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[154] 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[155] 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.[156] 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[157] 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,[158] 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[159] 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[160] 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,[161] 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.[162] 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.