Part 7

“The main distinction of Nottingham journalism lies in the fact that it is associated with the name of Dr. J. M. Barrie.… To-day the so-called ‘Press House’ is a tavern a few yards removed from the ‘Frying Pan,’ and there penny-a-liners and half-fledged reporters drink beer and fancy themselves full-blown journalists, carrying down the traditions of Billy Kirker and that bright Bohemian band. But there are no Barries among them.”

Nottingham, evidently, is in a parlous way.

“It is well known that Dr. Barrie’s start was like that of so many others who have won their way to greatness in the Republic of Letters: a brief spell of journalism, and then—the plunge into literature.”

One can hear Dr. Barrie splashing about for dear life.

“It had never occurred to him [Barrie] that his task lay so near his hand; that to turn the lives of his fellow-townsmen into literature was the way that God had chosen for him to make the age to come his own.”

I should think not, indeed!

“In Barrie’s case it was comparatively a short struggle, and two or three years after the time when he found that Scots dialect was enough to damn a book, he had succeeded in making it an attraction; presently its charm became the most striking feature of contemporary letters, and what we may call the Barrie school arose to accomplish feats unique in the literary history of the nineteenth century.”

Prodigious!

“Sydney Smith was witty; so, too, was Sheridan; Dickens was a humourist; Hood, like Barrie, was at once a wit and a humourist.”

Who would have thought it?

“The noblest book which Barrie has given to the world is none other than _Margaret Ogilvy_, in which—to use the vile and vulgar phrase—he has made ‘copy’ of his mother.… If he had done nothing more than draw that sweet picture of a good woman’s humble, happy life, he would have deserved well of his generation. It was a delicate, almost an impossible, task to take up, and only an artist of the first order could have dared to hope for success in it.… There is no passage in all that Barrie has written more essentially Scottish in character than the delightfully humorous account of his mother on the prospect of his election to a well-known London club, for which he had been nominated by the good fairy of his literary life—Frederick Greenwood.”

Most interesting and most illuminating. Now for Dr. Hammerton on smaller matters. He assures us that “if one will only read the anecdotes of village ‘loonies’ with which Scots literature abounds—especially Dean Ramsay’s _Reminiscences_ and _The Laird o’ Logan_—he will find that the average Scots idiot was a creature of considerably more humour than the average Englishman”—which is a palpable hit. Also, “Only once have I felt inclined to wince in reading anything of Barrie’s, and that was one chapter entitled, ‘Making the Best of it,’ in _A Window in Thrums_; for here it seemed to me he was dwelling on an unworthy element of character which is more typical of the English rural and working classes than of the Scots. I mean the flattering of wealthy fools with a view to largess.”

Dr. Hammerton is quite amusing. His notion of the tremendousness of Dr. Barrie and of the vast superiority of the Scotch does him credit. One day, perhaps, he will wake up to the fact that Dr. Barrie is not among the persons who write literature. And even though Dr. Hammerton should never realise it, the fact remains.

X

THE SCOT IN LETTERS

Dr. Archer was once at pains to prove that his countrymen had contributed “at least their share” of good works to the main stream of English literature. Dr. Archer did this with the help, I believe, of an anthology by Mr. Henley. Properly wielded, an anthology is an excellent weapon, inasmuch as you can prove almost anything out of it. In the supposition that Scotland has done admirably by letters, Dr. Archer has the support of a large body of Scotchmen. For my own part I am quite ready to admit that she has done her best. What a poor best that is, everybody is aware, though so far as I know it is now for the first time set forth in print. When one comes to look upon English literature in the mass, beginning with Chaucer and coming down to Tennyson, and dealing only with the larger forces which have gone to the production of it, one perceives at once that Scotland’s share in the matter has been so small as to be scarcely worth counting. Against Chaucer, perhaps, she can place James I., but the difference is as the difference between chalk and cheese. Against Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists she has nothing to show you, good, bad, or indifferent. Against Milton I suppose she will offer you Drummond of Hawthornden, and for Shelley and Keats, Burns. And of course she vaunts herself on Scott and Carlyle, and takes a certain haughty pride in the fact that R. L. Stevenson was Scotch.

To James I. and Drummond of Hawthornden she is welcome; both of them are what may be termed tolerable poets, and there the matter ends. Of Burns and his work I have already given my view, but I would say here that while at the present moment his popularity is of the widest and has all the appearances of stability, the circumstance that he wrote in a vernacular must ultimately relegate him to a position of comparative obscurity. As Scotland gradually extricates herself from the sloughs of barbarism in which she wallows so joyfully, she will inevitably shed her uncouth dialect, and, as soon as that is accomplished, Burns, excepting as a curiosity, will no longer exist.

For Scott and Carlyle little need be said. Both, I believe, have had their day. Scott, erstwhile the Wizard of the North, is rapidly dropping out of public favour. At the present moment he is what may be styled “a school-prize classic.” _Ivanhoe_ and _The Lady of the Lake_, once considered to be marvellous performances, are now doled out to grubby children for punctual attendance at board schools. In the libraries, public and private, Scott, of course, figures, but the public library statistics go to indicate that he is not being read with avidity, and in private libraries he is felt to be rather a cumberer of space. Talking to a well-known Scotch critic as to the general decay of interest in Scott, I found him to be under no illusion on the point, and he electrified me by saying, “Scott—well, of course! But between ourselves, man, I cannot read the d⸺ books.” This is pretty well everybody’s case. To avow that you have not read Scott is still, perhaps, to confess to a defect in your reading. All the same, if you are a person of average tendencies, you have not read Scott, neither do you propose to do so.

Thomas Carlyle—“true Thomas” as Dr. Archer pathetically dubs him—is another Scotch rocket which has already touched its highest and begun to descend. Both intellectually and as an artist Carlyle, it is true, was worth a dozen Scotts, but he was a Scotchman, and come as near it as he may, a Scotchman cannot do enduring work. So that Carlyle, in the natural order of things, is, as one might say, dropping down the ladder rung by rung. He has ceased to be a “force.” People have discovered that his so-called gospel is a somewhat cheap and snobbish affair. All that is really left of him is _The French Revolution_, which survives because of a certain vividness of style. For the rest, Carlyle looks like going to pieces. A century hence he will be of no more account than Christopher North is to-day.

As to Stevenson, while the Scotch are disposed to brag about him when occasion arises, they have always fought more or less shy of him. He has never been admitted to that cordial intimacy of relation which a Scotchman extends alike to Robbie Burns and Dr. R. S. Crockett. As a matter of fact, he wrote too well and with too sincere a regard for the finer elements of literature to be properly understood in Scotland. Further, he took the precaution not to interlard his English with such phrases as “ben the hoose,” “getting a wee doited,” and so forth. He had no use for Scotch idioms, and when he dropped into them he was sorry for it. And he did not stiffen his pages with panegyric of the Scotch character. In fact, Stevenson tacitly refused to have anything to do with the advertising of his countrymen. He had the good sense to perceive that if you are to use the English language as a medium for expression, you might as well use it skilfully and decently while you are about it. More than all, he did not boast of having been born in a wynd, or of having pu’d fine gowans wi’ Jeanie, the auld sweetie wife’s dochter at Drumkettle.

And an author—a modern author—who is guilty of all these sins of commission and omission must not expect perfection from the warm heart of Scotia. Somehow the Scotch seem to be a nation of persons without fathers. Nearly every Scot one meets strikes one as being a first generation man. You know instinctively, even if he does not tell you, that in his childhood he ran about with untended nose and called his mother “mither.” Even after he has been to “the college,” and made some progress in the business or profession to which he may have devoted himself, he clings to his squalid origins and to the manners of his forbears for dear life. He is the barbarian who scorns to be tamed. The tradition of Scottish independence demands that he should keep you well posted in the facts as to his humble descent and upbringing, and that he should go on speaking as much of his heaven-forsaken dialect as you will let him. To such a person a Scot of the Stevenson type does not appeal. Stevenson, of course, was a Scot, and meet to be bragged about as a successful Scot. For all that he was not a “brither Scot.” He took to the English way and the English manner, and the brither Scots as a body had no alternative but to turn a sour face towards him. From the literary point of view, though he accomplished great things, R. L. S. is just another instance of the ultimate ineptitude of the Scotchman. He tried and tried and tried. No writer of our time has had nobler ideals. Yet he could not climb after his desire. His books are a procession of worthy and even splendid failures. The Scotchness of his blood, do what he might to eradicate it, was too much for him. It kept him from attaining the highest.

To treat of the new school of Scottish writers in the present chapter is, perhaps, to do them too much honour. At no period in the history of letters has such flagrantly bad writing been offered to the English public as is being at present offered by our Scottish authors. Their works have been boomed into a vogue which they do not deserve, and even Scotchmen admit that their so-called transcripts from life are as false and as shoddy as such transcripts well could be. Writing on this subject, Mr. R. B. Cunninghame, himself a Scot, says: “If it pleases them (the hoot-awa’-man gang) to represent that half of the population of their native land is imbecile, the fault is theirs. But for the idiots, the precentors, elders of churches, the ‘select men,’ and those landward folk who have been dragged of late into publicity, I compassionate them, knowing their language has been distorted, and they themselves been rendered such abject snivellers, that not a hen wife, shepherd, ploughman, or any one who thinks in ‘guid braid Scots’ would recognise himself dressed in the motley which it has been the pride of kailyard writers to bestow. Neither would I have Englishmen believe that the entire Scotch nation is composed of ministers, elders, and maudlin whiskified physicians, nor even of precentors who are employed in Scotland to put the congregation out by starting hymns on the wrong note, or in a key impossible for any but themselves to compass.” Mr. Cunninghame ought to know.

The other day I saw in a paper, edited, of course, by a Scotchman, a reference to “many contemporary Scottish men of letters.” I do not hesitate to assert that the number of Scottish men of letters now living can be counted twice on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, with the persons who might be expected to count in such a category, in my mind’s eye, I have difficulty in admitting that any one of them is a man of letters in the strict sense of the phrase. Even Dr. Andrew Lang, who is by far the most competent Scotchman now writing, would probably not care to lay claim to the dignity which the term “men of letters” suggests.

XI

THE SCOT IN COMMERCE

When a Scotchman’s parents decide that he shall be neither a minister nor a journalist, or when a wee laddie who has been dedicated to one or other of these offices kicks over the traces, or turns out something of a failure, there are still splendid openings for him. Far away to the south stretches that land of milk and honey—“England”—and there is scarcely a square mile of it whereon you do not find either a shop or a bank or a factory, or some other hive of industry created, of course, for the special benefit of Scotchmen. Donald, the hobbledehoy, that would not be a minister, and was not intended for a professor, and had not shorthand enough to be a journalist, is packed off South to wear an apron, to shovel gold behind bars, or “to work his way up” in an engineering establishment, as the case may be. Furthermore, he is understood to make an excellent gardener, and not a few English noblemen like to keep him about their places weeding and pruning, and feeding hogs. In the main, however, he rather tends to become a clerk in an office. There is something about being able to keep your coat on while you work and to be in the confidence of Mr. Foozlem’s books,—of holding, in short, a “position of trust,” at thirty shillings a week, which is peculiarly attractive to the Scottish mind; and employers of clerical labour appear to be firmly convinced that Donald is the man for them. They like him because he is never late, he is always putting a bit by, and he is as cheap as horseflesh. His slowness and want of sagacity are no great matter. The fact that he can only work in grooves also does not matter. Thrift and punctuality, not to mention cheapness, clothe him with virtues like a garment, and when higher posts fall vacant, your employer—good, easy man—has a way of turning a hopeful eye on “that steady young Scot.” The late remarkable case of Mr. Goudie, who was as Scotch as you make them, and, perhaps, the greatest and stupidest rogue that has adorned the annals of modern banking, shows what a Scotch clerk can do when he tries. The genius of his country asserted itself in the matter of Mr. Goudie, and we saw what we saw. In banks, at any rate, to be Scotch will not be to rank with Cæsar’s wife for quite a little time to come. Of course, we shall be told that the raking up of Goudie is unfair. It always is unfair to say anything to the detriment of Scotchmen. But the point I wish to insist upon is that Scotch clerks and Scotch managers and Scotchmen at large are no more trustworthy and no more to be depended upon and no less human than Englishmen. The Scotch themselves spare no effort to have it believed that if you want men of true probity, you must go to Scotland for them. Employers have taken them at their word and continue to take them at their word, and, all other things being equal, if there are two applicants for a position in the average commercial house, and one of them is English and the other Scotch, the Scotchman gets the preference, simply because he is Scotch.

Among Dr. Maclaren’s Drumtochty marvels, there is an old couple who have a son who is a professor. That son, being, of course, a model of what a son should be, writes home to his good mother once a week, and the letter is invariably forthcoming in the kirkyard on Sundays, so that all who care to read may be informed as to the professor’s condition and progress. Many touching things are said by the admirers of this honest couple as to the honour their son has conferred upon “the Glen,” and the general prodigiousness of his character and position. But it never occurs to Dr. Maclaren to put into the mouth of any of his people a single word as to what is thought of the professor by the persons with whom he is dealing. What do his fellow professors think of him? What do his students think of him? We all know that professor from Drumtochty, and we all wish that Drumtochty had kept him. Not only in universities, but wherever there is a modest living to be made, there you will find him in full bloom, and the more authority he has, the less possible is he to get on with. As a colleague, too, he is equally objectionable. When a certain Scotch lady was informed during the time of the Indian Mutiny that her son had been captured by the enemy with other prisoners and that he had been put into a chain-gang, she said with emotion, “God help the man that’s chained to oor Sandy.” And this is precisely the trouble. To work amicably with a Scotchman in any commercial capacity is well nigh an impossibility. He is eaten up with a squint-eyed envy; the fear that for some inscrutable reason you wish to oust him out of his occupation is ever with him, and it is part of his creed and code to shoulder out any fellow worker who happens to be getting a little more money or a little more credit than himself. In fact, when he comes to take up any sort of a berth, it is with the consciousness that, as a Scot, it is his duty by hook or by crook to make himself master of the situation, and, if needs be, to turn out in the long run his own employer. If you ask a Scotchman how it comes to pass that so many of his compatriots hold positions of influence in commercial houses, he will reply, nine times out of ten, “Well, you see, we just drop into them.” If this were so, nobody would mind, but as a matter of fact, your Scotchman is far too calculating to drop into anything. His great game is the game of grab; he will move heaven and earth to get what he wants, and, as Dr. Robertson Nicoll has told us, he is not over-scrupulous in his methods of getting it. Every commercial man could give instances of this over-reachingness which is such an essential feature of the policy of the Scotch employee. Live and let live is not at all in his way. Of gratitude for help rendered he knows nothing. He begins life with sycophancy, and the moment he meets with any sort of success, he assumes a truculent over-bearingness which he is pleased to call force of character. When you hear of men being deprived of their positions by sharp practice and shiftiness, no matter whether it be in a draper’s shop or in a gilt-edged bank, you will find that nine times out of ten there is a Scotchman in the case; that it is the Scotchman who has got up the bother, and that it is the Scotchman who is to take the post the other man vacates. Dr. Nicoll, who is a veritable encyclopædia of Scotch character, wrote some time ago a number of articles which he called _Firing out the Fools_. He asserted very properly that in most business houses there are always a number of fools who are a dead weight on progress. The capable men who are not quite capable enough are the plague of most heads of commercial concerns. You want a man to do such and such things; you look round your staff; you consider the merits of this and that person, and you feel that none of them is exactly the person you want. What are you to do? If you endeavour to get a man from outside, the chances are that he will be no better than the men you have. Dr. Nicoll, of course, knows exactly what you should do. He does not say, “Send for the nearest Scotchman,” because that would be a little too explicit; but he does say that plod is the great quality which distinguishes competence from foolishness, and, as everybody knows, the Scot is nothing if not a plodder. Plod, plod, plod, with plenty of divagations into plotting and scheming, is the essence of his life. And when all is said and done, plod may be counted about the meanest and least desirable of the virtues. It is to the plodders that we owe pretty well everything we wished we had not got. The very word plod is about the ugliest and the most nauseating in the English language. Your plodder may plod and plod and plod, but he never does anything that is more than middling. In the arts this is a fact beyond traverse. The plodding artist is still a student at fifty; the plodding writer is a fool to the end of his life; the plodding actor says, “My Lord, the carriage waits,” till the workhouse or the grave claims him for its own. This being so, why should the plodder be the only ware in commercial matters? Brilliancy and imagination are nowadays just as much wanted in business as in any other department of life. Tact and a reasonably decent feeling for your fellow-man are also wanted. Your Scot, on his own showing, does not possess these qualities. He even goes so far as to disdain them and to assure you that they are not consistent with “force of character” and “rugged independence.” The moral is obvious, and I should not be surprised if English employers of labour have not already begun to take it to heart. Fire out the fools! is a shibboleth which comes ill from a Scotchman, because in the large result it may easily mean, Fire out the Scotchmen.

XII

THE SCOT AS A DIPSOMANIAC

Under the inspiring tutelage of the national bard, Scotland has become one of the drunkenest nations in the world. Among the lower classes of the Scotch cities drunkenness is the preponderating vice. In the rural districts whiskey is the only beverage that finds any sort of favour. There is no occasion of life which does not provoke the average Scotchman to inhibition. Births, deaths, and marriages are all celebrated in drink. On Burns Day, Scotland rushes to the bottle as one man. The same is true of New Year’s Day; and year in and year out everybody “tastes” and “tastes” and “tastes” from morn to dewy eve. The land simply seethes in whiskey, and though you take hold of the wings of the morning you cannot get away from the odour of it. In twelve hours spent in Edinburgh I saw more drinking than could be seen in an English town of the same population in a couple of days, and I know what drinking means.