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Cornell University Library 
 DA 772.C94 
 
 Unspeakable Scot. 
 
 3 1924 028 125 726 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028125726 
 
The 
 Unspeakable Scot 
 
 %- Ay \^ 
 T. W. H. CROSLAND 
 
 London : GRANT RICHARDS 
 
 New York : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 1902 
 
Copyright, IQ02, by 
 T. W. H. CROSLAND 
 
 Published, July, iqoa 
 Reprinted, August, 1902 ; October, igoa 
 
 Ube Vsniclierbocliet titcee, Vtew Kocft 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FAGB 
 
 I. The Superstition . . . i 
 
 II. Predecessors .... 23 
 
 III. The Pow-wow Men ... 42 
 
 IV. The Scot in Journalism . . 57 
 V. Thrums and Drumtochty . 76 
 
 VI. Barbie 92 
 
 VII. The Bard loi 
 
 VIII. The Scot as a Critic . -117 
 
 IX. The Scot as Biographer . 142 
 
 X. The Scot in Letters . . 153 
 
 XI. The Scot in Commerce . .163 
 
 XII. The Scot as a Dipsomaniac . 172 
 
 XIII. The Scot as Criminal . .179 
 
 XIV. The Scot by Adoption . . 186 
 XV. The Scot and England . . 194 
 
 XVI. The Way Out . . . .204 
 
 XVII. Advertisement . . .212 
 
 iii 
 
The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 THE SUPERSTITION 
 
 This book is for Anglo-Saxons. It is also 
 in the nature of a broad hint for Scotch- 
 men. My qualification to bestow broad hints 
 upon the politest and most intellectual 
 of the peoples is that I possess a large fund 
 of contempt for the Scottish character. Also, 
 I had the misfortune to be bom on a day 
 which is marked, sadly enough, in the calen- 
 dars. Burns died. So that, one way and 
 another, I appear to have been raised up for 
 the work before us, even as Dr. J. M. Barrie ' 
 
 ' In a booklet entitled The Kilt and How to Wear It, 
 the Hon. Stuart Erskine assures us that "in Scotland 
 
2 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 was raised up to assist the fortunes of a cer- 
 tain brand of smoking mixture.' 
 
 Of course, if a man speak of the Scotch in 
 any but the most dulcet tones he invites the 
 onslaught of a thousand witty pens. The 
 bare title of the present essay is pronounced 
 by good judges to be uncomplimentary to 
 Scotland, and I can well imagine that since 
 its announcement Drs. Lang, Archer, Robert- 
 son NicoU, Ross, and Hamish Hendry, to- 
 gether with a base residuum of anonymous 
 reviewers, have made a point of sleeping in 
 their clothes in order that they might be 
 "ready, aye ready," to deal faithfully with 
 the haughty Southron at the earliest possible 
 moment. I like to think, however, that Dr. 
 Lang, who, with true Scottish shrewdness, 
 avowed himself but yesterday a convinced 
 
 every man is a gentleman." On the other hand, in 
 England quite a number of Scotchmen seem to be 
 doctors. I trust that I shall not be considered wanting 
 in respect if I prefix the august, abdominal "Dr." to 
 the names of all Scotch gentlemen whom I have 
 occasion to mention. 
 
 ' Vide that piece of arrant Jeromeism, My Lady 
 Nicotine. 
 
The Superstition 3 
 
 crystal-gazer,' has had due prevision of the 
 friendliness of my intentions. Were I dis- 
 posed to bloody battle, I might have opened 
 fire by remarking in hot type that if you 
 scratch a Scotchman you wiU find a very low 
 person indeed. Or I could have thrown from 
 my pompom that shining projectile : 
 
 False Scot 
 Sold his king 
 For a groat. 
 
 But who, that has a feeling for warfare, 
 would fight with a Scotchman? Such a one, 
 I hope, does not breathe ; the plain fact being 
 that if a Scot beats you, he beats you; 
 whereas, if you begin to beat a Scot, he wiU 
 assuredly bawl, in the King's name, for the 
 law. "Hech, sirs, rin for the polls. Ah 'm 
 gettin' whupped!" Let us therefore con- 
 tinue our discourse amicably. 
 
 Yotir proper child of Caledonia believes 
 in his bones that he is the salt of the 
 earth. Prompted by a glozing pride, not to 
 
 ' Andrew Lang, " Magic Mirrors and Crystal-gaz- 
 ing," Monthly Review, February, 1902. 
 
4 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 say by a black and consuming avarice, he 
 has proclaimed his saltiness from the house- 
 tops in and out of season, unblushingly, 
 assiduously, and with results which have no 
 doubt been most satisfactory from his own 
 point of view. There is nothing creditable to 
 the race of men, from filial piety to a pretty 
 taste in claret, which he has not sedulously 
 advertised as a virtue peculiar to himself. 
 This arrogation has served him passing well. 
 It has brought him into unrivalled esteem. 
 He is the one species of human animal that 
 is taken by all the world to be fifty per cent 
 cleverer and pluckier and honester than the 
 facts warrant. He is the daw with a pea- 
 cock's tail of his own painting. He is the ass 
 who has been at pains to cultivate the con- 
 vincing roar of a lion. He is the fine gentle- 
 man whose father toils with a muck-fork. 
 And, to have done with parable, he is 
 the clumsy lout from Tullietudlescleugh, 
 who, after a childhood of intimacy with the 
 crudest sort of poverty, and twelve months 
 at "the college" on moneys wrung from the 
 
The Superstition 5 
 
 diet of his family/ drops his threadbare kilt 
 and comes South in a slop suit to instruct the 
 English in the arts of civilisation and in the 
 English language. And because he is Scotch, 
 and the Scotch superstition is heavy on otir 
 Southern lands, England will forthwith give 
 him a chance; for an English chance is his 
 birthright. Soon, forbye, shall he be living 
 in "chambers" and writing idiot books. Or 
 he shall swell and hector and fume in the 
 sub-editor's room of a halfpenny paper. Or 
 a pompous and gravel-blind city house shall 
 grapple him to its soul in the capacity of con- 
 fidential clerk. Or he shall be cashier in a 
 jam factory, or "boo and boo" behind a 
 mercer's counter, or "wait on" in a coffee 
 tavern, or, for that matter, soak away his 
 chapped spirit in the four-ale bars off Fleet 
 Street. Hence, as an elegant writer in one 
 of the weekly reviews puts it, the Englishman 
 
 ' The Free University Education Scheme of Dr. 
 Andrew Carnegie (many times millionaire, beloved of 
 the American steel worker, and author of a book called 
 Triumphant Democracy, if you please) will no doubt 
 change all this. 
 
6 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 "is painfully aware that it is the Scot who 
 thrusts him aside in the contest for many of 
 the best prizes." *•.'.. - 
 
 When one turns to the intimate study of 
 the Scotch character as limned by Scotch 
 authority, one finds oneself confronted with 
 the work of two schools of artists, which, for 
 the sake of convenience, we will dub the Old 
 and New Schools. The Old School — of which, 
 by the way, every Scotchman save one is 
 either a member or a supporter — ^has had a 
 tremendous vogue and has accomplished 
 superhuman things for the country and 
 people of its love. To this school the Scotch 
 superstition owes its origin and its firm grip 
 on the imagination of the average white man. 
 It is a forthright, downright, thorough sort 
 of school, not in the least diffident or mealy- 
 mouthed, not in the least ambiguous, not in 
 the least infected with that "proud reserve" 
 which is understood to be Scotland's noblest 
 heritage. Among the choice exemplars of 
 the art of the Old School — and it has thou- 
 sands of choice exemplars — we may reckon 
 
3 ^ The Superstition 7 
 
 'pr. George Lockhart, who wrote the Memoirs 
 and thereby earned for himself imperishable 
 fame. Lockhart was a " Scotland-f or-ever " 
 man of the first water. ' ' As for the [Scots], ' ' 
 he says, "none will, I think, deny them to 
 have been a Brave, Generous, Hardy People. 
 . . . As the Scots were a Brave, so like- 
 wise were they a Polite People; every 
 Country has its own peculiar Customs, and 
 so had Scotland, but in the main they lived 
 and were refined as other Countries; and 
 this won't seem strange, for the English 
 themselves allow the Scots to be a Wise and 
 Ingenious People, for say they to a Proverb, 
 ' They never knew a Scots Man a Fool.' And 
 if so, what should hinder them from being 
 as well bred and civilised as any other Peo- 
 ple? Those of Rank (as they still do) trav- 
 elled Abroad into foreign Countries for their 
 Improvement, and vast numbers, when their 
 Country at home did not require their ser- 
 vices [mark the fine sophistry] went into that 
 of foreign Princes, from whence after they 
 had gained immortal Honour and Glory, they 
 
8 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 rettimed home ; and as it is obvious that at 
 this very time (which must chiefly proceed 
 from this humour of TravelUng) the Scotch 
 Gentry do far exceed those of England, so 
 that in the one you shall find all the ac- 
 complishments of well-bred gentleman, and 
 in your country English Esquires all the 
 Barbarity imaginable." ' Thus Dr. George 
 Lockhart, two hundred years ago. 'Tis a 
 fair picture and a winning, if a trifle over- 
 stated. There stands yotir brilliant, and at 
 the same time unassuming, figure of a Scotch- 
 man — "brave," "generous," "hardy," "po- 
 lite," "refined," "not a fool," "well bred," 
 "civilised," "travelled," "wise," "ingen- 
 ious," and immortally "honourable" and 
 ' ' glorious. ' ' Who can withstand him ? Who 
 would deny him the look of love, the patriot 
 glow? Certainly not the men of his own 
 blood, who have their livings to get. Cer- 
 tainly not the Scotchman, who perceives, by 
 favour of Dr. Lockhart, his own impeccable 
 
 ^ George Lockhart, Memoirs Concerning the Affairs 
 of Scotland from Queen Anne's Accession to May, 1707. 
 
The Superstition 9 
 
 sonsie self done to the life. To this day the 
 artists of the Old School continue to paint 
 the same inspiring portrait, and if you look 
 into the latest replica, by no less judicial a 
 hand than that of Dr. John Hill Burton ' 
 you shall discover the undying lineaments, 
 bespeaking the undying virtues, and com- 
 posed sweetly to the purposes of the undying 
 advertisement. 
 
 So much for the Old School. As for the 
 New School, I take credit that it is a dis- 
 covery of my own. It consists of one man 
 only. He is a Scotchman, and his name is 
 William Robertson NicoU. Dr. NicoU is the 
 editor of the British Weekly. He also edits 
 the Bookman, and lounges round letters in a 
 paper called the Sketch. Some time ago this 
 great and good Scotchman was accused of 
 indulging in too many literary aliases. We 
 were then informed by a protigi of his that it 
 would be well for us to lift reverent eyes and 
 behold in Dr. William Robertson NicoU "a 
 force in letters" — "the only force, some of 
 
 I John Hill Burton, D.C.L., LL.D., The Scot Abroad. 
 
lo The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 us think," added the incense-breathing pro- 
 Ug^. We looked and beheld. Also we read, 
 in Who 's Who, that Dr. NicoU was the author 
 of The Lamb of God, The Key of the Grave, 
 The Incarnate Saviour, The Return to the 
 Cross, The Secret of Christian Experience, 
 Songs of Rest, and Sunday Afternoon Ver- 
 ses, aU, no doubt, excellent and exciting works, 
 but obviously sealed to a department of 
 letters in which we have not specialised. 
 Therefore, we took " the-f orce-in-letters " 
 notion for granted. Our own idea of Dr. 
 Robertson NicoU's relation to letters will be 
 set forth duly in another chapter. Mean- 
 while, it is necessary to say that Dr. NicoU 
 is one of those delightfully irresponsible 
 literary forces who babble of "Mr. S. R. 
 Crockett's great novel Joan of the Sword 
 Hand," in one breath, and with the next 
 pray to be delivered from" a misuse of 
 words." 
 
 But let us give honour where honour is due. 
 There are white marks even on the editor of 
 the British Weekly. For quite two years 
 
The Superstition ii 
 
 past his dropsical penn)rworth has been otir 
 constant solace in times of darkness and diffi- 
 culty. Each week it contains a lengthy 
 and helpful letter by one "Claudius Clear." 
 Many young Scotch writers have told us in 
 many a useful paragraph that they do not 
 think they are breaking a confidence when 
 they say that "Claudius Clear" is one of the 
 pen names of Dr. Robertson NicoU. So that 
 on the whole "Claudius" is a Scotchman, 
 despite the circumstance that he dates his 
 correspondence from Basil Regis, Middlesex, 
 and masquerades in a name which is about as 
 Scotch as ' ' Schiepan. ' ' For that matter, any- 
 body might have guessed it from his syntax. 
 And being a Scotchman, "Claudius" is, of 
 course, omniscient and infallible. That is 
 where the absurd beauty of him comes in. 
 That, Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, is why 
 one reads the British Weekly. Do you wish 
 to know how to run the Times? Would you 
 care to be instructed in "the art of conversa- 
 tion"? Are you anxious to learn what is 
 really meant by "good manners"? Would 
 
12 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 you be advised on "Order and Method," 
 "Brilliance," "Overwork," "Handwriting," 
 "Publishing as a Profession," "Editing as a 
 Profession," "The Keeping of Old Letters," 
 "How to Remember and how to Forget," 
 " The Art of Life," " The Art of Taking things 
 Coolly," "Turning Out the Fools," or indeed 
 on any other matter under the sun — from 
 " Vanity " to " Samuel " ?— why, you just turn 
 up "Claudius," and there you are; two 
 columns which settle the question swiftly 
 and for ever. What wonder, then, that in 
 my anxiety to get at the truth about Scotch- 
 men, I should turn up "Claudius"? Nor 
 have I turned him up in vain, as witness the 
 following admirable words : 
 
 "In the first place, the Scotsman is a son 
 of the rock. The circumstances of his birth 
 and upbringing are as a rule very stem. He 
 is cradled in the storm; he has to fight for 
 life in a rough climate, in a huddle of grey 
 houses. The amenities of life are by no 
 means plentiful. As a rule, money is scarce. 
 There are few demonstrations of affection: 
 
The Superstition 13 
 
 one is made to feel that he must trust him- 
 self, that man is a soldier, and life is a fight. 
 [Here, Scot-like, the worthy "Claudius" 
 breaks off to indulge in a little pathetic 
 personal reminiscence.] When I look back 
 to my early years it seems to me that the 
 whole atmosphere was laden with care, that 
 the strain on the hearts of the people was so 
 tightened by the material needs of those who 
 depended on them that life was a taut rope 
 on which only a trained acrobat could keep 
 his balance. The result was a feeling of 
 constant anxiety, a dread of the intwre. It 
 was haunted by fears which could hardly 
 be measured, and as the years went on their 
 difficulties seemed to increase. [Which, to 
 say the least, is clumsily put.] In this way 
 yoting Scotsmen were taught to take things 
 seriously. They knew that their right arms 
 must serve them, and they did not lean upon 
 others. They were thus fiercely independ- 
 ent. They asked nothing from those about 
 them — ^the asking would be vain. As they 
 sought nothing they would give nothing. 
 
14 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Acknowledgment of superior position they 
 resolutely refused; and they were ready to 
 resent every asstunption of superiority. They 
 knew weU that the door of opportunity opens 
 but seldom, and were eager to enter it when 
 it did open. They knew that success in any 
 form was to be paid for, and they were willing 
 to pay. They would work hard without 
 complaining, and they were willing to sacri- 
 fice, and ever came to disdain the pleasures 
 and amusements of life. They had been 
 taught that it was of no use to complain, and 
 they did not complain. But they made 
 amends for this by refusing to be gracious, by 
 a reserved and proud manner. They knew 
 that competition was the law of life, and 
 they were none too gentle in dealing with 
 their competitors. Those who achieved 
 positions were objects of criticism, and the 
 criticism was pitiless enough. For a fight 
 they were in constant readiness. ' Touch me 
 gin you daur,' was the national motto, and 
 there never was one more expressive of 
 character. The Scotsman as a rule does not 
 
The Superstition 15 
 
 take the offensive, but those who meddle 
 with him must take all the consequences." ' 
 Clearly, as one might say, a Daniel come 
 to judgment! "Claudius Clear," the New 
 School, struts and roisters and swaggers as 
 your Scot must do, or perish; but, on the 
 whole and out of the honesty of his heart, 
 he will modify. Perhaps he was not in the 
 best of humours when he wrote the foregoing. 
 Anyway it rather disposes of the gallant and 
 debonair vision conjured up for us by the 
 glowing pencils of the Old School. The 
 generous, polite, refined, well-bred, civilised, 
 and immortally honourable and glorious 
 Scotchman of Dr. George Lockhart becomes, 
 under the brush of Dr. Robertson NicoU, 
 another and a distinctly less beautiful person- 
 ality. He is bom on the rock. The ameni- 
 ties of life are not for him. He is haunted 
 by constant fears. He will give nothing. 
 He refuses to be gracious. He is none too 
 gentle in dealing with his competitors. And 
 
 ' "English and Scotch," The British,Weekly, January 
 16, 1902. 
 
1 6 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 instead of saying "Nemo me impune laces- 
 set," as you might expect of a young man 
 who has been to college, he whoops "Touch 
 me gin you daur, " like any common rowdy. 
 When I come to think of it, I am much 
 obliged to the New School, 
 
 On another matter — a very big matter, 
 indeed, with your common Scotchman — Dr. 
 NicoU is equally frank. " I think I may also 
 say," he remarks, "that the Scottish people 
 cared very much for education and know- 
 ledge, far more in my opinion than the 
 average Englishman. They thought about 
 learning as the New Englanders did in the 
 days of Emerson. The learned man was 
 much more respected than the rich man. 
 Perhaps there was an intuition that in the 
 end of the day knowledge is the key to 
 everything. But thirty years ago, at all 
 events, knowledge was regarded as an end, 
 and its possessor was profoundly esteemed. 
 The summum bonum^ of the best Scottish 
 
 'English and Scotch," The British Weekly, January 
 i6, 190a. 
 
The Superstition 17 
 
 youth in those days was to be a profes- 
 sor." Summum bonum is scarcely the 
 phrase, but that and the New Englanders 
 may pass. Scotland, admittedly, enjoys a 
 reputation for learning of a sort. Once, 
 I visited Edinbiu-gh with a Scotchman. It 
 was a rash thing to do, yet I did it. On 
 the road north my Scotchman filled me 
 with tales of his country's culture. "You 
 are not going into a dirty English city," 
 quoth he, "but into a centre of light and 
 leading. Every man, woman, and child 
 in 'aud Immemour' can at least read, and 
 every publican in the place keeps a set of 
 Chambers's Encyclopmdia, a copy of Fox's 
 Book of Martyrs, and plenty of back numbers 
 of the Nineteenth Century, just as an English 
 publican keeps for the use of his customers 
 the Post Office Directory and Whitaker's Al- 
 manack. ' ' And the first thing I noticed when 
 we got into Edinburgh was a fruiterer's sign, 
 upon which was written in startling letters : 
 
 FRUITS IN THERE SEASON 
 
 All the same, I concede that the Scotch 
 
1 8 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 really do love learning. I gather, too, from 
 unbiassed sources that they starve their 
 mothers and make gin-mules of their fathers 
 to get it. And when it is gotten, what a 
 monstrous and unlovely possession it usually 
 turns out to be. For your Scotchman always 
 takes knowledge for wisdom. His learning 
 consists wholly of "facts and figures," all 
 grouped methodically round that heaven-sent 
 date, A.D. 13 14,' and if you cannot tell him 
 off-hand the salary of the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, the population of Otaheite and 
 the names of the fixed stars, he votes you a 
 damned ignorant Southron, and goes about 
 telling his friends that he should n't wonder 
 if you never went to "the schule." It may 
 rejoice him to know that his readiness to 
 answer all manner of questions involving 
 book learning is in point of fact the begin- 
 nings of a species of idiocy. Persons of 
 whom this idiocy has got properly hold are 
 
 '"The Battle of Bannockbum was won by the 
 Scotch in 1314. Here's tae us, wha's like us?" — 
 Scotch Toast. 
 
The Superstition 19 
 
 styled by the medical profession "idiot 
 savants." "In all asylums," says Professor 
 Vivian Poore, "you will find idiot savants. 
 . . . There used to be at Earlswood — 
 and I saw him when I visited Earlswood — 
 an idiot quite incapable of taking care of 
 himself, but who had a most extraordinary 
 memory. When I went to the asylum the 
 superintendent said to me: 'Ask that man 
 anything you like.' It was rather a strange 
 thing to be told to do ; I said : ' What kind of 
 thing shall I ask about ? ' And he said : ' Any 
 ordinary bit of knowledge.' I said : ' Tell me 
 about Socrates.' The idiot then drew him- 
 self up like a child would who was about to 
 repeat a lesson, gave a cough, and told me 
 about Socrates. ... He knew a great 
 deal more about Socrates than I did; he 
 knew when he was bom, why he was con- 
 demned, the name of his wife, and everything 
 that was essential to be known. This he re- 
 peated without difficulty. The superintend- 
 ent gave a grin and said : ' Would you like to 
 ask him anything else?' I was afraid that 
 
20 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 the man might ask me something. I said*. 
 'What do you know about comets?' Im- 
 mediately he gave me — I presume correctly 
 — all the facts about the chief comets, their 
 periods of revolution, the names of the best 
 known, and so on. Nothing that had ever 
 been read by this patient did he seem to for- 
 get. The words which had been read to 
 him seemed to have stuck to the cells of his 
 brain like so much superior glue, and nothing 
 would eradicate it." ' 
 
 How very, very, very Scotch! Who has 
 not met just this idiot savant in a newspaper 
 office, at the meetings of absurd societies, at 
 the houses of uncultivated people? And 
 always, always, he is Scotch. And always, 
 always, he has that sententious trick of 
 drawing himself up to launching into his 
 subject by way of the self-satisfied cough of 
 conscious knowledge. 
 
 And now, to make a handsome end for a 
 brilliant chapter, let us remember 
 
 ' George Vivian Poore, A Treatise on Medical Juris- 
 prudence, I go I. 
 
The Superstition 21 
 
 I. That Hadrian had the excellent 
 sense to build a wall for the pur- 
 pose of keeping the scotch out op 
 England. 
 II. That for a thousand years the Scot 
 WAS England's bitterest enemy, and 
 
 PLOTTED AND MADE WAR AGAINST HER 
 
 WITH France. 
 
 III. That the Scotch deserted that 
 
 LARGE lame WOMAN (AND, ACCORDING 
 
 to the Scotch, that paragon of all 
 THE virtues), Mary Stuart, in her 
 
 HOUR OF direst NEED. 
 
 IV. That it was the Scotch who sold 
 Charles I. (and a Stuart) to the 
 Parliamentarians for £400,000. 
 
 V. That the Stuarts were the wicked- 
 est AND stupidest KINGS EUROPE HAS 
 EVER KNOWN. 
 
 VI. That the Scotch are in point of 
 fact quite the dullest race of 
 
 WHITE men in the WORLD, AND THAT 
 
 they "knock along" simply by 
 virtue of the scottish superstition 
 
22 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 COUPLED WITH PLOD, THRIFT, A GRAVID 
 MANNER, AND THE ORDINARY ENDOW- 
 MENTS OF MEDIOCRITY. 
 
 VII. That it was a Scotchman who intro- 
 duced THISTLES into CaNADA, AND 
 
 that, very likely, it was a scotch- 
 man who introduced rabbits into 
 Australia. 
 
II 
 
 PREDECESSORS 
 
 From the day he first clapped eyes on him, 
 the Englishman has felt that there was some- 
 thing wrong about the Scotchman. And 
 this feeling rapidly crystallised itself into lit- 
 erature. Many early ballads against the 
 Scotch are to be found by him who cares to 
 look for them. That Chaucer did not love 
 Scotchmen is pretty certain, though there is 
 nothing in his writings to prove it. The 
 same holds true of Spenser. But when one 
 comes to Shakespeare the case is very much 
 altered. There can be no getting away from 
 the circumstance that Shakespeare knew his 
 Scotchman through and through. Any Scot 
 who is feeling a desire to be particularly 
 humble and to learn the real truth about 
 23 
 
24 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 himself and his compatriots should read and 
 read again the tragedy of Macbeth. Of course, 
 Shakespeare does not count much in Scot- 
 land. Whenever a Scottish writer of the old 
 school has to speak of him, he does so with a 
 grumbling grudgingness as who should say, 
 " The man was a genius, but not a Scot, what 
 a peety!" 
 
 "Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare 
 into plant," warbled Bums. Think of it! 
 And I have seen a Scotch reviewer complain 
 that a certain author was cursed with a 
 "Shakespearean smartness." This antip- 
 athy for the Bard of Avon has often created 
 much wonderment in the mind of the Eng- 
 lishman, and the cause of it, one may guess, 
 is that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. There is 
 scarcely a line in that tremendous drama 
 which does not mean bitter reading for 
 Scotchmen. About the first person named 
 is one Macdonwald : 
 
 The merciless Macdonwald 
 Worthy to be a rebel for to that, 
 The multiplying villainies of Nature 
 Do swarm upon him. 
 
Predecessors 25 
 
 In a neighbouring passage we are given a 
 beautiful insight into Scottish views of war- 
 fare. Ross is made to say : 
 
 Sweno the Norway's King craves composition, 
 Nor would we deign him burial of his men 
 Till he disbursed at Saint Colmes' inch 
 Ten thousand dollars to our general use. 
 
 " Ten thousand dollars to our general use " ! 
 From the beginning of time Scotch fighting 
 men have been mercenaries, and Scotch 
 armies have insisted upon fining a vanquished 
 foe. They did it in France; and they did it 
 in their own country. And, after Naseby, 
 the Scotch army in England, coming to the 
 conclusion that there was nothing more to be 
 done, straightway demanded a sum of money 
 in the way of solatium for leaving the coun- 
 try. " Nor would we deign him burial of his 
 men till he disbursed," hits them hard. 
 Shakespeare, as was his way, understood. 
 Then one comes to the celebrated scene on 
 the blasted heath. Here enter three witches, 
 and to them Macbeth and Banquo. Mac- 
 beth, bloated with pride and devoured with 
 
26 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 ambition, falls an easy victim to Shakes- 
 peare's trinity of hags. 
 
 All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! 
 All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee. Thane of Cawdor! 
 All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter! 
 
 The man swells visibly as a Scotchman 
 should, and. stalks off heroically, full of the 
 consciousness of his own bigness. And mark 
 how arrant a Scotchman he becomes in the 
 result. In his castle he has for guest a king 
 who has trusted him and bestowed honours 
 and dignities upon him. "Conduct me to 
 mine host," says the unsuspecting monarch. 
 "We love him highly, and shall continue our 
 graces towards him." And all the time the 
 excellent Macbeth and his excellent lady are 
 plotting mtirder. When it comes to the 
 point of actual killing, the gentleman's 
 Scotch spirits fail him ; he is really not sure, 
 don't you know, whether after all it ought to 
 be done. Then the lady very naturally 
 grows disgusted and shrill: 
 
 Was the hope drunk, 
 Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since? 
 And wakes it now to look so green and pale 
 
Predecessors 27 
 
 At what it did so freely? From this time, 
 Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard 
 To be the same in thine own act and valour, 
 As thou art in desire? Would'st thou have that 
 Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, 
 And live a coward in thine own esteem; 
 Letting I dare not wait upon I would, 
 Like the poor cat i' the adage? 
 
 And what a deliciously smug Scotch an- 
 swer is immediately forthcoming! Says the 
 faint-hearted traitor: 
 
 I dare all that may become a man; 
 Who dares do more, is none. 
 
 Here we have the moralising scoundrel in 
 which Scotland is so prolific turned out to the 
 life. Right through the play Shakespeare 
 pitilessly holds up to our gaze the low and 
 squalid cunning, treachery, the hypocrisy, 
 and the devilry which have always been and 
 always will be at the bottom of the Scotch- 
 man's sotil, and Macduff puts the coping 
 stone on the structure of opprobrium by call- 
 ing his countryman a hell-hound and a blood- 
 ier villain than terms can give him out, and 
 assuring him that he will live to be the show 
 and gaze o' the time : 
 
28 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Painted upon a pole and underwrit, 
 Here may you see the tyrant. 
 
 From Shakespeare it is an easy jump to 
 Jonson, who helped to write a play which 
 put the Scot in such bad plight that it had to 
 be suppressed by the authorities. Then, of 
 course, there is Samuel Johnson, LL.D., who 
 hated the Scotch at large and by instinct. 
 Johnson has enjoyed no little reputation for 
 his animadversions upon Scotland. In bulk 
 they are slight, but they are decidedly to the 
 point. Boswell treasured them and put 
 them into his book, and to Johnson was the 
 glory. Boswell, it is true, was a Scotchman 
 himself, and the fact that he has given us one 
 of the most entertaining pieces of biography 
 ever written is allowed to redound to the 
 credit of Scotland. I never read the life, 
 however, without feeling that Johnson must 
 have written Boswell and that Boswell wrote 
 Johnson's poems. 
 
 The next good hater of your Scotchman is 
 Charles Lamb. Lamb, need one say, was 
 Lamby, even in his hatreds. He had a 
 
Predecessors 29 
 
 gentle heart and he never exerted himself to 
 put down aught in malice, so that he called 
 his feelings of contempt for Scotchmen an 
 imperfect sympathy, and this is what he 
 wrote : 
 
 "I have been trying all my life to like 
 Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from 
 the experiment in despair. They cannot like 
 me — ^and, in truth, I never knew one of that 
 nation who attempted to do it. There is 
 something more plain and ingenuous in their 
 mode of proceeding. We know one another 
 at first sight. There is an order of imperfect 
 intellects (under which mine must be content 
 to rank) which in its constitution is essen- 
 tially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the 
 sort of faculties I allude to have minds rather 
 suggestive than comprehensive. They have 
 no pretences to much clearness or precision in 
 their ideas or in their manner of expressing 
 them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to con- 
 fess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They 
 are content with fragments and scattered 
 pieces of truth. She presents no full front to 
 
30 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 them — a feature or side-face at the most. 
 Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays 
 at a system, are the utmost they pretend to. 
 They beat up a little game peradventure — 
 and leave it to knottier heads, more robust 
 constitutions, to run it down. The light that 
 lights them is not steady and polar, but mut- 
 able and shifting ; waxing, and again waning. 
 Their conversation is accordingly. They will 
 throw out a random word in or out of season, 
 and be content to let it pass for what it is 
 worth. They cannot speak always as if they 
 were upon their oath — but must be under- 
 stood, speaking or writing, with some abate- 
 ment. They seldom wait to mature a pro- 
 position, but e'en bring it to market in the 
 green ear. They delight to impart their de- 
 fective discoveries as they arise, without 
 waiting for their full development. They 
 are no systematisers, and would but err more 
 by attempting it. Their minds, as I said 
 before, are suggestive merely. The brain of 
 a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is 
 constituted upon quite a different plan. His 
 
Predecessors 31 
 
 Minerva is bom in panoply. You are never 
 admitted to see his ideas in their growth — if, 
 indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put 
 together upon principles of clock-work. You 
 never catch his mind in an undress. He 
 never hints or suggests anything, but unlades 
 his stock of ideas in perfect order and com- 
 pleteness. He brings his total wealth into 
 company and gravely unpacks it. His riches 
 are always about him. He never stoops to 
 catch a glimmering something in your pres- 
 ence, to share it with you, before he quite 
 knows whether it be true touch or not. You 
 cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. 
 He does not find, but bring. You never wit- 
 ness his first apprehension of a thing. His 
 understanding is always at its meridian — you 
 never see the first dawn, the early streaks. 
 He has no falterings of self -suspicion. Sur- 
 mises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, 
 semi-consciousness, partial illuminations, 
 dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no 
 place in his brain or vocabulary. The twi- 
 light of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he 
 
32 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 orthodox? — he has no doubts. Is he an in- 
 fidel? — he has none either. Between the 
 affirmative and the negative there is no bor- 
 der land with him. You cannot hover with 
 him upon the confines of truth, or wander in 
 the maze of a probable argument. He al- 
 ways keeps the path. You cannot make 
 excursions with him, for he sets you right. 
 His taste never fluctuates. His morality 
 never abates. He cannot compromise or 
 understand middle actions. There can be 
 but a right and a wrong. His conversation 
 is as a book. His affirmations have the sanc- 
 tity of an oath. You must speak upon the 
 square with him. He stops a metaphor like 
 a suspected person in an enemy's country. 
 'A healthy book!' said one of his country- 
 men to me, who had ventured to give that 
 appellation to John Buncle — 'did I catch 
 rightly what you said? I have heard of a 
 man in health and of a healthy state of body, 
 but I do not see how that epithet can be 
 properly applied to a book.' Above all, you 
 must beware of indirect expressions before a 
 
Predecessors 33 
 
 Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon yoiu" 
 irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein 
 of it. Remember you are upon your oath. 
 I have a print of a graceful female after 
 Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off 
 to Mr. . After he had examined it min- 
 utely, I ventured to ask him how he liked 
 'my beauty' (a foolish name it goes by 
 among my friends)— when he very gravely as- 
 stired me that ' he had considerable respect for 
 my character and talents ' (so he was pleased 
 to say), 'but had not given himself much 
 thought about the degree of my personal 
 pretensions.' The misconception staggered 
 me, but did not seem much to discon- 
 cert him. Persons of this nation are particu- 
 larly fond of affirming a truth — ^which nobody 
 doubts. They do not so properly affirm as 
 annunciate it. They do, indeed, appear to 
 have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it 
 were valuable for itself) that all truth be- 
 comes equally valuable, whether the proposi- 
 tion that contains it be new or old, disputed, 
 or such as is impossible to become a subject 
 
34 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 of disputation. I was present not long since 
 at a party of North Britons, where a son of 
 Bums was expected; and happened to drop 
 a silly expression (in my South British way), 
 that I wished it were the father instead of 
 the son, when four of them started up at once 
 to inform me that 'that was impossible, be- 
 cause he was dead.' An impracticable wish, 
 it seems, was more than they could conceive. 
 Swift has hit off this part of their character, 
 namely, their love of truth, in his biting way, 
 but with an illiberality that necessarily con- 
 fines the passage to the margin.' 
 
 "Thetediousnessof these people is certainly 
 provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one 
 
 ' There are some people who think they sufficiently 
 acquit themselves, and entertain their company, with 
 relating facts of no consequence, but at all out of the 
 road of such common incidents as happen every day; 
 and this I have observed more frequently among the 
 Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not 
 to omit the minutest circumstances of time or place; 
 which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved 
 by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent 
 and gesture peculiar to that country, would be hardly 
 tolerable. — Jonathan Swift, Hints towards an Essay on 
 Conversation. 
 
Predecessors 35 
 
 another ! In my early life I had a passionate 
 fondness for the poetry of Bums. I have 
 sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate my- 
 self with his countrymen by expressing it. 
 But I have always found that a true Scot 
 resents your admiration of his compatriot, 
 even more than he would your contempt of 
 him. The latter he imputes to your ' imper- 
 fect acquaintance with many of the words 
 which he uses ' ; and the same objection makes 
 it a presumption in you to suppose that you 
 can admire him. Thomson they seem to 
 have forgotten. Smollett they have neither 
 forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of 
 Rory and his companion upon their first in- 
 troduction to our metropolis. Speak of 
 Smollett as a great genius, and they will re- 
 tort upon you Hume's History compared 
 with his continuation of it. What if the his- 
 torian had continued Humphrey Clinker f " ' 
 I reproduce this estimate with the utmost 
 satisfaction. The irony of the "imperfect 
 intellects" passage will not be understood by 
 ' Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia. 
 
36 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 dull Donald ; indeed, he will in all probability 
 take the passage seriously and quote it 
 against me, but he is welcome. And on the 
 whole I think that Lamb's view of the Scot is 
 almost as acute as that of Dr. Robertson 
 NicoU himself. Nobody can doubt after 
 reading the foregoing that Lamb saw in the 
 Scotchman a crass and plantigrade person, 
 incapable of comprehending the inexplicit 
 and as devoid of true imagination as a brick. 
 Lamb's notion of the Scot's incapacity for 
 humour also chimes with that of Sidney 
 Smith, who, as all men know, was of opinion 
 that if you would have a Scotchman see a 
 joke it is necessary to perform a surgical 
 operation on him." 
 
 Last of all, though perhaps brightest and 
 best of them, who have lifted up their voices 
 in the unmasking of the Scot, we must take 
 
 ' Mr. Spielman has assured us that seventy-five per 
 cent, of the jokes accepted from outsiders by Punch 
 come from Scotland; this, however, only tends to show 
 that Lamb and Smith knew what they were talking 
 about, for it is everywhere admitted that if you want 
 humour, you must make a point of avoiding Punch. 
 
Predecessors 37 
 
 Mr. W. E. Henley. In an entirely just and 
 reasonable essay on Bums, Mr. Henley made 
 a passing reference to the poor living, lewd, 
 grimy, free-spoken, ribald old Scots peasant- 
 world. For this choice collocation of ad- 
 jectives he was rewarded with many Scottish 
 thwacks. That the old Scots peasant-world 
 was everything that Mr. Henley said of it no 
 person of sense will gainsay, and that the Scots 
 peasant- world of to-day is, if anything, worse, 
 is evident from the remark of one of Mr, 
 Henley's Scottish critics, who says: 
 
 "We challenge Mr. Henley, et hoc genus 
 omne, to disprove the fact that the record of 
 crime, immorality, loose living in every par- 
 ish wherein Bums resided, shows less by one 
 half — by fifty to seventy per cent. — in 
 that Bums epoch than it does in the same 
 parishes to-day." 
 
 Mr. Henley has brought such a swarm of 
 bees round his bonnet by a simple and quite 
 tolerant bit of criticism, that to venture on 
 anything in the way of plain talk about the 
 Scotch might well appal the stoutest. The 
 
38 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 worthy Dr. John D. Ross, editor of the Burns 
 Almanac and sundry other compilations of a 
 fatuously Bumsite character, has collected 
 some of the diatribes against Mr. Henley into 
 a volume which he calls Henley and Burns. 
 Like everything else that comes out of Scot- 
 land, this volume gives the Scotchman away 
 at all points. For example, it is made quite 
 plain that Mr. Henley's essay, a purely critical 
 venture, was regarded in Scotland as a base 
 attempt to pull down the cash value of early 
 editions of Burns's poetry. Dr. Ross's vol- 
 ume opens with the following oracular sen- 
 tence: " Lovers of Burns will rejoice to learn 
 from the large price paid this week for a Kil- 
 marnock edition, that despite the criticism of 
 Mr. W. E. Henley in the Centenary edition, 
 there are as yet no signs that the poet's popu- 
 larity is on the wane," and this brilliant 
 commercialist adds: "Rightly or wrongly, 
 Scotsmen will cling to the Burns' superstition, 
 and will be the better for it. At an important 
 book sale in Edinburgh this week, a Kilmar- 
 nock first edition in an apparently perfect 
 
Predecessors 39 
 
 state of preservation, fetched the remarkable 
 price of 545 guineas. The highest price ever 
 before given for a copy of this edition, muti- 
 lated, however, and in inferior condition, was 
 ;^i 20. Such a figure is undoubtedly a fancy 
 price. The book is very rare, and to the 
 bibliophile rarity is an aU-important consid- 
 eration in estimating value. But the popu- 
 larity of the poet, the admiration of the 
 uncritical, as Mr. Henley would put it, has 
 helped to magnify the price of the book, and 
 the critic's depreciation has had no effect on 
 the market." What in the name of all that 
 is Bumsy does this gentleman mean? 
 
 Again, in another paper headed "A Critic 
 Scarified," the scarifier takes Mr. Henley to 
 task for saying that "the Scots peasant . . . 
 fed so cheaply that even on high days and 
 holidays his diet (as set forth in the BUih- 
 some Bridal) consisted largely in preparations 
 of meal and vegetables and what is technic- 
 ally known as ' offal.' " To which Dr. Ross's 
 scarifier retorts, "The author is happily 
 addressing ignorant Southrons, not even 
 
40 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 'half -read' Scots. However, it need not be 
 imagined that Mr. Henley can translate the 
 Scots language of the poem he refers to, else he 
 would not assert that the viands specified in 
 it are such common fare, consisting as they 
 did of six dififerent soups, eight varieties of 
 fish (including shell-fish), six varieties of 
 flesh (roasts, salted meat, nolt feet, haggis, 
 tripe, sheep's head), three kinds of bread 
 (oaten, barley, and wheaten), cheese, new 
 ale, and brandy." On the face of it there is 
 here a mighty deal of offal to precious little 
 sound meat. If nolt feet, haggis, tripe, and 
 sheep's head are not offal in Scotland, they 
 are certainly reckoned in that category in 
 England. 
 
 We shall return to Dr. Ross's scarifier in a 
 chapter on "The Bard." Meanwhile, let us 
 note that the best English writers have agreed 
 that the Scotchman is, at best, not quite an 
 angel of light. They have looked on him 
 with the eye of calm perception, and they 
 have found him seriously wanting. That he 
 is a savage and a barbarian by blood, a free- 
 
Predecessors 41 
 
 booter by heredity, a dullard, a braggart, and 
 in short, a Scotchman, cannot be doubted. 
 The testimony is all against him, and until 
 he mends his ways it will continue to be 
 against him. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE POW-WOW MEN 
 
 It is the Scotchman's boast that the 
 Scotchman has always figured portentously 
 in the councils of the civilised nations. In 
 France, in Germany, and even in unbeautiful 
 Russia, Scotchmen have established them- 
 selves and at time and time risen to positions 
 of considerable political power. And if we 
 are to credit Dr. Hill Burton, this has always 
 been an excellent thing for the nations con- 
 cerned. According to Dr. Burton, if the 
 Scotch did not entirely build up the France 
 of the Middle Ages they had a mighty big 
 finger in the process, and we are asked to 
 believe by the same authority that it is the 
 strain of Scotch blood in the veins of the 
 French which has assisted very materially in 
 42 
 
The Pow-Wow Men 43 
 
 making the fortunes of that singularly fas- 
 cinating and ingenious people.' The subject 
 is a large one, and much that is edifying has 
 been written about it, not only by Scotch- 
 men, but by various foreign authors. On the 
 whole, perhaps, Europe has not done so 
 badly with her Scots, the reason being that 
 she never allowed them to be any Scotcher 
 than she could help, and turned them out the 
 minute they became aggressive. In Eng- 
 land, however, the more Scotch and the more 
 aggressive the Scot becomes the more we 
 seem to like him. At the present moment 
 England is virtually being run by the Scotch. 
 In the House of Commons the Leader of the 
 Government — ^and practically the autocrat of 
 
 ^ " It may be surely counted not without signifi- 
 cance among ethnical phenomena that, though France 
 has all along shown in her language the predominance 
 of the Latin race, three infusions of northern blood had 
 been successively poured into the country: first, the 
 Franks; then the Normans; and, lastly, the Scots. It 
 seems not unreasonable that these helped to communi- 
 cate to the vivacity and impetuosity of the original 
 race those qualifications of enterprise and endurance 
 which were needed to make up the illustrious history 
 of France." — The Scot Abroad. 
 
44 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 the Assembly — is the Right Honourable 
 Arthur James Balfour, a philosopher from 
 Scotland, who is so Scotch that he plays golf. 
 And the Leader of the Opposition, save the 
 mark! of an Opposition which, in a constitu- 
 tion like the British, carries upon its shoul- 
 ders the heaviest responsibilities, is Sir Henry 
 Campbell-Bannerman, also a Scotchman, and 
 if the truth must be told, a dullard. And in 
 the way of a third party, which will imperial- 
 ise with the Government and cackle of reform 
 with the Opposition, we have the Liberal 
 Leaguers, headed by that proud chieftain of 
 the pudding race — ^the Right Honourable the 
 Earl of Rosebery. So that at the front of 
 each of the three great political forces of 
 Britain — the forces which, when all is said, 
 mean everything to Britain as a nation — 
 there stands firm and erect some sort of a 
 Caledonian. Such a condition of things has 
 never existed in England before, and in the 
 light of recent political happenings it is de- 
 voutly to be hoped that it will never exist 
 again. Since Mr. Balfour and Sir Henry 
 
The Pow-Wow Men 45 
 
 Campbell-Bannerman came into the offices 
 they hold, England has been going steadily 
 down-hill. At no period in her history have 
 her enemies been so thick on the ground and 
 so exultant and sure of themselves as they are 
 at present, and at no period in her history has 
 her prestige been at so low an ebb. Politic- 
 ally she has come to coimt as a little less than 
 France and more than Spain. Formerly she 
 led the nations — now she is content to walk 
 humbly in line with them. Formerly she 
 led the band, now she is merely third trom- 
 bone player. Formerly, if she went to war, 
 it was with nations of ponderability and for 
 high principles ; tmtil the other day, she was 
 draining her best blood and getting rid of 
 one and a half millions of money weekly in 
 a struggle with a handful of freebooters, got 
 up and fomented largely in the interests of 
 the children of Israel. At the time of writing 
 Consols are at 94 and the Income Tax is is. 2d . 
 in the potind, which shows what managers 
 the Scotch are. Also Government, in so far as 
 Grovemment means the steady development 
 
46 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 of the higher interests of the state at home 
 and in the colonies, is at a dead stand- 
 still. The march of reform has been checked. 
 Progress in the wide sense of the term is no 
 more thought of. The legislative mill grinds 
 heavily along and the grist amounts to noth- 
 ing; in the seats of the mighty, — in the seats 
 of Benjamin Disraeli and William Ewart 
 Gladstone, — ^there blandly smiles Balfour and 
 dodders Campbell-Bannerman. Mr. Balfour, 
 golfer, and, for aught I know to the contrary, 
 curler and hammer-putter, plays what he is 
 pleased to call the game. Now the game is 
 no new thing. Practically it is a development 
 of that childish pastime known as "Jack's 
 on his Island." On Mr. Balfour's island 
 grows the green bay tree of power, and to live 
 snugly under the shade of that tree, no mat- 
 ter what comes, is, in the view of Mr. Balfour, 
 the game. It is with him a question of 
 what can I do for England, having due 
 regard to the exigencies of the game? 
 Hence does he seek and bring along young 
 talent. Having found your young talent, 
 
The Pow-Wow Men 47 
 
 you must make quite sure, not of its talented- 
 ness, but of its unwavering disposition to 
 play the game. Will it be loyal to the Bal- 
 four? Can you depend upon it to stick by 
 the Balfour though the heavens fall and it 
 thunder to the tune of Green Sleeves? Any- 
 thing that will subscribe to the Test Act of 
 the Balfour is young talent. Hence it comes 
 to pass that at the War Office we have had 
 that shallow, dandy Wyndham. He is a 
 prot6g6 of the Balfour, even as the Balfour is 
 the nephew of his uncle. And he plays the 
 game. When matters at the War Office be- 
 came too vasty for him he was shovelled by 
 the Balfour into the Chief Secretaryship for 
 Ireland. Even the Balfour and his friends 
 are fain to admit that Mr. Wyndham has 
 done no more for Ireland than he did for the 
 War Office. Yet he plays the game, and so 
 does the Balfour, and everything is right as 
 right can be. In Mr. Wyndham's old place 
 at the War Office we have that excellent dab- 
 bler, Mr. Brodrick. Mr. Brodrick, like the 
 House of Lords, has always been exceedingly 
 
48 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 busy doing nothing and doing it very well. 
 Periodically he stands on his hind legs in the 
 Commons and trots out tremendous schemes, 
 aU of which end pleasantly in smoke. The 
 rottenness of the British Army is no affair of 
 his ; it was rotten when he first made its ac- 
 quaintance — it will be just as rotten when he 
 leaves PaU Mall. Underneath the terrific 
 expenditure necessitated by the war there 
 are jobs and scandals of the gravest sort, and 
 Mr. Brodrick knows nothing about them. 
 His business is to vindicate the characters of 
 fribbling officers and gentlemen, to lay on 
 praise of the British soldier with a trowel, 
 and to assure the world at large that the per- 
 sons who have brought charges against army 
 contractors have brought those charges sim- 
 ply because the contractors' names are un- 
 English and consequently not pleasing to the 
 British commercial mind. He it is, in short, 
 who allows himself to be put up as a sort 
 of sand-bag in front of the Government, 
 guaranteed to ward off all attacks by simply 
 sitting tight and remaining as dumb as an 
 
The Pow-Wow Men 49 
 
 oyster. He was no doubt told when 
 he took up his present dignities that the 
 Balfour would expect him to play the 
 game, and, being a good man, he is play- 
 ing it. 
 
 For the rest of them one man only needs 
 be discussed. He is a Birmingham man, 
 Joseph Chamberlain by name. The Balfour 
 took him over from the other side, and, in 
 spite of all his faults, gave him a warm Scotch 
 welcome and set him high in the Balfourian 
 councils. From that day to this the Balfour 
 has looked upon him askance and wished him 
 anywhere but where he is; but the Balfour 
 is Scotch and he lacks the pluck to get rid of 
 the Birmingham gentleman, because it might 
 cost them something. The Birmingham gen- 
 tleman, knowing the Balfour to be Scotch, 
 defies him. 
 
 On the other side, as we have said, there 
 is poor, dear old Sir 'Enry of the double-bar- 
 relled Scotch name, which the economical 
 have reduced to C.-B. On the whole, C.-B. 
 is about as pathetic a figure as one can find 
 
50 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 in history; he is the type and flower of your 
 Scotchman lifted to the pinnacles. Sooner 
 or later he was bound to make a mess of it, 
 and, lacking the blood of Liverpool which de- 
 layed Mr. Gladstone's downfall for so many 
 years, he made it sooner. From the first he 
 has been the laughing-stock, not only of the 
 Government, and, for that matter, of Europe, 
 but also of his own party. He lolls enthroned 
 on the front Opposition Bench, shoulder to 
 shoulder with trusty lieutenants who never 
 obey him, and backed up by political friends 
 who put no trust in him. On the day that 
 he took the party 'by the nose, the party 
 dropped off, and all that remains to C.-B. is 
 the nose. To this relic of ambition realised 
 he clings with true Scottish pertinacity. He 
 has wrapped it up in a napkin and hidden it ; 
 probably it will never again be found, inas- 
 much as C.-B. is invariably too bewildered to 
 know what he is doing. Harcourt bewilders 
 him, Asquith bewilders him, Morley bewilders 
 him, and latterly there has come that crown- 
 ing bewilderment of them all. Lord Rosebery. 
 
The Pow-Wow Men 51 
 
 C.-B. will go bewildered through whatever 
 remains to him of his term of office, and when 
 Liberalism takes thought to get properly rid 
 of him, he will be more bewildered still. 
 He is too Scotch to perceive that nobody 
 wants him, and if he saw it he is too Scotch 
 to go. 
 
 As for Lord Rosebery, the less said about 
 him the better. He is of Scotch stock, and 
 he had the good fortune to be bom of an 
 English mother. But the Scotch blood in 
 him, the Scotch ineptitudes, the Scotch lack 
 of force prevail. He does everything by 
 turns and nothing long. Like Sir Henry 
 Campbell-Bannerman, he failed as a leader. 
 The statesman in him does not possess him; 
 it was a mere detail and a small one. As an 
 active politician he had to look around for a 
 model upon whom to shape himself. No 
 Scotchman can make the smallest sort of 
 mark, whether it be in politics or anything 
 else, without such a model. And in his 
 middle and later periods, at any rate, Lord 
 Rosebery has modelled himself upon Mr- 
 
52 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Augustine Birrell, and as is usual with Scotch- 
 men, he has practically ousted Mr. Birrell 
 from the position of wit-monger to the Liberal 
 party. In the House of Commons Mr. Bir- 
 rell made a reputation, not because he was a 
 statesman or an orator, but because he had a 
 habit of firing off a kind of loose wit which 
 passes in the House of Commons for epigram. 
 When he spoke, the House was sure to be in 
 a roar within the half-hour, and one or two 
 of the phrases he made became texts for 
 leader-writers and made good "quote" in 
 Liberal speeches. With true Scottish enter- 
 prise, Lord Rosebery determined to be a 
 second and a greater Birrell. He has suc- 
 ceeded. In the House of Lords he enjoys a 
 reputation for saying things. He is also 
 credited, as was Mr. Birrell, with a nice taste 
 in letters. And, like Mr. Birrell, he is not 
 infrequently asked down to Little Puddling- 
 ton in order to help in the celebration of the 
 centenaries of Little Puddlington's locally 
 bom geniuses. He dare no more make a 
 serious speech, either in the House of Lords 
 
The Pow-Wow Men 53 
 
 or at Little Puddlington, than he dare call 
 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman out of his 
 name. Fireworks are expected from him, 
 and if they were not forthcoming, there 
 would be no Lord Rosebery. He passes for 
 a great empire builder, and along with the 
 worthy Dr. Jameson he figures among the 
 executors of the late Mr. Rhodes's will. He 
 is the founder and President of the New Lib- 
 eral League, which will have nothing to do 
 with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, but 
 his personal friendship with Sir Henry Camp- 
 bell-Bannerman continues, and Sir Henry 
 Campbell-Bannerman is certainly not men- 
 tioned in Mr. Cecil Rhodes's will. In effect, 
 Lord Rosebery amounts to little more than 
 nothing. The Liberal League, which was to 
 make a great to-do in most matters apper- 
 taining to Liberalism and government, fizzled 
 like a bad squib for three or four weeks, and 
 then Lord Rosebery went to Nice. That is 
 exactly the man. When his time comes, 
 when the country wants him, when Liberal- 
 ism wants him, — when, in fact, anybody 
 
54 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 wants him, — ^he says, "Yes, yes, I am here," 
 and immediately starts either for Nice or 
 Epsom. Scotch modesty overcomes him. 
 Scotch caution says, "You know you are a 
 fool; be careful to avoid ultimate risks." 
 Scotch cowardice says, " If you go into battle 
 you may get hurt. Nice is much nicer." 
 In newspaper columns Lord Rosebery's 
 speeches read admirably, providing you do 
 not study them too closely, but any person 
 who has been present in the House of Lords 
 what time his Lordship was on his legs must 
 have gone away with shattered illusions. 
 Even as C.-B. stutters and blunders and 
 grabs for his words in the circumambient air, 
 so Lord Rosebery cackles and sentimental- 
 ises. In appearance he is of about the build 
 and body of a draper. His voice is that of an 
 anaemic curate. There are always tears in 
 it at the wrong places, and on the whole it 
 makes you laugh. And having spoken, he 
 trots out like a Scotch sparrow, and with hat 
 a-tilt and arms under his coat-tails poises 
 himself perkily on the steps of the entrance 
 
The Pow-Wow Men 55 
 
 to St. Stephen's Hall, and waits for his car- 
 riage to take him off to the station, and so to 
 Epsom or Nice. On the turf his reputation 
 is exactly the same in kind as his reputation 
 in politics. He is as variable as the shade 
 and as changeable as the moons. Some- 
 times he does brilliant things, but he cannot 
 keep them up. In brief he is half Scotch 
 and half soda. 
 
 It is to these redoubtable Scotch persons 
 that England is looking for good government, 
 and hence it comes to pass that of late she 
 has had to govern herself. Out of Scotch- 
 men you can get little that is business-like 
 and little that is dignified, at any rate where 
 statesmanship is concerned. Their ambi- 
 tions are illimitable, but their powers of exe- 
 cution not worth counting. They will fight 
 from behind cover to more or less bitter and 
 ignominious ends, but, like the Boer farmers, 
 to whom in many large respects they bear 
 the most striking resemblances, they never 
 know when they are beaten, and their war- 
 fare deteriorates into mere brigandism and 
 
56 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 filibustering. When Britain was ruled by- 
 Englishmen she wore the epithet Great 
 by good right ; since she has been ruled 
 by Scotchmen she has well nigh lost it. 
 
IV 
 
 THE SCOT IN JOURNALISM 
 
 We have seen on the word of Dr. Robert- 
 son Nicoll that once upon a time it was the 
 ambition of every Scotch youth to become a 
 professor. Once upon a time, too, and one 
 does not need to quote authority for it, every 
 second child in Idlts was devoted by his par- 
 ents to the ministry, and did, no doubt, 
 sooner or later attain to that admirable 
 ofifice. But latterly the supply of Scotch 
 professors has been a good deal bigger than 
 the demand, and it has dawned upon the 
 slow Scottish intellect that fyo a year and a 
 manse is after all not exactly one of the 
 prizes of life. Therefore your stem, calcu- 
 lating Scotch peasant has during late years 
 dedicated his son to the practice and service 
 
 57 
 
58 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 of journalism. Now journalism, though the 
 Fourth estate, is the last of the professions. 
 The journalist who is making ;£5oo a year, — 
 at any rate, the Scotch journalist who is 
 making ;£5oo a year, — is the exception and 
 not the rule. Sttll, ;^soo a year, or, for that 
 matter, ;^2 5o a year, is wealth to your aver- 
 age Scot, who, nine times out of ten, comes 
 hitherward from a district where persons 
 who once had a sovereign in their possession 
 are looked upon with awe and reverence. 
 Furthermore, journalism suits the Scot be- 
 cause it is a profession into which you can 
 crawl without inquiry as to your qualifica- 
 tions, and because it is a profession in which 
 the most middling talents will take you a 
 long way. The reporting staffs and sub- 
 editorial staffs of both the London and 
 provincial journals can, I think, boast a deci- 
 dedly decent leaven of Scotchmen. In Fleet 
 Street, if you do not happen to possess a 
 little of the Doric, you are at some disadvan- 
 tage in comprehending the persons with 
 whom you are compelled to talk. " Hoo aire 
 
The Scot in Journalism 59 
 
 ye the noo?" is the conventional greeting in 
 most newspaper offices. Also a large propor- 
 tion of the persons who come up the stairs 
 on personal business which usually tiuns out 
 to be the personal business of the persons, 
 and resolves itself into a request for review- 
 ing, or an offer to do another man's work at 
 a cheap rate, are very Scotch indeed; and 
 while they drop the Doric word with fair suc- 
 cess, they cannot for the life of them get out 
 of the Doric idiom and the Doric accent. 
 Armed with a letter of introduction from 
 Professor McMoss — ^whom you do not know 
 — and with a sheaf of dog's eared certificates 
 picked up at Scotch universities, they de- 
 scend upon you with the air of men who know 
 for a surety that you are dying for their ser- 
 vices, and when they go out, after wasting an 
 altogether unnecessary amount of your time 
 and temper, it is with black looks and a burn- 
 ing conviction that you refused to employ 
 them because you know them to be so clever 
 that they might supplant you in your own 
 chair. 
 
6o The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Ten years ago it was the man from Oxford 
 or Cambridge that was considered the essen- 
 tial thing in journalism. Nowadays the atti- 
 tude of newspaper proprietors in want of a 
 smart man amounts to "No university man 
 need apply." I do not think that we are 
 very far from the day when the tune will be 
 changed to "No Scotchman need apply." 
 Numerically the Scotch journalist is unques- 
 tionably strong. He possesses, too, certain 
 solid qualities which are undoubtedly desir- 
 able in a journalist. For example, he is 
 punctual, cautious, dogged, unoriginal, and a 
 born galley-slave. You can knock an awful 
 lot of work out of him, and no matter how 
 little you pay him he may be depended upon 
 to sustain the dignity of the office in the 
 matter of clothes, external habits of life, and 
 a dog-like devotion to the hand that feeds 
 him and the foot that kicks him. In short, 
 he is a capital routine man, and if you have a 
 journal which you wish to maintain on the 
 ancient lines of stodge and flat-footedness, 
 the Scotchman does you admirably. But it 
 
The Scot in Journalism 6i 
 
 is impossible to get away from the fact that 
 the vogue of the stolid, arid, stereotyped, 
 sleepy sort of journalism which satisfied the 
 last generation is rapidly going to pieces. 
 The contemporary world wants and will have 
 what it chooses to call the "live" journalist, 
 and the Scotchman who is a live journalist to 
 the extent of evolving anything bright or 
 subtle or suggestive or original has yet to be 
 found. At the present moment he is man- 
 aging to keep himself alive by imitation. As 
 a plagiarist of ideas, necessity has made him 
 a master. He knows that the reign of dul- 
 ness is coming to an end, and that the auld 
 wife journalism in whose benevolent pres- 
 ence he has prosed and prosed for so many 
 years, is even now in her dotage and cannot 
 last much longer. So that he has taken 
 thought and determined to aim higher. 
 What man has done, a Scot can do. It is 
 not given to him to be witty and brilliant and 
 unhackneyed on a little oatmeal, but, thank 
 Heaven! he can always play sedulous ape, 
 and sedulous ape it shall be. 
 
62 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 These remarks, of course, apply only to the 
 lower reaches of journalism, to the sub-edi- 
 torial, reportorial, contributorial, and con- 
 tents bill making departments. When it 
 comes to a question of editors, matters 
 assume quite a different complexion. A 
 Scotch editor is, as a rule, a sight for gods and 
 little fishes. Dr. NicoU will tell you that the 
 Scot makes a good servant but a bad master. 
 This is the truth. Mercifully, you can count 
 the Scotch editors of London on the fingers 
 of one hand. So far as I am aware, there are 
 only two of them — Dr. Robertson Nicoll and 
 Dr. Nicol Dunn. Of one of them — him of the 
 Morning Post — ^you hear little, save that he 
 is a good fellow of no great parts, and that 
 he holds at his office a daily reception for 
 raw, unlicked Scotch youths who are come 
 newly over the border and crave the benefits 
 of his advice and assistance. Politically, his 
 paper can scarcely be considered a power; 
 its views on most questions are of no great 
 consequence, but it appears to have an enor- 
 mous circulation among the blue-blooded and 
 
The Scot in Journalism 63 
 
 the wealthy, whose doings it chronicles with 
 touching fidelity and regularity, and without 
 the smallest reference to the notoriously in- 
 dependent guinea stamp of Dr. Nicol Dunn's 
 favourite poet. The other Dr. NicoU is a 
 horse of another colour. He is all for Non- 
 conformity and the appraisement of healthy 
 and improving literature. Each of his papers 
 is a paper for the bosom of the family and 
 the ministers' Monday, and warranted to do 
 aU that can be done for the unco' guid of 
 North Britain, for aU Scottish writers of 
 whatever degree of merit or demerit, for Dr. 
 NicoU's EngHsh admirers, and Dr. NicoU 
 himself. On every issue of these remarkable 
 publications Dr. NicoU stamps the impress of 
 his own engaging personality. I have heard 
 it said by an admirer of his that he is three 
 men — a Scotch divine, a judge of letters, and 
 a journalist who never forgets that his main 
 business in life is to sell papers. These three 
 Dr. NicoUs are, I am assured, quite different 
 persons, inasmuch as the Doctor possesses 
 the blessed gift of detachment and thinks 
 
64 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 nothing of dictating an article on the genius 
 of Dr. Parker, a kindly appreciation of the 
 latest gory detective story, and a set of Sun- 
 day afternoon verses or so in a single morn- 
 ing. Of his lucubrations as a divine I shall 
 say nothing, because I have not studied them. 
 As a judge of letters, however, I take him to 
 be the most catholic scribbler in Europe. 
 Any author who is doing well — ^that is to say, 
 any author whose record of sales entitles him 
 to be considered a success — may always 
 reckon on a large hospitality in Dr. NicoU's 
 journals, and will always find Dr. NicoU and 
 his merry men beaming round the corner, hat 
 in hand. It is a case of what would you like, 
 sir? all the time. Are you spending your 
 holiday cruising on the blue Mediterranean in 
 the Duchess of Puttleham's yacht? Very 
 good. Paragraph in the column signed 
 "Man of Kent," with a delicate reference to 
 yotir last great novel. Have you projects? 
 Equally good. "Mr. So-and-So is, I under- 
 stand, hard at work on his next great novel." 
 Will yotir new book, 30,000 copies of which 
 
The Scot in Journalism 65 
 
 have been sold before the day of pubUcation, 
 make its appearance on April i? Capital. 
 Send us portraits of yourself at all ages from 
 three months to the present day, pictures of 
 the modest tenement in which you were bom, 
 and of your present town house and little 
 place in the country, and, bless your heart, 
 we will do the rest. Do people say that the 
 great novel, of which you have sold fifty 
 million copies in England and America, is a 
 pot-boiler and a stunner? Dear, dear me! 
 You have our heartiest sympathies, sir, and 
 if you would like to vindicate your character 
 as an artist in a couple of pages of the British 
 Weekly, why, my dear sir, we are at your 
 service. I do not say that there is any ter- 
 rific harm in this species of enterprise ; that it 
 pleases the mass of mankind and therefore 
 sells papers goes without saying. On the 
 other hand, it is quite subversive of the best 
 interests of letters, and therefore I am in- 
 fclined to think— and I set it down with great 
 sorrow — that Dr. NicoU, in spite of his de- 
 votional connection is, if he have any force in 
 
66 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 letters at all, a distinctly dubious and unde- 
 sirable force. 
 
 As an example of what the Bookman reaUy 
 can do when it has a mind, let us quote the 
 following review of a book by Mr. Le Gal- 
 lienne : 
 
 "Mr. Le Gallienne is the Dick Whittington 
 of song. His story reminds us of that other 
 Richard, who, one summer morning many 
 hundreds of years ago, sat listening to the 
 bells of distant London. The one carried his 
 little all tied up in a handkerchief slung to 
 the end of a stick ; the other came to London 
 to seek his fortune with a sheaf of manuscript 
 poems in his pocket and any number of 
 poems singing in his head. Now, Mr. Le 
 Gallienne is a figure in 'society,' and lives in 
 a beautiful house crowded with costly bric-h- 
 brac and valuable books ; but I like to think 
 sometimes of the sloping-roofed room, nest- 
 ling under the gables of one of the most pic- 
 turesque buildings left in London — quaint 
 old Staple's Inn — ^which was his first home in 
 the great city. 
 
The Scot in Journalism 67 
 
 " It was in just such a room that one might 
 picture Chatterton — rough-hewn oak beams 
 above, uneven oak flooring below, and in 
 front a ' magic casement ' ' opening upon the 
 foam' — not of 'perilous seas' — but of peril- 
 ous streets, where the black tides of hurry- 
 ing human creatures never ceases [sic] to ebb 
 and flow. Here were his bed, his books, and 
 his papers. Here, too, though shillings were 
 probably scarcer than sovereigns are now, 
 were the flowers, which the extravagant 
 tenant of the prophet's chamber was never 
 too poor to deny himself — ^the flowers which 
 were the inspiration of many of his songs. 
 And here, on a little stove in a corner, he 
 would himself boil the water with which to 
 brew for his visitor the tea or coffee that he 
 would hand round with the ease and grace of 
 a duke dispensing hospitality in his castle. 
 
 "I have been betrayed into this personal 
 reminiscence by reading how ' Love, a poor 
 poet in need of a room for his bed and his 
 rhymes,' and ' Beauty, a little blue-eyed girl 
 who loved him,' transformed into a seventh 
 
68 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 heaven a single seventh-story room which 
 they had rented, for surely ' Love' stands for 
 Mr. Le Gallienne himself, and 'Beauty' for 
 the sweet-faced young wife with dove-like 
 eyes and dove-like voice, whose loss has been 
 the great sorrow of the poet's life. It was in 
 a beautiful idyll called A Seventh-Story 
 Heaven that I read of the transformation, 
 and this brings me to the fact with which I 
 started or ought to have started — that Mr. 
 Le Gallienne has published a new book. In 
 other words, he has set open the door of 
 another House of Welcome on the literary 
 highway. And surely 't were as hard, on a 
 glaring summer's noon, for a tired and thirsty 
 traveller to pass by some ancient hostelry, 
 through the ivy-hung porch of which he sees, 
 lying back in cool shadow, a quaint stone- 
 pa ven nook with a glimpse of green lawn and 
 box-bordered flower beds beyond, as it were 
 for the literary wayfarer to turn aside from a 
 volume titled like Mr. Le Gallienne's, The 
 Prose Fancies of a Poet! Could a more 
 alluring sign be set aswing before the doors of 
 
The Scot in Journalism 69 
 
 any literary House of Refreshment? Nor 
 when we have entered are we disappointed by 
 the bill of fare which is put before us. 'A 
 Seventh-Story lieaven,' 'Spring by Parcel 
 Post,' 'A Poet in the City,' 'Brown Roses,' 
 ' Death and Two Friends,' 'A Seaport in the 
 Moon ' — here surely is a list which might stir 
 the imagination even of unimaginative folk. 
 "The score or so of 'Fancies' which form 
 the volume are, as was only to be expected, 
 of very varying merit. To the opening idyll, 
 'A Seventh-Story Heaven,' reference has 
 already been made. Mr. Le Gallienne's 
 friend and neighbour, Mr. Grant Allen, a de- 
 lightful naturalist and essayist, whom society 
 by her neglect has turned into a thrower into 
 her midst of Nihilistic bombs in the guise of 
 novels, could bear witness to the fact that 
 nests are built in stranger places, but surely 
 never did love-birds find such strange quar- 
 ters for their home as this eyrie at the top of 
 a building, the ground floor of which was a 
 sailor's tavern. But dingy and unlovely as 
 the spot may be, it is made beautiful for us 
 
yo The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 in Mr. Le Gallienne's page as the scene of a 
 love-story so exquisitely told, and so tremu- 
 lous with tender pathos, that we can only 
 corapare it to the work of the gentle Elia. 
 
 "I cannot say as much for the second 
 Fancy, whimsically entitled ' Spring by Par- 
 cel Post,' for it is surely an error of taste 
 which every admirer of Mr. Le Gallienne's 
 genius must regret. 'The big Dutch hya- 
 cinths,' he writes, 'are aheady shamelessly 
 enceinte with their buxom waxen blooms, so 
 fat and fragrant — (one is already delivered of 
 a fine blossom. Well, that is a fine baby, to 
 be stire! says {sic} the other hyacinths with 
 babes no less bonny under their own green 
 apron — all waiting for the doctor Sun).' 
 
 "I wonder if this offends the taste of my 
 readers as much as it offends mine. Mr. Le 
 Gallienne may quote science and physiology 
 against me, but I must confess that in regard 
 to children and flowers I like to keep my very 
 thoughts free from the smirch of sex, though 
 I concede and contend that the smirch is en- 
 tirely of man's, not of God's making. But in 
 
The Scot in Journalism 71 
 
 the passage I have quoted there is a certain 
 coarseness of associations which is painful in 
 connection with the purest and most perfect 
 thing on God's earth — a flower. It was to 
 me as if hot hands were tampering with the 
 petals of a lily. The air seemed to become 
 close as I read, and it was not until I had had 
 a dip — as into cool spring water — into the 
 flower-poems of Bums and Wordsworth that 
 I could go on with my reading of Prose 
 Fancies. 
 
 " Let us turn the page and forget that one 
 of the most delicately-minded of living poets, 
 whose work has hitherto been distinguished 
 for exquisite fancy and excellent taste, should 
 so far have ' lost himself ' as to have written it. 
 
 " Variations upon Whitebait is a caprice 
 as skilful as Rossetti's famous sonnet, A 
 Match with the Moon. It is a very curiosity 
 in similes, and though Mr. Le Gallienne will 
 toss you a fresh and apt simile for every fish 
 upon your fork, though he introduce as many 
 variations as a pianist introduces into Home, 
 Sweet Home, yet the essay is not all variation, 
 
72 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 but has a pretty story running like the thread 
 of a tune throughout, 
 
 "As for the 'Letter to an Unsuccessful 
 Literary Man,' I would suggest that it be 
 lithographed in order that the successful 
 author may use it as a form with which to 
 reply to the uninvited correspondent. If 
 only Mr. Le Gallienne could induce amateurs 
 to read this letter instead of writing letters of 
 their own to that most baited of beings, the 
 professional author, what a boon he would 
 confer upon his fellow craftsmen ! The essay, 
 On Loving One's Enemies, is scarcely written 
 in the spirit which its title and its protesta- 
 tions of charity might lead us to suppose. It 
 strikes me as somewhat self-conscious and 
 defiant ; but Death and Two Friends contains 
 some really signal work. For the gem of the 
 book, however, we must turn to A Seaport in 
 the Moon. This and the opening chapter, 
 A Seventh-Story Heaven, are in themselves 
 worth the modest sum which the publishers 
 ask for the volume. A Seaport in the Moon 
 is an exquisitely beautiful fancy. Mr. Le 
 
The Scot in Journalism 73 
 
 Gallienne was in the right mood when he 
 wrote it, and when he is in the mood he is a 
 magician. His page glows like a painter's 
 palette with rich colours, and the pictures 
 come and go before us like sunset pageant." 
 Apart from the delicious Scotch snob- 
 bery which jumps at you from every line of 
 this admirable piece of criticism, and leaving 
 altogether out of the question the downright 
 vulgarity and ineptitude of it, one would like 
 to know what the Bookman would say if Mr. 
 Le Gallienne published a similar book to- 
 morrow. At the time when this review was 
 published, Mr. Le Gallienne was in the zenith 
 of his somewhat slender and rarefied popu- 
 larity. He had captvired the heart of Ken- 
 sington with dainty vacuity. His locks were 
 curled and perfumed ; he figured prettily and 
 replied to the toast of letters at the dinners 
 of hterary clubs, and was the delicate high 
 priest of a little school of hot pressed poetry 
 and vapid prose. The Bookman, of course, 
 was bound to salute him with a chaste appre- 
 ciation. Since then the world has gone on 
 
74 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 and left Mr. Le Gallienne somewhat behind 
 it, also Mr. Le Gallienne himself has settled in 
 America and cut off his hair. No more does 
 he publish the booklet that takes the town; 
 no longer does he write of the "Woman's 
 Third" or sigh over the deception of ten- 
 der-hearted schoolgirls, who have provided 
 one with a sonnet. In short, his laurel hangs 
 dustily on a nail at the "Bodley Head," 
 and the raven locks that once bore it have 
 probably by this time gone to help in the 
 making of a mess of honest builders' mortar. 
 So that the Bookman knows him no more. 
 
 Prom the issue of the Bookman which con- 
 tains the review above quoted I take a couple 
 of "news notes." 
 
 "Mr. J. M. Barrie has finished a book on 
 his mother, which wiU be entitled Margaret 
 Ogilvy. It is perhaps the most beautiful and 
 exquisite piece of work he has yet accom- 
 plished. It is not a biography in the ordin- 
 ary sense, but gives aspects and incidents of 
 his mother's life in the style which Mr. Bar- 
 rie's readers know, keeping close throughout 
 
The Scot in Journalism 75 
 
 to facts. The volume will be published in 
 this country by Messrs. Hodder and Stough- 
 ton, and in America by Messrs. Scribner." 
 
 "Mr. S. R. Crockett's new novel is to be 
 entitled Lochinvar. Some eminent critics 
 who have had the privilege of reading the 
 portion already written are enthusiastic in 
 their praise of the work. It is said to be 
 more in the manner of The Lilac Sun-Bonnet 
 than some of Mr. Crockett's more recently 
 published novels." 
 
 So much for the Scotch journalist. 
 
THRUMS AND DRUMTOCHTY 
 
 The Scot abroad, or at any rate the Scot 
 that one knows and loves in London, is a 
 creature so winning and delectable in charac- 
 ter that one proceeds to the study of the 
 Scot at home with anticipations of the most 
 pleasurable kind. The best way to study the 
 Scot at home is, of course, to consult the 
 works of those eminent Scottish writers. Dr. 
 J. M. Barrie and Dr. Ian Maclaren, with occa- 
 sional reference to Dr. S. R. Crockett. Dr. 
 Barrie and Dr. Maclaren (otherwise Watson) 
 have been at pains to portray for us, with 
 what Dr. NicoU would no doubt call loving 
 and exquisite fidelity, the peoples and man- 
 ners and customs of two Scotch parishes, 
 named respectively Thrums and Drumtochty. 
 76 
 
Thrums and Drumtochty 'ii 
 
 Both, one gathers, are the prettiest, most 
 charitable, and most God-fearing communi- 
 ties to be found upon this globe of sinful con- 
 tinents. Butter will not melt, and ginger is 
 not hot in the mouth either at Thrums or 
 Drumtochty. The various books of the 
 chronicles of that earthly paradise. Thrums, 
 are of formidable number, and I do not pro- 
 fess to have read more than five of them. 
 But I have read enough to know all that I 
 want to know about Thrums. Here, it 
 seems, "twenty years ago, hundreds of 
 weavers lived and died Thoreaus 'ben the 
 hoose without knowing it." Here also lived 
 " the dear old soul who originally induced me 
 to enter the Auld Licht Kirk" and was "as 
 sweet and pure a woman as I ever knew"; 
 also Tammy Meaknaker, who died a bachelor 
 and "had been soured in his youth by dis- 
 appointment in love of which he spoke but 
 seldom," also Tibbie McQuhattay, "at whom 
 you may smile, but, ah! I know what she 
 was at the sick-bedside ' ' ; also Whinny Web- 
 ster, who ate peppermints in church, and 
 
78 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 when detected in the act "gave one wild 
 scream"; and "straightway became a God- 
 fearing man"; also Hendry Munn, "who 
 was the only man in Thrums who did not 
 quake when the minister looked at him"; 
 also Jess McQumpha, who "sat at the win- 
 dow for twenty years or more, looking at the 
 world as through a telescope," and who "was 
 possessed of a sweet, untarnished soul"; 
 also Leeby, who " died in the back end of the 
 year I have been speaking of"; and Jamie, 
 who did the home-coming, and gaed some- 
 body "sic a look"; and last, but not least, 
 in childishness, the Little Minister and Bab- 
 bie. For blithering sentiment of the cheap- 
 est and most obvious sort, these personages 
 have certainly never been equalled. The 
 whole tone of the Thrums chronicles is as 
 bathotic as it could be made even by a 
 Scotchman, and wherever one turns one 
 finds Mr. Barrie trotting out creatures of a 
 sentiment so slobbery that it would be 
 eschewed even by the scribbling, simpering 
 misses at a seminary. And at Drumtochty, 
 
Thrums and Drumtochty 79 
 
 need one say, Dr. Ian Maclaren introduces 
 you to the same set of silly figures. Dr. 
 Maclaren, it is true, put in the front of his 
 show a cunning Scotch farmer whose at- 
 tempts to cheat his landlord, the worthy 
 doctor, — parson as he is, — would evidently 
 have you smile, but all the rest of his people 
 are rare and radiant pieces of virtue, clothed 
 round in Scotch flesh and sandy hair, and 
 speaking the most uncompromising dialect. 
 For example, there is Mrs. Elspeth Macfad- 
 yen. This lady's claim to greatness is not 
 exactly of a moral kind, being based on the 
 circumstance that she obtained a penny 
 above the market price for her butter. All 
 the farmers' wives of the Scotch romances 
 invariably do this. Even Dr. Crockett's lady 
 of the lilac sunbonnet made the best butter 
 in three parishes. The butter woman, how- 
 ever, is not intended to count, so that we will 
 let her go by, and proceed duly to note the 
 heavenly dispositions of the rest of the Drum- 
 tochtyans. In the first place, there is Bax- 
 ter of Burnbrae. Burnbrae, it seems, "had 
 
8o The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 to make the choice that has been offered to 
 every man since the world began" ; in other 
 words, he had to choose between losing his 
 farm and changing his kirk. 
 
 "'Well, Baxter,* said the factor in his 
 room next day, ' your offer is all right in the 
 money, and we'll soon settle the building. 
 By the way, I suppose you've thought over 
 that kirk affair, and will give your word to 
 attend the EstabHshed Church, eh?' 
 
 " ' Ye may be sure that A've gien a' ye 
 said ma best judgment, and there 's naething 
 I wudna dae to be left in Bumbrae, but this 
 thing ye ask A canna grant.' 
 
 "' Why not?' and the factor, lounging in 
 his chair, eyed Burnbrae contemptuously as 
 he stood erect before him. ' My groom tells 
 me that there is not a grain of difference be- 
 tween aU those kirks in Scotland, and that 
 the whole affair is just downright bad tem- 
 per, and I believe he's right.' 
 
 " ' A wudna say onything disrespectfu', sir, 
 but it's juist possible that naither you nor 
 your groom ken the history o' the Free 
 
Thrums and Drumtochty 8i 
 
 Church; but ye may be sure sensible men 
 and puir fouk dinna mak' sic sacrifices for 
 bad temper.' " 
 
 Which is exceeding good of Bumbrae, if 
 a Httle too bad of Dr. Maclaren. 
 
 And otir excellent Scotch author makes 
 Bumbrae conclude the interview thus : " ' Sir,' 
 he said, with great solemnity, 'I pray God 
 you may never have such sorrow as you have 
 sent on my house this day.' " I should very 
 much doubt whether there is a Scotchman in 
 all Scotland who would not have made quite 
 a different ending with much fist-shaking and 
 calling down of curses in it. 
 
 Well, in the result, Bumbrae does leave 
 his farm; anyway, there is a sale, or as the 
 Scotch elegantly term it, a roup. And what 
 happens? Why, the neighbours — good, hon- 
 est bodies — ^tum up in their thousands and 
 buy in Btimbrae's farming stock at noble 
 prices, bidding high for everything in order 
 that Bximbrae may at least have a good roup. 
 Meanwhile the minister of the kirk with 
 which Bumbrae scorned to become a member 
 
82 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 has communicated with the owner of the 
 soil, the Earl of Kilspindie to wit, and to 
 Bumbrae Kilspindie writes, "Meet me in 
 Muirtown on Friday." On Friday, Bum- 
 brae meets the Earl. They crack together 
 of Bumbrae's son, the sergeant, who, like aU 
 the other Scotch sergeants of fiction, has just 
 won the Victoria Cross. " ' There will be no 
 speaking to Mrs. Baxter now after this ex- 
 ploit of the sergeant's! When I read it on 
 my way home I was as proud as if he had 
 been my own son. It was a gallant deed, and 
 well deserves the Cross. He '11 be getting his 
 commission some day. Lieutenant Baxter! 
 That will stir the Glen, eh?'" Then they 
 touch on the matter of the farm, and the tears 
 cometo Burnbrae's eyes. " ' Athocht,' he said, 
 ' when yir message cam, that maybe ye hed 
 anither mind than yir factor, and wud send 
 me back tae Jean wi' guid news in ma mooth.' 
 " ' Gin it be yir wuU that we flit, A '11 mak 
 nae mair complaint, an' there's nae bitter- 
 ness in ma hert. But A wud like ye tae ken 
 that it 'ill be a sair pairtin'. 
 
Thrums and Drumtochty 83 
 
 " 'For twa hundred years an' mair there's 
 been a Baxter at Burnbrae and a Hay at 
 Kilspindie; ane wes juist 9, workin' farmer, 
 an' the other a belted earl, but gude freends 
 an' faithfu' ; an', ma Lord, Burnbrae wes as 
 dear tae oor fouk as the castle wes tae 
 yours. 
 
 " 'A mind that day the Viscount cam' o' 
 age, an' we gaithered tae wush him weel, that 
 A saw the pictures o' the auld Hays on yir 
 walls, an' thocht hoo mony were the ties that 
 bund ye tae yir hame. 
 
 '"We haena pictures nor gowden treasures, 
 but there 's an auld chair at oor fireside, an' 
 A saw ma grandfather in it when A wes a 
 laddie at the schule, an' A mind him tellin' 
 me that his grandfather hed sat in lang 
 afore. It's no worth muckle, an' it's been 
 often mended, but A '11 no like tae see it car- 
 ried oot frae Burnbrae. 
 
 "'There is a Bible, tae, that hes come 
 doon, father tae son, frae 1690, and ilka 
 Baxter hes written his name in it, an' 
 "farmer at Burnbrae," but it'll no' be dune 
 
84 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 again, for oor race 'ill be awa frae Bumbrae 
 for ever. 
 
 " ' Be patient wi' me, ma Lord, for it's the 
 laist time we 're like tae meet, an ' there 's 
 anither thing A want tae say, for it 's heavy 
 on ma hert. 
 
 "'When the factor told me within this 
 verra room that we maun leave, he spoke o' 
 me as if A hed been a lawless man, an' it cut 
 me mair than ony ither word. 
 
 "'Ma Lord, it's no' the men that fear 
 their God that 'ill brak the laws, an' A ken 
 nae Baxter that wes ither than a loyal man 
 tae his King and country. 
 
 "'Ma uncle chairged wi' the Scots Greys 
 at Waterloo, and A mind him tellin', when 
 A wes a wee laddie, hoo the Hielanders cried 
 oot, "Scotland for ever," as they passed. 
 
 "'Aneedna tell ye aboot ma brither, for 
 he wes killed by yir side afore Sebastopol, 
 and the letter ye sent tae Bumbrae is keepit 
 in that Bible for a heritage. 
 
 " ' A'U mention naething aither o' ma ain 
 laddie, for ye 've said mair than wud be richt 
 
Thrums and Drumtochty 85 
 
 for me, but we coont it hard that when oor 
 laddie hes shed his blude like an honest man 
 for his Queen, his auld father and mither sud 
 be driven frae the hame their forebears hed 
 for seeven generations.' " 
 
 What a family! The sergeant with the. 
 V. C, ma uncle who chairged wi' the Scots" 
 Greys, and ma brither who wes killed by yif' 
 side afore Sebastopol, and, of course, the 
 Bible has to be lugged in. What wonder 
 that at this outburst of Scottish reticence, so 
 to say. Lord Kilspindie rose to his feet. In 
 the twinkling of a paragraph or two the shal- 
 low, monstrous, black-hearted English factor 
 is, need one say, coming in for a bit of his 
 Lordship's mind. 
 
 " ' You'll reduce the rent to the old figure, 
 and put in the name of John Baxter, and let 
 it be for the longest period we ever give on 
 the estate.' 
 
 " * But, Lord Kilspindie . . . I . . . 
 did you know ' 
 
 "'Do as I command you without another 
 word, ' and his Lordship was fearful to behold. ' ' 
 
86 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Baxter goes home to his farm victor. 
 The news goes down the Glen, — or up it as 
 the case may be, — and the question arises as 
 to what Baxter is going to do with the 
 farm that has been denuded of Hve stock and 
 implements, and before you can say Jack 
 Robinson every man who has made a pur- 
 chase at the Burnbrae roup is off to Burnbrae 
 with his purchase and dumps it down and 
 leaves it there, free, gratis, and for nothing. 
 
 Now the whole of this story is simply ridic- 
 ulous. Even if one swallowed the English 
 factor who had turned an old tenant out of 
 his farm on a question of kirk; even if one 
 swallowed the neighbourly bidding up at the 
 roup (not to mention the Victoria Cross and 
 the fighting uncle and brither),^Dr. Maclaren 
 cannot make us believe that a Scotchman 
 would part freely and without price with 
 anything that he had once bought. And 
 what a reflection it is upon the dulness of the 
 patient, resigned, and tear-stricken Burn- 
 brae, that he did not have the presence of 
 mind to address dear, good Earl of Kilspindie 
 
Thrums and Drumtochty 87 
 
 before the roup came off! But had he done 
 that, of course, Dr. Ian Maclaren could not 
 have made his point as to the incredible gen- 
 erosity of the dwellers about Drumtochty. 
 
 But the Glen could boast much more re- 
 markable men than Biu-nbrae. There is 
 Drumsheugh, about as pale a martyr as a 
 martyr-loving people could wish for. Drum- 
 sheugh passed in the Glen for a hard man and 
 a miser, "a wratch that 'ill hae the laist 
 penny in a bargain, and no spend a saxpence 
 gin he can keep it." But Drumsheugh was 
 sairly misjudged. He carried his tribble for 
 mair than thirty year, and then unburdened 
 himself of it over the whiskey to his friend, 
 Dr. Madura. "'Itwes for anither A gith- 
 ered, an' as fast as A got the gear A gied it 
 awa',' and Drumsheugh sprang to his feet, 
 his eyes shining; 'it wes for love's sake A 
 haggled an' schemed, an' stairved an' toiled, 
 till A've been a byword at kirk an' market 
 for nearness; A did it a', an' bore it a', for 
 ma love, an' for . . . ma love A wud 
 hae dvme ten times mair.' " Naturally, and 
 
88 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 the lady in the case was named Marget, the 
 bonniest as weel as the noblest o' weemen 
 (they all are). Well, Drumsheugh fell in 
 love with Marget when she was in her bloom. 
 With the true Scottish reticence, however, 
 he omitted to mention his condition to the 
 object of his affection, so that she went off 
 quite properly and married a feckless person 
 named Whinnie, who, being feckless, got him- 
 self into persistent holes for money, so that 
 Whinnie and Marget were continually being 
 threatened with the loss of their happy home, 
 and all the time Drumsheugh, for love's sake, 
 kept on sending money through his solicitors 
 in the name of Whinnie' s rich uncle in Amer- 
 ica. For thirty years Whinnie continued to 
 be a drain on his purse, and Drumsheugh 
 spake no word, but went on loving Marget 
 all the time. Being made the recipient of 
 this astonishing confidence, Maclure is for 
 posting off to Marget right away, and she, 
 good woman, posts as swiftly off to Drum- 
 sheugh. It is a case of ae fond kiss and 
 dinna peety me, Marget; A've hed ma re- 
 
Thrums and Drumtochty 89 
 
 ward, an' A'm mair than content; and we 
 wind up with the biblical reflection that 
 " They which shall be accounted worthy . . . 
 neither marry nor are given in marriage . . . 
 but are as the angels of God in Heaven"; 
 which is all very pretty and all very Scotch, 
 and all made to sell. We may note, how- 
 ever, that Drumsheugh did not stand alone 
 in Drumtochty for his devotion to a lost love. 
 The fetch is too easy and too safe for Dr. 
 Maclaren to allow himself the use of it only 
 once. There was a man in Drumtochty who 
 had been counted a cynic and a railer against 
 "merridge," even as Drtunsheugh was ac- 
 counted a miser. In the course of nature this 
 man, Jamie Soutar, came to die. On his death 
 bed he remarked to a friend, " ' Wha sed A 
 wes against merridge, Doctor Davidson?' 
 and Jamie's face flushed. ' Did ever man or 
 woman hear me speak lichtly o' the mystery 
 o' love? The Glen hes thocht me an auld 
 cankered bachelor, an' A've seen a lass leave 
 her lad's side on the sicht o' me. Little they 
 kent!'" Audit transpires that '"forty-five 
 
90 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 years syne A met ... a lassie near Kil- 
 drummie, an' A cam tae love her aince and 
 for ever, an' we hed . . . seeven evenin's 
 thegither. When A cam the next day she 
 wesna there, an' A hoddit amang the trees 
 for a ploy; but it wes lang waitin', for she 
 didna come, an' A gaed hame wi' fear in ma 
 hert. . . . 
 
 "'A set aff tae herhoose, and ilka turn o' 
 the road A lookit for Menie. Aince ma hert 
 loupit in ma breist like a birdie in its cage, 
 for a wumman cam' along the near road frae 
 Kildrummie, but it wesna Menie. 
 
 " ' When A saw her brither wi' his face tae 
 Drumtochty, A kent, afore he said a word, 
 that he wes seekin' me, an' that Menie was 
 deid. Never a tear cam' that day tae ma 
 een, an' he telt me, stannin' in the middle o' 
 the road, where it begins tae gae doon the hill : 
 
 '"It wes her throat, an' the doctor wes 
 feared frae the first day. The nicht she 
 didna come she wes carried (delirious); she 
 . . . said, " Jamie, Jamie," ower an' ower 
 again, an' wanted tae rise. 
 
Thrums and Drumtochty 91 
 
 " 'Aboot daybreak she cam' tae hersel', 
 and knew oor faces. "A'm deein'," she 
 said, ' ' an' A didna keep ma tryst last nicht. 
 It's ower late noo, an' A '11 no see him on 
 earth again. 
 
 "'Tell James Soutar that it wesna ma 
 blame A failed, an' gie him ma Bible," an' a 
 while aifter she said, "A '11 keep the tryst wi' 
 him some day," an' . . . that's a'.'" 
 
 After that, any child could tell you what 
 Jamie's "last words" would be. 
 
 "'Menie,' he cried, suddenly, with a new 
 voice, 'A 've keepit oor tryst.' " 
 
 Heaven help us! 
 
VI 
 
 BARBIE 
 
 From Thrums and Dnimtochty the blest 
 to Barbie, which is also in Scotland, may be 
 fairly described as a far cry. In the beauti- 
 ful communities conceived by Drs. Barrie 
 and Maclaren the milk of himian nature flows 
 like a river; everybody lives, not for his or 
 her foolish self, but for somebody else ; every- 
 body dies for somebody else; all bachelors 
 are faithful to the sweethearts of their youth 
 "for forty year and more"; all the women 
 make the best butter in Galloway; all the 
 girls are pretty and angelic of temperament, 
 and, in short, Thrums and Drumtochty are 
 little bits of heaven dropped on to the map 
 of Scotland. But Barbie is not of heavenly 
 origin in the least. The chronicles of Barbie 
 
 Q2 
 
Barbie 93 
 
 have been put into print for us by Mr. 
 George Douglas, and he calls his book The 
 House with the Green Shutters. If he had 
 wanted a just title for it, he might very well 
 have called it "The Unspeakable Scot." 
 Nowhere in letters does there exist such an 
 unsophisticated revelation of the minds and 
 habits of a savage and barbarous people as 
 is to be found in this book. It is fiction, of 
 course; but it is that kind of fiction which 
 has been written from observation, and is 
 practically a human document. The Barbie 
 crowd do not waste any time on little acts of 
 kindness; there is not a man among them 
 who cannot fairly be termed mean. If mean- 
 ness were the only fault one might be able to 
 put up with Barbie; but the inhabitants 
 have graver failings. They are all dour; 
 they are all bitter-hearted; they are all 
 greedy ; they are all merciless and full of the 
 wickedest guile. Gourlay, who is the hero of 
 the piece, counts among the most unpleasant 
 persons one has ever met in a book. He has 
 "the black glower in his een," and all the 
 
94 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Scotch qualities of envy, hatred, overween- 
 ing pride, and tyranny find full expression in 
 him. For years he has trampled the rest of 
 Barbie under his feet, and aU Barbie hates 
 him. "He had been bom and bred in Bar- 
 bie, and he knew his townsmen — oh, yes — 
 he knew them. He knew they laughed be- 
 cause he had no gift of the gab, and could 
 never be provost, or bailie, or elder, or even 
 chairman of the gasworks! 'Oh, verra 
 well, verra well, let Connal and Brodie and 
 AUardyce have the talk, and manage the 
 town's affairs ' (he was damned if they should 
 manage his !) ; he, for his part, preferred the 
 substantial reality." So that he treated 
 Barbie with contempt; he had a civil word 
 for nobody, and his manners were as bad as 
 only Scotch manners can be. It was these 
 very manners, however, that helped to bring 
 about his downfall. One fine morning a 
 stranger walked into Barbie; he was a 
 Scotchman, and in his appearance there 
 was "an air of dirty and pretentious weU- 
 to-doness," which is the Scotch way. 
 
Barbie 95 
 
 Well, this stranger ran up against Mr. 
 Goiirlay. 
 
 '"It's a fine morning, Mr. Gourlay!' sim- 
 pered the stranger. His air was that of a 
 forward tenant who thinks it a great thing 
 to pass remarks on the weather with his laird. 
 
 "Gourlay cast a look at the dropping 
 heavens. 
 
 '"Is that your opinion?' said he. 'I fail 
 to see 't mysel' . . .' 
 
 "The stranger laughed, a little deprecat- 
 ing giggle. ' I meant it was fine weather for 
 the fields,' he explained. . . . 
 
 " ' Are you a farmer, then ? ' Gourlay nipped 
 in, with his eye on the white waistcoat. 
 
 '"Oh— oh, Mr. Gourlay! A farmer, no. 
 Hi — ^hi! I'm not a farmer. I daresay, now, 
 you have no mind of me ! ' 
 
 "'No,' said Gourlay, regarding him very 
 gravely and steadily with his dark eyes. ' I 
 cannot say, sir, that I have the pleasure of 
 remembering you ! ' 
 
 '"Man, I'm a son of auld John Wilson of 
 Brigabee!' 
 
96 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 '"Oh, auld Wilson, the mole-catcher!' 
 said contemptuous Gourlay. 'What's this 
 they christened him now? " Toddling John- 
 nie," was it noat?' 
 
 "Wilson coloured. But he sniggered to 
 gloss over the awkwardness of the remark. 
 A coward always sniggers when insulted, 
 pretending that the insult is only a joke of 
 his opponent, and therefore to be laughed 
 aside. So he escapes the quarrel which he 
 fears a show of displeasure might provoke. 
 
 "But, though Wilson was not a handy 
 man, it was not timidity only that caused his 
 tame submission to Gourlay. . . ." 
 
 Here you have the two types of Scotch- 
 men presented ia speaking likenesses, namely, 
 the bully, primed with " repressiveness " and 
 " force of character," and the giggling lick- 
 spittle who does not know how to fight and 
 consequently falls back on livid revenges. 
 
 Later, Wilson ventures on a remark about 
 business. Gourlay retorts : 
 
 "'Business! Heavens, did ye hear him 
 talking? What did ToddHng Johnny's son 
 
Barbie 97 
 
 know about business? What was the world 
 coming to? To hear him setting up his face 
 there and asking the best merchant in the 
 town whether business was brisk! It was 
 high time to put him in his place, the con- 
 ceited upstart, shoving himself forward like 
 an equal!' 
 
 "For it was the assumption of equality- 
 implied by Wilson's manner that offended 
 Gourlay — as if mole-catcher's son and mono- 
 polist were discussing, on equal terms, mat- 
 ters of interest to them both. 
 
 " ' Business ! ' he said, gravely. ' Well, I 'm 
 not well acquainted with your line, but I 
 believe mole-traps are cheap — if ye have 
 any idea of taking up the oald trade!' 
 
 " Wilson's eyes flickered over him, hurt and 
 dubious. His mouth opened — then shut — 
 then he decided to speak after all. 'Oh, I 
 was thinking Barbie would be very quiet,' 
 said he, 'compared wi' places where they 
 have the railway! I was thinking it would 
 need stirring up a bit.' 
 
 "'Oh, ye was thinking that, was ye?' 
 
98 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 birred Gourlay, with a stupid man's repeti- 
 tion of his jibe. 'Well, I believe there's a 
 grand opening in the moleskin line, so there 's 
 a chance for ye! My quarrymen wear out 
 their breeks in no time ! ' 
 
 "Wilson's face, which had swelled with 
 red shame, went a dead white. ' Good morn- 
 ing!' he said, and started rapidly away 
 with a vicious dig of his stick upon the wet 
 road. 
 
 '"Goo-ood mor-r-ning, serr ! ' Gourlay 
 birred after him ; ' goo-ood mor-r-ning, serr ! ' 
 He felt he had been bright this morning. He 
 had put the branks on Wilson!" 
 
 In spite of his smallness and rattiness, Wil- 
 son is not without his Scotch feelings, so 
 that he goes away and schemes. And the 
 end of his scheming is that he becomes a 
 trade rival of Gourlay's in Barbie. Perhaps 
 man never had a more unscrupulous or fiend- 
 ishly cunning trade rival. The end of it is 
 that Gourlay is brought to the verge of bank- 
 ruptcy and dies miserably, while Barbie is 
 left to go on its wicked way rejoicing. This 
 
Barbie 99 
 
 fight between two ugly nattires is watched 
 by the poptilation of Barbie with great zest; 
 the combatants are continually egged on by 
 the sarcastic comments of the neebors, who 
 practically hate them both as they hate one 
 another. And the result is a picture which 
 rivals in hideousness anything of the kind 
 which has hitherto been attempted. From 
 The House with the Green Shutters one is able 
 to gather what life in a Scotch township 
 really means. One understands, too, how it 
 comes to pass that the Scotchmen one meets 
 in London are so wanting in the qualities 
 which render communication between men 
 possible and tolerable. Persons who have 
 spent their youth in such a township as Bar- 
 bie must of necessity have altogether wrong 
 views about life and the reason for it. Their 
 hand is against every man; to get and to 
 keep by fair means or foul is their sole ambi- 
 tion, and of the finer feelings which keep 
 existence sweet they know absolutely noth- 
 ing. It is a squalid picture, and not in the 
 least flattering to Scotland. Yet the Scotch 
 
loo The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 critics have not ventured to deny its authen- 
 ticity; indeed, they admit that there is a 
 great deal in it. Mr.^^ouglas, the author of 
 The House with the Green Shutters, is himself 
 a Scotchman, and to malign his country is 
 about the last thing you may expect from a 
 Scotch writer; his tendency usually is the 
 other way. To put Thrums, Drumtochty, 
 and Barbie into one vessel, as it were, to mix 
 them and make a blend of them is probably 
 to get at the truth about the Scot as he lives 
 and moves in his native element. And 
 when one has done this, one can only imagine 
 that the average Scotchman is a compound 
 of two things, — ^to wit, the knave and the 
 fool. 
 
VII 
 
 THE BARD 
 
 In England "the Bard" stands for Shake- 
 speare ; in Scotland, of course, when you say 
 "the Bard " you mean Robert Burns. Noth- 
 ing that Scotland ever possessed has abided 
 so firmly in the heart of the Scotchman as 
 "the Bard" — Robert Bums, that is to say. 
 An Englishman can forget that Shakespeare 
 ever existed. A Scotsman never forgets that 
 Robert Bums was a Scotchman. Mom, 
 noon, and night he will talk to you of Bums 
 if you give him half a chance. Till Dr. J. M. 
 Barrie and Dr. Crockett came in, the Scotch- 
 man had no other book but a dog's-eared 
 Burns, from which work he gathered his 
 views of life, including justification for his 
 vices. Round the person and poetry of 
 
I02 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Bums numberless well-meaning people have 
 found it worth their while to write a litera- 
 ture. There was a time when "the Bard" 
 received praise only from mere poets. Keats 
 wrote sonnets about him; Montgomery of- 
 fered him the usual graceful tribute ; Words- 
 worth mentioned him cheek by jowl with 
 Chatterton; and even Eliza Cook had her 
 metrical say about him. Then the prose men 
 came along — Carlyle, Stevenson, Henley. 
 Carlyle took the man Burns and set him up 
 for a tremendous genius, with "a head of 
 gold." Stevenson, whom probably for this 
 reason the Scotch do not love, ventured to 
 suggest that Mr. Burns had "feet of clay." 
 Mr. Henley followed and accentuated the 
 feet of clay, greatly to the annoyance of all 
 Scotland. It ill becomes the present writer 
 to attempt to do what has already been done 
 so well, therefore he will say nothing about 
 either heads of gold or feet of clay. But 
 Robert Burns is everybody's property, and 
 one may crave leave even at this late day to 
 say about him the thing that one believes. 
 
The Bard 103 
 
 The whole truth about Burns may be summed 
 up in half a dozen words. He was a poet, 
 he was a loose liver, and he was a ploughman. 
 And if one looks through his writings, one is 
 forced to the conclusion that he owes his 
 fame to the circumstances that he was a 
 loose liver and a ploughman rather than to 
 the circumstance that he was a poet. To 
 take up the works of Biims in one volume 
 and to glance through them haphazard, as- 
 saying here a page and there a page, is to 
 come to a knowledge of him which is rather 
 staggering. As I write, I have before me the 
 Globe Edition of the Complete Works of 
 Robert Burns, edited by Alexander Smith. 
 It is a portly book, and one is aware that it 
 contains matter which is really of excellent 
 quality, considered as poetry. Yet to test it 
 by chance openings is to perceive that in the 
 main Burns, as poet, has been vastly overrated. 
 On page 211, for example, which is about the 
 middle of the book, I find five pieces, not one 
 of which is good enough to grace a common 
 valentine. We lead off with Peggy's Charms: 
 
104 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 My Peggy's face, my Peggy's form, 
 The frost of hermit age might warm; 
 My Peggy's worth, my Peggy's mind, 
 Might charm the first of human kind. 
 I love my Peggy's angel air. 
 Her face so truly, heavenly fair, 
 Her native grace so void of art; 
 But I adore my Peggy's heart. 
 
 Not to put too fine a point upon it, this 
 is arrant drivel, villainously rhymed. Then 
 comes Up in the Morning Early : 
 
 Up in the morning's no' for me. 
 
 Up in the morning early; 
 When a' the hills are cover'd wi' snaw, 
 
 I 'm sure it 's winter fairly. 
 
 Cauld blaws the wind frae east to west, 
 
 The drift is driving sairly; 
 Sae loud and shrill's I hear the blast, 
 
 I 'm sure it 's winter fairly. 
 
 The birds sit chittering in the thorn, 
 
 A' day they fare but sparely; 
 And lang's the night frae e'en to mom, 
 
 I 'm sure it 's winter fairly. 
 
 One surmises Up in the Morning Early be- 
 longs to "that great body of treasurable 
 songs with which Burns has dowered his 
 countrymen." On the face of it, to find 
 sorrier stuff one would have to visit an Eng- 
 
The Bard 105 
 
 lish music hall. There is not a glimmer of 
 poetry in any one of the twelve lines, and the 
 composition as a whole might have been 
 written by a precocious infant in a Glasgow 
 Board School. After this precious produc- 
 tion we are regaled with the appended touch- 
 ing piece of sentimentalism : 
 
 Tho' cruel fate should bid us part, 
 
 As far's the pole and line; 
 Her dear idea round my heart 
 
 Should tenderly entwine. 
 
 Tho' mountains frown and deserts howl, 
 
 And oceans roar between; 
 Yet, dearer than my deathless soul, 
 
 I still would love my Jean. 
 
 The spectacle of a gentleman having some- 
 body's "dear idea" entwined, whether ten- 
 derly 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, 
 
io6 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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'nrng 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. 
 The' 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. 
 
The Bard 107 
 
 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 lucu- 
 brations have to do with love, and one won- 
 ders 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. 
 
io8 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 Ues. 
 
 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: 
 
The Bard 109 
 
 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? 
 
no The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 tmcouth orthography. Put into de- 
 cent English, many of his most vaunted 
 lays amount to nothing at all. Indeed, prac- 
 tically 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 dif- 
 ference between good writing and bad will 
 quarrel. But I do assert that the best of 
 Btims is not sufficient, either in quality or 
 quantity, to justify the absurd fame which 
 
The Bard m 
 
 has been bestowed upon him by his country- 
 men. James I., whom the average Scotch- 
 man barely knows by name, was, taking him 
 all in all, quite as good a poet as Burns. So 
 was Barbour; so was Drummond of Haw- 
 thomden ; and, I had almost added, so were 
 Stevenson and Robert Buchanan. The ques- 
 tion naturally arises. How comes it to pass 
 that Bums 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 alco- 
 holism. 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. 
 
112 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 suc- 
 ceeded in getting one of his canvases hung at 
 Btirlington House ; and if I remember rightly 
 there used to be a postman poet of whom sun- 
 dry 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 
 Bums, as we have seen, was a ploughman. 
 What special excellence may lie in being a 
 
The Bard 113 
 
 ploughman nobody but a Scotchman may- 
 perceive. In England our booms on hum- 
 ble talent are of short duration. Clare and 
 Ebenezer Elliott both had their little day, 
 and ceased to be. But the Scotch plough- 
 man 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 Bums 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 sym- 
 pathy. Whiskey and women are the sub- 
 jects 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 stand- 
 
114 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 ard of morality in the rural districts of Scot- 
 land is much lower to-day than it was in 
 Bums's time. The inference is obvious. 
 Bums, every Scotchman tells you, and tells 
 you truly, has played no small part in mould- 
 ing the sentiments and tendencies of the 
 Scotch people as we know them. It was he 
 who gave them their first notion of bump- 
 tious 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 free- 
 dom gang together ; and it was he who gave 
 the countenance of song to shameful and 
 squalid sexuality. In a great number of 
 Bums'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 ortho- 
 graphy, but every Scotchman knows what I 
 
The Bard 115 
 
 mean) ; he degraded and prostituted his in- 
 tellect, and earned thereby the love and wor- 
 ship 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 sus- 
 picion that he was an overrated poet. Some- 
 how, in perusing their estimates, one has a 
 feeling that Bums is not so much being ex- 
 pounded 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 
 imcommon degree to Ramsay and Fergus- 
 son." And, he adds, by way of defence, that 
 "when we remember Bums's obligation to 
 his predecessors, we must never forget his 
 immense advances on them." Perhaps not. 
 
ii6 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 wiU not bear examination. His life 
 as a whole would have discredited a dustman, 
 much less a poet. He whiaed 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. Bums 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 sim- 
 ply an incontinent yokel with a gift for met- 
 ricism. 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 prosper- 
 ous 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 
 117 
 
ii8 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 man- 
 agers. 
 
 "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 draw- 
 backs 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 
 
The Scot as a Critic 119 
 
 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 ex- 
 perience, 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 imag- 
 ine 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 mis- 
 take. 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 re- 
 fuse 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 
 
I20 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 whole page of a novel. But if you are pre- 
 pared 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 y 
 
 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 Scotch- 
 man. In point of unnecessariness it rivals 
 pretty well aught that I have had the felicity 
 to see in print. And it illustrates to admira- 
 tion 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 qudted he refers to "our ac- 
 
The Scot as a Critic 1 2 1 
 
 cursed 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 sHghtest 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 im- 
 peachment 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 in- 
 deed! 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 
 
122 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 angels." For thirteen centuries the pun of 
 the Bishop of Rome had remained decently 
 tucked away in the history books. And in 
 1 901, 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 in- 
 wardness 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 mod- 
 ern 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. Some- 
 how 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, ham- 
 mering at the theatre and "our accursed 
 
The Scot as a Critic 123 
 
 system," and he was fain for a softer job. 
 What work cotild a poor, tired critic take up 
 outside the potter's field of our acctirsed 
 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. Be- 
 ing a Scotchman, Dr. Archer thought, and 
 straightway set to work. He appears to 
 have plodded steadfastly through the writ- 
 ings of no fewer than thirty-three of the 
 minor contemporary poets of England and 
 America. Of each of these thirty-three child- 
 ren of the Muse, beginning with the Rev. H. 
 C. Beeching and ending with William Butler 
 Yeats, he wrote painfiil 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 con- 
 cern myself. Their general drift and tenor 
 may be inferred from the following examples, 
 culled from the article on Mr. Kipling: 
 
124 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 " Far be it from me to disparage Scots Wha 
 Hoe, 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 Hoe 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 imag- 
 inative 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, in- 
 deed, they have no bustles to shake, and I 
 
The Scot as a Critic 125 
 
 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 ex- 
 cluded 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 Gen- 
 eration might well have gone down to pos- 
 terity as a collection of middling and slightly 
 wrong-headed reviews, had Dr. Archer pos- 
 sessed 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 
 
126 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 contem- 
 porary 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 intel- 
 lectual 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 
 
The Scot as a Critic 127 
 
 father's having come from England with 
 Oliver Cromwell and settled in Glasgow; 
 but I never coidd discover any evidence 
 of it. The only thing that speaks in its fa- 
 vour 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 gate- 
 way of the Highlands. This being so, it ap- 
 pears 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 
 Chtirch 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 T believe, edited — an 
 
128 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 my- 
 self that can possibly be taken as showing 
 any marked relation to the poetic side of life, 
 is an extreme susceptibiUty (very clearly in- 
 herited 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, with- 
 out 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 rhjrthms 
 and simple curves of notes. I am not sure 
 that Lascia ch'ie pranga, Che faer fard senza 
 Euridice, and the cantabile in Chopin's Fun- 
 eral March, do not seem to me the very 
 
The Scot as a Critic 129 
 
 divinest utterances of the human spirit, be- 
 fore 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,' 'Fitz James 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 perman- 
 ent ill effects. At the same time I read the 
 
 greater part of The Faerie Queene with a 
 9 
 
I30 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 certain pleasure, but without any real appre- 
 ciation." 
 
 Wordsworth this remarkable youth "read 
 for a college essay " ; " Coleridge came to him 
 in the train of Wordsworth" ; and at seven- 
 teen 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 in- 
 exhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry." 
 
The Scot as a Critic 131 
 
 Later, we learn that Dr. Archer's own metri- 
 cal efforts have been "almost entirely con- 
 fined to comic, or, at any rate, journalistic, 
 verse," though he "never attained even the 
 fluency of the practised newspaper rhyme- 
 ster." Greek and Latin verses, he adds, 
 "were undreamt of in the Scottish curricu- 
 lum of my day. Practically we knew not 
 what quantity meant." 
 
 Altogether, therefore, Dr. William Archer's 
 "qualifications as a critic of poetry" wotild 
 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 Eng- 
 lish 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 bar- 
 rel organ"; poetry had no charms for him 
 till he was seventeen; and he did not dis- 
 cover Milton's "inexhaustible mine of the 
 ptu"e 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 
 
132 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 had "ready for press" five hundred pages of 
 appreciations of poets of the younger gen- 
 eration. It is truly marvellous and prodig- 
 iously 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 in- 
 terest by the exigencies of his work on news- 
 papers, 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 journal- 
 ism and pltime themselves on their "ptdl" 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 
 
The Scot as a Critic 133 
 
 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 stodgtness which have 
 overtaken the whole business during the past 
 decade or so. Persons who write, not to 
 mention persons who read, know fuU weU 
 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 au- 
 thor of such a book out of his meed of recog- 
 nition. In the long result this is true. But 
 waiting for the long result is a weary business. 
 
134 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 particularly when you discover that there is 
 an inclination on the part of the people who 
 have "the puU " 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 writ- 
 ings have, as a rule, been of so slender a 
 nature that I have marvelled to see them 
 noticed at aU. 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 grati- 
 tude. 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 aU 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. 
 
The Scot as a Critic 135 
 
 note' 
 
 The Scots opinion of Bums may perhaps 
 be best illustrated by quoting a Bums-Night 
 oration. The speech appended below may 
 be taken as a moderate sample of what 
 Bums's admirers are in the habit of saying 
 about him. I am indebted to Dr. Ross's 
 volume, Henley on Burns, for the excerpt: 
 " Bums suffered more from remorse and gen- 
 uine penitence than probably any man who 
 ever Uved. Not only so, but the very bitter- 
 ness of his cry, 'God be merciful to me a 
 sinner,' has been seized upon by his calum- 
 niators, and used as a weapon to stab him 
 behind his back. But leave Bums to his 
 Maker, and, keeping in view the parable of 
 
 ' In the Embankment Gardens, London, there is a 
 statue of Bums, on the pedestal of which appears the 
 appended inscription : 
 
 "The Poetic Genius of my country found me at the 
 plough and threw her inspiring mantle over me. She 
 bade me sing the loves, the joys, the rural scenes, and 
 rural pleasures of my native soil in my native tongue. 
 I tuned my wild, artless notes as she inspired." 
 
 Now any poet who can babble about his wild, art- 
 less notes is beyond praying for. I think this particu- 
 lar monument ought to be taken down. 
 
136 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 the Pharisee and the publican, it is just pos- 
 sible, nay probable, that those who talk so 
 glibly about the sins of Bums 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 Bums 
 with doubt and suspicion. Many decent, 
 worthy people, naturally and properly dis- 
 liking the clay, miss the gold. Many worthy 
 teetotallers dislike the poet on account of his 
 diinking songs ; but even they are beginning 
 to forgive him for writing Willie brewed a 
 peck p' maut and such like. The Pharisee 
 and the hypocrite, throughout their genera- 
 tions, 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 
 
The Scot as a Critic 137 
 
 never take to Btims. He is not sufficiently- 
 genteel for siUy ladyism and spurious no- 
 bility: 
 
 What though on hamely fare we dine, 
 
 Wear hodden gray, an' a' that, 
 Grie fules their silk, an' knaves their wine, 
 
 A man 's a man for a' that. 
 
 "The ultra-Calvinist can never take to 
 Bums, for Bums 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. 
 
138 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 " Bums 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, 
 Bums 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 pu!r. 
 Is king o' men for a' that. 
 
 "He was the high priest of htunanity: 
 
 Man's inhumanity to man 
 
 Makes countless thousands mourn. 
 
 Affliction's sons are brothers in distress; 
 A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss. 
 
The Scot as a Critic 139 
 
 It 's coming yet for a' that, 
 That man to man the warld o'er 
 Shall blithers be, an' a' that. 
 
 "Ay, Bums 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 en- 
 riched 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 Ameri- 
 can 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 wUl 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 Bums is made 
 out to be an honest fellow who went wrong 
 
I40 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 otir 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 Bums, 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 salr. 
 
 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 swlue. 
 Awa' wi' dreams o' laurell'd days divine I 
 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 leam'd the hale o't in a week. 
 
The Scot as a Critic h^ 
 
 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 Bums 
 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 
 142 
 
The Scot as Biographer 143 
 
 character and sa5migs of Dr. J. M. Barrie's 
 mother, viewed in the light of Dr. Barrie's 
 own "Hteraryness." I have no hesitation in 
 pronouncing it to be one of the most snob- 
 bish 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 mawkish- 
 ness. 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. Words- 
 worth 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. Com- 
 parisons in such a case would be doubly odi- 
 ous. 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 
 
144 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 aU the world into 
 the privacies of the filial and maternal rela- 
 tion at five shillings a time. If I understand 
 Margaret Ogilvy aright, she would have cut 
 ofiE both her hands rather than permit some 
 of the things in this book to become the prop- 
 erty of strangers, S3Tnpathetic or otherwise. 
 Of course, the excuse immediately forth- 
 coming from Dr. Barrie's friends and ad- 
 mirers 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 
 
The Scot as Biographer 145 
 
 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 pretematurally 
 excellent and dutiful son. If it shows that 
 Margaret Ogilvy was a simple, unsophisti- 
 cated woman of the people, it shows also that 
 J. M. Barrie had compassion on her intellect- 
 ual shortcomings and was ever ready to hum- 
 otir 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 sub- 
 scribe a pittance weekly, and the London 
 clubs were her scorn. Often I heard her on 
 them — she raised her voice to make me hear. 
 
146 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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' siUer? 
 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, com- 
 pared to the glory of being a member of a 
 club ? ' . . . My wisest policy was to re- 
 main downstars 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 mem- 
 ber. 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 
 
The Scot as Biographer 147 
 
 to make your mind easy on that head. You '11 
 get in, I 'se uphaud — and your thirty pounds 
 will get in, too.' " 
 
 And so on. Humour, of course! The 
 sagacious, garrtdous mother, the highly di- 
 verted, 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 
 
148 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 day in God's sight between the worn woman 
 and the Uttle child." 
 
 We can do without such books, Dr. J. M. 
 Barrie, even though they sell well. 
 
 Even as Dr. Archer has discovered in Para- 
 dise 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 to- 
 gether 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 
 
The Scot as Biographer 149 
 
 passage is as ingenious as it is absurdly 
 Scotch. 
 
 "Among the literary men of the present 
 day there is none who has been more per- 
 sonal 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 tav- 
 ern a few yards removed from the 'Frying 
 Pan,' and there penny-a-liners and half- 
 fledged reporters drink beer and fancy them- 
 selves 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 
 
15° The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 suc- 
 ceeded 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, 
 
The Scot as Biographer 151 
 
 like Barrie, was at once a wit and a hu- 
 moTirist." 
 
 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 liter- 
 ary 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 
 
152 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 anecdotes of village 'loonies' with which 
 Scots literatiire abounds — especially Dean 
 Ramsay's Reminiscences and The Laird 0' 
 Logan — he wiU 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 any- 
 thing 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 charac- 
 ter 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. 
 
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 an- 
 thology is an excellent weapon, inasmuch as 
 you can prove almost anything out of it. In 
 the supposition that Scotland has done ad- 
 mirably by letters, Dr. Archer has the sup- 
 port 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 
 153 
 
154 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 per- 
 ceives 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 wiU offer you Drtmimond of 
 Hawthornden, and for Shelley and Keats, 
 Btims. And of course she vaunts herself 
 on Scott and Carlyle, and takes a certain 
 haughty pride in the fact that R. L. Stev- 
 enson was Scotch. 
 
 To James I. and Drummond of Hawthorn- 
 den she is welcome; both of them are what 
 may be termed tolerable poets, and there the 
 matter ends. Of Bums and his work I have 
 already given my view, but I would say here 
 that while at the present moment his popu- 
 
The Scot in Letters 155 
 
 larity is of the widest and has all the appear- 
 ances of stability, the circumstance that he 
 wrote in a vernacular must ultimately rele- 
 gate him to a position of comparative ob- 
 scurity. As Scotland gradually extricates 
 herself from the sloughs of barbarism in 
 which she wallows so joyfully, she will in- 
 evitably shed her uncouth dialect, and, as 
 soon as that is accomplished. Bums, except- 
 ing 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 pres- 
 ent 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 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Talking to a well-known Scotch critic as to 
 the general decay of interest in Scott, I fottnd 
 him to be under no illusion on the point, and 
 he electrified me by saying, "Scott — well, of 
 course! But between ourselves, man, I can- 
 not read the d books." This is pretty 
 
 well everybody's case. To avow that you 
 have not read Scott is still, perhaps, to con- 
 fess to a defect in your reading. All the 
 same, if you are a person of average tenden- 
 cies, 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 intel- 
 lectually 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 
 
The Scot in Letters 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 dis- 
 posed 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 Btims 
 and Dr. R. S. Crockett. As a matter of fact, 
 he wrote too well and with too siacere a re- 
 gard for the finer elements of literature to 
 be properly tmderstood in Scotland. Fur- 
 ther, 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 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Stevenson tacitly refused to have anything 
 to do with the advertising of his cotintrymen. 
 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 skil- 
 fully 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 modem 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 un- 
 tended nose and called his mother "mither." 
 Even after he has been to "the college," and 
 made some progress in the business or pro- 
 fession to which he may have devoted him- 
 self, he clings to his squalid origins and to the 
 
The Scot in Letters 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 upbring- 
 ing, and that he should go on speaking as 
 much of his heaven-forsaken dialect as you 
 win 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 soiu: face towards him. From 
 the literary point of view, though he accom- 
 plished 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 failtires. The Scotchness of his 
 blood, do what he might to eradicate it, was 
 
i6o The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 too much for him. It kept him from at- 
 taining 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. Cunning- 
 hame, 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 lan- 
 guage has been distorted, and they them- 
 selves been rendered such abject snivellers, 
 
The Scot in Letters i6i 
 
 that not a henwife, shepherd, ploughman, or 
 any one who thinks in 'guid braid Scots' 
 wotdd 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 whiskiiied 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. Cun- 
 ninghame 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 let- 
 ters." 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. 
 
I 62 
 
 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Andrew Lang, who is by far the most com- 
 petent Scotchman now writing, would prob- 
 ably 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 fail- 
 tire, 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 pro- 
 fessor, and had not shorthand enough to be 
 
 a journalist, is packed off South to wear an 
 163 
 
164 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 apron, to shovel gold behind bars, or "to 
 work his way up" in an engineering estab- 
 lishment, as the case may be. Furthermore, 
 he is understood to make an excellent gard- 
 ener, 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 
 peciiliarly 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 
 
The Scot in Commerce 165 
 
 fall vacant, your employer — good, easy man 
 — has a way of turning a hopeful eye on 
 "that steady young Scot." The late re- 
 markable 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 modem banking, shows what a 
 Scotch clerk can do when he tries. The gen- 
 ius 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 Caesar's wife for quite a little 
 time to come. Of course, we shall be told 
 that the raking up of Goudie is vmiair. It 
 always is unfair to say anything to the detri- 
 ment 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 
 
1 66 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 be- 
 cause he is Scotch. 
 
 Among Dr. Maclaren's Drumtochty mar- 
 vels, 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 profess- 
 or's condition and progress. Many touching 
 things are said by the admirers of this honest 
 couple as to the honour their son has con- 
 ferred upon "the Glen," and the general pro- 
 digiousness 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. 
 
The Scot in Commerce 167 
 
 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 author- 
 ity 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 Scotch- 
 man 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 
 
1 68 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 in- 
 fluence 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 NicoU 
 has told us, he is not over-scrupulous in his 
 methods of getting it. Every commercial 
 man could give instances of this over-reach- 
 ingness 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 
 
The Scot in Commerce 169 
 
 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 encyclopaedia of 
 Scotch character, wrote some time ago a 
 ntunber of articles which he called Firing out 
 the Fools. He asserted very properly that in 
 most business houses there are always a num- 
 ber of fools who are a dead weight on pro- 
 gress. 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 
 
I70 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 them is exactly the person you want. What 
 are you to do? If you endeavotir to get a 
 man from outside, the chances are that he 
 will be no better than the men you have. 
 Dr. NicoU, 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 every- 
 body 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 mean- 
 est and least desirable of the virtues. It is 
 to the plodders that we owe pretty well every- 
 thing 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 mid- 
 dling. In the arts this is a fact beyond tra- 
 verse. The plodding artist is still a student 
 
The Scot in Commerce 1 7 1 
 
 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 work- 
 house or the grave claims him for its own. 
 This being so, why should the plodder be 
 the only ware in commercial matters? Bril- 
 liancy and imagination are nowadays just as 
 much wanted in business as in any other de- 
 partment of life. Tact and a reasonably 
 decent feeling for yotir fellow-man are also 
 wanted. Yoiur 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 Scotch- 
 men. 
 
XII 
 
 THE SCOT AS A DIPSOMANIAC 
 
 Under the inspiring tutelage of the na- 
 tional bard, Scotland has become one of the 
 drunkenest nations in the world. Among 
 the lower classes of the Scotch cities drunken- 
 ness is the preponderating vice. In the rural 
 districts whiskey is the only beverage that 
 finds any sort of favour. There is no occa- 
 sion of life which does not provoke the aver- 
 age 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 
 172 
 
The Scot as a Dipsomaniac 1 73 
 
 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 popu- 
 lation 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, whis- 
 key all along the road, whiskey at the jour- 
 ney's end; whiskey when you are well, 
 whiskey if you be sick, whiskey almost as 
 soon as you are bom, 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 re- 
 ception of English and American tourists, 
 and the Scot to the manner bom would not 
 
174 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 Scotch- 
 man 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 coimtry. 
 Whiskey, and that of the crudest and most 
 shuddering qualityis undoubtedly the Scotch- 
 man'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 particu- 
 larly in Fleet Street, his feats in this connec- 
 tion 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 Scot as a Dipsomaniac 175 
 
 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 ex- 
 hibit a tendency to song. And at closing 
 time it staggers forth singing Scots Wha Hoe 
 and My Ain Kind Dearie O in various path- 
 etic keys. Scots Wha Hae is a poor song to 
 sing in the circumstances, and as for My Ain 
 Kind Dearie 0, she probably ftmies 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 
 
176 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 constimption of whis- 
 key 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 wiU allow. In Scotland it is quite 
 general for men and women alike to drink 
 whiskey raw and to take the water after- 
 wards. 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. Bums the Almighty ap- 
 proved 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. 
 
The Scot as a Dipsomaniac i T] 
 
 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. Dour- 
 ness, 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 prop- 
 erly 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 can- 
 not smile ; he plods heavily away at whatever 
 
178 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 labour stands in front of him; he is gltim, 
 rude of tongue and dull of mind, and his breth- 
 ren 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 intel- 
 lects 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 in- 
 dependence. He is a ranter and a roarer in 
 his cups, and on the whole much more dis- 
 tressing 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 Satur- 
 day 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. 
 179 
 
i8o The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 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 mom 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 Bums's writing. 
 
 According to the latest rettims, the popu- 
 lation of Scotland is 4,472,000. In the year 
 1900, which is the latest year for which stat- 
 istics are available, a matter of 180,000 per- 
 
The Scot as Criminal i8i 
 
 sons were charged with criminal ofEences in 
 Scotland. So that out of every twenty-five 
 Scotchmen in Scotland one is either a con- 
 victed criminal or a person who has been 
 charged with a criminal offence. From the 
 ofi&cial Buff-book dealing with the subject I 
 take the following: 
 
 "The criminal returns for 1900 show an 
 increase over those for the previous year 
 tinder all the important classes into which 
 crime and offences are grouped, the number 
 of persons charged has risen to close upon 
 180,000, and if we compare this with the 
 last published English tables for the year 
 1899, we shall find, for equal numbers of pop- 
 ulation, Scotland has over three charges for 
 every two in England. 
 
 "Furthermore, imprisonments in Scotland 
 continue to be proportionately much higher 
 than in England, and for every three com- 
 mittals in England there are seven in Scot- 
 land. The increase in criminal offences 
 during 1900 is distributed under the fol- 
 lowing heads": 
 
1 82 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 Culpable homicide 28 
 
 Assaults of husbands on wives 690 
 
 Cruel and unnatural treatment of children 242 
 
 Housebreaking of all kinds 190 
 
 Theft 1,916 
 
 Malicious mischief 986 
 
 Betting games and lotteries 96 
 
 Breach of the peace, etc 519 
 
 Cruelty to animals I4S 
 
 Offences in relation to dogs 148 
 
 Drunkenness 5,785 
 
 Offences against Elementary Education Acts. . . 397 
 
 Army deserters 1,207 
 
 Offences against Police Acts, by-laws and regu- 
 lations 9,570 
 
 Prostitution 613 
 
 Bicycling, etc., offences 367 
 
 Obstructions and nuisances, and other Road 
 
 Act offences 2,664 
 
 Public Health Act offences 162 
 
 Lodging without consent of owner under Vag- 
 rancy Acts 425 
 
 26,150 
 
 It will thus be seen that theft and drunken- 
 ness bear the gree among Scotch crimes, 
 while the large number of offences against 
 police acts, by-laws, and regulations tends to 
 show that the Scot is not a good citizen. The 
 mere statistics as to crime, however, do not 
 give one anything like an adequate idea of 
 the general depravity of the Scotch charac- 
 
The Scot as Criminal 183 
 
 ter. To understand it properly we must 
 add to the criminal returns the illegitimacy 
 returns. 
 
 From Dr. Albert Leffingwell's' book on 
 illegitimacy I take the following passage : 
 
 "In 1 88 1 the census of Scotland showed 
 that there were then living in that portion 
 of the kingdom 492,454 unmarried women 
 (that is to say, spinsters and widows) be- 
 tween the ages of fifteen and forty-five. 
 During the ten years 1878-87 there were 
 bom in Scotland 105,091 illegitimate child- 
 ren, or an annual average of twenty-one to 
 each thousand unmarried females at this 
 specified age. In England and Wales the 
 corresponding number of the unmarried 
 females was 3,046,431, and the number of 
 illegitimate births dtiring the same period 
 was 426,184, or fourteen to each thousand of 
 the possible mothers. In Ireland, the number 
 of unmarried women at this age was a third 
 larger than in Scotland, or 731,767. Yet to 
 
 ' Albert Leffingwell, M.D., Illegitimacy: Two Studies 
 in Demography. 
 
1 84 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 each thousand of these were bom every year 
 less than five illegitimate children dtiring a 
 ten-year period, 1878-87. Here again we 
 are perplexed with the problem why Scotia 
 and Hibemia should present such widely dif- 
 ferent contrasts. Every year in Scotland 
 there are five times the proportion of bastards 
 that see the light in Ireland! " 
 
 Dr. Leffingwell's perplexity is the perplex- 
 ity of the scientific person. That Btims 
 should have anything to do with illegitimacy 
 of Scotia would probably seem ridiculous to 
 the scientific mind, but I believe that Bums, 
 and the spirit of loose living for which he 
 stands, have been to no little extent respon- 
 sible for bringing Scotland to the discredit- 
 able and degrading pass indicated by Dr. 
 Leffingwell's figures. 
 
 In Ireland the rate of illegitimacy is 4.4, 
 in Scotland, 2 1 . 5 to each thousand unmarried 
 women. Now, the poet who stands in the 
 same relation to the Irish people as Burns 
 does to the Scotch is Thomas Moore. He 
 has given Ireland quite as considerable a body 
 
The Scot as Criminal 185 
 
 of songs as Bums has given to Scotland. He 
 is just as essentially Irish as Burns is Scotch ; 
 but compare the tone of the two men. One 
 of them gives you The lass who made the bed 
 to me, the other, Rich and rare were the gems 
 she wore. In reading Burns you find that 
 quite two thirds of what he has written is 
 marred by unpleasant and libidinous sugges- 
 tion, but there is not a line of Moore which 
 would not pass muster in a ladies' school. 
 To the rantin' roarin' Billies of Scotland the 
 difference may form material for a sneer, but 
 in the long run, clearly, the advantage is with 
 the women of Ireland. If Scotland wishes to 
 get rid of her drunkenness and to lessen the 
 crime which arises out of it, and if she wishes 
 to bring herself into line with the ordinary 
 standards of decency, she will, I am afraid, 
 have to put a little less trust in that mighty 
 performer before the Flesh— Robert Btims. 
 
i 
 
 XIV 
 
 THE SCOT BY ADOPTION 
 
 I HAVE been told that there are two kinds 
 of Scotchmen, and that it would be a mistake 
 to confound them, or to suggest that they 
 have any characteristics in common. One 
 kind, and the best kind, I am assured, is the 
 Highlander. The other — and the more dis- 
 reputable kind — is the Scotchman of the 
 Lowlands. I have met both sorts, and I 
 have not been able to discover that there is 
 much to choose between them. For all prac- 
 tical purposes the blood is identical. It may 
 at one time have been of two distinct strains, 
 but these appear to have become in a great 
 measure fused, and the blend is not beauti- 
 ful. I think it was Dr. Cunninghame Graham 
 who said of a certain Scotch peddler that he 
 
 i86 
 
The Scot by Adoption 187 
 
 looked like a cross between a low-class Indian 
 and an ourang-outang that had somehow 
 got itself baptised. This, no doubt, is a 
 little severe. But a Scotchman does cer- 
 tainly make one feel that underneath his 
 unsatisfactory and obviously imperfect civ- 
 ilisation the hairy simian sits and grins. 
 Rouse him, thwart him, disappoint him, rally 
 him, and suddenly your cross-eyed, sandy- 
 haired, bandy-legged, but withal sleek, 
 smug, moralising man suddenly "bleezes," 
 and you perceive in him the ten thousand 
 devils of an ancient and arboreal barbarity. 
 Whether he be Highlander or Lowlander or 
 mongrel, as he mostly is, it is just the same. 
 He is Scotch and compounded for the most 
 part of savage. Like the converted Kroo- 
 boy, he may at any time revert into his im- 
 memorial primalism and you can never be 
 sure of him. Whether he hail from the Isles 
 or from the Lothians, the Scot is just the 
 Scot, and there is nothing more to be said for 
 him. 
 
 There is, however, a kind of Scot who, 
 
i88 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 while not of Scotch blood, has adopted the 
 manners and habits of Caledonia, and is 
 rather flattered if you take him for a true- 
 bom Scotchman. This type of creature 
 usually owes his retrogression to the fact that 
 he has married a Scotch wife. Of Scotch- 
 women as a body, I do not wish to say any- 
 thing that will be considered ungallant. If 
 one passes over their abnormal capacity for 
 thrift, I suppose they are pretty much the 
 same as other women. So far as I am aware 
 I have not met more than a dozen Scotch- 
 women in my life. Two of them I have 
 known intimately, and I have always thanked 
 my stars that I was not married to either of 
 them. But to return to our Scotchman by 
 adoption. Usually, as I say, he is married to 
 a Scotchwoman. Before you arrive at a 
 knowledge of this circumstance, you are in- 
 chned to wonder what is the matter with him. 
 His style and proclivities have induced you 
 to set him down for a Scotchman, yet you 
 find that his Doric is bad, that he eats his 
 porridge with sugar and takes his whiskey 
 
The Scot by Adoption 189 
 
 with soda, and that he was bom in Glouces- 
 tershire. Also, he tells you frankly that his 
 parents were not Scotch, and he adds, with 
 a look of supreme satisfaction, "but my 
 wife is." And straightway he plunges into 
 tender reminiscences of the days of his court- 
 ship, touches modestly upon the wealth and 
 importance of his wife's relations, hints at 
 the fearful expense to which he was put by 
 his many journeys North when he went 
 a- wooing, and gurgles with a sickly smile that 
 it was worth the trouble, and that he does 
 not know "what he would do without her." 
 All of which is mightily interesting. If you 
 pursue your investigations further, you will 
 find that the man is perhaps a little more to 
 pity than to blame. He has been compelled 
 to become as Scotch as he knows how, willy- 
 nilly. At the head of his table sits the 
 daughter of Scotia— ruddy, chapped, and 
 sharp of tongue; she looks down on things 
 English, her husband included ; her children 
 are taught to remember that their grand- 
 father is a provost and magnificent in the 
 
I go The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 jute line; she keeps her house in the Scotch 
 manner, her servants are Scotch, her house- 
 hold linens are Scotch, her beef is Scotch, and 
 her whiskey is Scotch; her little boys wear 
 tartan ; tripe is the great dish for supper, and 
 her husband must eat oatmeal to the verge 
 of scrofula. Abroad, too, this man must be 
 as Scotch as the best of them. In his place 
 of business, Scotchmen proUg^s of his wife's 
 relations are the only ware : he loathes them, 
 and they laugh at him behind his back, but 
 he has to put up with them. On Saturdays 
 they instruct him in the mysteries of " gowf " ; 
 on Mondays they tell one another what a 
 "damned foozler" he is. His holidays are 
 always spent in the Western Highlands; he 
 is everlastingly seeing his wife off to Aber- 
 deen ; he banks at the Bank of Scotland ; he 
 smokes the tobacco which has been so ably 
 pushed into fame by Dr. J. M. Barrie; he 
 believes that the Glasgow bailies know what 
 they are about; his money, which has been 
 scraped together on the Scotch principle, is 
 doucely put away in Scotch ventures; and 
 
The Scot by Adoption 191 
 
 altogether Scotland does very well out of him. 
 The fact that he is a mean little man does not 
 worry him. The practice and view of life 
 which the lady of his affections has forced 
 upon him is bringing him a due share of this 
 world's gear, and in that fact he takes con- 
 solation for his attenuated honesty, his lost 
 manhood, and his lost nationality. This is 
 one side of the picture and the brightest. 
 
 On the other side it were well for us not to 
 look too closely. The Englishman who has 
 been appropriated by a Scotch wife does not 
 always succeed in profiting by the worldly 
 wisdom with which his spouse would imbue 
 him. Then there is trouble. For a Scotch- 
 woman who cannot report to her kindred in 
 Scotland that her husband is "getting on " 
 feels that she has been robbed of the prime 
 joy of existence. Her contempt for the man 
 who cannot win and grip siller eats into her 
 soul, until she has no other sentiment left. 
 Bit by bit she develops into a scold and 
 a curtain-lecturer; the man who found her 
 so fair by the Birks of Aberfeldey becomes a 
 
192 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 furtive wanderer from her side, and it all 
 ends in too much whiskey, recrimination, and 
 execration. I know an Englishman of parts 
 who has never earned enough money to be 
 under the necessity of paying income tax. 
 He is a man of small stature and limp, and 
 he has a great fear in his eyes. He is one of 
 those men who might have done things and 
 have omitted to do them. The gossip about 
 him is that he is badly married. Once I saw 
 his wife. She was a big, raw-boned Scotch- 
 woman, with a heavy accent on her. It was 
 New Year's Eve, and she had evidently been 
 "tasting." At sight of me, out of the big- 
 ness of her Scotch hospitality, she proposed 
 a "nep," and half filled three glasses from a 
 stone bottle. Then, with hand on hip, glass 
 uplifted, and a blaze on her face, she cried: 
 " Here 's tae us and to hell with the English." 
 We drank the toast in something of a silence. 
 Later, when I was about to leave, my limp 
 friend would have accompanied me to the 
 door. But the mistress of his heart would 
 have none of it. "Ye '11 awa'," she said, 
 
The Scot by Adoption 193 
 
 then, "to yer bed; yer friend is no' that fou 
 but he can find his ain way oot." So that 
 we shook hands and parted on the stair. The 
 man had had twenty years of it. I under- 
 stand him. 
 
 The idiot who takes to wearing kilts and 
 speaking with an accent for the mere sake of 
 it is scarcely worth notice. But there are 
 such people even outside Colney Hatch. 
 What they see in the Scotch to admire to the 
 point of spuriousness I cannot for the life of 
 me make out. The garb of old Gaul is, no 
 doubt, very fetching from the point of view 
 of the weak-minded, but of its effeminacy 
 there can be no doubt. Really, it is a cos- 
 tume for small and pretty boys who are too 
 young to be breeched. In view of its asso- 
 ciations and of its innate childishness, — not 
 to say immodesty, — ^it is a great pity that any 
 Englishman should go out of his way to wear 
 it. 
 
 13 
 
XV 
 
 THE SCOT AND ENGLAND 
 
 Although the political relations between 
 Scotland and England would seem to have 
 been of the smoothest since the Act of Union, 
 and in spite of the fact that on the whole the 
 merging of the two peoples under one Gov- 
 ernment has tended hugely to the benefit of 
 Scotland, it is the Scotch fashion to lament 
 the Union with groans and to insist that 1707 
 was a black year for Scotchmen. I believe 
 that were it not for the circumstance that 
 Scotland cannot produce capable men even 
 in the way of agitators we should soon have 
 at St. Stephen's a Scotch party which would 
 be just as troublesome and just as noisy and 
 truculent as is the Irish party. I believe, 
 
 too, that within twelve months' time as big a 
 194 
 
The Scot and England 195 
 
 demand for Home Rule and as much disquiet 
 and rebellion could be got up in Scotland 
 as have ever existed in Ireland. Fortu- 
 nately, however, the Scotch possess neither 
 the requisite agitators nor the requisite pluck 
 to indulge in serious demonstrations against 
 the Imperial Government. So that they 
 have to content themselves with futile gnun- 
 bling and petty acts of disloyalty. The Scot 
 has always been more or less of a fine hand 
 at a treason. Out of Scotland has come the 
 only treasonable organisation which England 
 can boast of at the present day. I refer, of 
 course, to that absiurd group of persons who 
 once a year decorate the statue of Charles I. 
 at Whitehall with cheap wreaths, and circu- 
 late leaflets which profess to prove that the 
 reigning monarch in these realms is a usurp- 
 er, and that our only true monarch is a 
 woman by the name of Mary, who lives some- 
 where on the Continent. In any country 
 but England these gentry would be laid by 
 the heels; though the mere fact that they 
 are Scotch renders them qtiite ineffective. 
 
196 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 We can afford to smile at them. All the 
 same, we must remember that if they cotild. 
 make trouble they would. Even in the mat- 
 ter of the King's Coronation the Scotch have 
 managed to give us the usual display of 
 stupid insolence. Writing to his paper in 
 May last, the Scottish correspondent of the 
 Times said : 
 
 "The approaching coronation of the King 
 and Queen seems to have awakened rather 
 less enthusiasm in certain quarters than either 
 the Jubilee or the Diamond Jubilee of her 
 late Majesty. It would be absurd to make 
 much of the difference, but it does exist. In 
 a word, the celebration of the event will be 
 distinctly more official than the rejoicings 
 over the two notable epochs of Queen Vic- 
 toria's later life. Two circumstances have 
 helped to bring this about — ^the Royal proc- 
 lamation of two successive holidays, and 
 what is known in Scotland as the 'numeral.' 
 They are both absolutely sentimental con- 
 siderations, but they have had a slight influ- 
 ence. Trades councils, becoming ' permeated' 
 
The Scot and England 197 
 
 with Socialism, protest against what they are 
 pleased to call the 'mummery' in London, 
 and the association of themselves therewith 
 through local rejoicings, and the idea of los- 
 ing two days' pay in one week is just suffi- 
 cient to arouse their resentment, which some 
 corporations have tried to appease by ignor- 
 ing the proclamation, or applying it, on 
 their own initiative, to one of the days only. 
 The 'numeral' connotes the quasi-patriotic 
 objection to the assumption of the title of 
 King Edward VII. by his Majesty. Some 
 Scotsmen persist in refusing to see that, in 
 calling himself the Seventh Edward, the 
 King neither intended to, nor did, insinuate 
 that he was the seventh of that name who 
 had reigned over the United Kingdom, and 
 they declaim in grotesque fashion against 
 the payment of any kind of homage to the 
 Crown. Their insignificance is shown by 
 the snub administered to them recently by 
 the Convention of Burghs, which is nothing 
 if it is not truly and characteristically Scot- 
 tish: their influence is no less unmistakable 
 
198 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 in the resolution of several public bodies to 
 omit the 'numeral' from the inscription on 
 their coronation medals, and in the untimely 
 fits of economy that have overcome some 
 local authorities not as a rtde averse to 
 feasting." 
 
 It is the old tale over again. The Scotch 
 braggart cry — "unconquered and tmcon- 
 querable " — is made to rend the welkin when- 
 ever the opportunity serves. Edward the 
 Seventh, of course, cannot be Edward the 
 Seventh of Scotland. It would never do. 
 Therefore the "numeral" must not appear 
 on Scotch medals, and the rejoicings are to 
 be as far as possible of an official character. 
 The ululation over the loss of two days' pay 
 also is eminently Scotch. There is a time 
 for work and a time for play, says the wise 
 man; but the whey-faced Scot plays always 
 with a certain disconsolateness because he 
 feels that he is losing money all the time. 
 The fact is, that Scottish life and Scottish 
 manners are almost entirely dominated by 
 the more evil traits of the Scotch character. 
 
The Scot and England 199 
 
 Independence and thrift must be read into 
 everything the Scotchman does. Poverty- 
 stricken, starveling pride has been the ruin of 
 the Scottish people. It has made many of 
 them sour, disagreeable, greedy, and disloyal; 
 it has made some of them hypocrites and 
 crafty rogues; it has narrowed their minds 
 and stunted their national development; it 
 has made them a by-word and a mock in all 
 .the countries of the world, and it has brought 
 them to opprobrium even among Turks and 
 Chinamen. 
 
 The career of the Scotchman in England 
 has been picturesquely summarised by Dr. 
 Cunninghame Graham: 
 
 "In the blithe times of clans and moss- 
 troopers [he says], when Jardines rode and 
 Johnstones raised, when Grahams stole, Mc- 
 Gregors plundered, and Campbells prayed 
 themselves into fat sinecures, we were your 
 enemies. In stricken fields you southern 
 folks used to discomfit us by reason of your 
 archers and your riders sheathed in steel. 
 We on the borders had the vantage of you, as 
 
200 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 you had cattle for us to steal, houses to bum, 
 and money and valuables for us to carry off. 
 We having none, you were not in a state to 
 push retaliation in an effective way. Later, 
 we sent an impecunious king to govern you, 
 and with him went a train of ragged cour- 
 tiers, aU with authentic pedigrees but light 
 of purse. From this time date the Sawnies 
 and the Sandies, the calumnies about our 
 cuticle, and those which stated that we were 
 so tender-hearted that we scrupled to de- 
 prive of life the smallest insect which we had 
 about our clothes. You found our cheek- 
 bones out, saw our red hair, and noted that 
 we blew our noses without a pocket-handker- 
 chief, to save undue expense. ... So 
 far so good. But still you pushed discovery 
 to whiskey, haggis, sneeshin, predestination, 
 and all the other mysteries both of our cook- 
 ery and our faith. The bagpipes burst upon 
 you (with a skirl), and even Shakespeare set 
 down things about them which I refrain from 
 quoting, only because I do not wish to 
 frighten gentlewomen. . . . King George 
 
The Scot and England 201 
 
 came in, in pudding time, and all was 
 changed, and a new race of Scotsmen dawned 
 on the English view. The '15 and the '45 
 sent out the Highlanders, rough-footed and 
 with deerskin thongs tied round their heads, 
 . . . they marched and conquered and 
 made England reel, retreated, lost Culloden, 
 and the mist received them back. But their 
 brief passage altered your views again, and 
 you perceived that Scotland was not all 
 bailie, prayer-monger, merchant, and sancti- 
 monious cheat. . . . Then Scott arose 
 and threw a glamour over Scotland which 
 was nearly all his own. True, we were poor, 
 but then our poverty was so romantic, and 
 we appeared fighting for home and haggis, 
 for foolish native kings, for hills, for heather, 
 freedom, and for all those things which Eng- 
 lishmen enjoy to read about, but which in 
 actual life they take good care only them- 
 selves shall share. The pale-faced master 
 and the Highland chief, the ruined gentle- 
 man, the swashbuckler, soldier, faithful ser- 
 vant, and the rest, he marked and made his 
 
202 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 own, but then he looked about to find his 
 counterfoil, the low comedians without whose 
 presence every tragedy must halt. 
 
 " Then came the Kailyarders, and said that 
 Scott was Tory, Jacobite, unpatriotic, un- 
 presbyterian, and they alone could draw the 
 Scottish type. England believed them, and 
 their large sale and cheap editions clinched 
 it, and to-day a Scotchman stands confessed 
 a sentimental fool, a canting cheat, a grave, 
 sententious man, dressed in a 'stan o' black,' 
 oppressed with the tremendous difficulties of 
 the jargon he is bound to speak, and, above 
 all, weighed down with the responsibilities of 
 being Scotch." 
 
 As I have already mentioned, Dr. Cunning- 
 hame Graham is a Scot. 
 
 The whole truth about the Scotch relation 
 with England is that the Scot is more than 
 sensible of the advantage it brings him, but 
 being by disposition wise as a serpent, he is 
 afraid that if he did not pretend to deplore 
 it, it might not last in its present comfortable 
 unrestrictedness. Of course, this fear is en- 
 
The Scot and England 203 
 
 tirely baseless. The Englishman is too easy- 
 hearted to make laws against needy aliens 
 whether from north of the Tweed or else- 
 where. All the same, the Scot continues to 
 howl on principle. He will not have our 
 King, he will not have the "numeral," to 
 call him English or even include him under 
 the term British is an indignity and an out- 
 rage. The Act of Union was a big mistake: 
 the poor Scot has been trodden down f orbye 
 ever since, and altogether he is sorry that he 
 is alive. And, for my own part, I am quite 
 inclined to think that there is much to be 
 said for the latter sentiment. 
 
XVI 
 
 THE WAY OUT 
 
 I DO not think it is an exaggeration to 
 describe England as a Scot-ridden country. 
 To whatever department of activity one 
 looks one finds therein, working his way up 
 for all he is worth and by not over-scrupu- 
 lous methods, the so-called canny Scot. In 
 some professions, notably that of journalism, 
 as I have shown, he has made himself more 
 or less predominant. In banks, offices, and 
 manufactories he is to be found as frequently 
 as not, ruling the roost in the capacity of 
 manager or overseer; and in the general 
 atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon business life 
 there is a persistent feel of him. That he 
 should come from his own heathery wastes 
 
 and starved townlets to a richer land is quite 
 204 
 
The Way Out 205 
 
 natural. That he should desire to do his 
 best for himself and for people of his own 
 blood is also natural. But that he should 
 put on airs and forget that, after all, he is 
 an alien and a person who by good right is 
 with us only on sufferance, is the mistake he 
 makes. The power that he has got for him- 
 self has been won largely by combination and 
 advertisement. The Scotch superstition is 
 the oyster out of which he lives. That super- 
 stition was never more general than it is 
 to-day, and the advertisement of Scottish vir- 
 tues and Scottish capacities was never in 
 merrier progress. The time has come, I 
 think, for Englishmen to make a stand in 
 the matter. At any rate, the time has come 
 for the Scotchman to be taught his place. 
 One would hesitate to suggest that he should 
 be got rid of entirely, for he has his uses and 
 his good qualities. As a hewer of wood and 
 a drawer of water, as a person fitted by tem- 
 perament for the exercise of mechanical 
 ftmctions, he is all very well ; but in matters 
 where intellect and sparkle are required he 
 
2o6 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 should be left severely alone. To rid the 
 press of his influence would be an excellent 
 thing for the press. It cannot be shown that 
 he is of the least use in journalism, or that 
 he does things any better, whether as re- 
 porter, sub-editor, or editor, than the aver- 
 age Englishman. And it can be shown that 
 he has used his influence on the press for 
 purposes which, however legitimate they 
 may appear to him, are not in the public in- 
 terest. It is not in the public interest that 
 every newspaper one picks up should con- 
 tain certificates of character for the Scotch; 
 it is not in the public interest that he should 
 be continually written down for a person of 
 especial intellect, probity, shrewdness, hu- 
 mour, and the rest. His intellect, in point of 
 fact, is middling; his probity merely aver- 
 age; his shrewdness questionable, and his 
 humoiir neither here nor there. As a subor- 
 dinate he is always a very doubtful bargain. 
 As a person in authority he is just a buUy — 
 "a bad master," as Dr. NicoU puts it. Em- 
 ployers of labour would find it distinctly to 
 
The Way Out 207 
 
 their interest to look into the question and 
 to find out how far they are being imposed 
 upon by mere sententiousness and wise looks 
 with nothing behind them that is of conse- 
 quence. It is not too much to say that if 
 you have a Scotchman in your place of busi- 
 ness, you are, as a rule, all the weaker for it. 
 If you go thoroughly into him you wiU find 
 that his only quality is his capacity for plod ; 
 as against this he has many ugly traits — 
 jealousy, over-reachingness, and greediness 
 among them. Rarely, if ever, does he under- 
 stand his business, and of initiative and orig- 
 inality he is, as a rule, devoid. Changes and 
 advances are not at all in his line. If you 
 ask him for something new, something out of 
 the ordinary, he will bring it to you and im- 
 press you (by talk) with the notion that you 
 are getting what you want; but if you ex- 
 amine it, you wiU find that it is not new at 
 all, and that really it is not what you want. 
 The Scot, in fact, rarely rises above medi- 
 ocrity; he seldom has an inspiration or a 
 happy thought ; he cannot rise to occasions, 
 
2o8 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 and while he is most punctual in his attention 
 to duty and most assiduous and steadfast as 
 a labourer, his work is never perfectly done, 
 and too frequently it is scamped and carried 
 out without regard to finish or excellence. 
 Of pride or delight in labour the Scotchman 
 knows nothing. He works in order that he 
 may get money and secure his own personal 
 advancement. His loyalty is a question of 
 pounds, shillings, and pence ; he will be loyal 
 to you just as long as you are paying him more 
 than he can get elsewhere, and the moment 
 somebody comes along with a better offer, 
 there is an end of you so far as he is concerned. 
 There are not wanting signs that, in spite 
 of the manner in which it has been hidden 
 and bolstered up, the Scotchman's real char- 
 acter is beginning to be properly understood. 
 Nobody can say, with any show of truth, that 
 the Scot is either loved or admired by the 
 peoples with whom he comes in contact out- 
 side his own country. Indeed, I believe that 
 throughout England there is a very strong 
 anti-Scotch feeling. I have found it difficult 
 
The Way Out 209 
 
 to meet an Englishman who, if you ques- 
 tioned him straightly, would not admit that 
 he has a rooted dislike for Scotchmen. That 
 dislike the Scotchman has himself aroused. 
 His bumptiousness and uncouthness, his lack 
 of manners, his frequent lack of principle, and 
 his want of decent feeling, have brought and 
 will continue to bring their own reward. In 
 this book I feel that I have merely touched 
 the fringe of the subject. Facts that go to 
 prove the main contentions I have laid 
 down abound. I have not been able to use a 
 tithe of them. Every person of understand- 
 ing can give you instance after instance of 
 the Scotchman's underbredness, ineptitude, 
 and disposition to meanness. Furthermore, 
 Scotchmen themselves are full of such in- 
 stances. Indeed, for the material used in 
 most of the chapters of this work I am in- 
 debted to Scotchmen. From first to last I 
 have done my best to convict them out of 
 their own mouths, and if I have failed, the 
 fault is not the fault of the Scotch. 
 
 For the general guidance of young Scotch- 
 
2IO The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 men who wish to succeed in this country and 
 who do not desire to add further opprobrium 
 to the Scotch character, I shall offer a few 
 broad hints, which are worth taking to heart : 
 
 I. Remember that outside Scotland 
 
 YOU are a good ■ DEAL OF A FOR- 
 EIGNER. 
 
 II. Be assured that the King's Eng- 
 lish IS THE language WHICH DE- 
 CENT MEN EXPECT YOU TO SPEAK IN 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 III. DoURNESS IS REALLY NOT A VIRTUE. 
 
 IV. There is nothing specially credit- 
 able IN having been born on a muck 
 heap. Do not boast about it. 
 
 V. There are greater virtues than 
 THRIFT. It is better to die penni- 
 less THAN to have BEEN TOO MUCH 
 OF A SAVER. 
 
 VI. Never undertake what you cannot 
 
 do. a shut mouth and a SENTEN- 
 TIOUS AIR WILL NOT SERVE YOU FOR 
 EVER. 
 
The Way Out 2 1 1 
 
 VII, Do NOT SET UP TO BE A JUDGE OF ANY 
 OF THE FINE ARTS. YoU ARE NOT 
 INTENDED FOR IT. 
 
 VIII. Try to forget that the Battle 
 OF Bannockburn was won by the 
 Scotch in 1314. The dates of 
 Flodden and Culloden are much 
 better worth remembering, though 
 most Englishmen have forgotten 
 
 BOTH OF them. 
 
 IX. Do YOUR best to live down Dr. 
 
 NiCOLL'S suggestion THAT YOU 
 
 are not over-scrupulous in your 
 
 METHODS of DEALING WITH COM- 
 PETITORS. 
 
 X. IF, WITHOUT SERIOUS INCON- 
 VENIENCE TO YOURSELF, YOU 
 CAN MANAGE TO REMAIN AT 
 HOME, PLEASE DO. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 Never apologise before the offence is a 
 good rule, and in certain circumstances a 
 still better rule is, do not apologise at all. 
 I have not the smallest intention of regret- 
 ting anything that has been written in the 
 foregoing chapters. But I am informed by 
 a Scotchman who has been kind enough to 
 read them in proof that there is some likeli- 
 hood of their being misunderstood. This, 
 of course, would be a thousand pities. So 
 that I shall venture on what may be termed, 
 for the want of a better phrase, an explana- 
 tion. When Dr. Johnson was asked to ex- 
 plain his reasons for disliking the Scotch, his 
 reply was of the vaguest. Lamb also did 
 not quite know why he disliked them; and, 
 on the whole, it is difficult to say flatly why 
 qne cannot get on with the simple child of 
 
 212 
 
Advertisement 2 1 3 
 
 Caledonia. As a matter of fact, my own 
 antipathy always amuses me. Whether it 
 will amuse the Scotch is another matter. But 
 for the sake of their own peace of mind I 
 should like to ask them not to jtunp to fool- 
 ish conclusions about various hard things I 
 have said. Since the time of Burns, Scotch- 
 men appear to have yearned for some one 
 who should show them their faults : 
 
 Oh wad some power the giftie gie us 
 To see oorsels as ithers see us ! 
 
 is as frequent on their lips as "The best laid 
 schemes o' mice and men," "A man's a man 
 for a' that," and the rest of them. And, in 
 this instance, I have simply done my best to 
 play the r61e of "some power." To put an 
 ugly man in front of a mirror is not, perhaps, 
 to do him the most tender of services, espe- 
 cially if you comment upon his style of 
 beauty the whUe. For all that, I am hoping 
 that in some small measure I may be doing 
 great and useful things for the Scotch as a 
 nation. If they would only be at a little 
 
214 The Unspeakable Scot 
 
 pains to discover their faults and at a little 
 more pains to correct them, one could en- 
 courage hopes for Scotland. " Much may be 
 done with the Scotchman," said Dr. Johnson, 
 "if you catch him young," or words to that 
 effect. I am afraid that to all Scotchmen 
 who have passed the age of forty the present 
 volume will be a wasted lesson. But there 
 appear to be a very large number of Scots 
 who have not yet attained the prime of life, 
 and it is among these that I expect my coun- 
 sel to have effect. They really cannot do 
 themselves the smallest hurt by taking to 
 heart the warnings and advice which, as a 
 result of great labour, are here put before 
 them. Oh, my dear young Scottish friends, 
 let me implore you to be wise in time. If I 
 have beaten you with clubs, be assured that 
 it is as much for your good as for my emolu- 
 ment. If you have bought this book, you 
 never spent a few sixpences to better advan- 
 tage in your life. If you have borrowed it, 
 as I expect most of you have, you are for- 
 given, providing you will really try to mend. 
 
Advertisement 215 
 
 For all things to which I have set my hand 
 that may cause you pain I am truly sorry. 
 Yet, as the chastisers of one's youth were 
 wont to say, the punishment hurts me far 
 more than it hurts you. I know you will 
 believe me and do your best to love me. 
 Whether you do or not, I shall ever continue 
 to take a kindly interest in you and to pray 
 for your general reform, 
 
 THE END 
 
By R. DE MAULDE LA CLAVlfeRE 
 
 WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 
 
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