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[24] 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.

[25]

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[26] 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
[27]
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:

[28]
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[29] 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[30] 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[31] 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[32] 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[33] 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[34] 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[35] 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[36] 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[37] 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[38] 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[39] 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[40] ‘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[41] 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.