amusing without being "jocose," and sympathetic without being maudlin, and who can write of Scottish life and character with a minimum of the dreary old wit about ministers and whisky.1 Perhaps, too, by the date of his appearance some one else may have realised the immense amount of stuff, as yet practically untouched and lying ready to the novelist's hand, in the life of the Scottish professional, commercial, and middling classes. A Balzac would be unnecessary; a second Miss Ferrier would suffice, with Miss Ferrier's acrimony a little mollified, though with all her keen scent for absurdities and foibles unimpaired. The tone would have to be pitched low, and melodrama would have to be rigorously eschewed. The characters would talk, not in Scots, but in Scotticisms; and the works of such a writer would be a valuable repertory of those engaging idioms. Some obloquy he would infallibly incur in the conscientious discharge of his duty; for his localities and personages would be sure to be identified (however unjustly) with actual places and human beings. But he would probably reap a fairly substantial reward, to say nothing of the pleasure inseparable from working a new and rich vein of character and manners. As regards the intellectual future of the country generally there is certainly no apparent cause for gloom; and this forecast might be expressed in more positively sanguine terms if there were any prospect of a diminution in the national failings of self-consciousness and vanity. The tendency to reckon all Caledonian geese as swans and to lose a just sense of proportion in a rapture of patriotic enthusiasm is, of course, assiduously fostered by the public press. It were cruel and short-sighted to discourage so useful a virtue as local patriotism. This not very lofty ideal has to some extent been realised in an unpretending, but excellent, brochure entitled Wee MacGregor (Glasgow, 1902). There are no beadles, nor is there any drink, in it; and the dialect of the West is reproduced with what I am told is astonishing fidelity. No one would select the village of Bowden as a suitable place for delivering a diatribe against Thomas Aird, nor journey to Kirkintilloch for the express purpose of disparaging David Gray. But what is commendable in a parish may be unbecoming in a nation; and few impartial observers would deny that too strong a tincture of the merely parochial is often perceptible in our ebullitions of national self-satisfaction. To boast vociferously of the number of responsible and lucrative appointments held by Scotsmen in the British Empire may be natural. But it is not exactly dignified; and a readiness to accept or tolerate the most flagrant "Kailyard" or "Whistlebinkie" because of the country of its inspiration may, with habitual indulgence, degenerate into a serious fault. The achievements of the Scottish nation in the arts of war and peace are assuredly not so insignificant as to make it necessary for its members to obtrude them, in season and out, upon the notice of an amused and admiring world; and, in particular, there is little need for nervous apprehension that what is best and greatest in our literature will be forgotten by anybody whose remembrance is worth having. If a portion of our literary record has at times fallen into comparative obscurity, much of the blame rests with those who have exercised no discrimination in the apportionment of their extravagant praises, as well as with those who have so puffed out and magnified the figure of Burns as to intercept the light of cordial recognition from his predecessors. If this besetting weakness, then (together with certain others, such as a "love of rhetoric, and admiration for bad models") could by any possibility be corrected, a decided improvement would be wrought in the national habit of mind. But even though (as may well be feared) it should prove too deeply-seated to be eradicable, there is no call to despair. One circumstance, at all events, is of happy omen for the future. The conditions. of Scottish life and society seem almost to preclude the possibility Mr. Sellar to Mr. Nichol, apud Knight's Memoir of the latter, p. 225. of the existence of a distinctive literary class or caste in Scotland. To foster the growth of such a class the environment of a huge capital appears to be essential. Edinburgh is fortunately still too small to provide the requisite atmosphere and surroundings; nor is it easy to imagine that they will ever be found in the "second city of the Empire." Such a thing as a literary caste has, in truth, never existed in the Scottish metropolis. In the age of Robertson and in the age of Scott (as in the seventeenth century), the great men of letters had each his profession. They were lawyers, or professors, or clergymen, or doctors, as the case might be. Much as we may regret the glories of those memorable epochs we may at least rejoice that there are no symptoms of the growth of a body of men prepared to maintain that the practice of literature should be reserved for a self-elected coterie of experts, and to deprecate the criticism of outsiders and "amateurs" with a shrill cry of "Procul este profani." Another hopeful indication lies in the fact that at few periods in their history, probably, have the Scottish Universities been better manned or more efficient than they are to-day. There is no reason why this happy state of matters should not be indefinitely prolonged, provided that two preliminary conditions are satisfied. The bounty of benevolent, but injudicious, millionaires must be directed into the proper channels, and the absurd claim of the successful "business man" as such to prescribe a curriculum of University study must be summarily repelled. The cult of the "useless" must be sedulously prosecuted, and the standards of the counting-house and the market-place must be firmly rejected when they attempt, in a seat of learning, to supplant the traditions inseparably associated with the idea of a liberal education. These indispensable conditions complied with, we may be sure that the Universities will continue to turn out men well fitted for attaining distinction in prose-literature: in scholarship, in philosophy, in history, in science. The national standard of comfort is immeasurably higher, and wealth is much more widely distributed, than of old; yet there is no solid ground for believing in the degeneracy of the race, or for supposing that the supply of intelligent, hard-headed, and hard-working men is sensibly diminishing. Genius, indeed, is another matter. For genius no man can be answerable. Its ways are not as our ways; its spirit bloweth where it listeth; and no "system of national education," however well-devised in theory or serviceable in practice, can do anything to affect its production or much to affect its development. LIST OF SOME OF THE PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES REFERRED TO IN THE COURSE OF THIS WORK Bannatyne Club Publications, 1823-67. Brown, P. Hume, George Buchanan, 1890. Brown, P. Hume, Life of John Knox, 1895. Burns, The Poetry of, ed. Henley and Henderson, 4 vols., 1896–7. Burton, Life and Correspondence of David Hume, 1846. Carlyle, Alexander, Autobiography, 1860. Child, F. J., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols., 1882-98. Cockburn, Life and Correspondence of Francis Jeffrey, 2 vols., 1852. Graham, Rev. H. G., Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Graham, Rev. H. G., Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed., 1901. Gummere, F. B., The Beginnings of Poetry, 1901. Henderson, T. F., Scottish Vernacular Literature, 1898. Irving, David, History of Scotish Poetry, 1861. Irving, David, Scotish Writers, 1839. Lang, History of Scotland, vols. i. and ii., 1900-02. Lang, Life and Letters of J. G. Lockhart, 2 vols., 1896. Laing, David, Select Remains of Ancient Popular and Romance Poetry of Scotland, 1885. |