The
Unspeakable Scot

BY
T. W. H. CROSLAND

London: GRANT RICHARDS
New York: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
1902

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

Published, July, 1902

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

CONTENTS

The Unspeakable Scot

I
THE SUPERSTITION

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

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

False Scot

Sold his king

For a groat.

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

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

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

So much for the Old School. As for the New School, I take credit that it is a discovery of my own. It consists of one man only. He is a Scotchman, and his name is William Robertson Nicoll. Dr. Nicoll is the editor of the British Weekly. He also edits the Bookman, and lounges round letters in a paper called the Sketch. Some time ago this great and good Scotchman was accused of indulging in too many literary aliases. We were then informed by a protégé of his that it would be well for us to lift reverent eyes and behold in Dr. William Robertson Nicoll “a force in letters”—“the only force, some of us think,” added the incense-breathing protégé. We looked and beheld. Also we read, in Who’s Who, that Dr. Nicoll was the author of The Lamb of God, The Key of the Grave, The Incarnate Saviour, The Return to the Cross, The Secret of Christian Experience, Songs of Rest, and Sunday Afternoon Verses, all, no doubt, excellent and exciting works, but obviously sealed to a department of letters in which we have not specialised. Therefore, we took “the-force-in-letters” notion for granted. Our own idea of Dr. Robertson Nicoll’s relation to letters will be set forth duly in another chapter. Meanwhile, it is necessary to say that Dr. Nicoll is one of those delightfully irresponsible literary forces who babble of “Mr. S. R. Crockett’s great novel Joan of the Sword Hand,” in one breath, and with the next pray to be delivered from “a misuse of words.”

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

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

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

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

FRUITS IN THERE SEASON

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

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

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

II
PREDECESSORS

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

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

The merciless Macdonwald

Worthy to be a rebel for to that,

The multiplying villainies of Nature

Do swarm upon him.

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

Sweno the Norway’s King craves composition,

Nor would we deign him burial of his men

Till he disbursed at Saint Colmes’ inch

Ten thousand dollars to our general use.

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

All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!

All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!

All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter!

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

Was the hope drunk,

Wherein you dress’d yourself? hath it slept since?

And wakes it now to look so green and pale

At what it did so freely? From this time,

Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard

To be the same in thine own act and valour,

As thou art in desire? Would’st thou have that

Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,

And live a coward in thine own esteem;

Letting I dare not wait upon I would,

Like the poor cat i’ the adage?

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

I dare all that may become a man;

Who dares do more, is none.

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

Painted upon a pole and underwrit,

Here may you see the tyrant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III
THE POW-WOW MEN

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

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

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

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

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

IV
THE SCOT IN JOURNALISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much for the Scotch journalist.

V
THRUMS AND DRUMTOCHTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heaven help us!

VI
BARBIE

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

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

“Gourlay cast a look at the dropping heavens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII
THE BARD

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

My Peggy’s face, my Peggy’s form,

The frost of hermit age might warm;

My Peggy’s worth, my Peggy’s mind,

Might charm the first of human kind.

I love my Peggy’s angel air,

Her face so truly, heavenly fair,

Her native grace so void of art;

But I adore my Peggy’s heart.

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

Up in the morning’s no’ for me,

Up in the morning early;

When a’ the hills are cover’d wi’ snaw,

I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

Cauld blaws the wind frae east to west,

The drift is driving sairly;

Sae loud and shrill’s I hear the blast,

I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

The birds sit chittering in the thorn,

A’ day they fare but sparely;

And lang’s the night frae e’en to morn,

I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

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

Tho’ cruel fate should bid us part,

As far’s the pole and line;

Her dear idea round my heart

Should tenderly entwine.

Tho’ mountains frown and deserts howl,

And oceans roar between;

Yet, dearer than my deathless soul,

I still would love my Jean.

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

Straight the sky grew black and daring;

Thro’ the woods the whirlwinds rave;

Trees with aged arms were warring,

O’er the swelling, drumlie wave.

Such was my life’s deceitful morning,

Such the pleasures I enjoy’d;

But lang or noon, loud tempests storming

A’ my flowery bliss destroy’d.

Tho’ fickle fortune has deceived me,

She promised fair, and performed but ill;

Of monie a joy and hope bereav’d me,

I bear a heart shall support me still.

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

Ye gallants bright, I red you right,

Beware of bonie Ann:

Her comely face sae fu’ o’ grace,

Your heart she will trepan.

Her een sae bright, like stars by night,

Her skin is like the swan;

Sae jimpy lac’d her genty waist,

That sweetly ye might span.

Youth, grace, and love, attendant move,

And pleasure leads the van;

In a’ their charms, and conquering arms,

They wait on bonie Ann.

The captive bands may chain the hands,

But love enslaves the man:

Ye gallants braw, I red you a’

Beware of bonie Ann.

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

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

TO JOHN M’MURDO, Esq.

O, could I give thee India’s wealth,

As I this trifle send!

Because thy joy in both would be

To share them with a friend.

But golden sands did never grace

The Heliconean stream;

Then take what gold could never buy—

An honest Bard’s esteem.

ON THE DEATH OF A LAP-DOG, NAMED ECHO

In wood and wild, ye warbling throng,

Your heavy loss deplore;

Now half-extinct your powers of song,

Sweet Echo is no more.

Ye jarring, screeching things around,

Scream your discordant joys;

Now half your din of tuneless sound

With Echo silent lies.

LINES WRITTEN AT LOUDEN MANSE

The night was still, and o’er the hill

The moon shone on the castle wa’;

The mavis sang, while dew-drops hang

Around her on the castle wa’.

Sae merrily they danced the ring,

Frae eenin’ till the cock did craw;

And the o’erword o’ the spring,

Was Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.

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

Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,

Scots whom Bruce has often led;

Welcome to your gory bed

Or to victorie!

Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,

See the front o’ battle lour,

See approach proud Edward’s power—

Chains and slaverie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?

Wha can fill a coward’s grave?

Wha sae base as be a slave?—

Let him turn and flee!

Wha for Scotland’s king and law

Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,

Freeman stand or freeman fa’,

Let him follow me!

By Oppression’s woes and pains,

By your sons in servile chains,

We will drain our dearest veins,

But they shall be free.

Lay the proud usurpers low!