Part 6
“Only by some narrow trick of definition can such work (_McAndrew’s Hymn_) be excluded from the sphere of poetry; and poetry or no poetry, it is certainly very strong and vital literature.”
Here let us agree to differ with Dr. Archer, inasmuch as _McAndrew’s Hymn_ is merely rhymed note-book eked out with a few phrases of the Doric.
On the whole, _Poets of the Younger Generation_ might well have gone down to posterity as a collection of middling and slightly wrong-headed reviews, had Dr. Archer possessed a tithe of the shrewdness commonly imputed to persons of his blood. But in putting the book before the world, Dr. Archer could not be content to figure as a simple reviewer, he must needs preface it with a pompous and bloated introduction. “Appreciation [he says nobly] is the end and aim of the following pages. The verb ‘to appreciate’ is used, rightly or wrongly, in two senses; it sometimes means to realise, at other times to enhance the value of a thing. I use the word in both significations. While attempting to define, to appraise, the talent of individual poets, I hope to enhance the reader’s estimate of the value of contemporary poetry as a whole.” After several pages of this sort of thing we come upon a full-dress “personal statement,” the like of which has never before been given us by mortal critic. Practically, it is a biography of Dr. William Archer, with special reference to Dr. William Archer’s spiritual and intellectual growth and his “qualifications as a critic of poetry.” The pose and tone of it are inimitable. It puts Burns and his “wild artless notes” utterly to the blush. As Dr. Archer himself would say, it is grotesque and it is magnificent. It begins with a rataplan on ancestral drums: “In the first place, I am a pure bred Scotchman. There is some vague family legend of an ancestor of my father’s having come from England with Oliver Cromwell and settled in Glasgow; but I never could discover any evidence of it. The only thing that speaks in its favour is that my name, common in England, is uncommon in Scotland. My maternal grandfather and grandmother both came of families that seem to have dwelt from time immemorial in and about Perth, at the gateway of the Highlands. This being so, it appears very improbable that there should not be some Keltic admixture in my blood; but I cannot absolutely lay my finger on any ‘Mac’ among my forbears. Both my parents belong to families of a deeply religious cast of mind, ultra-orthodox in dogma, heterodox and even vehemently dissenting on questions of Church Government. I can trace some way back in my mother’s family a strain of good, sound, orthodox literary culture and taste; of specially poetical faculty, little or none. It may, perhaps, be worth mentioning that one of my great-grandfathers or great-great-uncles printed—and I believe, edited—an edition of the poets, much esteemed in its day.”
Nothing could be better worth mentioning, Mr. Archer. Pray proceed:
“The earliest symptom I can find in myself that can possibly be taken as showing any marked relation to the poetic side of life, is an extreme susceptibility (very clearly inherited from my father) to simple, pathetic music. It is related that even in my infancy, one special tune—the _Adeste Fideles_—if so much as hummed in my neighbourhood, would always make me howl lustily; and, indeed, to this day it seems to me infinitely pathetic. I have carried through life, without any sort of musical gift, and with a very imperfect apprehension of tonality, harmony, and the refinements and complexities of musical expression, this keen sensibility to the emotional effect of certain lovely rhythms and simple curves of notes. I am not sure that _Lascia ch’ie pranga, Che faer farò senza Euridice_, and the cantabile in Chopin’s _Funeral March_, do not seem to me the very divinest utterances of the human spirit, before which all the achievements of all the poets fade and grow dim. But it is all one to me (or very nearly so) whether they are reeled off on a barrel organ or performed by the greatest singers—the finest orchestra. Nay, my own performance of them, in the silent chamber concerts of memory, are enough to bring the tears to my eyes.”
Good man!
“I cannot remember that the poetry I learned at school interested or pleased me particularly—‘On Linden, when the sun was low,’ ‘FitzJames was brave, yet to his heart,’ ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,’ and so forth.… The first composition of mine that ever found its way into print was some sort of a rhapsody (in prose) on Byron at Missolonghi. The attack passed off in six months or so, and I am not aware that it left behind any permanent ill effects. At the same time I read the greater part of _The Faerie Queene_ with a certain pleasure, but without any real appreciation.”
Wordsworth this remarkable youth “read for a college essay”; “Coleridge came to him in the train of Wordsworth”; and at seventeen _The Ancient Mariner_ seemed to him “the most magical of poems.” Tennyson he read “with pleasure”; Keats “had not yet taken hold” of him; and Milton he “could not read.” Ultimately, however, he came to appreciate Milton in this wise. “I spent my twentieth year idling in Australia, and, being somewhat hard up for literature, I set myself to read _Paradise Lost_ from beginning to end, at the rate of a book a day. I accomplished the task, but it bored me unspeakably.… I did not return to it for seven or eight years, until one day I found myself starting on a railway journey with nothing to read, and paid a shilling at a station bookstall for a pocket _Paradise Lost_.” On that journey the scales fell from Dr. Archer’s eyes. Ever since, _Paradise Lost_ has been to him “an inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry.” Later, we learn that Dr. Archer’s own metrical efforts have been “almost entirely confined to comic, or, at any rate, journalistic, verse,” though he “never attained even the fluency of the practised newspaper rhymester.” Greek and Latin verses, he adds, “were undreamt of in the Scottish curriculum of my day. Practically we knew not what quantity meant.”
Altogether, therefore, Dr. William Archer’s “qualifications as a critic of poetry” would seem to be, on his own showing, of a negative rather than a positive order. He is a pure bred Scotchman; he may have a little English blood in him, but he has not been able to trace it; he is without any sort of musical gift; he likes his music “reeled off on a barrel organ”; poetry had no charms for him till he was seventeen; and he did not discover Milton’s “inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry” till he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of age. Also at his college they “did not know what quantity meant.” Yet at the age of forty-three he had “ready for press” five hundred pages of appreciations of poets of the younger generation. It is truly marvellous and prodigiously Scotch. And it sets one wondering. At what epoch in his extraordinary life did Dr. Archer begin to take a critical interest in the drama? Was he shovelled into that interest by the exigencies of his work on newspapers, or did it come to him, like his love of Milton, on a railway journey? Furthermore, how many of his brither Scots, who labour so solemnly in the vineyard of literary journalism and plume themselves on their “pull” in contemporary letters, are of the like origins and possess the same disqualifications as Dr. William Archer? I doubt if one per cent. of them is really competent. I know for a fact that ninety per cent. of them are absolutely devoid of taste, much less of understanding and vision, and that they exercise critical functions not because they have insight or feeling for literature, but because “a living” and certain petty powers are to be had out of it. The much vaunted “Scotch pull” in criticism is without doubt the worst trouble that has ever assailed English letters. In a great measure it has been responsible for the general slackening and stodginess which have overtaken the whole business during the past decade or so. Persons who write, not to mention persons who read, know full well that at the present time criticism is well nigh a dead letter in this country. Reviews are no longer taken seriously either by authors or the public; the literary papers languish, depending, for such revenue as they possess, upon publishers’ advertisements instead of upon circulation; literary opinion has been fined down to sheer puff on the one hand and flagrant abuse or neglect on the other, and to be the friend or admiring acquaintance of certain persons is become the only sure road to literary advancement. It is the fashion to say that nobody, however ill-disposed, can stop the sale of a good book, or keep the author of such a book out of his meed of recognition. In the long result this is true. But waiting for the long result is a weary business, particularly when you discover that there is an inclination on the part of the people who have “the pull” to put the clock back for you at every turn; what time they boom the work of their “ain folk” and shout loudly and insistently for catch-penny mediocrity. This, by the way, is not in any sense a “sore-head” asseveration; because my own writings have, as a rule, been of so slender a nature that I have marvelled to see them noticed at all. Besides, I do not think that I am without friends even among the apostles of the “Scotch pull.” They have done me many a service, and with a lively sense of favours to come I hereby offer them gratitude. All the same, I should not be sorry to see them disbanded. I should not be sorry to hear that never a one of them was to be permitted again to set pen to paper in the capacity of reviewer. Literary journalism would be all the sweeter and saner for such a closure, and judging by the rates of payment they take, the “Scotch pull” combination would be very little the poorer.
NOTE[15]
The Scots opinion of Burns may perhaps be best illustrated by quoting a Burns-Night oration. The speech appended below may be taken as a moderate sample of what Burns’s admirers are in the habit of saying about him. I am indebted to Dr. Ross’s volume, _Henley on Burns_, for the excerpt: “Burns suffered more from remorse and genuine penitence than probably any man who ever lived. Not only so, but the very bitterness of his cry, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner,’ has been seized upon by his calumniators, and used as a weapon to stab him behind his back. But leave Burns to his Maker, and, keeping in view the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, it is just possible, nay probable, that those who talk so glibly about the sins of Burns may find at the great day of reckoning that the penitent poet and the penitent publican are justified rather than they. There are certain classes of people who must always look upon Burns with doubt and suspicion. Many decent, worthy people, naturally and properly disliking the clay, miss the gold. Many worthy teetotallers dislike the poet on account of his drinking songs; but even they are beginning to forgive him for writing _Willie brewed a peck o’ maut_ and such like. The Pharisee and the hypocrite, throughout their generations, will always dislike him, not because of his sins, but on account of his satires:
Oh ye wha are sae guid yersel’, Sae pious and sae holy, You’ve nought to do but mark an’ tell Yer neebour’s fauts and folly; Whose life is like a weel-gaun mill Supplied in store o’ water: The heapit clappers ebben still, An’ still the clap plays clatter.
“The ‘gigman’ and the clothes-horse can never take to Burns. He is not sufficiently genteel for silly ladyism and spurious nobility:
What though on hamely fare we dine, Wear hodden gray, an’ a’ that, Gie fules their silk, an’ knaves their wine, A man’s a man for a’ that.
“The ultra-Calvinist can never take to Burns, for Burns broke the back of ‘the auld licht.’ The genuine Calvinist of the poet’s time showed only the dark side of the shield. Burns showed the bright:
Where human weakness has come short, Or frailty stepp’d aside, Do thou, All Good, for such thou art, In shades of darkness hide.
Where with intention I have err’d, No other plea I have, But ‘Thou art good, and goodness still Delighteth to forgive.’
“The golden calf is as much worshipped in England to-day as it was in the desert four thousand years ago:
If happiness have not her seat And centre in the breast, We may be wise and rich and great, But never can be blest.
“Burns will never be praised by those who dote upon forms, vestments, and such like priestly trumpery, for he wrote _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_:
Compared with this, how poor religion’s pride In all the pomp of method and of art, When men display to congregations wide Religion’s every grace except the heart. The Power incensed the pageant will desert, The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole; But, haply, in some cottage, far apart, Will hear, well pleased, the language of the soul, And in his book of life the inmate poor enrol.
“A child of the common people himself, Burns never deserted his class. He taught the poor man that:
The rank is but the guinea stamp, The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
“He ennobled honest labour:
The honest man, though e’er sae puir, Is king o’ men for a’ that.
“He was the high priest of humanity:
Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn.
Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress; A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss.
It’s coming yet for a’ that, That man to man the warld o’er Shall brithers be, an’ a’ that.
“Ay, Burns is like a great mountain, based on earth, towering towards heaven—of a mixed character, containing gold, silver, brass, iron, and clay, and from which every man, according to his taste, can become enriched by the gold and the silver, or get mired in the clay. All that is best in Burns (and that is nearly the whole) will remain a precious possession with the Anglo-Saxon race in the ages yet to come. The Stars and Stripes of our cousins across the sea—the great American people—will ere long float side by side with the grand old flag that for a thousand years has braved the battle and the breeze. And the Bible and Burns will lie side by side in the homes of the reunited Anglo-Saxon race,—the freest, bravest, and most liberty-loving people the world ever saw or shall see.”
It will be noted that herein Burns is made out to be an honest fellow who went wrong only at times; also the mire in him is a small detail, his best being nearly the whole of him; also that in the glorious days to come, when the Anglo-Saxon races shall have fused into one great people, Burns and the Bible are to be our great literary and ethical standby.
As indicating the kind of abuse that the Scot is in the habit of levelling at persons who disagree with him as to Burns, I likewise print a set of verses aimed at Mr. Henley by one of Dr. Ross’s scarifiers:
Ere disappointment, cauld neglect, and spleen Had soured my bluid an’ jaundiced baith my een, My saul aspired, upo’ the wings o’ rhyme, To mount unscaithed to airy heichts sublime; An’, like the lark, to drap, in music rare, Braw sangs to cheer folks when their hearts were sair. I struggled lang, but fand it a’ nae use, Nocht paid, I saw, save arrogant abuse.
“Blind fule,” I cried, “to fling your pearls to swine. Awa’ wi’ dreams o’ laurell’d days divine! Bid Fame guid-bye, and a’ sic feckless trash,— Henceforth write naething but what brings ye cash.”
I glower’d about for something worth my while— Some _thing_ held dear—on whilk to “spew” my bile, An’ fixt my e’e upo’ a certain bard, Syne bocht a Jamieson, an’ studied hard; An’ wha that hears me the vernacular speak Wad think I learn’d the hale o’t in a week. Weel up in Scotch, I set mysel’ to wark To strip the _Poet_ to his very sark, An’ gie the warld a pictur’ o’ the _Man_ An’ a’ his _Doin’s_—on the cut-throat plan. My book, gat up regairdless o’ expense, Was hailed _the_ book by ilka man o’ sense; Some “half-read” gowks ayont the Tweed micht sneer, An’ name mysel’ in words no’ fit to hear; I only leuch. The man himsel’ was deid— _He_ couldna reach me, sae I didna heed.
The author of this effusion must have known perfectly well that Mr. Henley would have written just as he has written, if Burns had been alive. The suggestion that “he couldna reach me, and I didna heed,” is purely gratuitous and foolish.
IX
THE SCOT AS BIOGRAPHER
There are two Scotch books of biography, all published, I believe, within the last six years, which invariably raise my gorge. One of them is _Margaret Ogilvy_, by Dr. J. M. Barrie; the second is _J. M. Barrie and his Books_, by Dr. J. A. Hammerton. The first, dealing with a dead mother, is a work that nothing but a sense of duty could induce me to handle in the present connection. It has, however, been put before the public without so much as an attempt at justification or apology, and with the plain intention of being sold precisely in the manner of other literary wares, and it must therefore take its chance. _Margaret Ogilvy_ appears to have gone into no end of editions. It is an account of the character and sayings of Dr. J. M. Barrie’s mother, viewed in the light of Dr. Barrie’s own “literaryness.” I have no hesitation in pronouncing it to be one of the most snobbish books that have issued from the press any time this hundred years. It begins snobbishly, it goes on snobbishly, and it ends snobbishly. Offered to the reading public as a piece of fictional sentiment, it would still have been open to the charge of mawkishness. Offered unblushingly as a transcript from the life and for the perusal of all who care to purchase, deplorable is the mildest epithet one can justly apply to it. Wordsworth writes somewhere of a person “who would peep and botanise about his mother’s grave.” This is exactly the feeling that a reading of _Margaret Ogilvy_ gives you. Comparisons in such a case would be doubly odious. Yet one does not find that Margaret Ogilvy, in spite of everything that her son has done for her in the way of “keying-up” to literary requirements, was any the sweeter, or any the nobler, or any the more intellectual than one may presume the mother of any other writer of Dr. Barrie’s parts to have been. She was a good mother, she gave birth to Dr. Barrie, she ministered to him in childhood, she denied herself for him; she took pleasure in his educational and literary progress, she offered him much advice; she believed in “God” and “love,” and she died in the faith. The mothers of most literary people have done as much. It has been left to Dr. Barrie to snatch away the decent veil which hides the sanctities of life from the common gaze, and to let all the world into the privacies of the filial and maternal relation at five shillings a time. If I understand Margaret Ogilvy aright, she would have cut off both her hands rather than permit some of the things in this book to become the property of strangers, sympathetic or otherwise.
Of course, the excuse immediately forthcoming from Dr. Barrie’s friends and admirers will be “the lesson.” It is the only excuse that can possibly be raked up, and, like the majority of excuses, it is a poor stick to lean upon. For “the lesson” of _Margaret Ogilvy_ simply amounts to this, that conceit and self-advertisement may bring a man to the silliest and least dignified of passes. In point of fact Dr. Barrie’s “little study” is just as much a study of himself as of his mother. If it shows Margaret Ogilvy in the figure of an excellent mother, it also shows J. M. Barrie in the figure of a preternaturally excellent and dutiful son. If it shows that Margaret Ogilvy was a simple, unsophisticated woman of the people, it shows also that J. M. Barrie had compassion on her intellectual shortcomings and was ever ready to humour the poor body and to twinkle tolerantly on her whimsies, when he might, had he so chosen, have withered her with a word. To take a sample passage: “Now that I was an author, I must get into a club. But you should have heard my mother on clubs! She knew of none save those to which you subscribe a pittance weekly, and the London clubs were her scorn. Often I heard her on them—she raised her voice to make me hear, whichever room I might be in, and it was when she was sarcastic that I skulked the most: ‘Thirty pounds is what he will have to pay the first year, and ten pounds a year after that. You think it’s a lot o’ siller? Oh, no, you’re mista’en—it’s nothing ava’. For the third part of thirty pounds you could rent a four-roomed house, but what is a four-roomed house, what is thirty pounds, compared to the glory of being a member of a club?’ … My wisest policy was to remain downstairs when these withering blasts were blowing, but probably I went up in self-defence.
“‘I never saw you so pugnacious before, mother.’
“‘Oh,’ she would reply, promptly, ‘you canna expect me to be sharp in the uptake when I am no’ a member of a club.’
“‘But the difficulty is in becoming a member. They are very particular about whom they elect, and I daresay I shall not get in.’
“‘Well, I’m but a poor crittur (not being member of a club), but I think I can tell you to make your mind easy on that head. You’ll get in, I’se uphaud—and your thirty pounds will get in, too.’”
And so on. Humour, of course! The sagacious, garrulous mother, the highly diverted, patient son! The picture has pleased the Scotch and English-speaking nations of two hemispheres. Yet is it of the stupidest and the most foolish.
On another page we get the following pretty piece of curtain lifting: ‘So my mother and I go up the stair together. ‘We have changed places,’ she says; ‘that was just how I used to help you up, but I’m the bairn now.’ She brings out the Testament again; it was always lying within reach.… And when she has read for a long time she ‘gives me a look,’ as we say in the North, and I go out, to leave her alone with God.… Often and often I have found her on her knees, but I always went softly away, closing the door. I never heard her pray, but I know very well how she prayed, and that, when that door was shut, there was not a day in God’s sight between the worn woman and the little child.’
We can do without such books, Dr. J. M. Barrie, even though they sell well.
Even as Dr. Archer has discovered in _Paradise Lost_ an inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have I found in Dr. J. A. Hammerton’s _J. M. Barrie and his Books_ an inexhaustible fund of the pure gold of Scotch opinion not only as to Dr. Barrie, but also as to other matters. First let me string together a few pearls about Dr. Barrie.
“I have seen it argued [says our excellent author] that the publication of such a book as this is a reprehensible practice [_sic_], in that it implies the elevation of its subject to the rank of a classic.… A sufficient answer to this charge would seem to be that in such writers as J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, ‘Ian Maclaren,’ Rudyard Kipling, and several others [_sic_], the public that reads books is vastly more interested than it is in its mighty dead.”
The collocation of “such writers” in this passage is as ingenious as it is absurdly Scotch.
“Among the literary men of the present day there is none who has been more personal in his writings than Dr. Barrie; he is as personal in prose as Byron was in poetry. His own heart, his own experiences, the lives of his ‘ain folk,’ these have been the subjects out of which _his genius has made literature_.”
The italics are our own.