TO JOHN M’MURDO, Esq.O, could I give thee India’s wealth,As I this trifle send!Because thy joy in both would beTo share them with a friend.But golden sands did never graceThe Heliconean stream;Then take what gold could never buy—An honest Bard’s esteem.
TO JOHN M’MURDO, Esq.O, could I give thee India’s wealth,As I this trifle send!Because thy joy in both would beTo share them with a friend.But golden sands did never graceThe Heliconean stream;Then take what gold could never buy—An honest Bard’s esteem.
TO JOHN M’MURDO, Esq.
TO JOHN M’MURDO, Esq.
O, could I give thee India’s wealth,As I this trifle send!Because thy joy in both would beTo share them with a friend.But golden sands did never graceThe Heliconean stream;Then take what gold could never buy—An honest Bard’s esteem.
O, could I give thee India’s wealth,
As I this trifle send!
Because thy joy in both would be
To share them with a friend.
But golden sands did never grace
The Heliconean stream;
Then take what gold could never buy—
An honest Bard’s esteem.
ON THE DEATH OF A LAP-DOG, NAMED ECHOIn wood and wild, ye warbling throng,Your heavy loss deplore;Now half-extinct your powers of song,Sweet Echo is no more.Ye jarring, screeching things around,Scream your discordant joys;Now half your din of tuneless soundWith Echo silent lies.
ON THE DEATH OF A LAP-DOG, NAMED ECHOIn wood and wild, ye warbling throng,Your heavy loss deplore;Now half-extinct your powers of song,Sweet Echo is no more.Ye jarring, screeching things around,Scream your discordant joys;Now half your din of tuneless soundWith Echo silent lies.
ON THE DEATH OF A LAP-DOG, NAMED ECHO
ON THE DEATH OF A LAP-DOG, NAMED ECHO
In wood and wild, ye warbling throng,Your heavy loss deplore;Now half-extinct your powers of song,Sweet Echo is no more.
In wood and wild, ye warbling throng,
Your heavy loss deplore;
Now half-extinct your powers of song,
Sweet Echo is no more.
Ye jarring, screeching things around,Scream your discordant joys;Now half your din of tuneless soundWith Echo silent lies.
Ye jarring, screeching things around,
Scream your discordant joys;
Now half your din of tuneless sound
With Echo silent lies.
LINES WRITTEN AT LOUDEN MANSEThe night was still, and o’er the hillThe moon shone on the castle wa’;The mavis sang, while dew-drops hangAround her on the castle wa’.Sae merrily they danced the ring,Frae eenin’ till the cock did craw;And the o’erword o’ the spring,Was Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.
LINES WRITTEN AT LOUDEN MANSEThe night was still, and o’er the hillThe moon shone on the castle wa’;The mavis sang, while dew-drops hangAround her on the castle wa’.Sae merrily they danced the ring,Frae eenin’ till the cock did craw;And the o’erword o’ the spring,Was Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.
LINES WRITTEN AT LOUDEN MANSE
LINES WRITTEN AT LOUDEN MANSE
The night was still, and o’er the hillThe moon shone on the castle wa’;The mavis sang, while dew-drops hangAround her on the castle wa’.
The night was still, and o’er the hill
The moon shone on the castle wa’;
The mavis sang, while dew-drops hang
Around her on the castle wa’.
Sae merrily they danced the ring,Frae eenin’ till the cock did craw;And the o’erword o’ the spring,Was Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.
Sae merrily they danced the ring,
Frae eenin’ till the cock did craw;
And the o’erword o’ the spring,
Was Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.
These three effusions, dear reader, are really and truly the work of Burns—or, if you prefer it, of Burrrrrns. In despair one hunts up something for which the man is noted.Scots Wha Haeone thinks, will serve. It has been described as noble, and marvellous, and inspiring, and Heaven knows what besides. Here it is:
Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,Scots whom Bruce has often led;Welcome to your gory bedOr to victorie!Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,See the front o’ battle lour,See approach proud Edward’s power—Chains and slaverie!Wha will be a traitor knave?Wha can fill a coward’s grave?Wha sae base as be a slave?—Let him turn and flee!Wha for Scotland’s king and lawFreedom’s sword will strongly draw,Freeman stand or freeman fa’,Let him follow me!By Oppression’s woes and pains,By your sons in servile chains,We will drain our dearest veins,But they shall be free.Lay the proud usurpers low!Tyrants fall in every foe,Liberty’s in every blow,Let us do or dee!
Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,Scots whom Bruce has often led;Welcome to your gory bedOr to victorie!Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,See the front o’ battle lour,See approach proud Edward’s power—Chains and slaverie!Wha will be a traitor knave?Wha can fill a coward’s grave?Wha sae base as be a slave?—Let him turn and flee!Wha for Scotland’s king and lawFreedom’s sword will strongly draw,Freeman stand or freeman fa’,Let him follow me!By Oppression’s woes and pains,By your sons in servile chains,We will drain our dearest veins,But they shall be free.Lay the proud usurpers low!Tyrants fall in every foe,Liberty’s in every blow,Let us do or dee!
Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,Scots whom Bruce has often led;Welcome to your gory bedOr to victorie!
Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots whom Bruce has often led;
Welcome to your gory bed
Or to victorie!
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,See the front o’ battle lour,See approach proud Edward’s power—Chains and slaverie!
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,
See the front o’ battle lour,
See approach proud Edward’s power—
Chains and slaverie!
Wha will be a traitor knave?Wha can fill a coward’s grave?Wha sae base as be a slave?—Let him turn and flee!
Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?—
Let him turn and flee!
Wha for Scotland’s king and lawFreedom’s sword will strongly draw,Freeman stand or freeman fa’,Let him follow me!
Wha for Scotland’s king and law
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand or freeman fa’,
Let him follow me!
By Oppression’s woes and pains,By your sons in servile chains,We will drain our dearest veins,But they shall be free.
By Oppression’s woes and pains,
By your sons in servile chains,
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free.
Lay the proud usurpers low!Tyrants fall in every foe,Liberty’s in every blow,Let us do or dee!
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe,
Liberty’s in every blow,
Let us do or dee!
As a matter of fact,Scots Wha Haeis one those poems which most people have heard about and few people have read. For this reason I print itin extensoand commend it to the consideration of the critical. Is it really noble, or marvellous, or inspiring?Would it pass muster as a new performance? Is it a whit the better, or sounder, or more convincing thanGod Save the King, which everybody cheerfully admits is not poetry? I, for one, hae me doots.
Like Artemus Ward and writers of “Wot-the-Orfis-Boy Finks” order, Burns owes much of his seeming inspiration and humour to an uncouth orthography. Put into decent English, many of his most vaunted lays amount to nothing at all. Indeed, practically the whole of thepoetrywhich came from his pen could be compressed into a book of fifty pages. I do not say that much of the matter one would have to include in those fifty pages is not matter of an exceptional and extraordinary quality. Mr. Henley has told us that in the vernacular, Burns, at his best, touches the highest level; and with this pronouncement nobody who knows the difference between good writing and bad will quarrel. But I do assert that the best of Burns is not sufficient, either in quality or quantity, to justify the absurd fame whichhas been bestowed upon him by his countrymen. James I., whom the average Scotchman barely knows by name, was, taking him all in all, quite as good a poet as Burns. So was Barbour; so was Drummond of Hawthornden; and, I had almost added, so were Stevenson and Robert Buchanan. The question naturally arises, How comes it to pass that Burns who, excepting by a fluke, was always more or less of a middling poet, has come to rank as the finest thing in letters that Scotland ever produced? The answer to that question is simple enough. In spite ofThe Cotter’s Saturday Night, and two or three other pieces which are the delight and mainstay of the Scotch kirk-goer, Burns was undoubtedly the poet of licence and alcoholism. Also he was a ploughman.
Should humble state our mirth provoke!What folly to misca’ that,The sapling grows a stately oak,Wi’ spreading shade and a’ that.For a’ that and a’ that,His toils and cares and a’ that,We’ve seen a ploughman crowned at lastThe king o’ men for a’ that.
Should humble state our mirth provoke!What folly to misca’ that,The sapling grows a stately oak,Wi’ spreading shade and a’ that.For a’ that and a’ that,His toils and cares and a’ that,We’ve seen a ploughman crowned at lastThe king o’ men for a’ that.
Should humble state our mirth provoke!What folly to misca’ that,The sapling grows a stately oak,Wi’ spreading shade and a’ that.For a’ that and a’ that,His toils and cares and a’ that,We’ve seen a ploughman crowned at lastThe king o’ men for a’ that.
Should humble state our mirth provoke!
What folly to misca’ that,
The sapling grows a stately oak,
Wi’ spreading shade and a’ that.
For a’ that and a’ that,
His toils and cares and a’ that,
We’ve seen a ploughman crowned at last
The king o’ men for a’ that.
After illicit love and flaring drunkenness, nothing appeals so much to Scotch sentiment as having been born in the gutter. In this matter of admiration for people who attain notoriety from a basis of humble origins I do not know that the Scotch stand entirely alone. At the present moment, much fuss is being made in the newspapers over a policeman who has seen fit to devote himself to the painting of pictures, and who has succeeded in getting one of his canvases hung at Burlington House; and if I remember rightly there used to be a postman poet of whom sundry highly placed critics wrote sundry kindly encouraging and gratuitous things. Also the English press is apt to tell us that the great Lord So-and-So was originally a bootblack, and that the great Mr. So-and-So went to Canada with seven shillings in his pocket. In fact, the prodigy who began on nothing, and ultimately became rich or famous, is a figure which British humanity dearly loves. And Burns, as we have seen, was a ploughman. What special excellence may lie in being aploughman nobody but a Scotchman may perceive. In England our booms on humble talent are of short duration. Clare and Ebenezer Elliott both had their little day, and ceased to be. But the Scotch ploughman persists, and the fact that he was a ploughman helps him to persist, and is a great source of pride to the Scotch. The real reason, however, why Burns became, and continues to be, a sort of patron saint to the peoples north of the Tweed is, as I have already suggested, that he was an erotic writer and a condoner of popular vices. Turn where you will in his precious works, you will find that drunkenness and impropriety are matters for which he has unqualified sympathy. Whiskey and women are the subjects which furnish forth the majority of his flights. He writes of both with a freedom which would not nowadays be tolerated, and the moral effect of what he has to say cannot be regarded as otherwise than detrimental. I have before pointed out that one of Mr. Henley’s critics has asserted that the standardof morality in the rural districts of Scotland is much lower to-day than it was in Burns’s time. The inference is obvious. Burns, every Scotchman tells you, and tells you truly, has played no small part in moulding the sentiments and tendencies of the Scotch people as we know them. It was he who gave them their first notion of bumptious independence; it was he who taught them that “a man’s a man for a’ that”—which, on the whole, is a monstrous fallacy; it was he who averred that whiskey and freedom gang together; and it was he who gave the countenance of song to shameful and squalid sexuality. In a great number of Burns’s love songs the suggestion is of the lowest. One could take a selection of these songs, print them in a little book, have them sold in the streets of London at a penny, and be prosecuted at Bow Street for one’s trouble. The man’s mind was not clean; he made the Muse an instrument for the promulgation of skulduddery (I will not vouch for the orthography, but every Scotchman knows what Imean); he degraded and prostituted his intellect, and earned thereby the love and worship of a people who appear to have a sympathetic weakness for erotic verse if it be but Scotch.
It is hard to get the truth about Burns out of the Scotch writers; yet the more honest among them have always had a sneaking suspicion that he was an overrated poet. Somehow, in perusing their estimates, one has a feeling that Burns is not so much being expounded as defended. Stevenson, who tried to be just, has come nearer the mark about him than any writer of our own time; but even Stevenson lacked the courage to go the whole hog. Of Burns, the writer, he could be brought to say nothing more trenchant than that he “had a tendency to borrow a hint,” and that he was “indebted in a very uncommon degree to Ramsay and Fergusson.” And, he adds, by way of defence, that “when we remember Burns’s obligation to his predecessors, we must never forget his immense advances on them.” Perhaps not.
As to Burns, the man, it is safe to say that a more profligate person has seldom figured on the slopes of Parnassus. In love he was as carnal as he was false. He canted and prated and pretended, but his relations with women will not bear examination. His life as a whole would have discredited a dustman, much less a poet. He whined about his “misfortunes,” and advertised them and made much out of them; but nobody in his senses can sympathise with him. That he should be held up for a model by Scottish writers and Scottish preachers is a crying scandal. The king-o’-men cackle is the sheerest impertinence. Burns never was the king o’ men. He was never even a decent living man. He never had a rag of conduct wherewithal to cover himself. He was simply an incontinent yokel with a gift for metricism. That his memory should stand for so much in Scotland constitutes a very grave reflection upon the Scottish character and the Scottish point of view.
Taking him all in all, the Scotch critic is a good deal of an anomaly. To criticise is scarcely the Scotchman’sforte, his chief gifts lying rather in the direction of admiration, particularly of admiration for whatever is Scotch. But we have amongst us (and I do not wish him other than a long and prosperous career) one Scotch critic—or, at any rate, a Scotchman who passes for a critic. I refer, need it be said, to Dr. William Archer. Dr. Archer is the dramatic critic of theWorldnewspaper. Whenever I have looked into theWorldnewspaper, I have found a page or so of Dr. Archer. His work appears to be done to the satisfaction of his employers, and I have no fault to find with it, excepting thatI cannot bring myself to feel enthusiastic about it. To tackle Dr. Archer flying, as it were, let us peep at his contribution to the current number of his journal. Herein he deals with a play by Miss Netta Syrett and preaches a little sermon to theatrical managers.
“I admit, then [he says], that from the actor-manager’s point of view—his quite legitimate and inevitable point of view under our accursed system—the play has drawbacks that might well stand in the way of its production. But if any manager read it and did not recognise that he was face to face with an exceptional talent, and one of which, by judicious encouragement, much might be made, then I say that he showed a deplorable lack of discernment. This—hypothetic—manager ought to have sent for the authoress and said, ‘Miss Syrett, I cannot, for such and such reasons, produce this play. But there are scenes in it which show me that you have the making of a playwright in you. Have you other ideas? Yes, of course youhave. Well, go home and draw me out the scenario of a play that you think would suit me, and then come and let us talk it over. Remember, I promise nothing, except my very best attention to anything you may bring me. But that you shall have; and if you are not above taking hints from my experience, you may be able to avoid certain trifling errors and crudities into which you have fallen in this piece. Don’t be in a hurry. You ladies, if I may say so, are apt to imagine that, when once you have got an idea, a play can be improvised like a newspaper article or a six shilling novel. This is a mistake. A play, to have any solid value, must be carefully and laboriously built up. You will make false steps, find yourself in blind alleys, and have to try back and start afresh many and many a time. You will have days of discouragement, when your characters refuse point-blank to do what you want them to. Probably you will find in the end that you have given as much thought and labour to every line of your play as you would to awhole page of a novel. But if you are prepared to take your art seriously, you may rely upon my taking seriously whatever you may offer me. And be assured of this, that if you fail to do something really worth while, my disappointment will be scarcely less than your own.’ In some such words, as it seems to me, should the sagacious manager have addressed the authoress ofThe Finding of Nancy.”
Excellently intended, my dear Dr. Archer, excellently and honestly intended. But could gratuitousness, or egregiousness, or flat-footedness go further? Such an oration, happily, might come out of none but a Scotch mouth or from any pen but that of a Scotchman. In point of unnecessariness it rivals pretty well aught that I have had the felicity to see in print. And it illustrates to admiration the Scotch faculty for spreading out the commonplace and being sententious over it.
What Dr. Archer’s view of the theatre may be nobody knows. In the beginning of the speech I have quoted he refers to “our accursedsystem,” so that there must be a screw loose somewhere. For years Dr. Archer has been pounding away at this same system, and it seems to continue. Nor has Dr. Archer made the slightest dint upon it. A little while back, one of the wags in which London appears to abound pointed out that plays praised by Dr. Archer invariably come in for the shortest of runs. To which impeachment Dr. Archer replied, with great ingenuousness, by printing a formidable list of plays which had survived his approval. Another wag having said something against the Scotch in a paper calledThe Outlook, Dr. Archer exclaimed, in cold type, “Outlookindeed! Methinks that north of the Tweed they will call itOutrage!” This, of course, is a Scotch joke, and therefore an old one. In the year 600 or thereabouts, Gregory the Great, noting the fair faces and golden hair of some youths in the market-place of Rome, enquired from what country the men came. “They are Angles,” was the reply. “NotAngles,” quoth the worthy Gregory, “butangels.” For thirteen centuries the pun of the Bishop of Rome had remained decently tucked away in the history books. And in 1901, Dr. Archer, who really is a wit, drags it forth and makes another like it.
All these, however, be small deer. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with the true inwardness of Dr. Archer as critic, we must turn to hismagnum opus—that great guinea work of his, entitledPoets of the Younger Generation. Now, on the question of modern poetry, and particularly of the younger school of poets, people interested in poetry are always glad to hear words of wisdom. Have we any contemporary poets? If so, are they writing poetry for us, contemporary or otherwise? The subject invites. Somehow and for some reason or other it invited Dr. Archer. Indeed, it went further than inviting him; it inveigled him. No doubt the notion of writing a book about poets came to him on one of his discouraging days. He had been hammering, hammering, hammering at the theatre and “our accursedsystem,” and he was fain for a softer job. What work could a poor, tired critic take up outside the potter’s field of our accursed system? When a critic gets into that frame of mind he always thinks of the poets. Dr. Archer thought of the poets—the living poets—the poets of the younger generation. Being a Scotchman, Dr. Archer thought, and straightway set to work. He appears to have plodded steadfastly through the writings of no fewer than thirty-three of the minor contemporary poets of England and America. Of each of these thirty-three children of the Muse, beginning with the Rev. H. C. Beeching and ending with William Butler Yeats, he wrote painful notices, bejewelled with excerpts, put them into a book, and got them published by Mr. John Lane. With the beauty or otherwise of his thirty-three notices, in spite of their exquisite thirty-three-ness, I do not propose greatly to concern myself. Their general drift and tenor may be inferred from the following examples, culled from the article on Mr. Kipling:
“Far be it from me to disparageScots Wha Hae, but I am not sure that it possesses the tonic quality of the refrain of Mr. Kipling’s song of defeat:
An’ there ain’t no chorus ’ere to give,Nor there ain’t no band to play;But I wish I was dead ’fore I done what I didOr seen what I’d seed that day!
An’ there ain’t no chorus ’ere to give,Nor there ain’t no band to play;But I wish I was dead ’fore I done what I didOr seen what I’d seed that day!
An’ there ain’t no chorus ’ere to give,Nor there ain’t no band to play;But I wish I was dead ’fore I done what I didOr seen what I’d seed that day!
An’ there ain’t no chorus ’ere to give,
Nor there ain’t no band to play;
But I wish I was dead ’fore I done what I did
Or seen what I’d seed that day!
What in the name of goodness haveScots Wha Haeand these four lines got to do with one another? How can they be compared, except only as verse, and where, oh where, does the tonic quality of the Kipling lines come in? Again:
“In all the poetry of warfare, was there ever a more exactly observed and yet imaginative touch than that which describes the guns of the enemy ‘shaking their bustles like ladies so fine’? It is grotesque, and it is magnificent.”
As a matter of fact it is not observed at all, and it is certainly not magnificent. Ladies do not shake their bustles. Nowadays, indeed, they have no bustles to shake, and Ishould imagine that the sound criticism about the simile is that it is too temporary and far fetched. And for the third and last time:
“Only by some narrow trick of definition can such work (McAndrew’s Hymn) be excluded from the sphere of poetry; and poetry or no poetry, it is certainly very strong and vital literature.”
Here let us agree to differ with Dr. Archer, inasmuch asMcAndrew’s Hymnis merely rhymed note-book eked out with a few phrases of the Doric.
On the whole,Poets of the Younger Generationmight well have gone down to posterity as a collection of middling and slightly wrong-headed reviews, had Dr. Archer possessed a tithe of the shrewdness commonly imputed to persons of his blood. But in putting the book before the world, Dr. Archer could not be content to figure as a simple reviewer, he must needs preface it with a pompous and bloated introduction. “Appreciation [he says nobly] is the endand aim of the following pages. The verb ‘to appreciate’ is used, rightly or wrongly, in two senses; it sometimes means to realise, at other times to enhance the value of a thing. I use the word in both significations. While attempting to define, to appraise, the talent of individual poets, I hope to enhance the reader’s estimate of the value of contemporary poetry as a whole.” After several pages of this sort of thing we come upon a full-dress “personal statement,” the like of which has never before been given us by mortal critic. Practically, it is a biography of Dr. William Archer, with special reference to Dr. William Archer’s spiritual and intellectual growth and his “qualifications as a critic of poetry.” The pose and tone of it are inimitable. It puts Burns and his “wild artless notes” utterly to the blush. As Dr. Archer himself would say, it is grotesque and it is magnificent. It begins with a rataplan on ancestral drums: “In the first place, I am a pure bred Scotchman. There is some vague family legend of an ancestor of myfather’s having come from England with Oliver Cromwell and settled in Glasgow; but I never could discover any evidence of it. The only thing that speaks in its favour is that my name, common in England, is uncommon in Scotland. My maternal grandfather and grandmother both came of families that seem to have dwelt from time immemorial in and about Perth, at the gateway of the Highlands. This being so, it appears very improbable that there should not be some Keltic admixture in my blood; but I cannot absolutely lay my finger on any ‘Mac’ among my forbears. Both my parents belong to families of a deeply religious cast of mind, ultra-orthodox in dogma, heterodox and even vehemently dissenting on questions of Church Government. I can trace some way back in my mother’s family a strain of good, sound, orthodox literary culture and taste; of specially poetical faculty, little or none. It may, perhaps, be worth mentioning that one of my great-grandfathers or great-great-uncles printed—and I believe, edited—anedition of the poets, much esteemed in its day.”
Nothing could be better worth mentioning, Mr. Archer. Pray proceed:
“The earliest symptom I can find in myself that can possibly be taken as showing any marked relation to the poetic side of life, is an extreme susceptibility (very clearly inherited from my father) to simple, pathetic music. It is related that even in my infancy, one special tune—theAdeste 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 thatLascia ch’ie pranga, Che faer farò senza Euridice, and the cantabile in Chopin’sFuneral March, do not seem to me the verydivinest 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 ofThe Faerie Queenewith acertain 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 seventeenThe Ancient Marinerseemed 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 readParadise Lostfrom 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 pocketParadise Lost.” On that journey the scales fell from Dr. Archer’s eyes. Ever since,Paradise Losthas 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 hehad “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” incriticism 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.
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 ofthe 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 writingWillie brewed a peck o’ mautand 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’ tellYer neebour’s fauts and folly;Whose life is like a weel-gaun millSupplied in store o’ water:The heapit clappers ebben still,An’ still the clap plays clatter.
Oh ye wha are sae guid yersel’,Sae pious and sae holy,You’ve nought to do but mark an’ tellYer neebour’s fauts and folly;Whose life is like a weel-gaun millSupplied in store o’ water:The heapit clappers ebben still,An’ still the clap plays clatter.
Oh ye wha are sae guid yersel’,Sae pious and sae holy,You’ve nought to do but mark an’ tellYer neebour’s fauts and folly;Whose life is like a weel-gaun millSupplied in store o’ water:The heapit clappers ebben still,An’ still the clap plays clatter.
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 cannever 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.
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.
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.
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 stillDelighteth to forgive.’
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 stillDelighteth to forgive.’
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 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 stillDelighteth to forgive.’
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 seatAnd centre in the breast,We may be wise and rich and great,But never can be blest.
If happiness have not her seatAnd centre in the breast,We may be wise and rich and great,But never can be blest.
If happiness have not her seatAnd centre in the breast,We may be wise and rich and great,But never can be blest.
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 wroteThe Cottar’s Saturday Night:
Compared with this, how poor religion’s prideIn all the pomp of method and of art,When men display to congregations wideReligion’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.
Compared with this, how poor religion’s prideIn all the pomp of method and of art,When men display to congregations wideReligion’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.
Compared with this, how poor religion’s prideIn all the pomp of method and of art,When men display to congregations wideReligion’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.
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.
The rank is but the guinea stamp,The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
The rank is but the guinea stamp,The man’s the gowd for a’ 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.
The honest man, though e’er sae puir,Is king o’ men for a’ that.
The honest man, though e’er sae puir,Is king o’ men for a’ that.
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 manMakes countless thousands mourn.
Man’s inhumanity to manMakes countless thousands mourn.
Man’s inhumanity to manMakes countless thousands mourn.
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.
Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress;A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss.
Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress;A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss.
Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress;A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss.
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’erShall brithers be, an’ a’ that.
It’s coming yet for a’ that,That man to man the warld o’erShall brithers be, an’ a’ that.
It’s coming yet for a’ that,That man to man the warld o’erShall brithers be, an’ a’ that.
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 wrongonly 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 spleenHad 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—Somethingheld 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 speakWad think I learn’d the hale o’t in a week.Weel up in Scotch, I set mysel’ to warkTo strip thePoetto his very sark,An’ gie the warld a pictur’ o’ theManAn’ a’ hisDoin’s—on the cut-throat plan.My book, gat up regairdless o’ expense,Was hailedthebook 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—Hecouldna reach me, sae I didna heed.
Ere disappointment, cauld neglect, and spleenHad 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—Somethingheld 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 speakWad think I learn’d the hale o’t in a week.Weel up in Scotch, I set mysel’ to warkTo strip thePoetto his very sark,An’ gie the warld a pictur’ o’ theManAn’ a’ hisDoin’s—on the cut-throat plan.My book, gat up regairdless o’ expense,Was hailedthebook 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—Hecouldna reach me, sae I didna heed.
Ere disappointment, cauld neglect, and spleenHad 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.
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.”
“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—Somethingheld 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 speakWad think I learn’d the hale o’t in a week.Weel up in Scotch, I set mysel’ to warkTo strip thePoetto his very sark,An’ gie the warld a pictur’ o’ theManAn’ a’ hisDoin’s—on the cut-throat plan.My book, gat up regairdless o’ expense,Was hailedthebook 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—Hecouldna reach me, sae I didna heed.
I glower’d about for something worth my while—
Somethingheld 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 thePoetto his very sark,
An’ gie the warld a pictur’ o’ theMan
An’ a’ hisDoin’s—on the cut-throat plan.
My book, gat up regairdless o’ expense,
Was hailedthebook 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—
Hecouldna 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.
There are two Scotch books of biography, all published, I believe, within the last six years, which invariably raise my gorge. One of them isMargaret Ogilvy, by Dr. J. M. Barrie; the second isJ. 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 Ogilvyappears to have gone into no end of editions. It is an account of thecharacter 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 ofMargaret Ogilvygives 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 intellectualthan 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 stickto lean upon. For “the lesson” ofMargaret Ogilvysimply 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 youto 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 aday 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 inParadise Lostan inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have I found in Dr. J. A. Hammerton’sJ. M. Barrie and his Booksan 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 thispassage 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 whichhis 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 havewon 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 thanMargaret 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 theanecdotes of village ‘loonies’ with which Scots literature abounds—especially Dean Ramsay’sReminiscencesandThe 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,’ inA 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.
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 uponEnglish 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 popularityis 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.”IvanhoeandThe 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-calledgospel is a somewhat cheap and snobbish affair. All that is really left of him isThe 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 themanners 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, wastoo 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.
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 anapron, 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 postsfall 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 attheir 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 begetting 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. Hebegins 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 calledFiring 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 ofthem 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 studentat 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.