Chapter VII: That It Was a Scotchman Who Introduced Thistles Into (1)

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