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[58] 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[59] 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.

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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[61] 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.

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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[63] 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[64] 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[65] 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[66] 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.

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“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[68] 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[69] 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[70] 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[71] 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,[72] 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[73] 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[74] 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[75] 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.