VIII THE SCOT AS A CRITIC

Taking him all in all, the Scotch critic is a good deal of an anomaly. To criticise is scarcely the Scotchman’s forte, his chief gifts lying rather in the direction of admiration, particularly of admiration for whatever is Scotch. But we have amongst us (and I do not wish him other than a long and prosperous career) one Scotch critic—or, at any rate, a Scotchman who passes for a critic. I refer, need it be said, to Dr. William Archer. Dr. Archer is the dramatic critic of the World newspaper. Whenever I have looked into the World newspaper, I have found a page or so of Dr. Archer. His work appears to be done to the satisfaction of his employers, and I have no fault to find with it, excepting that[118] I cannot bring myself to feel enthusiastic about it. To tackle Dr. Archer flying, as it were, let us peep at his contribution to the current number of his journal. Herein he deals with a play by Miss Netta Syrett and preaches a little sermon to theatrical managers.

“I admit, then [he says], that from the actor-manager’s point of view—his quite legitimate and inevitable point of view under our accursed system—the play has drawbacks that might well stand in the way of its production. But if any manager read it and did not recognise that he was face to face with an exceptional talent, and one of which, by judicious encouragement, much might be made, then I say that he showed a deplorable lack of discernment. This—hypothetic—manager ought to have sent for the authoress and said, ‘Miss Syrett, I cannot, for such and such reasons, produce this play. But there are scenes in it which show me that you have the making of a playwright in you. Have you other ideas? Yes, of course you[119] have. Well, go home and draw me out the scenario of a play that you think would suit me, and then come and let us talk it over. Remember, I promise nothing, except my very best attention to anything you may bring me. But that you shall have; and if you are not above taking hints from my experience, you may be able to avoid certain trifling errors and crudities into which you have fallen in this piece. Don’t be in a hurry. You ladies, if I may say so, are apt to imagine that, when once you have got an idea, a play can be improvised like a newspaper article or a six shilling novel. This is a mistake. A play, to have any solid value, must be carefully and laboriously built up. You will make false steps, find yourself in blind alleys, and have to try back and start afresh many and many a time. You will have days of discouragement, when your characters refuse point-blank to do what you want them to. Probably you will find in the end that you have given as much thought and labour to every line of your play as you would to a[120] whole page of a novel. But if you are prepared to take your art seriously, you may rely upon my taking seriously whatever you may offer me. And be assured of this, that if you fail to do something really worth while, my disappointment will be scarcely less than your own.’ In some such words, as it seems to me, should the sagacious manager have addressed the authoress of The Finding of Nancy.”

Excellently intended, my dear Dr. Archer, excellently and honestly intended. But could gratuitousness, or egregiousness, or flat-footedness go further? Such an oration, happily, might come out of none but a Scotch mouth or from any pen but that of a Scotchman. In point of unnecessariness it rivals pretty well aught that I have had the felicity to see in print. And it illustrates to admiration the Scotch faculty for spreading out the commonplace and being sententious over it.

What Dr. Archer’s view of the theatre may be nobody knows. In the beginning of the speech I have quoted he refers to “our accursed[121] system,” so that there must be a screw loose somewhere. For years Dr. Archer has been pounding away at this same system, and it seems to continue. Nor has Dr. Archer made the slightest dint upon it. A little while back, one of the wags in which London appears to abound pointed out that plays praised by Dr. Archer invariably come in for the shortest of runs. To which impeachment Dr. Archer replied, with great ingenuousness, by printing a formidable list of plays which had survived his approval. Another wag having said something against the Scotch in a paper called The Outlook, Dr. Archer exclaimed, in cold type, “Outlook indeed! Methinks that north of the Tweed they will call it Outrage!” This, of course, is a Scotch joke, and therefore an old one. In the year 600 or thereabouts, Gregory the Great, noting the fair faces and golden hair of some youths in the market-place of Rome, enquired from what country the men came. “They are Angles,” was the reply. “Not Angles,” quoth the worthy Gregory, “but[122] angels.” For thirteen centuries the pun of the Bishop of Rome had remained decently tucked away in the history books. And in 1901, Dr. Archer, who really is a wit, drags it forth and makes another like it.

All these, however, be small deer. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with the true inwardness of Dr. Archer as critic, we must turn to his magnum opus—that great guinea work of his, entitled Poets of the Younger Generation. Now, on the question of modern poetry, and particularly of the younger school of poets, people interested in poetry are always glad to hear words of wisdom. Have we any contemporary poets? If so, are they writing poetry for us, contemporary or otherwise? The subject invites. Somehow and for some reason or other it invited Dr. Archer. Indeed, it went further than inviting him; it inveigled him. No doubt the notion of writing a book about poets came to him on one of his discouraging days. He had been hammering, hammering, hammering at the theatre and “our accursed[123] system,” and he was fain for a softer job. What work could a poor, tired critic take up outside the potter’s field of our accursed system? When a critic gets into that frame of mind he always thinks of the poets. Dr. Archer thought of the poets—the living poets—the poets of the younger generation. Being a Scotchman, Dr. Archer thought, and straightway set to work. He appears to have plodded steadfastly through the writings of no fewer than thirty-three of the minor contemporary poets of England and America. Of each of these thirty-three children of the Muse, beginning with the Rev. H. C. Beeching and ending with William Butler Yeats, he wrote painful notices, bejewelled with excerpts, put them into a book, and got them published by Mr. John Lane. With the beauty or otherwise of his thirty-three notices, in spite of their exquisite thirty-three-ness, I do not propose greatly to concern myself. Their general drift and tenor may be inferred from the following examples, culled from the article on Mr. Kipling:

[124]

“Far be it from me to disparage Scots Wha Hae, but I am not sure that it possesses the tonic quality of the refrain of Mr. Kipling’s song of defeat:
An’ there ain’t no chorus ’ere to give,
Nor there ain’t no band to play;
But I wish I was dead ’fore I done what I did
Or seen what I’d seed that day!

What in the name of goodness have Scots Wha Hae and these four lines got to do with one another? How can they be compared, except only as verse, and where, oh where, does the tonic quality of the Kipling lines come in? Again:

“In all the poetry of warfare, was there ever a more exactly observed and yet imaginative touch than that which describes the guns of the enemy ‘shaking their bustles like ladies so fine’? It is grotesque, and it is magnificent.”

As a matter of fact it is not observed at all, and it is certainly not magnificent. Ladies do not shake their bustles. Nowadays, indeed, they have no bustles to shake, and I[125] should imagine that the sound criticism about the simile is that it is too temporary and far fetched. And for the third and last time:

“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[126] 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[127] 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[128] 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[129] 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[130] 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.”[131] 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[132] 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[133] 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,[134] 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.

[135]
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[136] 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[137] 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.

[138]

“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.

[139]
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[140] 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.
[141]
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.