Chapter VII: That It Was a Scotchman Who Introduced Thistles Into (3)

“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: