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.” 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 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 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, 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.
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 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 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.
“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.
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 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.
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.
IX
THE SCOT AS BIOGRAPHER
There are two Scotch books of biography, all published, I believe,
within the last six years, which invariably raise my gorge. One of them
is _Margaret Ogilvy_, by Dr. J. M. Barrie; the second is _J. M. Barrie
and his Books_, by Dr. J. A. Hammerton. The first, dealing with a dead
mother, is a work that nothing but a sense of duty could induce me to
handle in the present connection. It has, however, been put before
the public without so much as an attempt at justification or apology,
and with the plain intention of being sold precisely in the manner of
other literary wares, and it must therefore take its chance. _Margaret
Ogilvy_ appears to have gone into no end of editions. It is an account
of the character and sayings of Dr. J. M. Barrie’s mother, viewed in
the light of Dr. Barrie’s own “literaryness.” I have no hesitation in
pronouncing it to be one of the most snobbish books that have issued from
the press any time this hundred years. It begins snobbishly, it goes on
snobbishly, and it ends snobbishly. Offered to the reading public as
a piece of fictional sentiment, it would still have been open to the
charge of mawkishness. Offered unblushingly as a transcript from the
life and for the perusal of all who care to purchase, deplorable is the
mildest epithet one can justly apply to it. Wordsworth writes somewhere
of a person “who would peep and botanise about his mother’s grave.” This
is exactly the feeling that a reading of _Margaret Ogilvy_ gives you.
Comparisons in such a case would be doubly odious. Yet one does not
find that Margaret Ogilvy, in spite of everything that her son has done
for her in the way of “keying-up” to literary requirements, was any the
sweeter, or any the nobler, or any the more intellectual than one may
presume the mother of any other writer of Dr. Barrie’s parts to have
been. She was a good mother, she gave birth to Dr. Barrie, she ministered
to him in childhood, she denied herself for him; she took pleasure in
his educational and literary progress, she offered him much advice; she
believed in “God” and “love,” and she died in the faith. The mothers of
most literary people have done as much. It has been left to Dr. Barrie to
snatch away the decent veil which hides the sanctities of life from the
common gaze, and to let all the world into the privacies of the filial
and maternal relation at five shillings a time. If I understand Margaret
Ogilvy aright, she would have cut off both her hands rather than permit
some of the things in this book to become the property of strangers,
sympathetic or otherwise.
Of course, the excuse immediately forthcoming from Dr. Barrie’s friends
and admirers will be “the lesson.” It is the only excuse that can
possibly be raked up, and, like the majority of excuses, it is a poor
stick to lean upon. For “the lesson” of _Margaret Ogilvy_ simply amounts
to this, that conceit and self-advertisement may bring a man to the
silliest and least dignified of passes. In point of fact Dr. Barrie’s
“little study” is just as much a study of himself as of his mother. If it
shows Margaret Ogilvy in the figure of an excellent mother, it also shows
J. M. Barrie in the figure of a preternaturally excellent and dutiful
son. If it shows that Margaret Ogilvy was a simple, unsophisticated
woman of the people, it shows also that J. M. Barrie had compassion on
her intellectual shortcomings and was ever ready to humour the poor body
and to twinkle tolerantly on her whimsies, when he might, had he so
chosen, have withered her with a word. To take a sample passage: “Now
that I was an author, I must get into a club. But you should have heard
my mother on clubs! She knew of none save those to which you subscribe a
pittance weekly, and the London clubs were her scorn. Often I heard her
on them—she raised her voice to make me hear, whichever room I might be
in, and it was when she was sarcastic that I skulked the most: ‘Thirty
pounds is what he will have to pay the first year, and ten pounds a year
after that. You think it’s a lot o’ siller? Oh, no, you’re mista’en—it’s
nothing ava’. For the third part of thirty pounds you could rent a
four-roomed house, but what is a four-roomed house, what is thirty
pounds, compared to the glory of being a member of a club?’ … My wisest
policy was to remain downstairs when these withering blasts were blowing,
but probably I went up in self-defence.
“‘I never saw you so pugnacious before, mother.’
“‘Oh,’ she would reply, promptly, ‘you canna expect me to be sharp in the
uptake when I am no’ a member of a club.’
“‘But the difficulty is in becoming a member. They are very particular
about whom they elect, and I daresay I shall not get in.’
“‘Well, I’m but a poor crittur (not being member of a club), but I think
I can tell you to make your mind easy on that head. You’ll get in, I’se
uphaud—and your thirty pounds will get in, too.’”
And so on. Humour, of course! The sagacious, garrulous mother, the
highly diverted, patient son! The picture has pleased the Scotch and
English-speaking nations of two hemispheres. Yet is it of the stupidest
and the most foolish.
On another page we get the following pretty piece of curtain lifting: ‘So
my mother and I go up the stair together. ‘We have changed places,’ she
says; ‘that was just how I used to help you up, but I’m the bairn now.’
She brings out the Testament again; it was always lying within reach.…
And when she has read for a long time she ‘gives me a look,’ as we say in
the North, and I go out, to leave her alone with God.… Often and often
I have found her on her knees, but I always went softly away, closing
the door. I never heard her pray, but I know very well how she prayed,
and that, when that door was shut, there was not a day in God’s sight
between the worn woman and the little child.’
We can do without such books, Dr. J. M. Barrie, even though they sell
well.
Even as Dr. Archer has discovered in _Paradise Lost_ an inexhaustible
mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have I found in Dr. J. A. Hammerton’s
_J. M. Barrie and his Books_ an inexhaustible fund of the pure gold of
Scotch opinion not only as to Dr. Barrie, but also as to other matters.
First let me string together a few pearls about Dr. Barrie.
“I have seen it argued [says our excellent author] that the publication
of such a book as this is a reprehensible practice [_sic_], in that
it implies the elevation of its subject to the rank of a classic.… A
sufficient answer to this charge would seem to be that in such writers as
J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, ‘Ian Maclaren,’ Rudyard Kipling, and several
others [_sic_], the public that reads books is vastly more interested
than it is in its mighty dead.”
The collocation of “such writers” in this passage is as ingenious as it
is absurdly Scotch.
“Among the literary men of the present day there is none who has been
more personal in his writings than Dr. Barrie; he is as personal in prose
as Byron was in poetry. His own heart, his own experiences, the lives of
his ‘ain folk,’ these have been the subjects out of which _his genius has
made literature_.”
The italics are our own.
“The main distinction of Nottingham journalism lies in the fact that it
is associated with the name of Dr. J. M. Barrie.… To-day the so-called
‘Press House’ is a tavern a few yards removed from the ‘Frying Pan,’ and
there penny-a-liners and half-fledged reporters drink beer and fancy
themselves full-blown journalists, carrying down the traditions of Billy
Kirker and that bright Bohemian band. But there are no Barries among
them.”
Nottingham, evidently, is in a parlous way.
“It is well known that Dr. Barrie’s start was like that of so many others
who have won their way to greatness in the Republic of Letters: a brief
spell of journalism, and then—the plunge into literature.”
One can hear Dr. Barrie splashing about for dear life.
“It had never occurred to him [Barrie] that his task lay so near his
hand; that to turn the lives of his fellow-townsmen into literature was
the way that God had chosen for him to make the age to come his own.”
I should think not, indeed!
“In Barrie’s case it was comparatively a short struggle, and two or three
years after the time when he found that Scots dialect was enough to damn
a book, he had succeeded in making it an attraction; presently its charm
became the most striking feature of contemporary letters, and what we may
call the Barrie school arose to accomplish feats unique in the literary
history of the nineteenth century.”
Prodigious!
“Sydney Smith was witty; so, too, was Sheridan; Dickens was a humourist;
Hood, like Barrie, was at once a wit and a humourist.”
Who would have thought it?
“The noblest book which Barrie has given to the world is none other than
_Margaret Ogilvy_, in which—to use the vile and vulgar phrase—he has made
‘copy’ of his mother.… If he had done nothing more than draw that sweet
picture of a good woman’s humble, happy life, he would have deserved well
of his generation. It was a delicate, almost an impossible, task to take
up, and only an artist of the first order could have dared to hope for
success in it.… There is no passage in all that Barrie has written more
essentially Scottish in character than the delightfully humorous account
of his mother on the prospect of his election to a well-known London
club, for which he had been nominated by the good fairy of his literary
life—Frederick Greenwood.”
Most interesting and most illuminating. Now for Dr. Hammerton on smaller
matters. He assures us that “if one will only read the anecdotes of
village ‘loonies’ with which Scots literature abounds—especially Dean
Ramsay’s _Reminiscences_ and _The Laird o’ Logan_—he will find that the
average Scots idiot was a creature of considerably more humour than the
average Englishman”—which is a palpable hit. Also, “Only once have I
felt inclined to wince in reading anything of Barrie’s, and that was one
chapter entitled, ‘Making the Best of it,’ in _A Window in Thrums_; for
here it seemed to me he was dwelling on an unworthy element of character
which is more typical of the English rural and working classes than of
the Scots. I mean the flattering of wealthy fools with a view to largess.”
Dr. Hammerton is quite amusing. His notion of the tremendousness of Dr.
Barrie and of the vast superiority of the Scotch does him credit. One
day, perhaps, he will wake up to the fact that Dr. Barrie is not among
the persons who write literature. And even though Dr. Hammerton should
never realise it, the fact remains.
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 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 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.