce this estimate with the utmost satisfaction. The irony of the
“imperfect intellects” passage will not be understood by dull Donald;
indeed, he will in all probability take the passage seriously and quote
it against me, but he is welcome. And on the whole I think that Lamb’s
view of the Scot is almost as acute as that of Dr. Robertson Nicoll
himself. Nobody can doubt after reading the foregoing that Lamb saw in
the Scotchman a crass and plantigrade person, incapable of comprehending
the inexplicit and as devoid of true imagination as a brick. Lamb’s
notion of the Scot’s incapacity for humour also chimes with that of
Sidney Smith, who, as all men know, was of opinion that if you would have
a Scotchman see a joke it is necessary to perform a surgical operation on
him.[13]

Last of all, though perhaps brightest and best of them, who have
lifted up their voices in the unmasking of the Scot, we must take
Mr. W. E. Henley. In an entirely just and reasonable essay on Burns,
Mr. Henley made a passing reference to the poor living, lewd, grimy,
free-spoken, ribald old Scots peasant-world. For this choice collocation
of adjectives he was rewarded with many Scottish thwacks. That the old
Scots peasant-world was everything that Mr. Henley said of it no person
of sense will gainsay, and that the Scots peasant-world of to-day is,
if anything, worse, is evident from the remark of one of Mr. Henley’s
Scottish critics, who says:

“We challenge Mr. Henley, _et hoc genus omne_, to disprove the fact that
the record of crime, immorality, loose living in every parish wherein
Burns resided, shows less by one half—by fifty to seventy per cent.—in
that Burns epoch than it does in the same parishes to-day.”

Mr. Henley has brought such a swarm of bees round his bonnet by a simple
and quite tolerant bit of criticism, that to venture on anything in
the way of plain talk about the Scotch might well appal the stoutest.
The worthy Dr. John D. Ross, editor of the _Burns Almanac_ and sundry
other compilations of a fatuously Burnsite character, has collected
some of the diatribes against Mr. Henley into a volume which he calls
_Henley and Burns_. Like everything else that comes out of Scotland,
this volume gives the Scotchman away at all points. For example, it is
made quite plain that Mr. Henley’s essay, a purely critical venture,
was regarded in Scotland as a base attempt to pull down the cash value
of early editions of Burns’s poetry. Dr. Ross’s volume opens with the
following oracular sentence: “Lovers of Burns will rejoice to learn from
the large price paid this week for a Kilmarnock edition, that despite
the criticism of Mr. W. E. Henley in the Centenary edition, there are
as yet no signs that the poet’s popularity is on the wane,” and this
brilliant commercialist adds: “Rightly or wrongly, Scotsmen will cling to
the Burns’ superstition, and will be the better for it. At an important
book sale in Edinburgh this week, a Kilmarnock first edition in an
apparently perfect state of preservation, fetched the remarkable price
of 545 guineas. The highest price ever before given for a copy of this
edition, mutilated, however, and in inferior condition, was £120. Such a
figure is undoubtedly a fancy price. The book is very rare, and to the
bibliophile rarity is an all-important consideration in estimating value.
But the popularity of the poet, the admiration of the uncritical, as Mr.
Henley would put it, has helped to magnify the price of the book, and the
critic’s depreciation has had no effect on the market.” What in the name
of all that is Burnsy does this gentleman mean?

Again, in another paper headed “A Critic Scarified,” the scarifier
takes Mr. Henley to task for saying that “the Scots peasant … fed so
cheaply that even on high days and holidays his diet (as set forth in
the _Blithsome Bridal_) consisted largely in preparations of meal and
vegetables and what is technically known as ‘offal.’” To which Dr. Ross’s
scarifier retorts, “The author is happily addressing ignorant Southrons,
not even ‘half-read’ Scots. However, it need not be imagined that Mr.
Henley can translate the Scots language of the poem he refers to, else he
would not assert that the viands specified in it are such common fare,
consisting as they did of six different soups, eight varieties of fish
(including shell-fish), six varieties of flesh (roasts, salted meat, nolt
feet, haggis, tripe, sheep’s head), three kinds of bread (oaten, barley,
and wheaten), cheese, new ale, and brandy.” On the face of it there is
here a mighty deal of offal to precious little sound meat. If nolt feet,
haggis, tripe, and sheep’s head are not offal in Scotland, they are
certainly reckoned in that category in England.

We shall return to Dr. Ross’s scarifier in a chapter on “The Bard.”
Meanwhile, let us note that the best English writers have agreed that the
Scotchman is, at best, not quite an angel of light. They have looked on
him with the eye of calm perception, and they have found him seriously
wanting. That he is a savage and a barbarian by blood, a freebooter by
heredity, a dullard, a braggart, and in short, a Scotchman, cannot be
doubted. The testimony is all against him, and until he mends his ways it
will continue to be against him.




III

THE POW-WOW MEN


It is the Scotchman’s boast that the Scotchman has always figured
portentously in the councils of the civilised nations. In France, in
Germany, and even in unbeautiful Russia, Scotchmen have established
themselves and at time and time risen to positions of considerable
political power. And if we are to credit Dr. Hill Burton, this has always
been an excellent thing for the nations concerned. According to Dr.
Burton, if the Scotch did not entirely build up the France of the Middle
Ages they had a mighty big finger in the process, and we are asked to
believe by the same authority that it is the strain of Scotch blood in
the veins of the French which has assisted very materially in making
the fortunes of that singularly fascinating and ingenious people.[14]
The subject is a large one, and much that is edifying has been written
about it, not only by Scotchmen, but by various foreign authors. On
the whole, perhaps, Europe has not done so badly with her Scots, the
reason being that she never allowed them to be any Scotcher than she
could help, and turned them out the minute they became aggressive. In
England, however, the more Scotch and the more aggressive the Scot
becomes the more we seem to like him. At the present moment England is
virtually being run by the Scotch. In the House of Commons the Leader
of the Government—and practically the autocrat of the Assembly—is the
Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour, a philosopher from Scotland, who
is so Scotch that he plays golf. And the Leader of the Opposition, save
the mark! of an Opposition which, in a constitution like the British,
carries upon its shoulders the heaviest responsibilities, is Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, also a Scotchman, and if the truth must be told, a
dullard. And in the way of a third party, which will imperialise with the
Government and cackle of reform with the Opposition, we have the Liberal
Leaguers, headed by that proud chieftain of the pudding race—the Right
Honourable the Earl of Rosebery. So that at the front of each of the
three great political forces of Britain—the forces which, when all is
said, mean everything to Britain as a nation—there stands firm and erect
some sort of a Caledonian. Such a condition of things has never existed
in England before, and in the light of recent political happenings it is
devoutly to be hoped that it will never exist again. Since Mr. Balfour
and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman came into the offices they hold,
England has been going steadily down-hill. At no period in her history
have her enemies been so thick on the ground and so exultant and sure of
themselves as they are at present, and at no period in her history has
her prestige been at so low an ebb. Politically she has come to count
as a little less than France and more than Spain. Formerly she led the
nations—now she is content to walk humbly in line with them. Formerly
she led the band, now she is merely third trombone player. Formerly,
if she went to war, it was with nations of ponderability and for high
principles; until the other day, she was draining her best blood and
getting rid of one and a half millions of money weekly in a struggle
with a handful of freebooters, got up and fomented largely in the
interests of the children of Israel. At the time of writing Consols are
at 94 and the Income Tax is 1_s._ 2_d._ in the pound, which shows what
managers the Scotch are. Also Government, in so far as Government means
the steady development of the higher interests of the state at home
and in the colonies, is at a dead standstill. The march of reform has
been checked. Progress in the wide sense of the term is no more thought
of. The legislative mill grinds heavily along and the grist amounts to
nothing; in the seats of the mighty,—in the seats of Benjamin Disraeli
and William Ewart Gladstone,—there blandly smiles Balfour and dodders
Campbell-Bannerman. Mr. Balfour, golfer, and, for aught I know to the
contrary, curler and hammer-putter, plays what he is pleased to call the
game. Now the game is no new thing. Practically it is a development of
that childish pastime known as “Jack’s on his Island.” On Mr. Balfour’s
island grows the green bay tree of power, and to live snugly under the
shade of that tree, no matter what comes, is, in the view of Mr. Balfour,
the game. It is with him a question of what can I do for England, having
due regard to the exigencies of the game? Hence does he seek and bring
along young talent. Having found your young talent, you must make quite
sure, not of its talentedness, but of its unwavering disposition to play
the game. Will it be loyal to the Balfour? Can you depend upon it to
stick by the Balfour though the heavens fall and it thunder to the tune
of Green Sleeves? Anything that will subscribe to the Test Act of the
Balfour is young talent. Hence it comes to pass that at the War Office we
have had that shallow, dandy Wyndham. He is a _protégé_ of the Balfour,
even as the Balfour is the nephew of his uncle. And he plays the game.
When matters at the War Office became too vasty for him he was shovelled
by the Balfour into the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland. Even the Balfour
and his friends are fain to admit that Mr. Wyndham has done no more
for Ireland than he did for the War Office. Yet he plays the game, and
so does the Balfour, and everything is right as right can be. In Mr.
Wyndham’s old place at the War Office we have that excellent dabbler,
Mr. Brodrick. Mr. Brodrick, like the House of Lords, has always been
exceedingly busy doing nothing and doing it very well. Periodically he
stands on his hind legs in the Commons and trots out tremendous schemes,
all of which end pleasantly in smoke. The rottenness of the British Army
is no affair of his; it was rotten when he first made its acquaintance—it
will be just as rotten when he leaves Pall Mall. Underneath the terrific
expenditure necessitated by the war there are jobs and scandals of the
gravest sort, and Mr. Brodrick knows nothing about them. His business
is to vindicate the characters of fribbling officers and gentlemen, to
lay on praise of the British soldier with a trowel, and to assure the
world at large that the persons who have brought charges against army
contractors have brought those charges simply because the contractors’
names are un-English and consequently not pleasing to the British
commercial mind. He it is, in short, who allows himself to be put up as a
sort of sand-bag in front of the Government, guaranteed to ward off all
attacks by simply sitting tight and remaining as dumb as an oyster. He
was no doubt told when he took up his present dignities that the Balfour
would expect him to play the game, and, being a good man, he is playing
it.

For the rest of them one man only needs be discussed. He is a Birmingham
man, Joseph Chamberlain by name. The Balfour took him over from the other
side, and, in spite of all his faults, gave him a warm Scotch welcome
and set him high in the Balfourian councils. From that day to this the
Balfour has looked upon him askance and wished him anywhere but where
he is; but the Balfour is Scotch and he lacks the pluck to get rid of
the Birmingham gentleman, because it might cost them something. The
Birmingham gentleman, knowing the Balfour to be Scotch, defies him.

On the other side, as we have said, there is poor, dear old Sir ’Enry
of the double-barrelled Scotch name, which the economical have reduced
to C.-B. On the whole, C.-B. is about as pathetic a figure as one can
find in history; he is the type and flower of your Scotchman lifted to
the pinnacles. Sooner or later he was bound to make a mess of it, and,
lacking the blood of Liverpool which delayed Mr. Gladstone’s downfall
for so many years, he made it sooner. From the first he has been the
laughing-stock, not only of the Government, and, for that matter, of
Europe, but also of his own party. He lolls enthroned on the front
Opposition Bench, shoulder to shoulder with trusty lieutenants who never
obey him, and backed up by political friends who put no trust in him. On
the day that he took the party by the nose, the party dropped off, and
all that remains to C.-B. is the nose. To this relic of ambition realised
he clings with true Scottish pertinacity. He has wrapped it up in a
napkin and hidden it; probably it will never again be found, inasmuch as
C.-B. is invariably too bewildered to know what he is doing. Harcourt
bewilders him, Asquith bewilders him, Morley bewilders him, and latterly
there has come that crowning bewilderment of them all, Lord Rosebery.
C.-B. will go bewildered through whatever remains to him of his term of
office, and when Liberalism takes thought to get properly rid of him, he
will be more bewildered still. He is too Scotch to perceive that nobody
wants him, and if he saw it he is too Scotch to go.

As for Lord Rosebery, the less said about him the better. He is of Scotch
stock, and he had the good fortune to be born of an English mother.
But the Scotch blood in him, the Scotch ineptitudes, the Scotch lack
of force prevail. He does everything by turns and nothing long. Like
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, he failed as a leader. The statesman in
him does not possess him; it was a mere detail and a small one. As an
active politician he had to look around for a model upon whom to shape
himself. No Scotchman can make the smallest sort of mark, whether it be
in politics or anything else, without such a model. And in his middle and
later periods, at any rate, Lord Rosebery has modelled himself upon Mr.
Augustine Birrell, and as is usual with Scotchmen, he has practically
ousted Mr. Birrell from the position of wit-monger to the Liberal party.
In the House of Commons Mr. Birrell made a reputation, not because he
was a statesman or an orator, but because he had a habit of firing off a
kind of loose wit which passes in the House of Commons for epigram. When
he spoke, the House was sure to be in a roar within the half-hour, and
one or two of the phrases he made became texts for leader-writers and
made good “quote” in Liberal speeches. With true Scottish enterprise,
Lord Rosebery determined to be a second and a greater Birrell. He has
succeeded. In the House of Lords he enjoys a reputation for saying
things. He is also credited, as was Mr. Birrell, with a nice taste in
letters. And, like Mr. Birrell, he is not infrequently asked down to
Little Puddlington in order to help in the celebration of the centenaries
of Little Puddlington’s locally born geniuses. He dare no more make a
serious speech, either in the House of Lords or at Little Puddlington,
than he dare call Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman out of his name. Fireworks
are expected from him, and if they were not forthcoming, there would
be no Lord Rosebery. He passes for a great empire builder, and along
with the worthy Dr. Jameson he figures among the executors of the late
Mr. Rhodes’s will. He is the founder and President of the New Liberal
League, which will have nothing to do with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman,
but his personal friendship with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman continues,
and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is certainly not mentioned in Mr. Cecil
Rhodes’s will. In effect, Lord Rosebery amounts to little more than
nothing. The Liberal League, which was to make a great to-do in most
matters appertaining to Liberalism and government, fizzled like a bad
squib for three or four weeks, and then Lord Rosebery went to Nice. That
is exactly the man. When his time comes, when the country wants him,
when Liberalism wants him,—when, in fact, anybody wants him,—he says,
“Yes, yes, I am here,” and immediately starts either for Nice or Epsom.
Scotch modesty overcomes him. Scotch caution says, “You know you are a
fool; be careful to avoid ultimate risks.” Scotch cowardice says, “If
you go into battle you may get hurt. Nice is much nicer.” In newspaper
columns Lord Rosebery’s speeches read _admirably_, providing you do not
study them too closely, but any person who has been present in the House
of Lords what time his Lordship was on his legs must have gone away
with shattered illusions. Even as C.-B. stutters and blunders and grabs
for his words in the circumambient air, so Lord Rosebery cackles and
sentimentalises. In appearance he is of about the build and body of a
draper. His voice is that of an anæmic curate. There are always tears in
it at the wrong places, and on the whole it makes you laugh. And having
spoken, he trots out like a Scotch sparrow, and with hat a-tilt and arms
under his coat-tails poises himself perkily on the steps of the entrance
to St. Stephen’s Hall, and waits for his carriage to take him off to the
station, and so to Epsom or Nice. On the turf his reputation is exactly
the same in kind as his reputation in politics. He is as variable as the
shade and as changeable as the moons. Sometimes he does brilliant things,
but he cannot keep them up. In brief he is half Scotch and half soda.

It is to these redoubtable Scotch persons that England is looking for
good government, and hence it comes to pass that of late she has had to
govern herself. Out of Scotchmen you can get little that is business-like
and little that is dignified, at any rate where statesmanship is
concerned. Their ambitions are illimitable, but their powers of execution
not worth counting. They will fight from behind cover to more or less
bitter and ignominious ends, but, like the Boer farmers, to whom in many
large respects they bear the most striking resemblances, they never know
when they are beaten, and their warfare deteriorates into mere brigandism
and filibustering. When Britain was ruled by Englishmen she wore the
epithet Great by good right; since she has been ruled by Scotchmen she
has well nigh lost it.




IV

THE SCOT IN JOURNALISM


We have seen on the word of Dr. Robertson Nicoll that once upon a time it
was the ambition of every Scotch youth to become a professor. Once upon a
time, too, and one does not need to quote authority for it, every second
child in kilts was devoted by his parents to the ministry, and did, no
doubt, sooner or later attain to that admirable office. But latterly the
supply of Scotch professors has been a good deal bigger than the demand,
and it has dawned upon the slow Scottish intellect that £70 a year and a
manse is after all not exactly one of the prizes of life. Therefore your
stern, calculating Scotch peasant has during late years dedicated his
son to the practice and service of journalism. Now journalism, though
the Fourth estate, is the last of the professions. The journalist who is
making £500 a year,—at any rate, the Scotch journalist who is making £500
a year,—is the exception and not the rule. Still, £500 a year, or, for
that matter, £250 a year, is wealth to your average Scot, who, nine times
out of ten, comes hitherward from a district where persons who once had
a sovereign in their possession are looked upon with awe and reverence.
Furthermore, journalism suits the Scot because it is a profession into
which you can crawl without inquiry as to your qualifications, and
because it is a profession in which the most middling talents will take
you a long way. The reporting staffs and sub-editorial staffs of both the
London and provincial journals can, I think, boast a decidedly decent
leaven of Scotchmen. In Fleet Street, if you do not happen to possess a
little of the Doric, you are at some disadvantage in comprehending the
persons with whom you are compelled to talk. “Hoo arre ye the noo?”
is the conventional greeting in most newspaper offices. Also a large
proportion of the persons who come up the stairs on personal business
which usually turns out to be the personal business of the persons, and
resolves itself into a request for reviewing, or an offer to do another
man’s work at a cheap rate, are very Scotch indeed; and while they drop
the Doric word with fair success, they cannot for the life of them
get out of the Doric idiom and the Doric accent. Armed with a letter
of introduction from Professor McMoss—whom you do not know—and with a
sheaf of dog’s eared certificates picked up at Scotch universities, they
descend upon you with the air of men who know for a surety that you
are dying for their services, and when they go out, after wasting an
altogether unnecessary amount of your time and temper, it is with black
looks and a burning conviction that you refused to employ them because
you know them to be so clever that they might supplant you in your own
chair.

Ten years ago it was the man from Oxford or Cambridge that was considered
the essential thing in journalism. Nowadays the attitude of newspaper
proprietors in want of a smart man amounts to “No university man need
apply.” I do not think that we are very far from the day when the tune
will be changed to “No Scotchman need apply.” Numerically the Scotch
journalist is unquestionably strong. He possesses, too, certain solid
qualities which are undoubtedly desirable in a journalist. For example,
he is punctual, cautious, dogged, unoriginal, and a born galley-slave.
You can knock an awful lot of work out of him, and no matter how little
you pay him he may be depended upon to sustain the dignity of the office
in the matter of clothes, external habits of life, and a dog-like
devotion to the hand that feeds him and the foot that kicks him. In
short, he is a capital routine man, and if you have a journal which you
wish to maintain on the ancient lines of stodge and flat-footedness, the
Scotchman does you admirably. But it is impossible to get away from
the fact that the vogue of the stolid, arid, stereotyped, sleepy sort
of journalism which satisfied the last generation is rapidly going to
pieces. The contemporary world wants and will have what it chooses to
call the “live” journalist, and the Scotchman who is a live journalist
to the extent of evolving anything bright or subtle or suggestive or
original has yet to be found. At the present moment he is managing to
keep himself alive by imitation. As a plagiarist of ideas, necessity has
made him a master. He knows that the reign of dulness is coming to an
end, and that the auld wife journalism in whose benevolent presence he
has prosed and prosed for so many years, is even now in her dotage and
cannot last much longer. So that he has taken thought and determined to
aim higher. What man has done, a Scot can do. It is not given to him to
be witty and brilliant and unhackneyed on a little oatmeal, but, thank
Heaven! he can always play sedulous ape, and sedulous ape it shall be.

These remarks, of course, apply only to the lower reaches of journalism,
to the sub-editorial, reportorial, contributorial, and contents bill
making departments. When it comes to a question of editors, matters
assume quite a different complexion. A Scotch editor is, as a rule, a
sight for gods and little fishes. Dr. Nicoll will tell you that the Scot
makes a good servant but a bad master. This is the truth. Mercifully,
you can count the Scotch editors of London on the fingers of one hand.
So far as I am aware, there are only two of them—Dr. Robertson Nicoll
and Dr. Nicol Dunn. Of one of them—him of the _Morning Post_—you hear
little, save that he is a good fellow of no great parts, and that he
holds at his office a daily reception for raw, unlicked Scotch youths who
are come newly over the border and crave the benefits of his advice and
assistance. Politically, his paper can scarcely be considered a power;
its views on most questions are of no great consequence, but it appears
to have an enormous circulation among the blue-blooded and the wealthy,
whose doings it chronicles with touching fidelity and regularity, and
without the smallest reference to the notoriously independent guinea
stamp of Dr. Nicol Dunn’s favourite poet. The other Dr. Nicoll is a horse
of another colour. He is all for Nonconformity and the appraisement of
healthy and improving literature. Each of his papers is a paper for
the bosom of the family and the ministers’ Monday, and warranted to
do all that can be done for the unco’ guid of North Britain, for all
Scottish writers of whatever degree of merit or demerit, for Dr. Nicoll’s
English admirers, and Dr. Nicoll himself. On every issue of these
remarkable publications Dr. Nicoll stamps the impress of his own engaging
personality. I have heard it said by an admirer of his that he is three
men—a Scotch divine, a judge of letters, and a journalist who never
forgets that his main business in life is to sell papers. These three
Dr. Nicolls are, I am assured, quite different persons, inasmuch as the
Doctor possesses the blessed gift of detachment and thinks nothing of
dictating an article on the genius of Dr. Parker, a kindly appreciation
of the latest gory detective story, and a set of Sunday afternoon verses
or so in a single morning. Of his lucubrations as a divine I shall say
nothing, because I have not studied them. As a judge of letters, however,
I take him to be the most catholic scribbler in Europe. Any author who
is doing well—that is to say, any author whose record of sales entitles
him to be considered a success—may always reckon on a large hospitality
in Dr. Nicoll’s journals, and will always find Dr. Nicoll and his merry
men beaming round the corner, hat in hand. It is a case of what would
you like, sir? all the time. Are you spending your holiday cruising
on the blue Mediterranean in the Duchess of Puttleham’s yacht? Very
good. Paragraph in the column signed “Man of Kent,” with a delicate
reference to your last great novel. Have you projects? Equally good. “Mr.
So-and-So is, I understand, hard at work on his next great novel.” Will
your new book, 30,000 copies of which have been sold before the day of
publication, make its appearance on April 1? Capital. Send us portraits
of yourself at all ages from three months to the present day, pictures
of the modest tenement in which you were born, and of your present town
house and little place in the country, and, bless your heart, we will
do the rest. Do people say that the great novel, of which you have
sold fifty million copies in England and America, is a pot-boiler and
a stunner? Dear, dear me! You have our heartiest sympathies, sir, and
if you would like to vindicate your character as an artist in a couple
of pages of the _British Weekly_, why, my dear sir, we are at your
service. I do not say that there is any terrific harm in this species
of enterprise; that it pleases the mass of mankind and therefore sells
papers goes without saying. On the other hand, it is quite subversive of
the best interests of letters, and therefore I am inclined to think—and I
set it down with great sorrow—that Dr. Nicoll, in spite of his devotional
connection is, if he have any force in letters at all, a distinctly
dubious and undesirable force.

As an example of what the _Bookman_ really can do when it has a mind, let
us quote the following review of a book by Mr. Le Gallienne:

“Mr. Le Gallienne is the Dick Whittington of song. His story reminds us
of that other Richard, who, one summer morning many hundreds of years
ago, sat listening to the bells of distant London. The one carried his
little all tied up in a handkerchief slung to the end of a stick; the
other came to London to seek his fortune with a sheaf of manuscript poems
in his pocket and any number of poems singing in his head. Now, Mr.
Le Gallienne is a figure in ‘society,’ and lives in a beautiful house
crowded with costly _bric-à-brac_ and valuable books; but I like to think
sometimes of the sloping-roofed room, nestling under the gables of one
of the most picturesque buildings left in London—quaint old Staple’s
Inn—which was his first home in the great city.

“It was in just such a room that one might picture Chatterton—rough-hewn
oak beams above, uneven oak flooring below, and in front a ‘magic
casement’ ‘opening upon the foam’—not of ‘perilous seas’—but of perilous
streets, where the black tides of hurrying human creatures never ceases
[_sic_] to ebb and flow. Here were his bed, his books, and his papers.
Here, too, though shillings were probably scarcer than sovereigns are
now, were the flowers, which the extravagant tenant of the prophet’s
chamber was never too poor to deny himself—the flowers which were the
inspiration of many of his songs. And here, on a little stove in a
corner, he would himself boil the water with which to brew for his
visitor the tea or coffee that he would hand round with the ease and
grace of a duke dispensing hospitality in his castle.

“I have been betrayed into this personal reminiscence by reading how
‘Love, a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his rhymes,’ and
‘Beauty, a little blue-eyed girl who loved him,’ transformed into a
seventh heaven a single seventh-story room which they had rented, for
surely ‘Love’ stands for Mr. Le Gallienne himself, and ‘Beauty’ for the
sweet-faced young wife with dove-like eyes and dove-like voice, whose
loss has been the great sorrow of the poet’s life. It was in a beautiful
idyll called _A Seventh-Story Heaven_ that I read of the transformation,
and this brings me to the fact with which I started or ought to have
started—that Mr. Le Gallienne has published a new book. In other words,
he has set open the door of another House of Welcome on the literary
highway. And surely ’twere as hard, on a glaring summer’s noon, for a
tired and thirsty traveller to pass by some ancient hostelry, through
the ivy-hung porch of which he sees, lying back in cool shadow, a
quaint stone-paven nook with a glimpse of green lawn and box-bordered
flower beds beyond, as it were for the literary wayfarer to turn aside
from a volume titled like Mr. Le Gallienne’s, _The Prose Fancies of a
Poet_! Could a more alluring sign be set aswing before the doors of
any literary House of Refreshment? Nor when we have entered are we
disappointed by the bill of fare which is put before us. ‘A Seventh-Story
Heaven,’ ‘Spring by Parcel Post,’ ‘A Poet in the City,’ ‘Brown Roses,’
‘Death and Two Friends,’ ‘A Seaport in the Moon’—here surely is a list
which might stir the imagination even of unimaginative folk.

“The score or so of ‘Fancies’ which form the volume are, as was
only to be expected, of very varying merit. To the opening idyll,
‘A Seventh-Story Heaven,’ reference has already been made. Mr. Le
Gallienne’s friend and neighbour, Mr. Grant Allen, a delightful
naturalist and essayist, whom society by her neglect has turned into a
thrower into her midst of Nihilistic bombs in the guise of novels, could
bear witness to the fact that nests are built in stranger places, but
surely never did love-birds find such strange quarters for their home
as this eyrie at the top of a building, the ground floor of which was a
sailor’s tavern. But dingy and unlovely as the spot may be, it is made
beautiful for us in Mr. Le Gallienne’s page as the scene of a love-story
so exquisitely told, and so tremulous with tender pathos, that we can
only compare it to the work of the gentle Elia.

“I cannot say as much for the second Fancy, whimsically entitled ‘Spring
by Parcel Post,’ for it is surely an error of taste which every admirer
of Mr. Le Gallienne’s genius must regret. ‘The big Dutch hyacinths,’
he writes, ‘are already shamelessly _enceinte_ with their buxom waxen
blooms, so fat and fragrant—(one is already delivered of a fine blossom.
Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! says [_sic_] the other hyacinths
with babes no less bonny under their own green apron—all waiting for the
doctor Sun).’

“I wonder if this offends the taste of my readers as much as it offends
mine. Mr. Le Gallienne may quote science and physiology against me, but
I must confess that in regard to children and flowers I like to keep my
very thoughts free from the smirch of sex, though I concede and contend
that the smirch is entirely of man’s, not of God’s making. But in the
passage I have quoted there is a certain coarseness of associations which
is painful in connection with the purest and most perfect thing on God’s
earth—a flower. It was to me as if hot hands were tampering with the
petals of a lily. The air seemed to become close as I read, and it was
not until I had had a dip—as into cool spring water—into the flower-poems
of Burns and Wordsworth that I could go on with my reading of _Prose
Fancies_.

“Let us turn the page and forget that one of the most delicately-minded
of living poets, whose work has hitherto been distinguished for exquisite
fancy and excellent taste, should so far have ‘lost himself’ as to have
written it.

“_Variations upon Whitebait_ is a caprice as skilful as Rossetti’s famous
sonnet, _A Match with the Moon_. It is a very curiosity in similes, and
though Mr. Le Gallienne will toss you a fresh and apt simile for every
fish upon your fork, though he introduce as many variations as a pianist
introduces into _Home, Sweet Home_, yet the essay is not all variation,
but has a pretty story running like the thread of a tune throughout.

“As for the ‘Letter to an Unsuccessful Literary Man,’ I would suggest
that it be lithographed in order that the successful author may use it as
a form with which to reply to the uninvited correspondent. If only Mr. Le
Gallienne could induce amateurs to read this letter instead of writing
letters of their own to that most baited of beings, the professional
author, what a boon he would confer upon his fellow craftsmen! The essay,
_On Loving One’s Enemies_, is scarcely written in the spirit which its
title and its protestations of charity might lead us to suppose. It
strikes me as somewhat self-conscious and defiant; but _Death and Two
Friends_ contains some really signal work. For the gem of the book,
however, we must turn to _A Seaport in the Moon_. This and the opening
chapter, _A Seventh-Story Heaven_, are in themselves worth the modest sum
which the publishers ask for the volume. _A Seaport in the Moon_ is an
exquisitely beautiful fancy. Mr. Le Gallienne was in the right mood when
he wrote it, and when he is in the mood he is a magician. His page glows
like a painter’s palette with rich colours, and the pictures come and go
before us like sunset pageant.”

Apart from the delicious Scotch snobbery which jumps at you from every
line of this admirable piece of criticism, and leaving altogether out
of the question the downright vulgarity and ineptitude of it, one would
like to know what the _Bookman_ would say if Mr. Le Gallienne published
a similar book to-morrow. At the time when this review was published,
Mr. Le Gallienne was in the zenith of his somewhat slender and rarefied
popularity. He had captured the heart of Kensington with dainty vacuity.
His locks were curled and perfumed; he figured prettily and replied
to the toast of letters at the dinners of literary clubs, and was the
delicate high priest of a little school of hot pressed poetry and vapid
prose. The _Bookman_, of course, was bound to salute him with a chaste
appreciation. Since then the world has gone on and left Mr. Le Gallienne
somewhat behind it, also Mr. Le Gallienne himself has settled in America
and cut off his hair. No more does he publish the booklet that takes
the town; no longer does he write of the “Woman’s Third” or sigh over
the deception of tender-hearted schoolgirls, who have provided one with
a sonnet. In short, his laurel hangs dustily on a nail at the “Bodley
Head,” and the raven locks that once bore it have probably by this time
gone to help in the making of a mess of honest builders’ mortar. So that
the _Bookman_ knows him no more.

From the issue of the _Bookman_ which contains the review above quoted I
take a couple of “news notes.”

“Mr. J. M. Barrie has finished a book on his mother, which will be
entitled _Margaret Ogilvy_. It is perhaps the most beautiful and
exquisite piece of work he has yet accomplished. It is not a biography in
the ordinary sense, but gives aspects and incidents of his mother’s life
in the style which Mr. Barrie’s readers know, keeping close throughout
to facts. The volume will be published in this country by Messrs. Hodder
and Stoughton, and in America by Messrs. Scribner.”

“Mr. S. R. Crockett’s new novel is to be entitled _Lochinvar_. Some
eminent critics who have had the privilege of reading the portion already
written are enthusiastic in their praise of the work. It is said to be
more in the manner of _The Lilac Sun-Bonnet_ than some of Mr. Crockett’s
more recently published novels.”

So much for the Scotch journalist.




V

THRUMS AND DRUMTOCHTY


The Scot abroad, or at any rate the Scot that one knows and loves in
London, is a creature so winning and delectable in character that one
proceeds to the study of the Scot at home with anticipations of the most
pleasurable kind. The best way to study the Scot at home is, of course,
to consult the works of those eminent Scottish writers, Dr. J. M. Barrie
and Dr. Ian Maclaren, with occasional reference to Dr. S. R. Crockett.
Dr. Barrie and Dr. Maclaren (otherwise Watson) have been at pains to
portray for us, with what Dr. Nicoll would no doubt call loving and
exquisite fidelity, the peoples and manners and customs of two Scotch
parishes, named respectively Thrums and Drumtochty. Both, one gathers,
are the prettiest, most charitable, and most God-fearing communities to
be found upon this globe of sinful continents. Butter will not melt,
and ginger is not hot in the mouth either at Thrums or Drumtochty. The
various books of the chronicles of that earthly paradise, Thrums, are
of formidable number, and I do not profess to have read more than five
of them. But I have read enough to know all that I want to know about
Thrums. Here, it seems, “twenty years ago, hundreds of weavers lived and
died Thoreaus ’ben the hoose without knowing it.” Here also lived “the
dear old soul who originally induced me to enter the Auld Licht Kirk” and
was “as sweet and pure a woman as I ever knew”; also Tammy Mealmaker,
who died a bachelor and “had been soured in his youth by disappointment
in love of which he spoke but seldom,” also Tibbie McQuhattay, “at whom
you may smile, but, ah! I know what she was at the sick-bedside”; also
Whinny Webster, who ate peppermints in church, and when detected in
the act “gave one wild scream”; and “straightway became a God-fearing
man”; also Hendry Munn, “who was the only man in Thrums who did not
quake when the minister looked at him”; also Jess McQumpha, who “sat at
the window for twenty years or more, looking at the world as through a
telescope,” and who “was possessed of a sweet, untarnished soul”; also
Leeby, who “died in the back end of the year I have been speaking of”;
and Jamie, who did the home-coming, and gaed somebody “sic a look”; and
last, but not least, in childishness, the Little Minister and Babbie.
For blithering sentiment of the cheapest and most obvious sort, these
personages have certainly never been equalled. The whole tone of the
Thrums chronicles is as bathotic as it could be made even by a Scotchman,
and wherever one turns one finds Mr. Barrie trotting out creatures of a
sentiment so slobbery that it would be eschewed even by the scribbling,
simpering misses at a seminary. And at Drumtochty, need one say, Dr. Ian
Maclaren introduces you to the same set of silly figures. Dr. Maclaren,
it is true, put in the front of his show a cunning Scotch farmer whose
attempts to cheat his landlord, the worthy doctor,—parson as he is,—would
evidently have you smile, but all the rest of his people are rare and
radiant pieces of virtue, clothed round in Scotch flesh and sandy hair,
and speaking the most uncompromising dialect. For example, there is
Mrs. Elspeth Macfadyen. This lady’s claim to greatness is not exactly
of a moral kind, being based on the circumstance that she obtained a
penny above the market price for her butter. All the farmers’ wives of
the Scotch romances invariably do this. Even Dr. Crockett’s lady of
the lilac sunbonnet made the best butter in three parishes. The butter
woman, however, is not intended to count, so that we will let her go by,
and proceed duly to note the heavenly dispositions of the rest of the
Drumtochtyans. In the first place, there is Baxter of Burnbrae. Burnbrae,
it seems, “had to make the choice that has been offered to every man
since the world began”; in other words, he had to choose between losing
his farm and changing his kirk.

“‘Well, Baxter,’ said the factor in his room next day, ‘your offer is all
right in the money, and we’ll soon settle the building. By the way, I
suppose you’ve thought over that kirk affair, and will give your word to
attend the Established Church, eh?’

“‘Ye may be sure that A’ve gien a’ ye said ma best judgment, and there’s
naething I wudna dae to be left in Burnbrae, but this thing ye ask A
canna grant.’

“‘Why not?’ and the factor, lounging in his chair, eyed Burnbrae
contemptuously as he stood erect before him. ‘My groom tells me that
there is not a grain of difference between all those kirks in Scotland,
and that the whole affair is just downright bad temper, and I believe
he’s right.’

“‘A wudna say onything disrespectfu’, sir, but it’s juist possible that
naither you nor your groom ken the history o’ the Free Church; but ye
may be sure sensible men and puir fouk dinna mak’ sic sacrifices for bad
temper.’”

Which is exceeding good of Burnbrae, if a little too bad of Dr. Maclaren.

And our excellent Scotch author makes Burnbrae conclude the interview
thus: “‘Sir,’ he said, with great solemnity, ‘I pray God you may never
have such sorrow as you have sent on my house this day.’” I should very
much doubt whether there is a Scotchman in all Scotland who would not
have made quite a different ending with much fist-shaking and calling
down of curses in it.

Well, in the result, Burnbrae does leave his farm; anyway, there is a
sale, or as the Scotch elegantly term it, a roup. And what happens? Why,
the neighbours—good, honest bodies—turn up in their thousands and buy in
Burnbrae’s farming stock at noble prices, bidding high for everything
in order that Burnbrae may at least have a good roup. Meanwhile the
minister of the kirk with which Burnbrae scorned to become a member has
communicated with the owner of the soil, the Earl of Kilspindie to wit,
and to Burnbrae Kilspindie writes, “Meet me in Muirtown on Friday.” On
Friday, Burnbrae meets the Earl. They crack together of Burnbrae’s son,
the sergeant, who, like all the other Scotch sergeants of fiction, has
just won the Victoria Cross. “‘There will be no speaking to Mrs. Baxter
now after this exploit of the sergeant’s! When I read it on my way home
I was as proud as if he had been my own son. It was a gallant deed,
and well deserves the Cross. He’ll be getting his commission some day.
Lieutenant Baxter! That will stir the Glen, eh?’” Then they touch on the
matter of the farm, and the tears come to Burnbrae’s eyes. “‘Athocht,’
he said, ‘when yir message cam, that maybe ye hed anither mind than yir
factor, and wud send me back tae Jean wi’ guid news in ma mooth.’

“‘Gin it be yir wull that we flit, A’ll mak nae mair complaint, an’
there’s nae bitterness in ma hert. But A wud like ye tae ken that it ’ill
be a sair pairtin’.

“‘For twa hundred years an’ mair there’s been a Baxter at Burnbrae and a
Hay at Kilspindie; ane wes juist a workin’ farmer, an’ the other a belted
earl, but gude freends an’ faithfu’; an’, ma Lord, Burnbrae wes as dear
tae oor fouk as the castle wes tae yours.

“‘A mind that day the Viscount cam’ o’ age, an’ we gaithered tae wush him
weel, that A saw the pictures o’ the auld Hays on yir walls, an’ thocht
hoo mony were the ties that bund ye tae yir hame.

“We haena pictures nor gowden treasures, but there’s an auld chair at
oor fireside, an’ A saw ma grandfather in it when A wes a laddie at the
schule, an’ A mind him tellin’ me that his grandfather hed sat in lang
afore. It’s no worth muckle, an’ it’s been often mended, but A’ll no like
tae see it carried oot frae Burnbrae.

“‘There is a Bible, tae, that hes come doon, father tae son, frae 1690,
and ilka Baxter hes written his name in it, an’ “farmer at Burnbrae,” but
it’ll no’ be dune again, for oor race ’ill be awa frae Burnbrae for ever.

“‘Be patient wi’ me, ma Lord, for it’s the laist time we’re like tae
meet, an’ there’s anither thing A want tae say, for it’s heavy on ma hert.

“‘When the factor told me within this verra room that we maun leave, he
spoke o’ me as if A hed been a lawless man, an’ it cut me mair than ony
ither word.

“‘Ma Lord, it’s no’ the men that fear their God that ’ill brak the laws,
an’ A ken nae Baxter that wes ither than a loyal man tae his King and
country.

“‘Ma uncle chairged wi’ the Scots Greys at Waterloo, and A mind him
tellin’, when A wes a wee laddie, hoo the Hielanders cried oot, “Scotland
for ever,” as they passed.

“‘A needna tell ye aboot ma brither, for he wes killed by yir side afore
Sebastopol, and the letter ye sent tae Burnbrae is keepit in that Bible
for a heritage.

“‘A’ll mention naething aither o’ ma ain laddie, for ye’ve said mair than
wud be richt for me, but we coont it hard that when oor laddie hes shed
his blude like an honest man for his Queen, his auld father and mither
sud be driven frae the hame their forebears hed for seeven generations.’”

What a family! The sergeant with the V. C., ma uncle who chairged wi’ the
Scots Greys, and ma brither who wes killed by yir side afore Sebastopol,
and, of course, the Bible has to be lugged in. What wonder that at this
outburst of Scottish reticence, so to say, Lord Kilspindie rose to his
feet. In the twinkling of a paragraph or two the shallow, monstrous,
black-hearted English factor is, need one say, coming in for a bit of his
Lordship’s mind.

“‘You’ll reduce the rent to the old figure, and put in the name of John
Baxter, and let it be for the longest period we ever give on the estate.’

“‘But, Lord Kilspindie … I … did you know⸺’

“‘Do as I command you without another word,’ and his Lordship was fearful
to behold.”

Baxter goes home to his farm victor. The news goes down the Glen,—or up
it as the case may be,—and the question arises as to what Baxter is going
to do with the farm that has been denuded of live stock and implements,
and before you can say Jack Robinson every man who has made a purchase at
the Burnbrae roup is off to Burnbrae with his purchase and dumps it down
and leaves it there, free, gratis, and for nothing.

Now the whole of this story is simply ridiculous. Even if one swallowed
the English factor who had turned an old tenant out of his farm on a
question of kirk; even if one swallowed the neighbourly bidding up at
the roup (not to mention the Victoria Cross and the fighting uncle and
brither), Dr. Maclaren cannot make us believe that a Scotchman would
part freely and without price with anything that he had once bought. And
what a reflection it is upon the dulness of the patient, resigned, and
tear-stricken Burnbrae, that he did not have the presence of mind to
address dear, good Earl of Kilspindie before the roup came off! But had
he done that, of course, Dr. Ian Maclaren could not have made his point
as to the incredible generosity of the dwellers about Drumtochty.

But the Glen could boast much more remarkable men than Burnbrae. There is
Drumsheugh, about as pale a martyr as a martyr-loving people could wish
for. Drumsheugh passed in the Glen for a hard man and a miser, “a wratch
that ’ill hae the laist penny in a bargain, and no spend a saxpence
gin he can keep it.” But Drumsheugh was sairly misjudged. He carried
his tribble for mair than thirty year, and then unburdened himself of
it over the whiskey to his friend, Dr. Maclure. “‘It wes for anither A
githered, an’ as fast as A got the gear A gied it awa’,’ and Drumsheugh
sprang to his feet, his eyes shining; ‘it wes for love’s sake A haggled
an’ schemed, an’ stairved an’ toiled, till A’ve been a byword at kirk an’
market for nearness; A did it a’, an’ bore it a’, for ma love, an’ for
… ma love A wud hae dune ten times mair.’” Naturally, and the lady in
the case was named Marget, the bonniest as weel as the noblest o’ weemen
(they all are). Well, Drumsheugh fell in love with Marget when she was
in her bloom. With the true Scottish reticence, however, he omitted to
mention his condition to the object of his affection, so that she went
off quite properly and married a feckless person named Whinnie, who,
being feckless, got himself into persistent holes for money, so that
Whinnie and Marget were continually being threatened with the loss of
their happy home, and all the time Drumsheugh, for love’s sake, kept on
sending money through his solicitors in the name of Whinnie’s rich uncle
in America. For thirty years Whinnie continued to be a drain on his
purse, and Drumsheugh spake no word, but went on loving Marget all the
time. Being made the recipient of this astonishing confidence, Maclure
is for posting off to Marget right away, and she, good woman, posts as
swiftly off to Drumsheugh. It is a case of ae fond kiss and dinna peety
me, Marget; A’ve hed ma reward, an’ A’m mair than content; and we wind
up with the biblical reflection that “They which shall be accounted
worthy … neither marry nor are given in marriage … but are as the angels
of God in Heaven”; which is all very pretty and all very Scotch, and all
made to sell. We may note, however, that Drumsheugh did not stand alone
in Drumtochty for his devotion to a lost love. The fetch is too easy and
too safe for Dr. Maclaren to allow himself the use of it only once. There
was a man in Drumtochty who had been counted a cynic and a railer against
“merridge,” even as Drumsheugh was accounted a miser. In the course of
nature this man, Jamie Soutar, came to die. On his death bed he remarked
to a friend, “‘Wha sed A wes against merridge, Doctor Davidson?’ and
Jamie’s face flushed. ‘Did ever man or woman hear me speak lichtly o’ the
mystery o’ love? The Glen hes thocht me an auld cankered bachelor, an’
A’ve seen a lass leave her lad’s side on the sicht o’ me. Little they
kent!’” And it transpires that “‘forty-five years syne A met … a lassie
near Kildrummie, an’ A cam tae love her aince and for ever, an’ we hed …
seeven evenin’s thegither. When A cam the next day she wesna there, an’ A
hoddit amang the trees for a ploy; but it wes lang waitin’, for she didna
come, an’ A gaed hame wi’ fear in ma hert.…

“‘A set aff tae her hoose, and ilka turn o’ the road A lookit for Menie.
Aince ma hert loupit in ma breist like a birdie in its cage, for a wumman
cam’ along the near road frae Kildrummie, but it wesna Menie.

“‘When A saw her brither wi’ his face tae Drumtochty, A kent, afore he
said a word, that he wes seekin’ me, an’ that Menie was deid. Never a
tear cam’ that day tae ma een, an’ he telt me, stannin’ in the middle o’
the road, where it begins tae gae doon the hill:

“‘It wes her throat, an’ the doctor wes feared frae the first day. The
nicht she didna come she wes carried (delirious); she … said, “Jamie,
Jamie,” ower an’ ower again, an’ wanted tae rise.

“‘Aboot daybreak she cam’ tae hersel’, and knew oor faces. “A’m deein’,”
she said, “an’ A didna keep ma tryst last nicht. It’s ower late noo, an’
A’ll no see him on earth again.

“‘“Tell James Soutar that it wesna ma blame A failed, an’ gie him ma
Bible,” an’ a while aifter she said, “A’ll keep the tryst wi’ him some
day,” an’ … that’s a’.’”

After that, any child could tell you what Jamie’s “last words” would be.

“‘Menie,’ he cried, suddenly, with a new voice, ‘A’ve keepit oor tryst.’”

Heaven help us!




VI

BARBIE


From Thrums and Drumtochty the blest to Barbie, which is also in
Scotland, may be fairly described as a far cry. In the beautiful
communities conceived by Drs. Barrie and Maclaren the milk of human
nature flows like a river; everybody lives, not for his or her foolish
self, but for somebody else; everybody dies for somebody else; all
bachelors are faithful to the sweethearts of their youth “for forty
year and more”; all the women make the best butter in Galloway; all the
girls are pretty and angelic of temperament, and, in short, Thrums and
Drumtochty are little bits of heaven dropped on to the map of Scotland.
But Barbie is not of heavenly origin in the least. The chronicles of
Barbie have been put into print for us by Mr. George Douglas, and he
calls his book _The House with the Green Shutters_. If he had wanted a
just title for it, he might very well have called it “The Unspeakable
Scot.” Nowhere in letters does there exist such an unsophisticated
revelation of the minds and habits of a savage and barbarous people as is
to be found in this book. It is fiction, of course; but it is that kind
of fiction which has been written from observation, and is practically a
human document. The Barbie crowd do not waste any time on little acts of
kindness; there is not a man among them who cannot fairly be termed mean.
If meanness were the only fault one might be able to put up with Barbie;
but the inhabitants have graver failings. They are all dour; they are
all bitter-hearted; they are all greedy; they are all merciless and full
of the wickedest guile. Gourlay, who is the hero of the piece, counts
among the most unpleasant persons one has ever met in a book. He has “the
black glower in his een,” and all the Scotch qualities of envy, hatred,
overweening pride, and tyranny find full expression in him. For years
he has trampled the rest of Barbie under his feet, and all Barbie hates
him. “He had been born and bred in Barbie, and he knew his townsmen—oh,
yes—he knew them. He knew they laughed because he had no gift of the
gab, and could never be provost, or bailie, or elder, or even chairman
of the gasworks! ‘Oh, verra well, verra well, let Connal and Brodie and
Allardyce have the talk, and manage the town’s affairs’ (he was damned
if they should manage his!); he, for his part, preferred the substantial
reality.” So that he treated Barbie with contempt; he had a civil word
for nobody, and his manners were as bad as only Scotch manners can be. It
was these very manners, however, that helped to bring about his downfall.
One fine morning a stranger walked into Barbie; he was a Scotchman,
and in his appearance there was “an air of dirty and pretentious
well-to-doness,” which is the Scotch way. Well, this stranger ran up
against Mr. Gourlay.

“‘It’s a fine morning, Mr. Gourlay!’ simpered the stranger. His air was
that of a forward tenant who thinks it a great thing to pass remarks on
the weather with his laird.

“Gourlay cast a look at the dropping heavens.

“‘Is that _your_ opinion?’ said he. ‘I fail to see ’t mysel’.…’

“The stranger laughed, a little deprecating giggle. ‘I meant it was fine
weather for the fields,’ he explained.…

“‘Are _you_ a farmer, then?’ Gourlay nipped in, with his eye on the white
waistcoat.

“‘Oh—oh, Mr. Gourlay! A farmer, no. Hi—hi! I’m not a farmer. I daresay,
now, you have no mind of _me_!’

“‘No,’ said Gourlay, regarding him very gravely and steadily with his
dark eyes. ‘I cannot say, sir, that I have the pleasure of remembering
_you_!’

“‘Man, I’m a son of auld John Wilson of Brigabee!’

“‘Oh, auld Wilson, the mole-catcher!’ said contemptuous Gourlay. ‘What’s
this they christened him now? “Toddling Johnnie,” was it noat?’

“Wilson coloured. But he sniggered to gloss over the awkwardness of the
remark. A coward always sniggers when insulted, pretending that the
insult is only a joke of his opponent, and therefore to be laughed aside.
So he escapes the quarrel which he fears a show of displeasure might
provoke.

“But, though Wilson was not a handy man, it was not timidity only that
caused his tame submission to Gourlay.…”

Here you have the two types of Scotchmen presented in speaking
likenesses, namely, the bully, primed with “repressiveness” and “force of
character,” and the giggling lickspittle who does not know how to fight
and consequently falls back on livid revenges.

Later, Wilson ventures on a remark about business. Gourlay retorts:

“‘Business! Heavens, did ye hear him talking? What did Toddling Johnny’s
son know about business? What was the world coming to? To hear him
setting up his face there and asking the best merchant in the town
whether business was brisk! It was high time to put him in his place, the
conceited upstart, shoving himself forward like an equal!’

“For it was the assumption of equality implied by Wilson’s manner that
offended Gourlay—as if mole-catcher’s son and monopolist were discussing,
on equal terms, matters of interest to them both.

“‘Business!’ he said, gravely. ‘Well, I’m not well acquainted with your
line, but I believe mole-traps are cheap—if ye have any idea of taking up
the oald trade!’

“Wilson’s eyes flickered over him, hurt and dubious. His mouth
opened—then shut—then he decided to speak after all. ‘Oh, I was thinking
Barbie would be very quiet,’ said he, ‘compared wi’ places where they
have the railway! I was thinking it would need stirring up a bit.’

“‘Oh, ye was thinking that, was ye?’ birred Gourlay, with a stupid man’s
repetition of his jibe. ‘Well, I believe there’s a grand opening in the
moleskin line, so _there’s_ a chance for ye! My quarrymen wear out their
breeks in no time!’

“Wilson’s face, which had swelled with red shame, went a dead white.
‘Good morning!’ he said, and started rapidly away with a vicious dig of
his stick upon the wet road.

“Goo-ood mor-r-ning, serr!’ Gourlay birred after him; ‘goo-ood
mor-r-ning, serr!’ He felt he had been bright this morning. He had put
the branks on Wilson!”

In spite of his smallness and rattiness, Wilson is not without his Scotch
feelings, so that he goes away and schemes. And the end of his scheming
is that he becomes a trade rival of Gourlay’s in Barbie. Perhaps man
never had a more unscrupulous or fiendishly cunning trade rival. The end
of it is that Gourlay is brought to the verge of bankruptcy and dies
miserably, while Barbie is left to go on its wicked way rejoicing. This
fight between two ugly natures is watched by the population of Barbie
with great zest; the combatants are continually egged on by the sarcastic
comments of the neebors, who practically hate them both as they hate
one another. And the result is a picture which rivals in hideousness
anything of the kind which has hitherto been attempted. From _The House
with the Green Shutters_ one is able to gather what life in a Scotch
township really means. One understands, too, how it comes to pass that
the Scotchmen one meets in London are so wanting in the qualities which
render communication between men possible and tolerable. Persons who
have spent their youth in such a township as Barbie must of necessity
have altogether wrong views about life and the reason for it. Their hand
is against every man; to get and to keep by fair means or foul is their
sole ambition, and of the finer feelings which keep existence sweet they
know absolutely nothing. It is a squalid picture, and not in the least
flattering to Scotland. Yet the Scotch critics have not ventured to
deny its authenticity; indeed, they admit that there is a great deal in
it. Mr. Douglas, the author of _The House with the Green Shutters_, is
himself a Scotchman, and to malign his country is about the last thing
you may expect from a Scotch writer; his tendency usually is the other
way. To put Thrums, Drumtochty, and Barbie into one vessel, as it were,
to mix them and make a blend of them is probably to get at the truth
about the Scot as he lives and moves in his native element. And when
one has done this, one can only imagine that the average Scotchman is a
compound of two things,—to wit, the knave and the fool.




VII

THE BARD


In England “the Bard” stands for Shakespeare; in Scotland, of course,
when you say “the Bard” you mean Robert Burns. Nothing that Scotland
ever possessed has abided so firmly in the heart of the Scotchman as
“the Bard”—Robert Burns, that is to say. An Englishman can forget that
Shakespeare ever existed. A Scotsman never forgets that Robert Burns was
a Scotchman. Morn, noon, and night he will talk to you of Burns if you
give him half a chance. Till Dr. J. M. Barrie and Dr. Crockett came in,
the Scotchman had no other book but a dog’s-eared Burns, from which work
he gathered his views of life, including justification for his vices.
Round the person and poetry of Burns numberless well-meaning people have
found it worth their while to write a literature. There was a time when
“the Bard” received praise only from mere poets. Keats wrote sonnets
about him; Montgomery offered him the usual graceful tribute; Wordsworth
mentioned him cheek by jowl with Chatterton; and even Eliza Cook had her
metrical say about him. Then the prose men came along—Carlyle, Stevenson,
Henley. Carlyle took the man Burns and set him up for a tremendous
genius, with “a head of gold.” Stevenson, whom probably for this reason
the Scotch do not love, ventured to suggest that Mr. Burns had “feet of
clay.” Mr. Henley followed and accentuated the feet of clay, greatly
to the annoyance of all Scotland. It ill becomes the present writer to
attempt to do what has already been done so well, therefore he will say
nothing about either heads of gold or feet of clay. But Robert Burns is
everybody’s property, and one may crave leave even at this late day to
say about him the thing that one believes. The whole truth about Burns
may be summed up in half a dozen words. He was a poet, he was a loose
liver, and he was a ploughman. And if one looks through his writings, one
is forced to the conclusion that he owes his fame to the circumstances
that he was a loose liver and a ploughman rather than to the circumstance
that he was a poet. To take up the works of Burns in one volume and to
glance through them haphazard, assaying here a page and there a page, is
to come to a knowledge of him which is rather staggering. As I write, I
have before me the Globe Edition of the _Complete Works of Robert Burns_,
edited by Alexander Smith. It is a portly book, and one is aware that
it contains matter which is really of excellent quality, considered as
poetry. Yet to test it by chance openings is to perceive that in the main
Burns, as poet, has been vastly overrated. On page 211, for example,
which is about the middle of the book, I find five pieces, not one of
which is good enough to grace a common valentine. We lead off with
_Peggy’s Charms_:

    My Peggy’s face, my Peggy’s form,
    The frost of hermit age might warm;
    My Peggy’s worth, my Peggy’s mind,
    Might charm the first of human kind.
    I love my Peggy’s angel air,
    Her face so truly, heavenly fair,
    Her native grace so void of art;
    But I adore my Peggy’s heart.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, this is arrant drivel, villainously
rhymed. Then comes _Up in the Morning Early_:

    Up in the morning’s no’ for me,
      Up in the morning early;
    When a’ the hills are cover’d wi’ snaw,
      I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

    Cauld blaws the wind frae east to west,
      The drift is driving sairly;
    Sae loud and shrill’s I hear the blast,
      I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

    The birds sit chittering in the thorn,
      A’ day they fare but sparely;
    And lang’s the night frae e’en to morn,
      I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

One surmises _Up in the Morning Early_ belongs to “that great body
of treasurable songs with which Burns has dowered his countrymen.”
On the face of it, to find sorrier stuff one would have to visit an
English music hall. There is not a glimmer of poetry in any one of
the twelve lines, and the composition as a whole might have been
written by a precocious infant in a Glasgow Board School. After this
precious production we are regaled with the appended touching piece of
sentimentalism:

    Tho’ cruel fate should bid us part,
      As far’s the pole and line;
    Her dear idea round my heart
      Should tenderly entwine.

    Tho’ mountains frown and deserts howl,
      And oceans roar between;
    Yet, dearer than my deathless soul,
      I still would love my Jean.

The spectacle of a gentleman having somebody’s “dear idea” entwined,
whether tenderly or otherwise, round his heart would surely set a cat
laughing. And the loving of Jean, though mountains frown and deserts
howl and oceans roar between, is clearly the merest fustian. Follows _I
Dreamed I Lay Where Flowers were Springing_—a stupid sort of dream to
say the least of it. The flowers, it seems, were springing “gaily in
the sunny beam,” and the poet, it seems, not only “dreamed that he lay
among them” but, that he was “list’ning to the wild birds singing by a
falling crystal stream,” which is a very common and hackneyed thing for a
tenth-rate poet to do. But mark:

    Straight the sky grew black and daring;
      Thro’ the woods the whirlwinds rave;
    Trees with aged arms were warring,
      O’er the swelling, drumlie wave.

    Such was my life’s deceitful morning,
      Such the pleasures I enjoy’d;
    But lang or noon, loud tempests storming
      A’ my flowery bliss destroy’d.
    Tho’ fickle fortune has deceived me,
      She promised fair, and performed but ill;
    Of monie a joy and hope bereav’d me,
      I bear a heart shall support me still.

The moral here is as lame as the meter, and in the open market to-day the
“poem” is not worth fourpence. We finish the page with _Bonie Ann_:

    Ye gallants bright, I red you right,
      Beware of bonie Ann:
    Her comely face sae fu’ o’ grace,
      Your heart she will trepan.
    Her een sae bright, like stars by night,
      Her skin is like the swan;
    Sae jimpy lac’d her genty waist,
      That sweetly ye might span.

    Youth, grace, and love, attendant move,
      And pleasure leads the van;
    In a’ their charms, and conquering arms,
      They wait on bonie Ann.
    The captive bands may chain the hands,
      But love enslaves the man:
    Ye gallants braw, I red you a’
      Beware of bonie Ann.

One notes that three out of these five lucubrations have to do with
love, and one wonders how a man who went about with such ill-considered
love-verses in his pocket ever got a woman to look at him.

To take our life in our hands once more, we open on page 153. Here we
have a choice selection of short pieces, and feeble, which we reproduce
as they stand:

TO JOHN M’MURDO, ESQ.

    O, could I give thee India’s wealth,
      As I this trifle send!
    Because thy joy in both would be
      To share them with a friend.
    But golden sands did never grace
      The Heliconean stream;
    Then take what gold could never buy—
      An honest Bard’s esteem.

ON THE DEATH OF A LAP-DOG, NAMED ECHO

    In wood and wild, ye warbling throng,
      Your heavy loss deplore;
    Now half-extinct your powers of song,
      Sweet Echo is no more.

    Ye jarring, screeching things around,
      Scream your discordant joys;
    Now half your din of tuneless sound
      With Echo silent lies.

LINES WRITTEN AT LOUDEN MANSE

    The night was still, and o’er the hill
      The moon shone on the castle wa’;
    The mavis sang, while dew-drops hang
      Around her on the castle wa’.

    Sae merrily they danced the ring,
      Frae eenin’ till the cock did craw;
    And the o’erword o’ the spring,
      Was Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.

These three effusions, dear reader, are really and truly the work of
Burns—or, if you prefer it, of Burrrrrns. In despair one hunts up
something for which the man is noted. _Scots Wha Hae_ one thinks, will
serve. It has been described as noble, and marvellous, and inspiring, and
Heaven knows what besides. Here it is:

    Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
    Scots whom Bruce has often led;
    Welcome to your gory bed
                  Or to victorie!

    Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,
    See the front o’ battle lour,
    See approach proud Edward’s power—
                  Chains and slaverie!

    Wha will be a traitor knave?
    Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
    Wha sae base as be a slave?—
                  Let him turn and flee!

    Wha for Scotland’s king and law
    Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
    Freeman stand or freeman fa’,
                  Let him follow me!

    By Oppression’s woes and pains,
    By your sons in servile chains,
    We will drain our dearest veins,
                  But they shall be free.

    Lay the proud usurpers low!
    Tyrants fall in every foe,
    Liberty’s in every blow,
                  Let us do or dee!

As a matter of fact, _Scots Wha Hae_ is one those poems which most people
have heard about and few people have read. For this reason I print it
_in extenso_ and commend it to the consideration of the critical. Is it
really noble, or marvellous, or inspiring? Would it pass muster as a new
performance? Is it a whit the better, or sounder, or more convincing than
_God Save the King_, which everybody cheerfully admits is not poetry? I,
for one, hae me doots.

Like Artemus Ward and writers of “Wot-the-Orfis-Boy Finks” order,
Burns owes much of his seeming inspiration and humour to an uncouth
orthography. Put into decent English, many of his most vaunted lays
amount to nothing at all. Indeed, practically the whole of the _poetry_
which came from his pen could be compressed into a book of fifty pages.
I do not say that much of the matter one would have to include in those
fifty pages is not matter of an exceptional and extraordinary quality.
Mr. Henley has told us that in the vernacular, Burns, at his best,
touches the highest level; and with this pronouncement nobody who knows
the difference between good writing and bad will quarrel. But I do
assert that the best of Burns is not sufficient, either in quality or
quantity, to justify the absurd fame which has been bestowed upon him
by his countrymen. James I., whom the average Scotchman barely knows by
name, was, taking him all in all, quite as good a poet as Burns. So was
Barbour; so was Drummond of Hawthornden; and, I had almost added, so were
Stevenson and Robert Buchanan. The question naturally arises, How comes
it to pass that Burns who, excepting by a fluke, was always more or less
of a middling poet, has come to rank as the finest thing in letters that
Scotland ever produced? The answer to that question is simple enough. In
spite of _The Cotter’s Saturday Night_, and two or three other pieces
which are the delight and mainstay of the Scotch kirk-goer, Burns was
undoubtedly the poet of licence and alcoholism. Also he was a ploughman.

    Should humble state our mirth provoke!
      What folly to misca’ that,
    The sapling grows a stately oak,
      Wi’ spreading shade and a’ that.
    For a’ that and a’ that,
    His toils and cares and a’ that,
    We’ve seen a ploughman crowned at last
    The king o’ men for a’ that.

After illicit love and flaring drunkenness, nothing appeals so much to
Scotch sentiment as having been born in the gutter. In this matter of
admiration for people who attain notoriety from a basis of humble origins
I do not know that the Scotch stand entirely alone. At the present
moment, much fuss is being made in the newspapers over a policeman who
has seen fit to devote himself to the painting of pictures, and who has
succeeded in getting one of his canvases hung at Burlington House; and
if I remember rightly there used to be a postman poet of whom sundry
highly placed critics wrote sundry kindly encouraging and gratuitous
things. Also the English press is apt to tell us that the great Lord
So-and-So was originally a bootblack, and that the great Mr. So-and-So
went to Canada with seven shillings in his pocket. In fact, the prodigy
who began on nothing, and ultimately became rich or famous, is a figure
which British humanity dearly loves. And Burns, as we have seen, was a
ploughman. What special excellence may lie in being a ploughman nobody
but a Scotchman may perceive. In England our booms on humble talent are
of short duration. Clare and Ebenezer Elliott both had their little day,
and ceased to be. But the Scotch ploughman persists, and the fact that
he was a ploughman helps him to persist, and is a great source of pride
to the Scotch. The real reason, however, why Burns became, and continues
to be, a sort of patron saint to the peoples north of the Tweed is, as I
have already suggested, that he was an erotic writer and a condoner of
popular vices. Turn where you will in his precious works, you will find
that drunkenness and impropriety are matters for which he has unqualified
sympathy. Whiskey and women are the subjects which furnish forth the
majority of his flights. He writes of both with a freedom which would not
nowadays be tolerated, and the moral effect of what he has to say cannot
be regarded as otherwise than detrimental. I have before pointed out that
one of Mr. Henley’s critics has asserted that the standard of morality
in the rural districts of Scotland is much lower to-day than it was in
Burns’s time. The inference is obvious. Burns, every Scotchman tells you,
and tells you truly, has played no small part in moulding the sentiments
and tendencies of the Scotch people as we know them. It was he who gave
them their first notion of bumptious independence; it was he who taught
them that “a man’s a man for a’ that”—which, on the whole, is a monstrous
fallacy; it was he who averred that whiskey and freedom gang together;
and it was he who gave the countenance of song to shameful and squalid
sexuality. In a great number of Burns’s love songs the suggestion is of
the lowest. One could take a selection of these songs, print them in a
little book, have them sold in the streets of London at a penny, and be
prosecuted at Bow Street for one’s trouble. The man’s mind was not clean;
he made the Muse an instrument for the promulgation of skulduddery (I
will not vouch for the orthography, but every Scotchman knows what I
mean); he degraded and prostituted his intellect, and earned thereby the
love and worship of a people who appear to have a sympathetic weakness
for erotic verse if it be but Scotch.

It is hard to get the truth about Burns out of the Scotch writers; yet
the more honest among them have always had a sneaking suspicion that he
was an overrated poet. Somehow, in perusing their estimates, one has a
feeling that Burns is not so much being expounded as defended. Stevenson,
who tried to be just, has come nearer the mark about him than any writer
of our own time; but even Stevenson lacked the courage to go the whole
hog. Of Burns, the writer, he could be brought to say nothing more
trenchant than that he “had a tendency to borrow a hint,” and that he was
“indebted in a very uncommon degree to Ramsay and Fergusson.” And, he
adds, by way of defence, that “when we remember Burns’s obligation to his
predecessors, we must never forget his immense advances on them.” Perhaps
not.

As to Burns, the man, it is safe to say that a more profligate person
has seldom figured on the slopes of Parnassus. In love he was as
carnal as he was false. He canted and prated and pretended, but his
relations with women will not bear examination. His life as a whole
would have discredited a dustman, much less a poet. He whined about his
“misfortunes,” and advertised them and made much out of them; but nobody
in his senses can sympathise with him. That he should be held up for a
model by Scottish writers and Scottish preachers is a crying scandal.
The king-o’-men cackle is the sheerest impertinence. Burns never was the
king o’ men. He was never even a decent living man. He never had a rag of
conduct wherewithal to cover himself. He was simply an incontinent yokel
with a gift for metricism. That his memory should stand for so much in
Scotland constitutes a very grave reflection upon the Scottish character
and the Scottish point of view.




VIII

THE SCOT AS A CRITIC


Taking him all in all, the Scotch critic is a good deal of an anomaly.
To criticise is scarcely the Scotchman’s _forte_, his chief gifts lying
rather in the direction of admiration, particularly of admiration for
whatever is Scotch. But we have amongst us (and I do not wish him other
than a long and prosperous career) one Scotch critic—or, at any rate,
a Scotchman who passes for a critic. I refer, need it be said, to
Dr. William Archer. Dr. Archer is the dramatic critic of the _World_
newspaper. Whenever I have looked into the _World_ newspaper, I have
found a page or so of Dr. Archer. His work appears to be done to the
satisfaction of his employers, and I have no fault to find with it,
excepting that I cannot bring myself to feel enthusiastic about it. To
tackle Dr. Archer flying, as it were, let us peep at his contribution to
the current number of his journal. Herein he deals with a play by Miss
Netta Syrett and preaches a little sermon to theatrical managers.

“I admit, then [he says], that from the actor-manager’s point of view—his
quite legitimate and inevitable point of view under our accursed
system—the play has drawbacks that might well stand in the way of its
production. But if any manager read it and did not recognise that he was
face to face with an exceptional talent, and one of which, by judicious
encouragement, much might be made, then I say that he showed a deplorable
lack of discernment. This—hypothetic—manager ought to have sent for the
authoress and said, ‘Miss Syrett, I cannot, for such and such reasons,
produce this play. But there are scenes in it which show me that you have
the making of a playwright in you. Have you other ideas? Yes, of course
you have. Well, go home and draw me out the scenario of a play that you
think would suit me, and then come and let us talk it over. Remember,
I promise nothing, except my very best attention to anything you may
bring me. But that you shall have; and if you are not above taking hints
from my experience, you may be able to avoid certain trifling errors
and crudities into which you have fallen in this piece. Don’t be in a
hurry. You ladies, if I may say so, are apt to imagine that, when once
you have got an idea, a play can be improvised like a newspaper article
or a six shilling novel. This is a mistake. A play, to have any solid
value, must be carefully and laboriously built up. You will make false
steps, find yourself in blind alleys, and have to try back and start
afresh many and many a time. You will have days of discouragement, when
your characters refuse point-blank to do what you want them to. Probably
you will find in the end that you have given as much thought and labour
to every line of your play as you would to a whole page of a novel. But
if you are prepared to take your art seriously, you may rely upon my
taking seriously whatever you may offer me. And be assured of this, that
if you fail to do something really worth while, my disappointment will
be scarcely less than your own.’ In some such words, as it seems to me,
should the sagacious manager have addressed the authoress of _The Finding
of Nancy_.”

Excellently intended, my dear Dr. Archer, excellently and honestly
intended. But could gratuitousness, or egregiousness, or flat-footedness
go further? Such an oration, happily, might come out of none but a
Scotch mouth or from any pen but that of a Scotchman. In point of
unnecessariness it rivals pretty well aught that I have had the felicity
to see in print. And it illustrates to admiration the Scotch faculty for
spreading out the commonplace and being sententious over it.

What Dr. Archer’s view of the theatre may be nobody knows. In the
beginning of the speech I have quoted he refers to “our accursed
system,” so that there must be a screw loose somewhere. For years Dr.
Archer has been pounding away at this same system, and it seems to
continue. Nor has Dr. Archer made the slightest dint upon it. A little
while back, one of the wags in which London appears to abound pointed out
that plays praised by Dr. Archer invariably come in for the shortest of
runs. To which impeachment Dr. Archer replied, with great ingenuousness,
by printing a formidable list of plays which had survived his approval.
Another wag having said something against the Scotch in a paper called
_The Outlook_, Dr. Archer exclaimed, in cold type, “_Outlook_ indeed!
Methinks that north of the Tweed they will call it _Outrage_!” This, of
course, is a Scotch joke, and therefore an old one. In the year 600 or
thereabouts, Gregory the Great, noting the fair faces and golden hair of
some youths in the market-place of Rome, enquired from what country the
men came. “They are Angles,” was the reply. “Not _Angles_,” quoth the
worthy Gregory, “but _angels_.” For thirteen centuries the pun of the
Bishop of Rome had remained decently tucked away in the history books.
And in 1901, Dr. Archer, who really is a wit, drags it forth and makes
another like it.

All these, however, be small deer. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with
the true inwardness of Dr. Archer as critic, we must turn to his _magnum
opus_—that great guinea work of his, entitled _Poets of the Younger
Generation_. Now, on the question of modern poetry, and particularly of
the younger school of poets, people interested in poetry are always glad
to hear words of wisdom. Have we any contemporary poets? If so, are they
writing poetry for us, contemporary or otherwise? The subject invites.
Somehow and for some reason or other it invited Dr. Archer. Indeed, it
went further than inviting him; it inveigled him. No doubt the notion of
writing a book about poets came to him on one of his discouraging days.
He had been hammering, hammering, hammering at the theatre and “our
accursed system,” and he was fain for a softer job. What work could a
poor, tired critic take up outside the potter’s field of our accursed
system? When a critic gets into that frame of mind he always thinks of
the poets. Dr. Archer thought of the poets—the living poets—the poets
of the younger generation. Being a Scotchman, Dr. Archer thought, and
straightway set to work. He appears to have plodded steadfastly through
the writings of no fewer than thirty-three of the minor contemporary
poets of England and America. Of each of these thirty-three children of
the Muse, beginning with the Rev. H. C. Beeching and ending with William
Butler Yeats, he wrote painful notices, bejewelled with excerpts, put
them into a book, and got them published by Mr. John Lane. With the
beauty or otherwise of his thirty-three notices, in spite of their
exquisite thirty-three-ness, I do not propose greatly to concern myself.
Their general drift and tenor may be inferred from the following
examples, culled from the article on Mr. Kipling:

“Far be it from me to disparage _Scots Wha Hae_, but I am not sure that
it possesses the tonic quality of the refrain of Mr. Kipling’s song of
defeat:

    An’ there ain’t no chorus ’ere to give,
      Nor there ain’t no band to play;
    But I wish I was dead ’fore I done what I did
      Or seen what I’d seed that day!

What in the name of goodness have _Scots Wha Hae_ and these four lines
got to do with one another? How can they be compared, except only as
verse, and where, oh where, does the tonic quality of the Kipling lines
come in? Again:

“In all the poetry of warfare, was there ever a more exactly observed and
yet imaginative touch than that which describes the guns of the enemy
‘shaking their bustles like ladies so fine’? It is grotesque, and it is
magnificent.”

As a matter of fact it is not observed at all, and it is certainly not
magnificent. Ladies do not shake their bustles. Nowadays, indeed, they
have no bustles to shake, and I should imagine that the sound criticism
about the simile is that it is too temporary and far fetched. And for the
third and last time:

“Only by some narrow trick of definition can such work (_McAndrew’s
Hymn_) be excluded from the sphere of poetry; and poetry or no poetry, it
is certainly very strong and vital literature.”

Here let us agree to differ with Dr. Archer, inasmuch as _McAndrew’s
Hymn_ is merely rhymed note-book eked out with a few phrases of the Doric.

On the whole, _Poets of the Younger Generation_ might well have gone
down to posterity as a collection of middling and slightly wrong-headed
reviews, had Dr. Archer possessed a tithe of the shrewdness commonly
imputed to persons of his blood. But in putting the book before the
world, Dr. Archer could not be content to figure as a simple reviewer,
he must needs preface it with a pompous and bloated introduction.
“Appreciation [he says nobly] is the end and aim of the following pages.
The verb ‘to appreciate’ is used, rightly or wrongly, in two senses;
it sometimes means to realise, at other times to enhance the value of
a thing. I use the word in both significations. While attempting to
define, to appraise, the talent of individual poets, I hope to enhance
the reader’s estimate of the value of contemporary poetry as a whole.”
After several pages of this sort of thing we come upon a full-dress
“personal statement,” the like of which has never before been given us
by mortal critic. Practically, it is a biography of Dr. William Archer,
with special reference to Dr. William Archer’s spiritual and intellectual
growth and his “qualifications as a critic of poetry.” The pose and tone
of it are inimitable. It puts Burns and his “wild artless notes” utterly
to the blush. As Dr. Archer himself would say, it is grotesque and it is
magnificent. It begins with a rataplan on ancestral drums: “In the first
place, I am a pure bred Scotchman. There is some vague family legend of
an ancestor of my father’s having come from England with Oliver Cromwell
and settled in Glasgow; but I never could discover any evidence of it.
The only thing that speaks in its favour is that my name, common in
England, is uncommon in Scotland. My maternal grandfather and grandmother
both came of families that seem to have dwelt from time immemorial in
and about Perth, at the gateway of the Highlands. This being so, it
appears very improbable that there should not be some Keltic admixture
in my blood; but I cannot absolutely lay my finger on any ‘Mac’ among
my forbears. Both my parents belong to families of a deeply religious
cast of mind, ultra-orthodox in dogma, heterodox and even vehemently
dissenting on questions of Church Government. I can trace some way
back in my mother’s family a strain of good, sound, orthodox literary
culture and taste; of specially poetical faculty, little or none. It
may, perhaps, be worth mentioning that one of my great-grandfathers or
great-great-uncles printed—and I believe, edited—an edition of the
poets, much esteemed in its day.”

Nothing could be better worth mentioning, Mr. Archer. Pray proceed:

“The earliest symptom I can find in myself that can possibly be taken as
showing any marked relation to the poetic side of life, is an extreme
susceptibility (very clearly inherited from my father) to simple,
pathetic music. It is related that even in my infancy, one special
tune—the _Adeste Fideles_—if so much as hummed in my neighbourhood,
would always make me howl lustily; and, indeed, to this day it seems to
me infinitely pathetic. I have carried through life, without any sort
of musical gift, and with a very imperfect apprehension of tonality,
harmony, and the refinements and complexities of musical expression, this
keen sensibility to the emotional effect of certain lovely rhythms and
simple curves of notes. I am not sure that _Lascia ch’ie pranga, Che faer
farò senza Euridice_, and the cantabile in Chopin’s _Funeral March_, do
not seem to me the very divinest utterances of the human spirit, before
which all the achievements of all the poets fade and grow dim. But it is
all one to me (or very nearly so) whether they are reeled off on a barrel
organ or performed by the greatest singers—the finest orchestra. Nay, my
own performance of them, in the silent chamber concerts of memory, are
enough to bring the tears to my eyes.”

Good man!

“I cannot remember that the poetry I learned at school interested or
pleased me particularly—‘On Linden, when the sun was low,’ ‘FitzJames
was brave, yet to his heart,’ ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on
the fold,’ and so forth.… The first composition of mine that ever found
its way into print was some sort of a rhapsody (in prose) on Byron at
Missolonghi. The attack passed off in six months or so, and I am not
aware that it left behind any permanent ill effects. At the same time I
read the greater part of _The Faerie Queene_ with a certain pleasure,
but without any real appreciation.”

Wordsworth this remarkable youth “read for a college essay”; “Coleridge
came to him in the train of Wordsworth”; and at seventeen _The Ancient
Mariner_ seemed to him “the most magical of poems.” Tennyson he read
“with pleasure”; Keats “had not yet taken hold” of him; and Milton he
“could not read.” Ultimately, however, he came to appreciate Milton in
this wise. “I spent my twentieth year idling in Australia, and, being
somewhat hard up for literature, I set myself to read _Paradise Lost_
from beginning to end, at the rate of a book a day. I accomplished the
task, but it bored me unspeakably.… I did not return to it for seven
or eight years, until one day I found myself starting on a railway
journey with nothing to read, and paid a shilling at a station bookstall
for a pocket _Paradise Lost_.” On that journey the scales fell from
Dr. Archer’s eyes. Ever since, _Paradise Lost_ has been to him “an
inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry.” Later, we learn that
Dr. Archer’s own metrical efforts have been “almost entirely confined to
comic, or, at any rate, journalistic, verse,” though he “never attained
even the fluency of the practised newspaper rhymester.” Greek and Latin
verses, he adds, “were undreamt of in the Scottish curriculum of my day.
Practically we knew not what quantity meant.”

Altogether, therefore, Dr. William Archer’s “qualifications as a critic
of poetry” would seem to be, on his own showing, of a negative rather
than a positive order. He is a pure bred Scotchman; he may have a
little English blood in him, but he has not been able to trace it; he
is without any sort of musical gift; he likes his music “reeled off on
a barrel organ”; poetry had no charms for him till he was seventeen;
and he did not discover Milton’s “inexhaustible mine of the pure gold
of poetry” till he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of age. Also
at his college they “did not know what quantity meant.” Yet at the
age of forty-three he had “ready for press” five hundred pages of
appreciations of poets of the younger generation. It is truly marvellous
and prodigiously Scotch. And it sets one wondering. At what epoch in his
extraordinary life did Dr. Archer begin to take a critical interest in
the drama? Was he shovelled into that interest by the exigencies of his
work on newspapers, or did it come to him, like his love of Milton, on a
railway journey? Furthermore, how many of his brither Scots, who labour
so solemnly in the vineyard of literary journalism and plume themselves
on their “pull” in contemporary letters, are of the like origins and
possess the same disqualifications as Dr. William Archer? I doubt if one
per cent. of them is really competent. I know for a fact that ninety per
cent. of them are absolutely devoid of taste, much less of understanding
and vision, and that they exercise critical functions not because they
have insight or feeling for literature, but because “a living” and
certain petty powers are to be had out of it. The much vaunted “Scotch
pull” in criticism is without doubt the worst trouble that has ever
assailed English letters. In a great measure it has been responsible for
the general slackening and stodginess which have overtaken the whole
business during the past decade or so. Persons who write, not to mention
persons who read, know full well that at the present time criticism
is well nigh a dead letter in this country. Reviews are no longer
taken seriously either by authors or the public; the literary papers
languish, depending, for such revenue as they possess, upon publishers’
advertisements instead of upon circulation; literary opinion has been
fined down to sheer puff on the one hand and flagrant abuse or neglect
on the other, and to be the friend or admiring acquaintance of certain
persons is become the only sure road to literary advancement. It is the
fashion to say that nobody, however ill-disposed, can stop the sale
of a good book, or keep the author of such a book out of his meed of
recognition. In the long result this is true. But waiting for the long
result is a weary business, particularly when you discover that there is
an inclination on the part of the people who have “the pull” to put the
clock back for you at every turn; what time they boom the work of their
“ain folk” and shout loudly and insistently for catch-penny mediocrity.
This, by the way, is not in any sense a “sore-head” asseveration; because
my own writings have, as a rule, been of so slender a nature that I have
marvelled to see them noticed at all. Besides, I do not think that I
am without friends even among the apostles of the “Scotch pull.” They
have done me many a service, and with a lively sense of favours to come
I hereby offer them gratitude. All the same, I should not be sorry to
see them disbanded. I should not be sorry to hear that never a one of
them was to be permitted again to set pen to paper in the capacity of
reviewer. Literary journalism would be all the sweeter and saner for such
a closure, and judging by the rates of payment they take, the “Scotch
pull” combination would be very little the poorer.


NOTE[15]

The Scots opinion of Burns may perhaps be best illustrated by quoting a
Burns-Night oration. The speech appended below may be taken as a moderate
sample of what Burns’s admirers are in the habit of saying about him. I
am indebted to Dr. Ross’s volume, _Henley on Burns_, for the excerpt:
“Burns suffered more from remorse and genuine penitence than probably any
man who ever lived. Not only so, but the very bitterness of his cry, ‘God
be merciful to me a sinner,’ has been seized upon by his calumniators,
and used as a weapon to stab him behind his back. But leave Burns to
his Maker, and, keeping in view the parable of the Pharisee and the
publican, it is just possible, nay probable, that those who talk so
glibly about the sins of Burns may find at the great day of reckoning
that the penitent poet and the penitent publican are justified rather
than they. There are certain classes of people who must always look upon
Burns with doubt and suspicion. Many decent, worthy people, naturally
and properly disliking the clay, miss the gold. Many worthy teetotallers
dislike the poet on account of his drinking songs; but even they are
beginning to forgive him for writing _Willie brewed a peck o’ maut_ and
such like. The Pharisee and the hypocrite, throughout their generations,
will always dislike him, not because of his sins, but on account of his
satires:

    Oh ye wha are sae guid yersel’,
      Sae pious and sae holy,
    You’ve nought to do but mark an’ tell
      Yer neebour’s fauts and folly;
    Whose life is like a weel-gaun mill
      Supplied in store o’ water:
    The heapit clappers ebben still,
      An’ still the clap plays clatter.

“The ‘gigman’ and the clothes-horse can never take to Burns. He is not
sufficiently genteel for silly ladyism and spurious nobility:

    What though on hamely fare we dine,
      Wear hodden gray, an’ a’ that,
    Gie fules their silk, an’ knaves their wine,
      A man’s a man for a’ that.

“The ultra-Calvinist can never take to Burns, for Burns broke the back of
‘the auld licht.’ The genuine Calvinist of the poet’s time showed only
the dark side of the shield. Burns showed the bright:

    Where human weakness has come short,
      Or frailty stepp’d aside,
    Do thou, All Good, for such thou art,
      In shades of darkness hide.

    Where with intention I have err’d,
      No other plea I have,
    But ‘Thou art good, and goodness still
      Delighteth to forgive.’

“The golden calf is as much worshipped in England to-day as it was in the
desert four thousand years ago:

    If happiness have not her seat
      And centre in the breast,
    We may be wise and rich and great,
      But never can be blest.

“Burns will never be praised by those who dote upon forms, vestments, and
such like priestly trumpery, for he wrote _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_:

    Compared with this, how poor religion’s pride
      In all the pomp of method and of art,
    When men display to congregations wide
      Religion’s every grace except the heart.
    The Power incensed the pageant will desert,
      The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole;
    But, haply, in some cottage, far apart,
      Will hear, well pleased, the language of the soul,
      And in his book of life the inmate poor enrol.

“A child of the common people himself, Burns never deserted his class. He
taught the poor man that:

    The rank is but the guinea stamp,
      The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

“He ennobled honest labour:

    The honest man, though e’er sae puir,
      Is king o’ men for a’ that.

“He was the high priest of humanity:

    Man’s inhumanity to man
      Makes countless thousands mourn.

    Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress;
      A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss.

    It’s coming yet for a’ that,
    That man to man the warld o’er
    Shall brithers be, an’ a’ that.

“Ay, Burns is like a great mountain, based on earth, towering towards
heaven—of a mixed character, containing gold, silver, brass, iron, and
clay, and from which every man, according to his taste, can become
enriched by the gold and the silver, or get mired in the clay. All that
is best in Burns (and that is nearly the whole) will remain a precious
possession with the Anglo-Saxon race in the ages yet to come. The Stars
and Stripes of our cousins across the sea—the great American people—will
ere long float side by side with the grand old flag that for a thousand
years has braved the battle and the breeze. And the Bible and Burns will
lie side by side in the homes of the reunited Anglo-Saxon race,—the
freest, bravest, and most liberty-loving people the world ever saw or
shall see.”

It will be noted that herein Burns is made out to be an honest fellow who
went wrong only at times; also the mire in him is a small detail, his
best being nearly the whole of him; also that in the glorious days to
come, when the Anglo-Saxon races shall have fused into one great people,
Burns and the Bible are to be our great literary and ethical standby.

As indicating the kind of abuse that the Scot is in the habit of
levelling at persons who disagree with him as to Burns, I likewise print
a set of verses aimed at Mr. Henley by one of Dr. Ross’s scarifiers:

    Ere disappointment, cauld neglect, and spleen
    Had soured my bluid an’ jaundiced baith my een,
    My saul aspired, upo’ the wings o’ rhyme,
    To mount unscaithed to airy heichts sublime;
    An’, like the lark, to drap, in music rare,
    Braw sangs to cheer folks when their hearts were sair.
    I struggled lang, but fand it a’ nae use,
    Nocht paid, I saw, save arrogant abuse.

    “Blind fule,” I cried, “to fling your pearls to swine.
    Awa’ wi’ dreams o’ laurell’d days divine!
    Bid Fame guid-bye, and a’ sic feckless trash,—
    Henceforth write naething but what brings ye cash.”

    I glower’d about for something worth my while—
    Some _thing_ held dear—on whilk to “spew” my bile,
    An’ fixt my e’e upo’ a certain bard,
    Syne bocht a Jamieson, an’ studied hard;
    An’ wha that hears me the vernacular speak
    Wad think I learn’d the hale o’t in a week.
    Weel up in Scotch, I set mysel’ to wark
    To strip the _Poet_ to his very sark,
    An’ gie the warld a pictur’ o’ the _Man_
    An’ a’ his _Doin’s_—on the cut-throat plan.
    My book, gat up regairdless o’ expense,
    Was hailed _the_ book by ilka man o’ sense;
    Some “half-read” gowks ayont the Tweed micht sneer,
    An’ name mysel’ in words no’ fit to hear;
    I only leuch. The man himsel’ was deid—
    _He_ couldna reach me, sae I didna heed.

The author of this effusion must have known perfectly well that Mr.
Henley would have written just as he has written, if Burns had been
alive. The suggestion that “he couldna reach me, and I didna heed,” is
purely gratuitous and foolish.




IX

THE SCOT AS BIOGRAPHER


There are two Scotch books of biography, all published, I believe,
within the last six years, which invariably raise my gorge. One of them
is _Margaret Ogilvy_, by Dr. J. M. Barrie; the second is _J. M. Barrie
and his Books_, by Dr. J. A. Hammerton. The first, dealing with a dead
mother, is a work that nothing but a sense of duty could induce me to
handle in the present connection. It has, however, been put before
the public without so much as an attempt at justification or apology,
and with the plain intention of being sold precisely in the manner of
other literary wares, and it must therefore take its chance. _Margaret
Ogilvy_ appears to have gone into no end of editions. It is an account
of the character and sayings of Dr. J. M. Barrie’s mother, viewed in
the light of Dr. Barrie’s own “literaryness.” I have no hesitation in
pronouncing it to be one of the most snobbish books that have issued from
the press any time this hundred years. It begins snobbishly, it goes on
snobbishly, and it ends snobbishly. Offered to the reading public as
a piece of fictional sentiment, it would still have been open to the
charge of mawkishness. Offered unblushingly as a transcript from the
life and for the perusal of all who care to purchase, deplorable is the
mildest epithet one can justly apply to it. Wordsworth writes somewhere
of a person “who would peep and botanise about his mother’s grave.” This
is exactly the feeling that a reading of _Margaret Ogilvy_ gives you.
Comparisons in such a case would be doubly odious. Yet one does not
find that Margaret Ogilvy, in spite of everything that her son has done
for her in the way of “keying-up” to literary requirements, was any the
sweeter, or any the nobler, or any the more intellectual than one may
presume the mother of any other writer of Dr. Barrie’s parts to have
been. She was a good mother, she gave birth to Dr. Barrie, she ministered
to him in childhood, she denied herself for him; she took pleasure in
his educational and literary progress, she offered him much advice; she
believed in “God” and “love,” and she died in the faith. The mothers of
most literary people have done as much. It has been left to Dr. Barrie to
snatch away the decent veil which hides the sanctities of life from the
common gaze, and to let all the world into the privacies of the filial
and maternal relation at five shillings a time. If I understand Margaret
Ogilvy aright, she would have cut off both her hands rather than permit
some of the things in this book to become the property of strangers,
sympathetic or otherwise.

Of course, the excuse immediately forthcoming from Dr. Barrie’s friends
and admirers will be “the lesson.” It is the only excuse that can
possibly be raked up, and, like the majority of excuses, it is a poor
stick to lean upon. For “the lesson” of _Margaret Ogilvy_ simply amounts
to this, that conceit and self-advertisement may bring a man to the
silliest and least dignified of passes. In point of fact Dr. Barrie’s
“little study” is just as much a study of himself as of his mother. If it
shows Margaret Ogilvy in the figure of an excellent mother, it also shows
J. M. Barrie in the figure of a preternaturally excellent and dutiful
son. If it shows that Margaret Ogilvy was a simple, unsophisticated
woman of the people, it shows also that J. M. Barrie had compassion on
her intellectual shortcomings and was ever ready to humour the poor body
and to twinkle tolerantly on her whimsies, when he might, had he so
chosen, have withered her with a word. To take a sample passage: “Now
that I was an author, I must get into a club. But you should have heard
my mother on clubs! She knew of none save those to which you subscribe a
pittance weekly, and the London clubs were her scorn. Often I heard her
on them—she raised her voice to make me hear, whichever room I might be
in, and it was when she was sarcastic that I skulked the most: ‘Thirty
pounds is what he will have to pay the first year, and ten pounds a year
after that. You think it’s a lot o’ siller? Oh, no, you’re mista’en—it’s
nothing ava’. For the third part of thirty pounds you could rent a
four-roomed house, but what is a four-roomed house, what is thirty
pounds, compared to the glory of being a member of a club?’ … My wisest
policy was to remain downstairs when these withering blasts were blowing,
but probably I went up in self-defence.

“‘I never saw you so pugnacious before, mother.’

“‘Oh,’ she would reply, promptly, ‘you canna expect me to be sharp in the
uptake when I am no’ a member of a club.’

“‘But the difficulty is in becoming a member. They are very particular
about whom they elect, and I daresay I shall not get in.’

“‘Well, I’m but a poor crittur (not being member of a club), but I think
I can tell you to make your mind easy on that head. You’ll get in, I’se
uphaud—and your thirty pounds will get in, too.’”

And so on. Humour, of course! The sagacious, garrulous mother, the
highly diverted, patient son! The picture has pleased the Scotch and
English-speaking nations of two hemispheres. Yet is it of the stupidest
and the most foolish.

On another page we get the following pretty piece of curtain lifting: ‘So
my mother and I go up the stair together. ‘We have changed places,’ she
says; ‘that was just how I used to help you up, but I’m the bairn now.’
She brings out the Testament again; it was always lying within reach.…
And when she has read for a long time she ‘gives me a look,’ as we say in
the North, and I go out, to leave her alone with God.… Often and often
I have found her on her knees, but I always went softly away, closing
the door. I never heard her pray, but I know very well how she prayed,
and that, when that door was shut, there was not a day in God’s sight
between the worn woman and the little child.’

We can do without such books, Dr. J. M. Barrie, even though they sell
well.

Even as Dr. Archer has discovered in _Paradise Lost_ an inexhaustible
mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have I found in Dr. J. A. Hammerton’s
_J. M. Barrie and his Books_ an inexhaustible fund of the pure gold of
Scotch opinion not only as to Dr. Barrie, but also as to other matters.
First let me string together a few pearls about Dr. Barrie.

“I have seen it argued [says our excellent author] that the publication
of such a book as this is a reprehensible practice [_sic_], in that
it implies the elevation of its subject to the rank of a classic.… A
sufficient answer to this charge would seem to be that in such writers as
J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, ‘Ian Maclaren,’ Rudyard Kipling, and several
others [_sic_], the public that reads books is vastly more interested
than it is in its mighty dead.”

The collocation of “such writers” in this passage is as ingenious as it
is absurdly Scotch.

“Among the literary men of the present day there is none who has been
more personal in his writings than Dr. Barrie; he is as personal in prose
as Byron was in poetry. His own heart, his own experiences, the lives of
his ‘ain folk,’ these have been the subjects out of which _his genius has
made literature_.”

The italics are our own.

“The main distinction of Nottingham journalism lies in the fact that it
is associated with the name of Dr. J. M. Barrie.… To-day the so-called
‘Press House’ is a tavern a few yards removed from the ‘Frying Pan,’ and
there penny-a-liners and half-fledged reporters drink beer and fancy
themselves full-blown journalists, carrying down the traditions of Billy
Kirker and that bright Bohemian band. But there are no Barries among
them.”

Nottingham, evidently, is in a parlous way.

“It is well known that Dr. Barrie’s start was like that of so many others
who have won their way to greatness in the Republic of Letters: a brief
spell of journalism, and then—the plunge into literature.”

One can hear Dr. Barrie splashing about for dear life.

“It had never occurred to him [Barrie] that his task lay so near his
hand; that to turn the lives of his fellow-townsmen into literature was
the way that God had chosen for him to make the age to come his own.”

I should think not, indeed!

“In Barrie’s case it was comparatively a short struggle, and two or three
years after the time when he found that Scots dialect was enough to damn
a book, he had succeeded in making it an attraction; presently its charm
became the most striking feature of contemporary letters, and what we may
call the Barrie school arose to accomplish feats unique in the literary
history of the nineteenth century.”

Prodigious!

“Sydney Smith was witty; so, too, was Sheridan; Dickens was a humourist;
Hood, like Barrie, was at once a wit and a humourist.”

Who would have thought it?

“The noblest book which Barrie has given to the world is none other than
_Margaret Ogilvy_, in which—to use the vile and vulgar phrase—he has made
‘copy’ of his mother.… If he had done nothing more than draw that sweet
picture of a good woman’s humble, happy life, he would have deserved well
of his generation. It was a delicate, almost an impossible, task to take
up, and only an artist of the first order could have dared to hope for
success in it.… There is no passage in all that Barrie has written more
essentially Scottish in character than the delightfully humorous account
of his mother on the prospect of his election to a well-known London
club, for which he had been nominated by the good fairy of his literary
life—Frederick Greenwood.”

Most interesting and most illuminating. Now for Dr. Hammerton on smaller
matters. He assures us that “if one will only read the anecdotes of
village ‘loonies’ with which Scots literature abounds—especially Dean
Ramsay’s _Reminiscences_ and _The Laird o’ Logan_—he will find that the
average Scots idiot was a creature of considerably more humour than the
average Englishman”—which is a palpable hit. Also, “Only once have I
felt inclined to wince in reading anything of Barrie’s, and that was one
chapter entitled, ‘Making the Best of it,’ in _A Window in Thrums_; for
here it seemed to me he was dwelling on an unworthy element of character
which is more typical of the English rural and working classes than of
the Scots. I mean the flattering of wealthy fools with a view to largess.”

Dr. Hammerton is quite amusing. His notion of the tremendousness of Dr.
Barrie and of the vast superiority of the Scotch does him credit. One
day, perhaps, he will wake up to the fact that Dr. Barrie is not among
the persons who write literature. And even though Dr. Hammerton should
never realise it, the fact remains.




X

THE SCOT IN LETTERS


Dr. Archer was once at pains to prove that his countrymen had contributed
“at least their share” of good works to the main stream of English
literature. Dr. Archer did this with the help, I believe, of an anthology
by Mr. Henley. Properly wielded, an anthology is an excellent weapon,
inasmuch as you can prove almost anything out of it. In the supposition
that Scotland has done admirably by letters, Dr. Archer has the support
of a large body of Scotchmen. For my own part I am quite ready to admit
that she has done her best. What a poor best that is, everybody is aware,
though so far as I know it is now for the first time set forth in print.
When one comes to look upon English literature in the mass, beginning
with Chaucer and coming down to Tennyson, and dealing only with the
larger forces which have gone to the production of it, one perceives
at once that Scotland’s share in the matter has been so small as to be
scarcely worth counting. Against Chaucer, perhaps, she can place James
I., but the difference is as the difference between chalk and cheese.
Against Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists she has nothing to
show you, good, bad, or indifferent. Against Milton I suppose she will
offer you Drummond of Hawthornden, and for Shelley and Keats, Burns. And
of course she vaunts herself on Scott and Carlyle, and takes a certain
haughty pride in the fact that R. L. Stevenson was Scotch.

To James I. and Drummond of Hawthornden she is welcome; both of them
are what may be termed tolerable poets, and there the matter ends. Of
Burns and his work I have already given my view, but I would say here
that while at the present moment his popularity is of the widest and
has all the appearances of stability, the circumstance that he wrote in
a vernacular must ultimately relegate him to a position of comparative
obscurity. As Scotland gradually extricates herself from the sloughs of
barbarism in which she wallows so joyfully, she will inevitably shed her
uncouth dialect, and, as soon as that is accomplished, Burns, excepting
as a curiosity, will no longer exist.

For Scott and Carlyle little need be said. Both, I believe, have had
their day. Scott, erstwhile the Wizard of the North, is rapidly dropping
out of public favour. At the present moment he is what may be styled
“a school-prize classic.” _Ivanhoe_ and _The Lady of the Lake_, once
considered to be marvellous performances, are now doled out to grubby
children for punctual attendance at board schools. In the libraries,
public and private, Scott, of course, figures, but the public library
statistics go to indicate that he is not being read with avidity, and
in private libraries he is felt to be rather a cumberer of space.
Talking to a well-known Scotch critic as to the general decay of interest
in Scott, I found him to be under no illusion on the point, and he
electrified me by saying, “Scott—well, of course! But between ourselves,
man, I cannot read the d⸺ books.” This is pretty well everybody’s case.
To avow that you have not read Scott is still, perhaps, to confess to
a defect in your reading. All the same, if you are a person of average
tendencies, you have not read Scott, neither do you propose to do so.

Thomas Carlyle—“true Thomas” as Dr. Archer pathetically dubs him—is
another Scotch rocket which has already touched its highest and begun to
descend. Both intellectually and as an artist Carlyle, it is true, was
worth a dozen Scotts, but he was a Scotchman, and come as near it as he
may, a Scotchman cannot do enduring work. So that Carlyle, in the natural
order of things, is, as one might say, dropping down the ladder rung by
rung. He has ceased to be a “force.” People have discovered that his
so-called gospel is a somewhat cheap and snobbish affair. All that is
really left of him is _The French Revolution_, which survives because of
a certain vividness of style. For the rest, Carlyle looks like going to
pieces. A century hence he will be of no more account than Christopher
North is to-day.

As to Stevenson, while the Scotch are disposed to brag about him when
occasion arises, they have always fought more or less shy of him. He
has never been admitted to that cordial intimacy of relation which a
Scotchman extends alike to Robbie Burns and Dr. R. S. Crockett. As a
matter of fact, he wrote too well and with too sincere a regard for the
finer elements of literature to be properly understood in Scotland.
Further, he took the precaution not to interlard his English with such
phrases as “ben the hoose,” “getting a wee doited,” and so forth. He had
no use for Scotch idioms, and when he dropped into them he was sorry
for it. And he did not stiffen his pages with panegyric of the Scotch
character. In fact, Stevenson tacitly refused to have anything to do
with the advertising of his countrymen. He had the good sense to perceive
that if you are to use the English language as a medium for expression,
you might as well use it skilfully and decently while you are about it.
More than all, he did not boast of having been born in a wynd, or of
having pu’d fine gowans wi’ Jeanie, the auld sweetie wife’s dochter at
Drumkettle.

And an author—a modern author—who is guilty of all these sins of
commission and omission must not expect perfection from the warm heart
of Scotia. Somehow the Scotch seem to be a nation of persons without
fathers. Nearly every Scot one meets strikes one as being a first
generation man. You know instinctively, even if he does not tell you,
that in his childhood he ran about with untended nose and called his
mother “mither.” Even after he has been to “the college,” and made some
progress in the business or profession to which he may have devoted
himself, he clings to his squalid origins and to the manners of his
forbears for dear life. He is the barbarian who scorns to be tamed. The
tradition of Scottish independence demands that he should keep you well
posted in the facts as to his humble descent and upbringing, and that
he should go on speaking as much of his heaven-forsaken dialect as you
will let him. To such a person a Scot of the Stevenson type does not
appeal. Stevenson, of course, was a Scot, and meet to be bragged about as
a successful Scot. For all that he was not a “brither Scot.” He took to
the English way and the English manner, and the brither Scots as a body
had no alternative but to turn a sour face towards him. From the literary
point of view, though he accomplished great things, R. L. S. is just
another instance of the ultimate ineptitude of the Scotchman. He tried
and tried and tried. No writer of our time has had nobler ideals. Yet he
could not climb after his desire. His books are a procession of worthy
and even splendid failures. The Scotchness of his blood, do what he might
to eradicate it, was too much for him. It kept him from attaining the
highest.

To treat of the new school of Scottish writers in the present chapter
is, perhaps, to do them too much honour. At no period in the history
of letters has such flagrantly bad writing been offered to the English
public as is being at present offered by our Scottish authors. Their
works have been boomed into a vogue which they do not deserve, and
even Scotchmen admit that their so-called transcripts from life are
as false and as shoddy as such transcripts well could be. Writing on
this subject, Mr. R. B. Cunninghame, himself a Scot, says: “If it
pleases them (the hoot-awa’-man gang) to represent that half of the
population of their native land is imbecile, the fault is theirs. But
for the idiots, the precentors, elders of churches, the ‘select men,’
and those landward folk who have been dragged of late into publicity, I
compassionate them, knowing their language has been distorted, and they
themselves been rendered such abject snivellers, that not a hen wife,
shepherd, ploughman, or any one who thinks in ‘guid braid Scots’ would
recognise himself dressed in the motley which it has been the pride of
kailyard writers to bestow. Neither would I have Englishmen believe
that the entire Scotch nation is composed of ministers, elders, and
maudlin whiskified physicians, nor even of precentors who are employed
in Scotland to put the congregation out by starting hymns on the wrong
note, or in a key impossible for any but themselves to compass.” Mr.
Cunninghame ought to know.

The other day I saw in a paper, edited, of course, by a Scotchman, a
reference to “many contemporary Scottish men of letters.” I do not
hesitate to assert that the number of Scottish men of letters now living
can be counted twice on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, with the persons
who might be expected to count in such a category, in my mind’s eye, I
have difficulty in admitting that any one of them is a man of letters
in the strict sense of the phrase. Even Dr. Andrew Lang, who is by far
the most competent Scotchman now writing, would probably not care to lay
claim to the dignity which the term “men of letters” suggests.




XI

THE SCOT IN COMMERCE


When a Scotchman’s parents decide that he shall be neither a minister
nor a journalist, or when a wee laddie who has been dedicated to one or
other of these offices kicks over the traces, or turns out something of a
failure, there are still splendid openings for him. Far away to the south
stretches that land of milk and honey—“England”—and there is scarcely
a square mile of it whereon you do not find either a shop or a bank or
a factory, or some other hive of industry created, of course, for the
special benefit of Scotchmen. Donald, the hobbledehoy, that would not be
a minister, and was not intended for a professor, and had not shorthand
enough to be a journalist, is packed off South to wear an apron, to
shovel gold behind bars, or “to work his way up” in an engineering
establishment, as the case may be. Furthermore, he is understood to
make an excellent gardener, and not a few English noblemen like to keep
him about their places weeding and pruning, and feeding hogs. In the
main, however, he rather tends to become a clerk in an office. There
is something about being able to keep your coat on while you work and
to be in the confidence of Mr. Foozlem’s books,—of holding, in short,
a “position of trust,” at thirty shillings a week, which is peculiarly
attractive to the Scottish mind; and employers of clerical labour appear
to be firmly convinced that Donald is the man for them. They like him
because he is never late, he is always putting a bit by, and he is as
cheap as horseflesh. His slowness and want of sagacity are no great
matter. The fact that he can only work in grooves also does not matter.
Thrift and punctuality, not to mention cheapness, clothe him with virtues
like a garment, and when higher posts fall vacant, your employer—good,
easy man—has a way of turning a hopeful eye on “that steady young Scot.”
The late remarkable case of Mr. Goudie, who was as Scotch as you make
them, and, perhaps, the greatest and stupidest rogue that has adorned the
annals of modern banking, shows what a Scotch clerk can do when he tries.
The genius of his country asserted itself in the matter of Mr. Goudie,
and we saw what we saw. In banks, at any rate, to be Scotch will not be
to rank with Cæsar’s wife for quite a little time to come. Of course, we
shall be told that the raking up of Goudie is unfair. It always is unfair
to say anything to the detriment of Scotchmen. But the point I wish to
insist upon is that Scotch clerks and Scotch managers and Scotchmen at
large are no more trustworthy and no more to be depended upon and no less
human than Englishmen. The Scotch themselves spare no effort to have it
believed that if you want men of true probity, you must go to Scotland
for them. Employers have taken them at their word and continue to take
them at their word, and, all other things being equal, if there are two
applicants for a position in the average commercial house, and one of
them is English and the other Scotch, the Scotchman gets the preference,
simply because he is Scotch.

Among Dr. Maclaren’s Drumtochty marvels, there is an old couple who have
a son who is a professor. That son, being, of course, a model of what
a son should be, writes home to his good mother once a week, and the
letter is invariably forthcoming in the kirkyard on Sundays, so that all
who care to read may be informed as to the professor’s condition and
progress. Many touching things are said by the admirers of this honest
couple as to the honour their son has conferred upon “the Glen,” and
the general prodigiousness of his character and position. But it never
occurs to Dr. Maclaren to put into the mouth of any of his people a
single word as to what is thought of the professor by the persons with
whom he is dealing. What do his fellow professors think of him? What do
his students think of him? We all know that professor from Drumtochty,
and we all wish that Drumtochty had kept him. Not only in universities,
but wherever there is a modest living to be made, there you will find him
in full bloom, and the more authority he has, the less possible is he
to get on with. As a colleague, too, he is equally objectionable. When
a certain Scotch lady was informed during the time of the Indian Mutiny
that her son had been captured by the enemy with other prisoners and that
he had been put into a chain-gang, she said with emotion, “God help the
man that’s chained to oor Sandy.” And this is precisely the trouble. To
work amicably with a Scotchman in any commercial capacity is well nigh
an impossibility. He is eaten up with a squint-eyed envy; the fear that
for some inscrutable reason you wish to oust him out of his occupation is
ever with him, and it is part of his creed and code to shoulder out any
fellow worker who happens to be getting a little more money or a little
more credit than himself. In fact, when he comes to take up any sort of
a berth, it is with the consciousness that, as a Scot, it is his duty by
hook or by crook to make himself master of the situation, and, if needs
be, to turn out in the long run his own employer. If you ask a Scotchman
how it comes to pass that so many of his compatriots hold positions of
influence in commercial houses, he will reply, nine times out of ten,
“Well, you see, we just drop into them.” If this were so, nobody would
mind, but as a matter of fact, your Scotchman is far too calculating to
drop into anything. His great game is the game of grab; he will move
heaven and earth to get what he wants, and, as Dr. Robertson Nicoll has
told us, he is not over-scrupulous in his methods of getting it. Every
commercial man could give instances of this over-reachingness which is
such an essential feature of the policy of the Scotch employee. Live and
let live is not at all in his way. Of gratitude for help rendered he
knows nothing. He begins life with sycophancy, and the moment he meets
with any sort of success, he assumes a truculent over-bearingness which
he is pleased to call force of character. When you hear of men being
deprived of their positions by sharp practice and shiftiness, no matter
whether it be in a draper’s shop or in a gilt-edged bank, you will find
that nine times out of ten there is a Scotchman in the case; that it is
the Scotchman who has got up the bother, and that it is the Scotchman
who is to take the post the other man vacates. Dr. Nicoll, who is a
veritable encyclopædia of Scotch character, wrote some time ago a number
of articles which he called _Firing out the Fools_. He asserted very
properly that in most business houses there are always a number of fools
who are a dead weight on progress. The capable men who are not quite
capable enough are the plague of most heads of commercial concerns. You
want a man to do such and such things; you look round your staff; you
consider the merits of this and that person, and you feel that none of
them is exactly the person you want. What are you to do? If you endeavour
to get a man from outside, the chances are that he will be no better than
the men you have. Dr. Nicoll, of course, knows exactly what you should
do. He does not say, “Send for the nearest Scotchman,” because that would
be a little too explicit; but he does say that plod is the great quality
which distinguishes competence from foolishness, and, as everybody knows,
the Scot is nothing if not a plodder. Plod, plod, plod, with plenty of
divagations into plotting and scheming, is the essence of his life. And
when all is said and done, plod may be counted about the meanest and
least desirable of the virtues. It is to the plodders that we owe pretty
well everything we wished we had not got. The very word plod is about the
ugliest and the most nauseating in the English language. Your plodder
may plod and plod and plod, but he never does anything that is more
than middling. In the arts this is a fact beyond traverse. The plodding
artist is still a student at fifty; the plodding writer is a fool to
the end of his life; the plodding actor says, “My Lord, the carriage
waits,” till the workhouse or the grave claims him for its own. This
being so, why should the plodder be the only ware in commercial matters?
Brilliancy and imagination are nowadays just as much wanted in business
as in any other department of life. Tact and a reasonably decent feeling
for your fellow-man are also wanted. Your Scot, on his own showing, does
not possess these qualities. He even goes so far as to disdain them and
to assure you that they are not consistent with “force of character”
and “rugged independence.” The moral is obvious, and I should not be
surprised if English employers of labour have not already begun to take
it to heart. Fire out the fools! is a shibboleth which comes ill from a
Scotchman, because in the large result it may easily mean, Fire out the
Scotchmen.




XII

THE SCOT AS A DIPSOMANIAC


Under the inspiring tutelage of the national bard, Scotland has become
one of the drunkenest nations in the world. Among the lower classes of
the Scotch cities drunkenness is the preponderating vice. In the rural
districts whiskey is the only beverage that finds any sort of favour.
There is no occasion of life which does not provoke the average Scotchman
to inhibition. Births, deaths, and marriages are all celebrated in
drink. On Burns Day, Scotland rushes to the bottle as one man. The same
is true of New Year’s Day; and year in and year out everybody “tastes”
and “tastes” and “tastes” from morn to dewy eve. The land simply seethes
in whiskey, and though you take hold of the wings of the morning you
cannot get away from the odour of it. In twelve hours spent in Edinburgh
I saw more drinking than could be seen in an English town of the same
population in a couple of days, and I know what drinking means.

Whiskey to breakfast, whiskey to dinner, whiskey to supper; whiskey when
you meet a friend, whiskey over all business meetings whatsoever; whiskey
before you go into the kirk, whiskey when you come out; whiskey when
you are about to take a journey, whiskey all along the road, whiskey at
the journey’s end; whiskey when you are well, whiskey if you be sick,
whiskey almost as soon as you are born, whiskey the last thing before
you die—that is Scotland. There is a cock-and-bull tale to the effect
that all the finest clarets go to Leith and are drunk in Edinburgh.
Practically, there is no really good claret in all Scotland, unless it
be at the hotels which have been built for the reception of English and
American tourists, and the Scot to the manner born would not give you
a “thank you” for the best claret in the world. “Go bring me a pint of
wine and bring it in a silver tassy” was a mere piece of swagger on the
part of the bard. Wine is not drunk in Scotland; the Scotchman can get no
“forrader” with it, and as for drinking it out of a silver tassy, there
are not more than three silver tassies in the country. Whiskey, and that
of the crudest and most shuddering quality is undoubtedly the Scotchman’s
peculiar vanity. The amount that he can consume without turning a hair is
quite appalling. I have seen a Scotchman drink three bottles of Glenlivet
on a railway journey from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, and when he got out
at Edinburgh he strutted doucely to the refreshment bar and demanded
further whiskey. In London, and particularly in Fleet Street, his feats
in this connection are notorious. In the more central quarters of London
there are a number of hostelries which are almost wholly devoted to
Scottish requirements in the way of ardent liquors. Under some Scotch
name, such as the Scotch Stores, the Clachan, the Highland Laddie, and
so forth, these places flourish and the proprietors of them wax fat.
Here, any morning in the week, you will find brither Scots assembled,
elbow on counter, indulging in the whiskey which delights their souls.
All day there is plenty of company, plenty of Doric, plenty of discussion
on politics and the questions of the hour, but more than all, a steady
flow of whiskey. And by eleven P.M. or thereabouts the company begins
to exhibit a tendency to song. And at closing time it staggers forth
singing _Scots Wha Hae_ and _My Ain Kind Dearie O_ in various pathetic
keys. _Scots Wha Hae_ is a poor song to sing in the circumstances, and
as for _My Ain Kind Dearie O_, she probably fumes at home and is not in
the least kind in her welcoming of her whiskeyful lord. It is certain
that the number of persons in Fleet Street employed upon the press either
in literary capacities or as advertisement canvassers or printers is
very considerable, and among the lower grades of them, the drinking of
whiskey appears to be considered a part of their duty to themselves
and to mankind at large. At the same time it is only fair to say that
a drunken Scotchman is not by any means a common spectacle, the reason
being that the Scot is so inured to the consumption of whiskey from his
youth up, that he can take almost any quantity without becoming drunk
about the legs. Drink, however, he must and will have, and both at home
and abroad he makes a point of getting as much of it as his means will
allow. In Scotland it is quite general for men and women alike to drink
whiskey raw and to take the water afterwards. This is done at every meal,
and if you call upon a Scotch household at any hour of the day you will
be at once offered a four-or five-finger dose of the national drink. To
refuse it is to be set down for an evilly-disposed person. Burns the
Almighty approved of whiskey drinking; with him it was the symbol of
good-fellowship, and he is quoted to you continually as the justification
of all excesses.

    We are na drunk, we’re no’ that drunk
    But just a drappie in our ee,

is the great retort used by Scotchmen if one suggests that they have had
enough or too much.

It is to the Scot’s amazing capacity for the consumption of spirit that
one may fairly attribute some of his minor defects. Dourness, of which
every Scotchman possesses a fair share, and of which he is invariably
more or less proud, has always struck me as being in a great measure the
outcome of too much whiskey overnight. It is not till he is properly
exhilarated with drink that a Scot can unbend himself in the smallest
degree. Once primed, he does his best to prove himself an excellent and
generous fellow by becoming as uproarious as the host of the tavern in
which he is drinking will allow him to be. But next morning, when the
whiskey is out of him, he is a very sad and sober man indeed. Then it
is that he passes for “dour.” You talk with him and get for answers
grunts: he cannot smile; he plods heavily away at whatever labour stands
in front of him: he is glum, rude of tongue and dull of mind, and his
brethren set it down for you to his “Scots dourness.”

His gift of steady drinking also accounts, in my opinion, for his general
mediocrity. Whiskey may be a fine and healthy drink for persons who do
not take enough of it; but to be braced up with it by day and to swim in
it by night is calculated to have a detrimental effect even on the bright
intellects that come out of Scotland. I have not the smallest desire to
suggest that there are not plenty of hard drinkers whose blood is more
or less purely English, yet somehow there is no kind of man in the world
who makes the drinking of furious spirit a _cultus_ and a boast in the
way that the Scotchman does. To be fou’ or as he would put it, to have a
drappie in his eye, is the Scotchman’s notion of bigness and freedom and
manly independence. He is a ranter and a roarer in his cups, and on the
whole much more distressing to meet drunk than sober, which is saying a
great deal.




XIII

THE SCOT AS CRIMINAL


Burns, like every other Scotchman that has trailed a pen, did not fail
to help along the Scottish advertisement with a suitable contribution.
He wrote _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_, and thereby did a great thing
for Scotland, setting up a picture of Scottish home life and piety which
the generations seem to regard as authentic. We have all been taught to
admire the moral excellences of that cottar, not to mention the moral
excellences of his wife and children:

    With joy unfeigned brothers and sisters meet,
    And each for others’ welfare kindly spiers;
    The social hours swift winged, unnotic’d fleet,
    Each tells the unco’s that he see or hears.
    The parents partial eye their hopeful years,
    Anticipation forward prints the view;
    The mother, wi’ her needle and her shears,
    Gars auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new,
    The father mixes a’ wi’ admonition due.

    Their masters’ and their mistresses’ command
    The younkers a’ are warned to obey.
    And mind their labours wi’ an eydent hand,
    And ne’er tho’ out of sight to jauk or play—
    And O! be sure to fear the Lord alway.
    And mind your duty, duly morn and night,
    Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray,
    Implore his counsel and assisting might,
    They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright.

All of which is very fine, and, with much more to the like effect, has
helped the Scotch peasant into an odour of sanctity which on the whole
does not appear to be quite his element. Indeed, so far from conducting
his life in the manner suggested by _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_, the
average Scot of the lower orders appears to base himself on the more
scandalous portion of Burns’s writing.

According to the latest returns, the population of Scotland is 4,472,000.
In the year 1900, which is the latest year for which statistics are
available, a matter of 180,000 persons were charged with criminal
offences in Scotland. So that out of every twenty-five Scotchmen in
Scotland one is either a convicted criminal or a person who has been
charged with a criminal offence. From the official Buff-book dealing with
the subject I take the following:

“The criminal returns for 1900 show an increase over those for the
previous year under all the important classes into which crime and
offences are grouped, the number of persons charged has risen to close
upon 180,000, and if we compare this with the last published English
tables for the year 1899, we shall find, for equal numbers of population,
Scotland has over three charges for every two in England.

“Furthermore, imprisonments in Scotland continue to be proportionately
much higher than in England, and for every three committals in England
there are seven in Scotland. The increase in criminal offences during
1900 is distributed under the following heads”:

    Culpable homicide                                            28
    Assaults of husbands on wives                               690
    Cruel and unnatural treatment of children                   242
    Housebreaking of all kinds                                  190
    Theft                                                     1,916
    Malicious mischief                                          986
    Betting games and lotteries                                  96
    Breach of the peace, etc.                                   519
    Cruelty to animals                                          145
    Offences in relation to dogs                                148
    Drunkenness                                               5,785
    Offences against Elementary Education Acts                  397
    Army deserters                                            1,207
    Offences against Police Acts, by-laws and regulations     9,570
    Prostitution                                                613
    Bicycling, etc, offences                                    367
    Obstructions and nuisances, and other Road Act offences   2,664
    Public Health Act offences                                  162
    Lodging without consent of owner under Vagrancy Acts        425
                                                             ------
                                                             26,150

It will thus be seen that theft and drunkenness bear the gree among
Scotch crimes, while the large number of offences against police acts,
by-laws, and regulations tends to show that the Scot is not a good
citizen. The mere statistics as to crime, however, do not give one
anything like an adequate idea of the general depravity of the Scotch
character. To understand it properly we must add to the criminal returns
the illegitimacy returns.

From Dr. Albert Leffingwell’s[16] book on illegitimacy I take the
following passage:

“In 1881 the census of Scotland showed that there were then living in
that portion of the kingdom 492,454 unmarried women (that is to say,
spinsters and widows) between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. During
the ten years 1878-87 there were born in Scotland 105,091 illegitimate
children, or an annual average of twenty-one to each thousand unmarried
females at this specified age. In England and Wales the corresponding
number of the unmarried females was 3,046,431, and the number of
illegitimate births during the same period was 426,184, or fourteen
to each thousand of the possible mothers. In Ireland, the number of
unmarried women at this age was a third larger than in Scotland, or
731,767. Yet to each thousand of these were born every year less than
five illegitimate children during a ten-year period, 1878-87. Here again
we are perplexed with the problem why Scotia and Hibernia should present
such widely different contrasts. Every year in Scotland there are _five
times the proportion_ of bastards that see the light in Ireland!”

Dr. Leffingwell’s perplexity is the perplexity of the scientific person.
That Burns should have anything to do with illegitimacy of Scotia would
probably seem ridiculous to the scientific mind, but I believe that
Burns, and the spirit of loose living for which he stands, have been to
no little extent responsible for bringing Scotland to the discreditable
and degrading pass indicated by Dr. Leffingwell’s figures.

In Ireland the rate of illegitimacy is 4.4, in Scotland, 21.5 to each
thousand unmarried women. Now, the poet who stands in the same relation
to the Irish people as Burns does to the Scotch is Thomas Moore. He has
given Ireland quite as considerable a body of songs as Burns has given
to Scotland. He is just as essentially Irish as Burns is Scotch; but
compare the tone of the two men. One of them gives you _The lass who made
the bed to me_, the other, _Rich and rare were the gems she wore_. In
reading Burns you find that quite two thirds of what he has written is
marred by unpleasant and libidinous suggestion, but there is not a line
of Moore which would not pass muster in a ladies’ school. To the rantin’
roarin’ Billies of Scotland the difference may form material for a sneer,
but in the long run, clearly, the advantage is with the women of Ireland.
If Scotland wishes to get rid of her drunkenness and to lessen the crime
which arises out of it, and if she wishes to bring herself into line with
the ordinary standards of decency, she will, I am afraid, have to put a
little less trust in that mighty performer before the Flesh—Robert Burns.




XIV

THE SCOT BY ADOPTION


I have been told that there are two kinds of Scotchmen, and that it
would be a mistake to confound them, or to suggest that they have any
characteristics in common. One kind, and the best kind, I am assured, is
the Highlander. The other—and the more disreputable kind—is the Scotchman
of the Lowlands. I have met both sorts, and I have not been able to
discover that there is much to choose between them. For all practical
purposes the blood is identical. It may at one time have been of two
distinct strains, but these appear to have become in a great measure
fused, and the blend is not beautiful. I think it was Dr. Cunninghame
Graham who said of a certain Scotch peddler that he looked like a cross
between a low-class Indian and an ourang-outang that had somehow got
itself baptised. This, no doubt, is a little severe. But a Scotchman
does certainly make one feel that underneath his unsatisfactory and
obviously imperfect civilisation the hairy simian sits and grins. Rouse
him, thwart him, disappoint him, rally him, and suddenly your cross-eyed,
sandy-haired, bandy-legged, but withal sleek, smug, moralising man
suddenly “bleezes,” and you perceive in him the ten thousand devils of
an ancient and arboreal barbarity. Whether he be Highlander or Lowlander
or mongrel, as he mostly is, it is just the same. He is Scotch and
compounded for the most part of savage. Like the converted Kroo-boy, he
may at any time revert into his immemorial primalism and you can never
be sure of him. Whether he hail from the Isles or from the Lothians, the
Scot is just the Scot, and there is nothing more to be said for him.

There is, however, a kind of Scot who, while not of Scotch blood, has
adopted the manners and habits of Caledonia, and is rather flattered if
you take him for a true-born Scotchman. This type of creature usually
owes his retrogression to the fact that he has married a Scotch wife.
Of Scotchwomen as a body, I do not wish to say anything that will be
considered ungallant. If one passes over their abnormal capacity for
thrift, I suppose they are pretty much the same as other women. So far as
I am aware I have not met more than a dozen Scotchwomen in my life. Two
of them I have known intimately, and I have always thanked my stars that
I was not married to either of them. But to return to our Scotchman by
adoption. Usually, as I say, he is married to a Scotchwoman. Before you
arrive at a knowledge of this circumstance, you are inclined to wonder
what is the matter with him. His style and proclivities have induced you
to set him down for a Scotchman, yet you find that his Doric is bad,
that he eats his porridge with sugar and takes his whiskey with soda,
and that he was born in Gloucestershire. Also, he tells you frankly
that his parents were not Scotch, and he adds, with a look of supreme
satisfaction, “but my wife is.” And straightway he plunges into tender
reminiscences of the days of his courtship, touches modestly upon the
wealth and importance of his wife’s relations, hints at the fearful
expense to which he was put by his many journeys North when he went
a-wooing, and gurgles with a sickly smile that it was worth the trouble,
and that he does not know “what he would do without her.” All of which is
mightily interesting. If you pursue your investigations further, you will
find that the man is perhaps a little more to pity than to blame. He has
been compelled to become as Scotch as he knows how, willy-nilly. At the
head of his table sits the daughter of Scotia—ruddy, chapped, and sharp
of tongue; she looks down on things English, her husband included; her
children are taught to remember that their grandfather is a provost and
magnificent in the jute line; she keeps her house in the Scotch manner,
her servants are Scotch, her household linens are Scotch, her beef is
Scotch, and her whiskey is Scotch; her little boys wear tartan; tripe is
the great dish for supper, and her husband must eat oatmeal to the verge
of scrofula. Abroad, too, this man must be as Scotch as the best of them.
In his place of business, Scotchmen _protégés_ of his wife’s relations
are the only ware: he loathes them, and they laugh at him behind his
back, but he has to put up with them. On Saturdays they instruct him in
the mysteries of “gowf”; on Mondays they tell one another what a “damned
foozler” he is. His holidays are always spent in the Western Highlands;
he is everlastingly seeing his wife off to Aberdeen; he banks at the
Bank of Scotland; he smokes the tobacco which has been so ably pushed
into fame by Dr. J. M. Barrie; he believes that the Glasgow bailies know
what they are about; his money, which has been scraped together on the
Scotch principle, is doucely put away in Scotch ventures; and altogether
Scotland does very well out of him. The fact that he is a mean little
man does not worry him. The practice and view of life which the lady of
his affections has forced upon him is bringing him a due share of this
world’s gear, and in that fact he takes consolation for his attenuated
honesty, his lost manhood, and his lost nationality. This is one side of
the picture and the brightest.

On the other side it were well for us not to look too closely. The
Englishman who has been appropriated by a Scotch wife does not always
succeed in profiting by the worldly wisdom with which his spouse would
imbue him. Then there is trouble. For a Scotchwoman who cannot report
to her kindred in Scotland that her husband is “getting on” feels
that she has been robbed of the prime joy of existence. Her contempt
for the man who cannot win and grip siller eats into her soul, until
she has no other sentiment left. Bit by bit she develops into a scold
and a curtain-lecturer; the man who found her so fair by the Birks of
Aberfeldey becomes a furtive wanderer from her side, and it all ends in
too much whiskey, recrimination, and execration. I know an Englishman
of parts who has never earned enough money to be under the necessity of
paying income tax. He is a man of small stature and limp, and he has a
great fear in his eyes. He is one of those men who might have done things
and have omitted to do them. The gossip about him is that he is badly
married. Once I saw his wife. She was a big, raw-boned Scotchwoman, with
a heavy accent on her. It was New Year’s Eve, and she had evidently been
“tasting.” At sight of me, out of the bigness of her Scotch hospitality,
she proposed a “nep,” and half filled three glasses from a stone bottle.
Then, with hand on hip, glass uplifted, and a blaze on her face, she
cried: “Here’s tae us and to hell with the English.” We drank the toast
in something of a silence. Later, when I was about to leave, my limp
friend would have accompanied me to the door. But the mistress of his
heart would have none of it. “Ye’ll awa’,” she said, then, “to yer bed;
yer friend is no’ that fou but he can find his ain way oot.” So that we
shook hands and parted on the stair. The man had had twenty years of it.
I understand him.

The idiot who takes to wearing kilts and speaking with an accent for
the mere sake of it is scarcely worth notice. But there are such people
even outside Colney Hatch. What they see in the Scotch to admire to the
point of spuriousness I cannot for the life of me make out. The garb
of old Gaul is, no doubt, very fetching from the point of view of the
weak-minded, but of its effeminacy there can be no doubt. Really, it is
a costume for small and pretty boys who are too young to be breeched.
In view of its associations and of its innate childishness,—not to say
immodesty,—it is a great pity that any Englishman should go out of his
way to wear it.




XV

THE SCOT AND ENGLAND


Although the political relations between Scotland and England would
seem to have been of the smoothest since the Act of Union, and in spite
of the fact that on the whole the merging of the two peoples under one
Government has tended hugely to the benefit of Scotland, it is the Scotch
fashion to lament the Union with groans and to insist that 1707 was a
black year for Scotchmen. I believe that were it not for the circumstance
that Scotland cannot produce capable men even in the way of agitators
we should soon have at St. Stephen’s a Scotch party which would be just
as troublesome and just as noisy and truculent as is the Irish party. I
believe, too, that within twelve months’ time as big a demand for Home
Rule and as much disquiet and rebellion could be got up in Scotland as
have ever existed in Ireland. Fortunately, however, the Scotch possess
neither the requisite agitators nor the requisite pluck to indulge in
serious demonstrations against the Imperial Government. So that they have
to content themselves with futile grumbling and petty acts of disloyalty.
The Scot has always been more or less of a fine hand at a treason. Out
of Scotland has come the only treasonable organisation which England can
boast of at the present day. I refer, of course, to that absurd group of
persons who once a year decorate the statue of Charles I. at Whitehall
with cheap wreaths, and circulate leaflets which profess to prove that
the reigning monarch in these realms is a usurper, and that our only
true monarch is a woman by the name of Mary, who lives somewhere on
the Continent. In any country but England these gentry would be laid
by the heels; though the mere fact that they are Scotch renders them
quite ineffective. We can afford to smile at them. All the same, we
must remember that if they could make trouble they would. Even in the
matter of the King’s Coronation the Scotch have managed to give us the
usual display of stupid insolence. Writing to his paper in May last, the
Scottish correspondent of the _Times_ said:

“The approaching coronation of the King and Queen seems to have awakened
rather less enthusiasm in certain quarters than either the Jubilee or
the Diamond Jubilee of her late Majesty. It would be absurd to make much
of the difference, but it does exist. In a word, the celebration of the
event will be distinctly more official than the rejoicings over the two
notable epochs of Queen Victoria’s later life. Two circumstances have
helped to bring this about—the Royal proclamation of two successive
holidays, and what is known in Scotland as the ‘numeral.’ They are
both absolutely sentimental considerations, but they have had a slight
influence. Trades councils, becoming ‘permeated’ with Socialism,
protest against what they are pleased to call the ‘mummery’ in London,
and the association of themselves therewith through local rejoicings,
and the idea of losing two days’ pay in one week is just sufficient to
arouse their resentment, which some corporations have tried to appease
by ignoring the proclamation, or applying it, on their own initiative,
to one of the days only. The ‘numeral’ connotes the quasi-patriotic
objection to the assumption of the title of King Edward VII. by his
Majesty. Some Scotsmen persist in refusing to see that, in calling
himself the Seventh Edward, the King neither intended to, nor did,
insinuate that he was the seventh of that name who had reigned over the
United Kingdom, and they declaim in grotesque fashion against the payment
of any kind of homage to the Crown. Their insignificance is shown by the
snub administered to them recently by the Convention of Burghs, which
is nothing if it is not truly and characteristically Scottish: their
influence is no less unmistakable in the resolution of several public
bodies to omit the ‘numeral’ from the inscription on their coronation
medals, and in the untimely fits of economy that have overcome some local
authorities not as a rule averse to feasting.”

It is the old tale over again. The Scotch braggart cry—“unconquered
and unconquerable”—is made to rend the welkin whenever the opportunity
serves. Edward the Seventh, of course, cannot be Edward the Seventh of
Scotland. It would never do. Therefore the “numeral” must not appear
on Scotch medals, and the rejoicings are to be as far as possible of
an official character. The ululation over the loss of two days’ pay
also is eminently Scotch. There is a time for work and a time for play,
says the wise man; but the whey-faced Scot plays always with a certain
disconsolateness because he feels that he is losing money all the
time. The fact is, that Scottish life and Scottish manners are almost
entirely dominated by the more evil traits of the Scotch character.
Independence and thrift must be read into everything the Scotchman does.
Poverty-stricken, starveling pride has been the ruin of the Scottish
people. It has made many of them sour, disagreeable, greedy, and
disloyal; it has made some of them hypocrites and crafty rogues; it has
narrowed their minds and stunted their national development; it has made
them a by-word and a mock in all the countries of the world, and it has
brought them to opprobrium even among Turks and Chinamen.

The career of the Scotchman in England has been picturesquely summarised
by Dr. Cunninghame Graham:

“In the blithe times of clans and moss-troopers [he says], when Jardines
rode and Johnstones raised, when Grahams stole, McGregors plundered, and
Campbells prayed themselves into fat sinecures, we were your enemies.
In stricken fields you southern folks used to discomfit us by reason of
your archers and your riders sheathed in steel. We on the borders had
the vantage of you, as you had cattle for us to steal, houses to burn,
and money and valuables for us to carry off. We having none, you were
not in a state to push retaliation in an effective way. Later, we sent
an impecunious king to govern you, and with him went a train of ragged
courtiers, all with authentic pedigrees but light of purse. From this
time date the Sawnies and the Sandies, the calumnies about our cuticle,
and those which stated that we were so tender-hearted that we scrupled
to deprive of life the smallest insect which we had about our clothes.
You found our cheekbones out, saw our red hair, and noted that we blew
our noses without a pocket-handkerchief, to save undue expense.… So far
so good. But still you pushed discovery to whiskey, haggis, sneeshin,
predestination, and all the other mysteries both of our cookery and our
faith. The bagpipes burst upon you (with a skirl), and even Shakespeare
set down things about them which I refrain from quoting, only because I
do not wish to frighten gentlewomen.… King George came in, in pudding
time, and all was changed, and a new race of Scotsmen dawned on the
English view. The ’15 and the ’45 sent out the Highlanders, rough-footed
and with deerskin thongs tied round their heads, … they marched and
conquered and made England reel, retreated, lost Culloden, and the mist
received them back. But their brief passage altered your views again, and
you perceived that Scotland was not all bailie, prayer-monger, merchant,
and sanctimonious cheat.… Then Scott arose and threw a glamour over
Scotland which was nearly all his own. True, we were poor, but then our
poverty was so romantic, and we appeared fighting for home and haggis,
for foolish native kings, for hills, for heather, freedom, and for all
those things which Englishmen enjoy to read about, but which in actual
life they take good care only themselves shall share. The pale-faced
master and the Highland chief, the ruined gentleman, the swashbuckler,
soldier, faithful servant, and the rest, he marked and made his own, but
then he looked about to find his counterfoil, the low comedians without
whose presence every tragedy must halt.

“Then came the Kailyarders, and said that Scott was Tory, Jacobite,
unpatriotic, unpresbyterian, and they alone could draw the Scottish type.
England believed them, and their large sale and cheap editions clinched
it, and to-day a Scotchman stands confessed a sentimental fool, a canting
cheat, a grave, sententious man, dressed in a ‘stan o’ black,’ oppressed
with the tremendous difficulties of the jargon he is bound to speak, and,
above all, weighed down with the responsibilities of being Scotch.”

As I have already mentioned, Dr. Cunninghame Graham is a Scot.

The whole truth about the Scotch relation with England is that the
Scot is more than sensible of the advantage it brings him, but being
by disposition wise as a serpent, he is afraid that if he did not
pretend to deplore it, it might not last in its present comfortable
unrestrictedness. Of course, this fear is entirely baseless. The
Englishman is too easy hearted to make laws against needy aliens whether
from north of the Tweed or elsewhere. All the same, the Scot continues
to howl on principle. He will not have our King, he will not have the
“numeral,” to call him English or even include him under the term British
is an indignity and an outrage. The Act of Union was a big mistake: the
poor Scot has been trodden down forbye ever since, and altogether he is
sorry that he is alive. And, for my own part, I am quite inclined to
think that there is much to be said for the latter sentiment.




XVI

THE WAY OUT


I do not think it is an exaggeration to describe England as a Scot-ridden
country. To whatever department of activity one looks one finds therein,
working his way up for all he is worth and by not over-scrupulous
methods, the so-called canny Scot. In some professions, notably that
of journalism, as I have shown, he has made himself more or less
predominant. In banks, offices, and manufactories he is to be found
as frequently as not, ruling the roost in the capacity of manager or
overseer; and in the general atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon business life
there is a persistent feel of him. That he should come from his own
heathery wastes and starved townlets to a richer land is quite natural.
That he should desire to do his best for himself and for people of
his own blood is also natural. But that he should put on airs and
forget that, after all, he is an alien and a person who by good right
is with us only on sufferance, is the mistake he makes. The power
that he has got for himself has been won largely by combination and
advertisement. The Scotch superstition is the oyster out of which he
lives. That superstition was never more general than it is to-day, and
the advertisement of Scottish virtues and Scottish capacities was never
in merrier progress. The time has come, I think, for Englishmen to make
a stand in the matter. At any rate, the time has come for the Scotchman
to be taught his place. One would hesitate to suggest that he should be
got rid of entirely, for he has his uses and his good qualities. As a
hewer of wood and a drawer of water, as a person fitted by temperament
for the exercise of mechanical functions, he is all very well; but in
matters where intellect and sparkle are required he should be left
severely alone. To rid the press of his influence would be an excellent
thing for the press. It cannot be shown that he is of the least use in
journalism, or that he does things any better, whether as reporter,
sub-editor, or editor, than the average Englishman. And it can be shown
that he has used his influence on the press for purposes which, however
legitimate they may appear to him, are not in the public interest. It
is not in the public interest that every newspaper one picks up should
contain certificates of character for the Scotch; it is not in the
public interest that he should be continually written down for a person
of especial intellect, probity, shrewdness, humour, and the rest. His
intellect, in point of fact, is middling; his probity merely average;
his shrewdness questionable, and his humour neither here nor there.
As a subordinate he is always a very doubtful bargain. As a person in
authority he is just a bully—“a bad master,” as Dr. Nicoll puts it.
Employers of labour would find it distinctly to their interest to look
into the question and to find out how far they are being imposed upon by
mere sententiousness and wise looks with nothing behind them that is of
consequence. It is not too much to say that if you have a Scotchman in
your place of business, you are, as a rule, all the weaker for it. If
you go thoroughly into him you will find that his only quality is his
capacity for plod; as against this he has many ugly traits—jealousy,
over-reachingness, and greediness among them. Rarely, if ever, does he
understand his business, and of initiative and originality he is, as a
rule, devoid. Changes and advances are not at all in his line. If you ask
him for something new, something out of the ordinary, he will bring it to
you and impress you (by talk) with the notion that you are getting what
you want; but if you examine it, you will find that it is not new at all,
and that really it is not what you want.

The Scot, in fact, rarely rises above mediocrity; he seldom has an
inspiration or a happy thought; he cannot rise to occasions, and while
he is most punctual in his attention to duty and most assiduous and
steadfast as a labourer, his work is never perfectly done, and too
frequently it is scamped and carried out without regard to finish or
excellence. Of pride or delight in labour the Scotchman knows nothing.
He works in order that he may get money and secure his own personal
advancement. His loyalty is a question of pounds, shillings, and pence;
he will be loyal to you just as long as you are paying him more than he
can get elsewhere, and the moment somebody comes along with a better
offer, there is an end of you so far as he is concerned.

There are not wanting signs that, in spite of the manner in which it has
been hidden and bolstered up, the Scotchman’s real character is beginning
to be properly understood. Nobody can say, with any show of truth, that
the Scot is either loved or admired by the peoples with whom he comes
in contact outside his own country. Indeed, I believe that throughout
England there is a very strong anti-Scotch feeling. I have found it
difficult to meet an Englishman who, if you questioned him straightly,
would not admit that he has a rooted dislike for Scotchmen. That dislike
the Scotchman has himself aroused. His bumptiousness and uncouthness, his
lack of manners, his frequent lack of principle, and his want of decent
feeling, have brought and will continue to bring their own reward. In
this book I feel that I have merely touched the fringe of the subject.
Facts that go to prove the main contentions I have laid down abound. I
have not been able to use a tithe of them. Every person of understanding
can give you instance after instance of the Scotchman’s underbredness,
ineptitude, and disposition to meanness. Furthermore, Scotchmen
themselves are full of such instances. Indeed, for the material used in
most of the chapters of this work I am indebted to Scotchmen. From first
to last I have done my best to convict them out of their own mouths, and
if I have failed, the fault is not the fault of the Scotch.

For the general guidance of young Scotchmen who wish to succeed in this
country and who do not desire to add further opprobrium to the Scotch
character, I shall offer a few broad hints, which are worth taking to
heart:

       I. REMEMBER THAT OUTSIDE SCOTLAND YOU ARE A GOOD DEAL OF A
          FOREIGNER.

      II. BE ASSURED THAT THE KING’S ENGLISH IS THE LANGUAGE WHICH
          DECENT MEN EXPECT YOU TO SPEAK IN ENGLAND.

     III. DOURNESS IS REALLY NOT A VIRTUE.

      IV. THERE IS NOTHING SPECIALLY CREDITABLE IN HAVING BEEN BORN
          ON A MUCK HEAP. DO NOT BOAST ABOUT IT.

       V. THERE ARE GREATER VIRTUES THAN THRIFT. IT IS BETTER TO DIE
          PENNILESS THAN TO HAVE BEEN TOO MUCH OF A SAVER.

      VI. NEVER UNDERTAKE WHAT YOU CANNOT DO. A SHUT MOUTH AND A
          SENTENTIOUS AIR WILL NOT SERVE YOU FOR EVER.

     VII. DO NOT SET UP TO BE A JUDGE OF ANY OF THE FINE ARTS. YOU
          ARE NOT INTENDED FOR IT.

    VIII. TRY TO FORGET THAT THE BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN WAS WON BY
          THE SCOTCH IN 1314. THE DATES OF FLODDEN AND CULLODEN ARE
          MUCH BETTER WORTH REMEMBERING, THOUGH MOST ENGLISHMEN HAVE
          FORGOTTEN BOTH OF THEM.

      IX. DO YOUR BEST TO LIVE DOWN DR. NICOLL’S SUGGESTION THAT
          YOU ARE NOT OVER-SCRUPULOUS IN YOUR METHODS OF DEALING WITH
          COMPETITORS.

       X. IF, WITHOUT SERIOUS INCONVENIENCE TO YOURSELF, YOU CAN
          MANAGE TO REMAIN AT HOME, PLEASE DO.




ADVERTISEMENT


Never apologise before the offence is a good rule, and in certain
circumstances a still better rule is, do not apologise at all. I have
not the smallest intention of regretting anything that has been written
in the foregoing chapters. But I am informed by a Scotchman who has been
kind enough to read them in proof that there is some likelihood of their
being misunderstood. This, of course, would be a thousand pities. So that
I shall venture on what may be termed, for the want of a better phrase,
an explanation. When Dr. Johnson was asked to explain his reasons for
disliking the Scotch, his reply was of the vaguest. Lamb also did not
quite know why he disliked them; and, on the whole, it is difficult to
say flatly why one cannot get on with the simple child of Caledonia.
As a matter of fact, my own antipathy always amuses me. Whether it will
amuse the Scotch is another matter. But for the sake of their own peace
of mind I should like to ask them not to jump to foolish conclusions
about various hard things I have said. Since the time of Burns, Scotchmen
appear to have yearned for some one who should show them their faults:

      Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
    To see oorsels as ithers see us!

is as frequent on their lips as “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men,”
“A man’s a man for a’ that,” and the rest of them. And, in this instance,
I have simply done my best to play the rôle of “some power.” To put an
ugly man in front of a mirror is not, perhaps, to do him the most tender
of services, especially if you comment upon his style of beauty the
while. For all that, I am hoping that in some small measure I may be
doing great and useful things for the Scotch as a nation. If they would
only be at a little pains to discover their faults and at a little more
pains to correct them, one could encourage hopes for Scotland. “Much may
be done with the Scotchman,” said Dr. Johnson, “if you catch him young,”
or words to that effect. I am afraid that to all Scotchmen who have
passed the age of forty the present volume will be a wasted lesson. But
there appear to be a very large number of Scots who have not yet attained
the prime of life, and it is among these that I expect my counsel to have
effect. They really cannot do themselves the smallest hurt by taking to
heart the warnings and advice which, as a result of great labour, are
here put before them. Oh, my dear young Scottish friends, let me implore
you to be wise in time. If I have beaten you with clubs, be assured that
it is as much for your good as for my emolument. If you have bought
this book, you never spent a few sixpences to better advantage in your
life. If you have borrowed it, as I expect most of you have, you are
forgiven, providing you will really try to mend. For all things to which
I have set my hand that may cause you pain I am truly sorry. Yet, as the
chastisers of one’s youth were wont to say, the punishment hurts me far
more than it hurts you. I know you will believe me and do your best to
love me. Whether you do or not, I shall ever continue to take a kindly
interest in you and to pray for your general reform.

THE END




FOOTNOTES


[1] In a booklet entitled _The Kilt and How to Wear It_, the Hon. Stuart
Erskine assures us that “in Scotland every man is a gentleman.” On the
other hand, in England quite a number of Scotchmen seem to be doctors. I
trust that I shall not be considered wanting in respect if I prefix the
august, abdominal “Dr.” to the names of all Scotch gentlemen whom I have
occasion to mention.

[2] _Vide_ that piece of arrant Jeromeism, _My Lady Nicotine_.

[3] Andrew Lang, “Magic Mirrors and Crystal-gazing,” _Monthly Review_,
February, 1902.

[4] The Free University Education Scheme of Dr. Andrew Carnegie (many
times millionaire, beloved of the American steel worker, and author of a
book called _Triumphant Democracy_, if you please) will no doubt change
all this.

[5] George Lockhart, _Memoirs Concerning the Affairs of Scotland from
Queen Anne’s Accession to May, 1707_.

[6] John Hill Burton, D.C.L., LL.D., _The Scot Abroad_.

[7] “English and Scotch,” _The British Weekly_, January 16, 1902.

[8] “English and Scotch,” _The British Weekly_, January 16, 1902.

[9] “The Battle of Bannockburn was won by the Scotch in 1314. Here’s tae
us, wha’s like us?”—_Scotch Toast._

[10] George Vivian Poore, _A Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence_, 1901.

[11] There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit themselves,
and entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, but
at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day;
and this I have observed more frequently among the Scots than any other
nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of
time or place; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved
by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar
to that country, would be hardly tolerable.—Jonathan Swift, _Hints
towards an Essay on Conversation_.

[12] Charles Lamb, _Essays of Elia_.

[13] Mr. Spielman has assured us that seventy-five per cent. of the jokes
accepted from outsiders by _Punch_ come from Scotland; this, however,
only tends to show that Lamb and Smith knew what they were talking about,
for it is everywhere admitted that if you want humour, you must make a
point of avoiding _Punch_.

[14] “It may be surely counted not without significance among ethnical
phenomena that, though France has all along shown in her language the
predominance of the Latin race, three infusions of northern blood had
been successively poured into the country: first, the Franks; then the
Normans; and, lastly, the Scots. It seems not unreasonable that these
helped to communicate to the vivacity and impetuosity of the original
race those qualifications of enterprise and endurance which were needed
to make up the illustrious history of France.”—_The Scot Abroad._

[15] In the Embankment Gardens, London, there is a statue of Burns, on
the pedestal of which appears the appended inscription:

“The Poetic Genius of my country found me at the plough and threw her
inspiring mantle over me. She bade me sing the loves, the joys, the rural
scenes, and rural pleasures of my native soil in my native tongue. I
tuned my wild, artless notes as she inspired.”

Now any poet who can babble about his wild, artless notes is beyond
praying for. I think this particular monument ought to be taken down.

[16] Albert Leffingwell, M.D., _Illegitimacy: Two Studies in Demography_.







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