And oceans roar between;
Yet, dearer than my deathless soul,
I still would love my Jean.
The spectacle of a gentleman having somebody’s “dear idea” entwined,
whether tenderly or otherwise, round his heart would surely set a cat
laughing. And the loving of Jean, though mountains frown and deserts
howl and oceans roar between, is clearly the merest fustian. Follows _I
Dreamed I Lay Where Flowers were Springing_—a stupid sort of dream to
say the least of it. The flowers, it seems, were springing “gaily in
the sunny beam,” and the poet, it seems, not only “dreamed that he lay
among them” but, that he was “list’ning to the wild birds singing by a
falling crystal stream,” which is a very common and hackneyed thing for a
tenth-rate poet to do. But mark:
Straight the sky grew black and daring;
Thro’ the woods the whirlwinds rave;
Trees with aged arms were warring,
O’er the swelling, drumlie wave.
Such was my life’s deceitful morning,
Such the pleasures I enjoy’d;
But lang or noon, loud tempests storming
A’ my flowery bliss destroy’d.
Tho’ fickle fortune has deceived me,
She promised fair, and performed but ill;
Of monie a joy and hope bereav’d me,
I bear a heart shall support me still.
The moral here is as lame as the meter, and in the open market to-day the
“poem” is not worth fourpence. We finish the page with _Bonie Ann_:
Ye gallants bright, I red you right,
Beware of bonie Ann:
Her comely face sae fu’ o’ grace,
Your heart she will trepan.
Her een sae bright, like stars by night,
Her skin is like the swan;
Sae jimpy lac’d her genty waist,
That sweetly ye might span.
Youth, grace, and love, attendant move,
And pleasure leads the van;
In a’ their charms, and conquering arms,
They wait on bonie Ann.
The captive bands may chain the hands,
But love enslaves the man:
Ye gallants braw, I red you a’
Beware of bonie Ann.
One notes that three out of these five lucubrations have to do with
love, and one wonders how a man who went about with such ill-considered
love-verses in his pocket ever got a woman to look at him.
To take our life in our hands once more, we open on page 153. Here we
have a choice selection of short pieces, and feeble, which we reproduce
as they stand:
TO JOHN M’MURDO, ESQ.
O, could I give thee India’s wealth,
As I this trifle send!
Because thy joy in both would be
To share them with a friend.
But golden sands did never grace
The Heliconean stream;
Then take what gold could never buy—
An honest Bard’s esteem.
ON THE DEATH OF A LAP-DOG, NAMED ECHO
In wood and wild, ye warbling throng,
Your heavy loss deplore;
Now half-extinct your powers of song,
Sweet Echo is no more.
Ye jarring, screeching things around,
Scream your discordant joys;
Now half your din of tuneless sound
With Echo silent lies.
LINES WRITTEN AT LOUDEN MANSE
The night was still, and o’er the hill
The moon shone on the castle wa’;
The mavis sang, while dew-drops hang
Around her on the castle wa’.
Sae merrily they danced the ring,
Frae eenin’ till the cock did craw;
And the o’erword o’ the spring,
Was Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.
These three effusions, dear reader, are really and truly the work of
Burns—or, if you prefer it, of Burrrrrns. In despair one hunts up
something for which the man is noted. _Scots Wha Hae_ one thinks, will
serve. It has been described as noble, and marvellous, and inspiring, and
Heaven knows what besides. Here it is:
Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots whom Bruce has often led;
Welcome to your gory bed
Or to victorie!
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,
See the front o’ battle lour,
See approach proud Edward’s power—
Chains and slaverie!
Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?—
Let him turn and flee!
Wha for Scotland’s king and law
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand or freeman fa’,
Let him follow me!
By Oppression’s woes and pains,
By your sons in servile chains,
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free.
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe,
Liberty’s in every blow,
Let us do or dee!
As a matter of fact, _Scots Wha Hae_ is one those poems which most people
have heard about and few people have read. For this reason I print it
_in extenso_ and commend it to the consideration of the critical. Is it
really noble, or marvellous, or inspiring? Would it pass muster as a new
performance? Is it a whit the better, or sounder, or more convincing than
_God Save the King_, which everybody cheerfully admits is not poetry? I,
for one, hae me doots.
Like Artemus Ward and writers of “Wot-the-Orfis-Boy Finks” order,
Burns owes much of his seeming inspiration and humour to an uncouth
orthography. Put into decent English, many of his most vaunted lays
amount to nothing at all. Indeed, practically the whole of the _poetry_
which came from his pen could be compressed into a book of fifty pages.
I do not say that much of the matter one would have to include in those
fifty pages is not matter of an exceptional and extraordinary quality.
Mr. Henley has told us that in the vernacular, Burns, at his best,
touches the highest level; and with this pronouncement nobody who knows
the difference between good writing and bad will quarrel. But I do
assert that the best of Burns is not sufficient, either in quality or
quantity, to justify the absurd fame which has been bestowed upon him
by his countrymen. James I., whom the average Scotchman barely knows by
name, was, taking him all in all, quite as good a poet as Burns. So was
Barbour; so was Drummond of Hawthornden; and, I had almost added, so were
Stevenson and Robert Buchanan. The question naturally arises, How comes
it to pass that Burns who, excepting by a fluke, was always more or less
of a middling poet, has come to rank as the finest thing in letters that
Scotland ever produced? The answer to that question is simple enough. In
spite of _The Cotter’s Saturday Night_, and two or three other pieces
which are the delight and mainstay of the Scotch kirk-goer, Burns was
undoubtedly the poet of licence and alcoholism. Also he was a ploughman.
Should humble state our mirth provoke!
What folly to misca’ that,
The sapling grows a stately oak,
Wi’ spreading shade and a’ that.
For a’ that and a’ that,
His toils and cares and a’ that,
We’ve seen a ploughman crowned at last
The king o’ men for a’ that.
After illicit love and flaring drunkenness, nothing appeals so much to
Scotch sentiment as having been born in the gutter. In this matter of
admiration for people who attain notoriety from a basis of humble origins
I do not know that the Scotch stand entirely alone. At the present
moment, much fuss is being made in the newspapers over a policeman who
has seen fit to devote himself to the painting of pictures, and who has
succeeded in getting one of his canvases hung at Burlington House; and
if I remember rightly there used to be a postman poet of whom sundry
highly placed critics wrote sundry kindly encouraging and gratuitous
things. Also the English press is apt to tell us that the great Lord
So-and-So was originally a bootblack, and that the great Mr. So-and-So
went to Canada with seven shillings in his pocket. In fact, the prodigy
who began on nothing, and ultimately became rich or famous, is a figure
which British humanity dearly loves. And Burns, as we have seen, was a
ploughman. What special excellence may lie in being a ploughman nobody
but a Scotchman may perceive. In England our booms on humble talent are
of short duration. Clare and Ebenezer Elliott both had their little day,
and ceased to be. But the Scotch ploughman persists, and the fact that
he was a ploughman helps him to persist, and is a great source of pride
to the Scotch. The real reason, however, why Burns became, and continues
to be, a sort of patron saint to the peoples north of the Tweed is, as I
have already suggested, that he was an erotic writer and a condoner of
popular vices. Turn where you will in his precious works, you will find
that drunkenness and impropriety are matters for which he has unqualified
sympathy. Whiskey and women are the subjects which furnish forth the
majority of his flights. He writes of both with a freedom which would not
nowadays be tolerated, and the moral effect of what he has to say cannot
be regarded as otherwise than detrimental. I have before pointed out that
one of Mr. Henley’s critics has asserted that the standard of morality
in the rural districts of Scotland is much lower to-day than it was in
Burns’s time. The inference is obvious. Burns, every Scotchman tells you,
and tells you truly, has played no small part in moulding the sentiments
and tendencies of the Scotch people as we know them. It was he who gave
them their first notion of bumptious independence; it was he who taught
them that “a man’s a man for a’ that”—which, on the whole, is a monstrous
fallacy; it was he who averred that whiskey and freedom gang together;
and it was he who gave the countenance of song to shameful and squalid
sexuality. In a great number of Burns’s love songs the suggestion is of
the lowest. One could take a selection of these songs, print them in a
little book, have them sold in the streets of London at a penny, and be
prosecuted at Bow Street for one’s trouble. The man’s mind was not clean;
he made the Muse an instrument for the promulgation of skulduddery (I
will not vouch for the orthography, but every Scotchman knows what I
mean); he degraded and prostituted his intellect, and earned thereby the
love and worship of a people who appear to have a sympathetic weakness
for erotic verse if it be but Scotch.
It is hard to get the truth about Burns out of the Scotch writers; yet
the more honest among them have always had a sneaking suspicion that he
was an overrated poet. Somehow, in perusing their estimates, one has a
feeling that Burns is not so much being expounded as defended. Stevenson,
who tried to be just, has come nearer the mark about him than any writer
of our own time; but even Stevenson lacked the courage to go the whole
hog. Of Burns, the writer, he could be brought to say nothing more
trenchant than that he “had a tendency to borrow a hint,” and that he was
“indebted in a very uncommon degree to Ramsay and Fergusson.” And, he
adds, by way of defence, that “when we remember Burns’s obligation to his
predecessors, we must never forget his immense advances on them.” Perhaps
not.
As to Burns, the man, it is safe to say that a more profligate person
has seldom figured on the slopes of Parnassus. In love he was as
carnal as he was false. He canted and prated and pretended, but his
relations with women will not bear examination. His life as a whole
would have discredited a dustman, much less a poet. He whined about his
“misfortunes,” and advertised them and made much out of them; but nobody
in his senses can sympathise with him. That he should be held up for a
model by Scottish writers and Scottish preachers is a crying scandal.
The king-o’-men cackle is the sheerest impertinence. Burns never was the
king o’ men. He was never even a decent living man. He never had a rag of
conduct wherewithal to cover himself. He was simply an incontinent yokel
with a gift for metricism. That his memory should stand for so much in
Scotland constitutes a very grave reflection upon the Scottish character
and the Scottish point of view.
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 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 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 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
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 _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 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:
“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 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 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 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 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 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 certain pleasure,
but without any real appreciation.”