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.
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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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.
XI
THE SCOT IN COMMERCE
When a Scotchman’s parents decide that he shall be neither a minister
nor a journalist, or when a wee laddie who has been dedicated to one or
other of these offices kicks over the traces, or turns out something of a
failure, there are still splendid openings for him. Far away to the south
stretches that land of milk and honey—“England”—and there is scarcely
a square mile of it whereon you do not find either a shop or a bank or
a factory, or some other hive of industry created, of course, for the
special benefit of Scotchmen. Donald, the hobbledehoy, that would not be
a minister, and was not intended for a professor, and had not shorthand
enough to be a journalist, is packed off South to wear an apron, to
shovel gold behind bars, or “to work his way up” in an engineering
establishment, as the case may be. Furthermore, he is understood to
make an excellent gardener, and not a few English noblemen like to keep
him about their places weeding and pruning, and feeding hogs. In the
main, however, he rather tends to become a clerk in an office. There
is something about being able to keep your coat on while you work and
to be in the confidence of Mr. Foozlem’s books,—of holding, in short,
a “position of trust,” at thirty shillings a week, which is peculiarly
attractive to the Scottish mind; and employers of clerical labour appear
to be firmly convinced that Donald is the man for them. They like him
because he is never late, he is always putting a bit by, and he is as
cheap as horseflesh. His slowness and want of sagacity are no great
matter. The fact that he can only work in grooves also does not matter.
Thrift and punctuality, not to mention cheapness, clothe him with virtues
like a garment, and when higher posts fall vacant, your employer—good,
easy man—has a way of turning a hopeful eye on “that steady young Scot.”
The late remarkable case of Mr. Goudie, who was as Scotch as you make
them, and, perhaps, the greatest and stupidest rogue that has adorned the
annals of modern banking, shows what a Scotch clerk can do when he tries.
The genius of his country asserted itself in the matter of Mr. Goudie,
and we saw what we saw. In banks, at any rate, to be Scotch will not be
to rank with Cæsar’s wife for quite a little time to come. Of course, we
shall be told that the raking up of Goudie is unfair. It always is unfair
to say anything to the detriment of Scotchmen. But the point I wish to
insist upon is that Scotch clerks and Scotch managers and Scotchmen at
large are no more trustworthy and no more to be depended upon and no less
human than Englishmen. The Scotch themselves spare no effort to have it
believed that if you want men of true probity, you must go to Scotland
for them. Employers have taken them at their word and continue to take
them at their word, and, all other things being equal, if there are two
applicants for a position in the average commercial house, and one of
them is English and the other Scotch, the Scotchman gets the preference,
simply because he is Scotch.
Among Dr. Maclaren’s Drumtochty marvels, there is an old couple who have
a son who is a professor. That son, being, of course, a model of what
a son should be, writes home to his good mother once a week, and the
letter is invariably forthcoming in the kirkyard on Sundays, so that all
who care to read may be informed as to the professor’s condition and
progress. Many touching things are said by the admirers of this honest
couple as to the honour their son has conferred upon “the Glen,” and
the general prodigiousness of his character and position. But it never
occurs to Dr. Maclaren to put into the mouth of any of his people a
single word as to what is thought of the professor by the persons with
whom he is dealing. What do his fellow professors think of him? What do
his students think of him? We all know that professor from Drumtochty,
and we all wish that Drumtochty had kept him. Not only in universities,
but wherever there is a modest living to be made, there you will find him
in full bloom, and the more authority he has, the less possible is he
to get on with. As a colleague, too, he is equally objectionable. When
a certain Scotch lady was informed during the time of the Indian Mutiny
that her son had been captured by the enemy with other prisoners and that
he had been put into a chain-gang, she said with emotion, “God help the
man that’s chained to oor Sandy.” And this is precisely the trouble. To
work amicably with a Scotchman in any commercial capacity is well nigh
an impossibility. He is eaten up with a squint-eyed envy; the fear that
for some inscrutable reason you wish to oust him out of his occupation is
ever with him, and it is part of his creed and code to shoulder out any
fellow worker who happens to be getting a little more money or a little
more credit than himself. In fact, when he comes to take up any sort of
a berth, it is with the consciousness that, as a Scot, it is his duty by
hook or by crook to make himself master of the situation, and, if needs
be, to turn out in the long run his own employer. If you ask a Scotchman
how it comes to pass that so many of his compatriots hold positions of
influence in commercial houses, he will reply, nine times out of ten,
“Well, you see, we just drop into them.” If this were so, nobody would
mind, but as a matter of fact, your Scotchman is far too calculating to
drop into anything. His great game is the game of grab; he will move
heaven and earth to get what he wants, and, as Dr. Robertson Nicoll has
told us, he is not over-scrupulous in his methods of getting it. Every
commercial man could give instances of this over-reachingness which is
such an essential feature of the policy of the Scotch employee. Live and
let live is not at all in his way. Of gratitude for help rendered he
knows nothing. He begins life with sycophancy, and the moment he meets
with any sort of success, he assumes a truculent over-bearingness which
he is pleased to call force of character. When you hear of men being
deprived of their positions by sharp practice and shiftiness, no matter
whether it be in a draper’s shop or in a gilt-edged bank, you will find
that nine times out of ten there is a Scotchman in the case; that it is
the Scotchman who has got up the bother, and that it is the Scotchman
who is to take the post the other man vacates. Dr. Nicoll, who is a
veritable encyclopædia of Scotch character, wrote some time ago a number
of articles which he called _Firing out the Fools_. He asserted very
properly that in most business houses there are always a number of fools
who are a dead weight on progress. The capable men who are not quite
capable enough are the plague of most heads of commercial concerns. You
want a man to do such and such things; you look round your staff; you
consider the merits of this and that person, and you feel that none of
them is exactly the person you want. What are you to do? If you endeavour
to get a man from outside, the chances are that he will be no better than
the men you have. Dr. Nicoll, of course, knows exactly what you should
do. He does not say, “Send for the nearest Scotchman,” because that would
be a little too explicit; but he does say that plod is the great quality
which distinguishes competence from foolishness, and, as everybody knows,
the Scot is nothing if not a plodder. Plod, plod, plod, with plenty of
divagations into plotting and scheming, is the essence of his life. And
when all is said and done, plod may be counted about the meanest and
least desirable of the virtues. It is to the plodders that we owe pretty
well everything we wished we had not got. The very word plod is about the
ugliest and the most nauseating in the English language. Your plodder
may plod and plod and plod, but he never does anything that is more
than middling. In the arts this is a fact beyond traverse. The plodding
artist is still a student at fifty; the plodding writer is a fool to
the end of his life; the plodding actor says, “My Lord, the carriage
waits,” till the workhouse or the grave claims him for its own. This
being so, why should the plodder be the only ware in commercial matters?
Brilliancy and imagination are nowadays just as much wanted in business
as in any other department of life. Tact and a reasonably decent feeling
for your fellow-man are also wanted. Your Scot, on his own showing, does
not possess these qualities. He even goes so far as to disdain them and
to assure you that they are not consistent with “force of character”
and “rugged independence.” The moral is obvious, and I should not be
surprised if English employers of labour have not already begun to take
it to heart. Fire out the fools! is a shibboleth which comes ill from a
Scotchman, because in the large result it may easily mean, Fire out the
Scotchmen.
XII
THE SCOT AS A DIPSOMANIAC
Under the inspiring tutelage of the national bard, Scotland has become
one of the drunkenest nations in the world. Among the lower classes of
the Scotch cities drunkenness is the preponderating vice. In the rural
districts whiskey is the only beverage that finds any sort of favour.
There is no occasion of life which does not provoke the average Scotchman
to inhibition. Births, deaths, and marriages are all celebrated in
drink. On Burns Day, Scotland rushes to the bottle as one man. The same
is true of New Year’s Day; and year in and year out everybody “tastes”
and “tastes” and “tastes” from morn to dewy eve. The land simply seethes
in whiskey, and though you take hold of the wings of the morning you
cannot get away from the odour of it. In twelve hours spent in Edinburgh
I saw more drinking than could be seen in an English town of the same
population in a couple of days, and I know what drinking means.
Whiskey to breakfast, whiskey to dinner, whiskey to supper; whiskey when
you meet a friend, whiskey over all business meetings whatsoever; whiskey
before you go into the kirk, whiskey when you come out; whiskey when
you are about to take a journey, whiskey all along the road, whiskey at
the journey’s end; whiskey when you are well, whiskey if you be sick,
whiskey almost as soon as you are born, whiskey the last thing before
you die—that is Scotland. There is a cock-and-bull tale to the effect
that all the finest clarets go to Leith and are drunk in Edinburgh.
Practically, there is no really good claret in all Scotland, unless it
be at the hotels which have been built for the reception of English and
American tourists, and the Scot to the manner born would not give you
a “thank you” for the best claret in the world. “Go bring me a pint of
wine and bring it in a silver tassy” was a mere piece of swagger on the
part of the bard. Wine is not drunk in Scotland; the Scotchman can get no
“forrader” with it, and as for drinking it out of a silver tassy, there
are not more than three silver tassies in the country. Whiskey, and that
of the crudest and most shuddering quality is undoubtedly the Scotchman’s
peculiar vanity. The amount that he can consume without turning a hair is
quite appalling. I have seen a Scotchman drink three bottles of Glenlivet
on a railway journey from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, and when he got out
at Edinburgh he strutted doucely to the refreshment bar and demanded
further whiskey. In London, and particularly in Fleet Street, his feats
in this connection are notorious. In the more central quarters of London
there are a number of hostelries which are almost wholly devoted to
Scottish requirements in the way of ardent liquors. Under some Scotch
name, such as the Scotch Stores, the Clachan, the Highland Laddie, and
so forth, these places flourish and the proprietors of them wax fat.
Here, any morning in the week, you will find brither Scots assembled,
elbow on counter, indulging in the whiskey which delights their souls.
All day there is plenty of company, plenty of Doric, plenty of discussion
on politics and the questions of the hour, but more than all, a steady
flow of whiskey. And by eleven P.M. or thereabouts the company begins
to exhibit a tendency to song. And at closing time it staggers forth
singing _Scots Wha Hae_ and _My Ain Kind Dearie O_ in various pathetic
keys. _Scots Wha Hae_ is a poor song to sing in the circumstances, and
as for _My Ain Kind Dearie O_, she probably fumes at home and is not in
the least kind in her welcoming of her whiskeyful lord. It is certain
that the number of persons in Fleet Street employed upon the press either
in literary capacities or as advertisement canvassers or printers is
very considerable, and among the lower grades of them, the drinking of
whiskey appears to be considered a part of their duty to themselves
and to mankind at large. At the same time it is only fair to say that
a drunken Scotchman is not by any means a common spectacle, the reason
being that the Scot is so inured to the consumption of whiskey from his
youth up, that he can take almost any quantity without becoming drunk
about the legs. Drink, however, he must and will have, and both at home
and abroad he makes a point of getting as much of it as his means will
allow. In Scotland it is quite general for men and women alike to drink
whiskey raw and to take the water afterwards. This is done at every meal,
and if you call upon a Scotch household at any hour of the day you will
be at once offered a four-or five-finger dose of the national drink. To
refuse it is to be set down for an evilly-disposed person. Burns the
Almighty approved of whiskey drinking; with him it was the symbol of
good-fellowship, and he is quoted to you continually as the justification
of all excesses.
We are na drunk, we’re no’ that drunk
But just a drappie in our ee,
is the great retort used by Scotchmen if one suggests that they have had
enough or too much.
It is to the Scot’s amazing capacity for the consumption of spirit that
one may fairly attribute some of his minor defects. Dourness, of which
every Scotchman possesses a fair share, and of which he is invariably
more or less proud, has always struck me as being in a great measure the
outcome of too much whiskey overnight. It is not till he is properly
exhilarated with drink that a Scot can unbend himself in the smallest
degree. Once primed, he does his best to prove himself an excellent and
generous fellow by becoming as uproarious as the host of the tavern in
which he is drinking will allow him to be. But next morning, when the
whiskey is out of him, he is a very sad and sober man indeed. Then it
is that he passes for “dour.” You talk with him and get for answers
grunts: he cannot smile; he plods heavily away at whatever labour stands
in front of him: he is glum, rude of tongue and dull of mind, and his
brethren set it down for you to his “Scots dourness.”
His gift of steady drinking also accounts, in my opinion, for his general
mediocrity. Whiskey may be a fine and healthy drink for persons who do
not take enough of it; but to be braced up with it by day and to swim in
it by night is calculated to have a detrimental effect even on the bright
intellects that come out of Scotland. I have not the smallest desire to
suggest that there are not plenty of hard drinkers whose blood is more
or less purely English, yet somehow there is no kind of man in the world
who makes the drinking of furious spirit a _cultus_ and a boast in the
way that the Scotchman does. To be fou’ or as he would put it, to have a
drappie in his eye, is the Scotchman’s notion of bigness and freedom and
manly independence. He is a ranter and a roarer in his cups, and on the
whole much more distressing to meet drunk than sober, which is saying a
great deal.
XIII
THE SCOT AS CRIMINAL
Burns, like every other Scotchman that has trailed a pen, did not fail
to help along the Scottish advertisement with a suitable contribution.
He wrote _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_, and thereby did a great thing
for Scotland, setting up a picture of Scottish home life and piety which
the generations seem to regard as authentic. We have all been taught to
admire the moral excellences of that cottar, not to mention the moral
excellences of his wife and children:
With joy unfeigned brothers and sisters meet,
And each for others’ welfare kindly spiers;
The social hours swift winged, unnotic’d fleet,
Each tells the unco’s that he see or hears.
The parents partial eye their hopeful years,
Anticipation forward prints the view;
The mother, wi’ her needle and her shears,
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new,
The father mixes a’ wi’ admonition due.
Their masters’ and their mistresses’ command
The younkers a’ are warned to obey.
And mind their labours wi’ an eydent hand,
And ne’er tho’ out of sight to jauk or play—
And O! be sure to fear the Lord alway.
And mind your duty, duly morn and night,
Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray,
Implore his counsel and assisting might,
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright.
All of which is very fine, and, with much more to the like effect, has
helped the Scotch peasant into an odour of sanctity which on the whole
does not appear to be quite his element. Indeed, so far from conducting
his life in the manner suggested by _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_, the
average Scot of the lower orders appears to base himself on the more
scandalous portion of Burns’s writing.
According to the latest returns, the population of Scotland is 4,472,000.
In the year 1900, which is the latest year for which statistics are
available, a matter of 180,000 persons were charged with criminal
offences in Scotland. So that out of every twenty-five Scotchmen in
Scotland one is either a convicted criminal or a person who has been
charged with a criminal offence. From the official Buff-book dealing with
the subject I take the following: