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BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 IAN MACLAREN 
 
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/cu31924026943344 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 IAN MACLAREN,f^-<< 
 
 AUTHOR OF "BESIDE THE BONNIE BRIAR BUSH," "AULO 
 LANG SYNE," "KATE CARNEGY," ETC., ETC. 
 
 i C^ 
 
 HODDER & STOUGHTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 

 VtG,^\3l 
 
 Copyright, igi2, 
 By George H. Doran Company 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Books and Bookmen , . . .., ,., , i 
 
 Humour: AN Analysis . ,. ,. ,., . . 45 
 
 Robert Burns ,.91 
 
 The Waverley Novels . ,., .; ,., ,, 127 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
Books and Bookmen 
 
 THEY cannot be separated any more 
 than sheep and a shepherd, but I am 
 minded to speak of the bookman 
 rather than of his books, and so it will be best 
 at the outset to define the tribe. 
 
 It does not follow that one is a bookman 
 because he has many books, for he may be a 
 book huckster or his books may be those with- 
 out which a gentleman's library is not com- 
 plete. And in the present imperfect arrange- 
 ment of life one may be a bookman and yet 
 have very few books, since he has not the 
 wherewithal to purchase diem. It is the 
 foolishness of his kind to desire a loved au- 
 thor in some becoming dress, and his fastidi- 
 ousness to ignore a friend in a four-pence- 
 halfpenny edition. The bookman, like the 
 poet, and a good many other people, is bom 
 and not made, and my grateful memory re- 
 tains an illustration of the diflFerence between 
 a bookowner and a bookman which I think is 
 apropos. As he was to preside at a lecture I 
 
2 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 was delivering he had in his courtesy invited 
 me to dinner, which was excellent, and as he 
 proposed to take the role that night of a man 
 who had been successful in business, but yet 
 allowed himself in leisure moments to trifle 
 with literature, he desired to create an atmos- 
 phere, and so he proposed with a certain im- 
 posing air that we should visit what he called 
 "my library." Across the magnificence of 
 the hall we went in stately procession, he first, 
 with that kind of walk by which a surveyor of 
 taxes could have at once assessed his income, 
 and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, fol- 
 lowing in the rear, trembling like a skiff in 
 the wake of an ocean liner. "There," he 
 said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his 
 waistcoat, " what do you think of that? " 
 And that was without question a very large 
 and ornate and costly mahogany bookcase 
 with glass doors. Before I saw the doors I 
 had no doubt about my host, but they were a 
 seal upon my faith, for although a bookman 
 is obliged to have one bit of glass in his gar- 
 den for certain rare plants from Russia and 
 Morocco, to say nothing of the gold and white 
 vellum lily upon which the air must not be 
 allowed to blow, especially when charged 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 3 
 
 with gas and rich in dust, yet he hates this 
 conservatory, just as much as he loves its con- 
 tents. His contentment is to have the flowers 
 laid out in open beds, where he can pluck a 
 blossom at will. As often as one sees the 
 books behind doors, and most of all when the 
 doors are locked, then he knows that the 
 owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst with 
 them in the evening hours when the work of 
 the day is done, but their jailer, who has 
 bought them in the market-place for gold, 
 and holds them in this foreign place by force. , 
 It has seemed to me as if certain old friends 
 looked out from their prison with appealing 
 glance, and one has been tempted to break the 
 glass and let, for instance, Elia go free. It 
 would be like the emancipation of a slave. 
 Elia was not, good luck for him, within this 
 particular prison, and I was brought back 
 from every temptation to break the laws of 
 property by my chairman, who was still pur- 
 suing his catechism. "What," was question 
 two, " do you think I paid for that? " It was 
 a hopeless catechism, for I had never pos- 
 sessed anything like that, and none of my 
 friends had in their homes anything like that, 
 and in my wildest moments I had never asked 
 
4 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 the price of such a thing as that. As it 
 loomed up before me in its speckless respecta- 
 bility and insolence of solid wealth my Eng- 
 lish sense of reverence for money awoke, and 
 I confessed that this matter was too high for 
 me ; but even then, casting a glance of depre- 
 cation in its direction, I noticed that was al- 
 most filled by a single work, and I wondered 
 what it could be. " Cost £80 if it cost a 
 penny, and I bought it second-hand in perfect 
 condition for £17, 5s., with the books thrown 
 in — All the Year Round from the beginning 
 in half calf;" and then we returned in pro- 
 cession to the drawing-room, where my pa- 
 tron apologised for our absence, and ex- 
 plained that when two bookmen got together 
 over books it was difficult to tear them away. 
 He was an admirable chairman, for he occu- 
 pied no time with a review of literature in his 
 address, and he slept without being noticed 
 through mine (which is all I ask of a chair- 
 man), and so it may seem ungrateful, but in 
 spite of " that " and any books, even Spenser 
 and Chaucer, which that might have con- 
 tained, this Maecenas of an evening was not a 
 bookman. 
 
 It is said, and now I am going to turn the 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 5 
 
 application of a pleasant anecdote upside 
 down, that a Colonial squatter having made 
 his pile and bethinking himself of his soul, 
 wrote home to an old friend to send him out 
 some chests of books, as many as he thought 
 fit, and the best that he could find. His 
 friend was so touched by this sign of grace that 
 he spent a month of love over the commission, 
 and was vastly pleased when he sent off, in 
 the best editions and in pleasant binding, the 
 very essence of English literature. It was a 
 disappointment that the only acknowledg- 
 ment of his trouble came on a postcard, to say 
 that the consignment had arrived in good con- 
 dition. A year afterwards, so runs the story, 
 he received a letter which was brief and to the 
 point. " Have been working over the books, 
 and if anything new has been written by Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare or John Milton, please send 
 it out." I believe this is mentioned as an in- 
 stance of barbarism. It cannot be denied that 
 it showed a certain ignorance of the history 
 of literature, which might be excused in a 
 bushman, but it also proved, which is much 
 more important, that he had the smack of let- 
 ters in him, for being turned loose without the 
 guide of any training in this wide field, he 
 
6 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 fixed as by instinct on the two classics of the 
 English tongue. With the help of all our 
 education, and all our reviews, could you and 
 I have done better, and are we not every day, 
 in our approval of unworthy books, doing 
 very much worse. Quiet men coming home 
 from business and reading, for the sixth time, 
 some noble English classic, would smile in 
 their modesty if any one should call them 
 bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder 
 judgment in literature than coteries of clever 
 people who go crazy for a brief time over the 
 tweet.ling of a minor poet, or the^ preciosity 
 of some fantastic critic. 
 
 There are those who buy their right to citi- 
 zenship in the commonwealth of bookmen, 
 but this bushman was free-born, and the sign 
 of the free-born is, that without critics to aid 
 him, or the training of a University, he knows 
 the difference between books which are so 
 much printed stuff and a good book which is 
 " the Precious life-blood of a Master Spirit." 
 The bookman will of course upon occasion 
 trifle with various kinds of reading, and there 
 is one member of the brotherhood who has a 
 devouring thirst for detective stories, and has 
 always been very grateful to the creator of 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 7 
 
 Sherlock Holmes. It is the merest pedantry 
 for a man to defend himself with a shamed 
 face for his light reading: it is enough that 
 he should be able to distinguish between the 
 books which come and go and those which 
 remain. So far as I remember, The Mystery 
 of a Hansom Cab and John Inglesant came 
 out somewhat about the same time, and there 
 were those of us who read them both; but 
 while we thought the Hansom Cab a very in- 
 genious plot which helped us to forget the te- 
 dium of a railway journey, I do not know that 
 there is a copy on our shelves. Certainly it 
 is not lying between The Ordeal of Richard 
 Feverel and The Mayor of Casterbridge. 
 But some of us venture to think that in that 
 admirable historical romance which moves 
 with such firm foot through both the troubled 
 England and the mysterious Italy of the 
 seventeenth century, Mr. Shorthouse won a 
 certain place in English literature. 
 
 When people are raving between the soup 
 and fish about some popular novel which to- 
 morrow will be forgotten, but which doubt- 
 less, like the moths which make beautiful the 
 summer-time, has its purpose in the world of 
 speech, it gives one bookman whom I know 
 
8 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 the keenest pleasure to ask his fair companion 
 whether she has read Mark Rutherford. He 
 is proudly conscious at the time that he is a 
 witness to perfection in a gay world which is 
 content with excitement, and he would be 
 more than human if he had not in him a touch 
 of the literary Pharisee. She has not read 
 Mark Rutherford, and he does not advise her 
 to seek it at the circulating library, be- 
 cause it will not be there, and if she got it 
 she would never read more than ten pages. 
 Twenty thousand people will greedily read 
 Twice Murdered and Once Hung and no 
 doubt they have their reward, while only 
 twenty people read Mark Rutherford; but 
 then the multitude do not read Twice Mur- 
 dered twice, while the twenty turn again and 
 again to Mark for its strong thinking and its 
 pure sinewy English style. And the children 
 of the twenty thousand will not know Twice 
 Murdered, but the children of the twenty, 
 with others added to them, will know and love 
 Mark Rutherford. Mr. Augustine Birrell 
 makes it, I think, a point of friendship that a 
 man should love George Borrow, whom I 
 think to appreciate is an excellent but an ac- 
 quired taste ; there are others who would pro- 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 9 
 
 pose Mark Rutherford and the Revelation in 
 Tanner's Lane as a sound test for a bookman's 
 palate. But . . . de gustibus . . . I 
 It is the chief office of the critic, while en- 
 couraging all honest work which either can 
 instruct or amuse, to distinguish between the 
 •books which must be content to pass and the 
 books which must remain because they have 
 an immortality of necessity. According to 
 the weightiest of French critics of our time 
 the author of such a book is one " who has en- 
 riched the human mind, who has really added 
 to its treasures, who has got it to take a step 
 further . . . who has spoken to all in a 
 style of his own, yet a style which finds itself 
 the style of everybody, in a style that is at once 
 new and antique, and is the contemporary of 
 all the ages." Without doubt Sainte-Beuve 
 has here touched the classical quality in litera- 
 ture as with a needle, for that book is a classic 
 to be placed beside Homer and Virgil and 
 Dante and Shakespeare — among the immor- 
 tals — which has wisdom which we cannot 
 find elsewhere, and whose form has risen 
 above the limitation of any single age. While 
 ordinary books are houses which serve for a 
 (generation or two at most, this kind of book 
 
10 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 is the Cathedral which towers above the 
 building at its base and can be seen from afar, 
 in which many generations shall find their 
 peace and inspiration. While other books are 
 like the humble craft which ply from place to 
 place along the coast, this book is as a stately 
 merchantman which compasses the great 
 waters and returns with a golden argosy. 
 
 The subject of the book does not enter into 
 the matter, and on subjects the bookman is 
 very catholic, and has an orthodox horror of 
 all sects. He does not require Mr. Froude's 
 delightful apology to win the Pilgrim's Prog- 
 ress a place on his shelf, because, although the 
 bookman may be far removed from Puritan- 
 ism, yet he knows that Bunyan had the secret 
 of English style, and although he may be as 
 far from Romanism, yet he must needs have 
 his A'Kempis, especially in Pickering's edi- 
 tion of 1828, and when he places the two 
 books side by side in the department of reli- 
 gion, he has a standing regret that there is no 
 Pilgrim's Progress also in Pickering. 
 
 Without a complete Milton he could not be 
 content. He would like to have Masson's life 
 too in 6 vols, (with index), and he is apt to 
 consider the great Puritan's prose still finer 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 11 
 
 than his poetry, and will often take down the 
 Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of 
 high latitudes ; but he has a corner in his heart 
 for that evil living and mendacious bravo but 
 most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. 
 While he counts Gibbon's, I mean Smith and 
 Milman's Gibbon's Rome in 8 vols., blue 
 cloth, the very model of histories, yet he rev- 
 els in those boaks which are the material for 
 historians, the scattered stones out of which 
 he builds his house, such as the diaries of John 
 Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and that scan- 
 dalous book, Grammont's Memoirs, and that 
 most credulous but interesting of Scots an- 
 nalists, Robert Wodrow. 
 
 According to the bookman, but not, I am 
 sorry to say, in popular judgment, the most 
 toothsome kind of literature is the Essay, and 
 you will find close to his hand a dainty vol- 
 ume of Lamb open perhaps at that, charming 
 paper on " Imperfect Sympathies," and 
 though the bookman be a Scot yet his palate 
 is pleasantly tickled by Lamb's description of 
 his national character — Lamb and the Scots 
 did not agree through an incompatibility 
 of humour — and near by he keeps his Haz- 
 litt, whom he sometimes considers the most 
 
12 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 virile writer of the century: nor would he be 
 quite happy unless he could find in the dark 
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. He is 
 much indebted to a London publisher for a 
 very careful edition of the Spectator, and still 
 more to that good bookman, Mr. Austin Dob- 
 son, for his admirable introduction. As the 
 bookman's father was also a bookman, for the 
 blessing descendeth unto the third and fourth 
 generation, he was early taught to love De 
 Quincey, and although, being a truthful man, 
 hfe cannot swear he has read every page in all 
 the fifteen volumes — roxburghe calf — yet 
 he knows his way about in that whimsical, 
 discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will 
 write on anything, or any person, always with 
 freshness and in good English, from the char- 
 acter of Judas Iscariot and " Murder as a 
 Fine Art" to the Lake Poets — there never 
 was a Lake school — and the Essenes. He 
 has much to say on Homer, and a good deal 
 also on " Flogging in Schools " ; he can 
 hardly let go Immanuel Kant, but if he does 
 it is to give his views, which are not favour- 
 able, of Wilhelm Meister; he is not above con- 
 sidering the art of cooking potatoes or the 
 question of whether human beings once had 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 13 
 
 tails, and in his theological moods he will ex- 
 pound St. John's Epistles, or the principles 
 of Christianity. The bookman, in fact, is a 
 quite illogical and irresponsible being, who 
 dare not claim that he searches for accurate 
 information in his books as for fine gold, and 
 he has been known to say that that department 
 of books of various kinds which come under 
 the head of " what's what," and " why's why," 
 and " Where's where," are not literature. He 
 does not care, and that may be foolish, 
 whether he agrees with the writer, and there 
 are times when he does not inquire too curi- 
 ously whether the writer be respectable, which 
 is very wrong, but he is pleased if this man 
 who died a year ago or three hundred years 
 has seen something with his own eyes and can 
 tell him what he saw in words that still have 
 in them the breath of life, and he will go with 
 cheerful inconsequence from Chaucer, the jol- 
 liest of all book companions, and Rabelais — 
 although that brilliant satirist had pages 
 which the bookman avoids, because they make 
 his gorge rise — to Don Quixote. If he car- 
 ries a Horace, Pickering's little gem, in his 
 waistcoat pocket, and sometimes pictures that 
 genial Roman club-man in the Savile, he has 
 
14 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 none the less an appetite for Marcus Aurelius. 
 The bookman has a series of love aflfairs be- 
 fore he is captured and settles down, say, with 
 his favourite novel, and even after he is a mid- 
 dle-aged married man he must confess to one 
 or two book friendships which are perilous to 
 his inflammable heart. 
 
 In the days of calf love every boy has first 
 tasted the sweetness of literature in two of 
 the best novels ever written, as well as two of 
 the best pieces of good English. One is Rob- 
 inson Crusoe and the other the Pilgrim's 
 Progress. Both were written by masters of 
 our tongue, and they remain until this day 
 the purest and most appetising introduction 
 to the book passion. They created two 
 worlds of adventure with minute vivid de- 
 tails and constant surprises — 'the foot on the 
 sand, for instance, in Crusoe, and the valley 
 of the shadow with the hobgoblin in Pilgrim's 
 Progress — and one will have a tenderness 
 for these two first loves even until the end. 
 Afterwards one went afield and sometimes got 
 into queer company, not bad but simply a lit- 
 tle common. There was an endless series of 
 Red Indian stories in my school-days, wherein 
 trappers could track the enemy by a broken 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 15 
 
 blade of grass, and the enemy escaped by com- 
 ing down the river under a log, and the price 
 was sixpence each. We used to pass the tuck- 
 shop at school for three days on end in order 
 that we might possess Leaping Deer, the 
 Shawnee Spy. We toadied shamefully to the 
 owner of Bull's Eye Joe, who, we understood, 
 had been the sole protection of a frontier state. 
 Again and again have I tried to find one of 
 those early friends, and in many places have 
 I inquired, but my humble companions have 
 disappeared and left no signs, like country 
 children one played with in holiday times. 
 
 It appears, however, that I have not been 
 the only lover of the trapper stories, nor the 
 only one who has missed his friends, for I re- 
 ceived a letter not long ago from a bookman 
 telling me that he had seen my complaint 
 somewhere, and sending me the Frontier 
 Angel on loan strictly that I might have an 
 hour's sinless enjoyment. He also said he 
 was on the track of Bill Bidden, another fa- 
 mous trapper, and hoped to send me word 
 that Bill was found, whose original value was 
 sixpence, but for whom this bookman was now 
 prepared to pay gold. One, of course, does 
 not mean that the Indian and trapper stories 
 
16 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 had the same claim to be literature as the Pil- 
 grim's Progress, for, be it said with reverence, 
 there was not much distinction in the style, or 
 art in the narrative, but they were romances, 
 and their subjects suited boys, who are bar- 
 barians, and there are moments when we are 
 barbarians again, and above all things these 
 tales bring back the days of long ago. It was 
 later that one fell under the power of two 
 more mature and exacting charmers, Mayne 
 Reid's Rifle Rangers and Dumas' Monte 
 Crista. The Rangers has vanished with 
 many another possession of the past, but I 
 still retain in a grateful memory the scene 
 where Rube, the Indian fighter, who is sup- 
 posed to have perished in a prairie fire and is 
 being mourned by the hero, emerges with 
 much humour from the inside of a buffalo 
 which was lying dead upon the plain, and 
 rails at the idea that he could be wiped out so 
 easily. Whether imagination has been at 
 work or not I do not know, but that is how 
 my memory has it now, and to this day 1 
 count that resurrection a piece of most fetch- 
 ing work. 
 
 Rambling through a bookshop a few 
 months ago I lighted on a copy of Monte 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 17 
 
 Crista and bought it greedily, for there was 
 a railway journey before me. It is a critical 
 experiment to meet a love of early days after 
 the years have come and gone. This stout 
 and very conventional woman — the mother 
 of thirteen children — could she have been 
 the black-eyed, slim girl to whom you and a 
 dozen other lads lost their hearts? On the 
 whole, one would rather have cherished the 
 former portrait and not have seen the original 
 in her last estate. It was therefore with a 
 flutter of delight that one found in this case 
 the old charm as fresh as ever — meaning, of 
 course, the prison escape with its amazing in- 
 genuity and breathless interest. 
 
 When one had lost his bashfulness and 
 could associate with grown-up books, then he 
 was admitted to the company of Scott, and 
 Thackeray, and Dickens, who were and are, 
 as far as one can see, to be the leaders of so- 
 ciety. My fond recollection goes back to an 
 evening in the early sixties when a father read 
 to his boy the first three chapters of the Pick- 
 wick Papers from the green-coloured parts, 
 and it is a bitter regret that in some clearance 
 of books that precious Pickwick was allowed 
 to go, as is supposed, with a lot of pamphlets 
 
18 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 on Church and State, to the great gain of an 
 unscrupulous dealer. 
 
 The editions of Scott are now innumerable, 
 each more tempting than the other ; but affec- 
 tion turns back to the old red and white, in 
 forty-eight volumes, wherein one first fell un- 
 der the magician's spell. Thackeray, for 
 some reason I cannot recall, unless it were a 
 prejudice in our home, I did not read in 
 youth, but since then I have never escaped 
 from the fascination of Vanity Fair and The 
 Neivcomes, and another about which I am to 
 speak. What giants there were in the old 
 days, when an average Englishman, tried by 
 some business worry, would say, " Never 
 mind, Thackeray's new book will be out to- 
 morrow." They stand, these three sets, Scott, 
 Thackeray, and Dickens, the very heart of 
 one's library of fiction. Wearied by sex nov- 
 els, problem novels, theological novels, and all 
 the other novels with a purpose, one returns 
 to the shelf and takes down a volume from 
 this circle, not because one has not read it, 
 but because one has read it thirty times and 
 wishes for sheer pleasure's sake to read it 
 again. Just as a tired man throws off his 
 dress coat and slips on an old study jacket, so 
 
BOOKS AND BOOiKMEN 19 
 
 one lays down the latest thoughtful or intense 
 or something worse pseudo work of fiction, 
 and is at ease with an old gossip who is ever 
 wise and cheery, who never preaches and yet 
 gives one a fillip of goodness. Among the 
 masters one must give a foremost place to 
 Balzac, who strikes one as the master of the 
 art in French literature. It is amazing that 
 in his own day he was not appreciated at his 
 full value, and that it was really left to time 
 to discover and vindicate his position. He is 
 the true founder of the realistic school in 
 everything wherein that school deserves re- 
 spect, and has been loyal to art. He is also 
 certain to maintain his hold and be an exam- 
 ple to writers after many modern realists have 
 been utterly and justly forgotten. 
 
 Two books from the shelf of fiction are 
 taken down and read once a year by a certain 
 bookman from beginning to end, and in this 
 matter he is now in the position of a Moham- 
 medan converted to Christianity who is ad- 
 vised by the missionary to choose one of his 
 two wives to have and to hold as a lawful 
 spouse. When one has given his heart to 
 Henry Esmond and the Heart of Midlothian 
 he is in a strait, and begins to doubt the ex- 
 
20 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 pediency of literary monogamy. Of course, 
 if it go by technique and finish, then Esmond 
 has it, which from first to last in conception 
 and execution is an altogether lovely book; 
 and if it go by "heroes — Esmond and Butler 
 — then again there is no comparison, for the 
 grandson of Cromwell's trooper was a very 
 wearisome, pedantic, grey-coloured Puritan 
 in whom one cannot affect the slightest inter- 
 est. How poorly he compares with Henry 
 Esmond, who was slow and diffident, but a 
 very brave, chivalrous, single-hearted, modest 
 gentleman, such as Thackeray loved to de- 
 scribe. Were it not heresy to our Lady Cas- 
 tlewood, whom all must love and serve, it also 
 comes to one that Henry and Beatrix would 
 have made a complete pair if she had put 
 some assurance in him and he had instilled 
 some principle into her, and Henry Esmond 
 might have married his young kinswoman had 
 he been more masterful and self-confident. 
 Thackeray takes us to a larger and gayer scene 
 than Scott's Edinburgh of narrow streets and 
 gloomy jails and working people and old 
 world theology, but yet it may be after all 
 Scott is stronger. No bit of history, for in- 
 stance, in Esmond takes such a grip of the im- 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 21 
 
 agination as the story of the Porteous mob. 
 After a single reading one carries that night 
 scene etched for ever in his memory. The 
 sullen, ruthless crowd of dour Scots, the grey 
 rugged houses lit up by the glare of the 
 torches, the irresistible storming of the Tol- 
 booth, the abject helplessness of Porteous in 
 the hands of his enemies, the austere and ju- 
 dicial self-restraint of the people, who did 
 their work as those who were serving justice, 
 their care to provide a minister for the crimi- 
 nal's last devotions, and their quiet dispersal 
 after the execution — all this remains unto 
 this day the most powerful description of 
 lynch law in fiction. The very strength of 
 old Edinburgh and of the Scots-folk is in the 
 Heart of Midlothian. The rivalry, however, 
 between these two books must be decided by 
 the heroine, and it seems dangerous to the 
 lover of Scott to let Thackeray's fine lady 
 stand side by side with our plain peasant girl, 
 yet soul for soul which was greater, Rachel of 
 Castlewood or Jeanie Deans? Lady Castle- 
 wood must be taken at the chief moment in 
 Esmond, when she says to Esmond: " To-day, 
 Henry, in the anthem when they sang, * When 
 the Lord turned the captivity of Zion we were 
 
22 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 like them that dream ' — I thought, yes, like 
 them that dream, and then it went, ' They that 
 sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that 
 goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come 
 again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves 
 with him.' I looked up from the book and 
 saw you; I was not surprised when I saw 
 you, I knew you would come, my dear, 
 and I saw the gold sunshine round your head." 
 That she said as she laughed and sobbed, 
 crying out wildly, " Bringing your sheaves 
 with you, your sheaves with you." And this 
 again, as Esmond thinks of her, is surely 
 beaten gold. " Gracious God, who was he, 
 weak and friendless creature, that such a love 
 should be poured out upon him; not in vain, 
 not in vain has he lived that such a treasure 
 be given him? What is ambition compared 
 to that but selfish vanity? To be rich, to be 
 famous: what do these profit a year hence 
 when other names sound louder than yours, 
 when you lie hidden away under the ground 
 along with the idle titles engraven on your 
 cofRn? Only true love lives after you, fol- 
 lows your memory with secret blessing or pre- 
 cedes you and intercedes for you. ' Non om- 
 nis moriar ' — if dying I yet live in a tender 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 28 
 
 heart or two, nor am lost and hopeless living, 
 if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays 
 for me." This seems to me the second finest 
 passage in English fiction, and the finest is 
 when Jeanie Deans went to London and 
 pleaded with the Queen for the life of her 
 condemned sister, for is there any plea in all 
 literature so eloquent in pathos and so true to 
 human nature as this, when the Scottish peas- 
 ant girl poured forth her heart: "When the 
 hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the 
 body — and seldom may it visit your lady- 
 ship — ■ and when the hour of death that comes 
 to high and low — lang and late may it be 
 yours — oh, my lady, then it is na' what we 
 hae dune for oursels but what we hae dune 
 for ithers that we think on maist pleasantly. 
 And the thought that ye hae intervened to 
 spare the puir thing's life will be sweeter in 
 that hour, come when it may, than if a word 
 of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous 
 mob at the tail of ae tow." Jeanie Deans is 
 the strongest woman in the gallery of Scott, 
 and an embodiment of all that is sober, and 
 strong, and conscientious, and passionate in 
 Scotch nature. 
 The bookman has indeed no trouble arrang- 
 
24 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 ing his gossips in his mind, where they hold 
 good fellowship, but he is careful to keep them 
 apart upon his bookshelves, and when he 
 comes home after an absence and finds his 
 study has been tidied, which in the feminine 
 mind means putting things in order, and to 
 the bookman general anarchy (it was the real 
 reason Eve was put out of Eden), when he 
 comes home, I say, and finds that happy but 
 indecorous rascal Boccaccio, holding his very 
 sides for laughter, between Lecky's History 
 of European Morals and Law's Serious Call, 
 both admirable books, then the bookman is 
 much exhilarated. Because of the mischief 
 that is in him he will not relieve those two ex- 
 cellent men of that disgraceful Italian's com- 
 pany for a little space, but if he finds that the 
 domestic sprite has thrust a Puritan between 
 two Anglican theologians he effects a separa- 
 tion without delay, for a religious contro- 
 versy with its din and clatter is more than he 
 can bear. 
 
 The bookman is indeed perpetually en- 
 gaged in his form of spring cleaning, which 
 is rearranging his books, and is always hoping 
 to square the circle, in both collecting the 
 books of one department together, and also 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 25 
 
 having his books in equal sizes. 'After a brief 
 glance at a folio and an octavo side by side he 
 gives up that attempt, but although he may 
 have to be content to see his large Augustine, 
 Benedictine edition, in the same row with 
 Bayle's Dictionary, he does not like it and 
 comforts himself by thrusting in between, as 
 a kind of mediator, Spotswood's History of 
 the Church of Scotland with Burnett's Mem- 
 oirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, that edition 
 which has the rare portrait of Charles I. by 
 Faithorne. He will be all his life rearrang- 
 ing, and so comes to understand how it is that 
 Rvomen spend forenoons of delight in box 
 rooms or store closets, and are happiest when 
 everything is turned upside down. It is a 
 slow business, rearrangement, for one cannot 
 flit a book bound after the taste of Grolier, 
 with graceful interlacement and wealth of 
 small ornaments, without going to the window 
 and lingering for a moment over the glorious 
 art, and one cannot handle a Compleat 
 Angler without tasting again some favourite 
 passage. It is days before five shelves are re- 
 constructed, days of unmixed delight, a per- 
 petual whirl of gaiety, as if one had been at a 
 conversazione, where all kinds of famous peo- 
 
26 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 pie whom you had known afar had been gath- 
 ered together and you had spoken to each as 
 if he had been the friend of your boyhood. 
 It is in fact a time of reminiscences, when the 
 two of you, the other being Sir Thomas 
 Browne, or Goldsmith, or Scott, or Thack- 
 eray, go over passages together which contain 
 the sweetest recollections of the past. When 
 the bookman reads the various suggestions for 
 a holiday which are encouraged in the daily 
 newspapers for commercial purposes about 
 the month of July, he is vastly amused by their 
 futility, and often thinks of pointing out the 
 only holiday which is perfectly satisfying. It 
 is to have a week without letters and without 
 visitors, with no work to do, and no hours, 
 either for rising up or lying down, and to 
 spend the week in a library, his own, of 
 course, by preference, opening out by a level 
 window into an old-fashioned garden where 
 the roses are in full bloom, and to wander as 
 he pleases from flower to flower where the 
 spirit of the books and the fragrance of the 
 roses mingle in one delight. 
 
 Times there are when he would like to hold 
 a meeting of bookmen, each of whom should 
 be a mighty hunter, and he would dare to in- 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 27 
 
 vite Cosmo Medici, who was as keen about 
 books as he was about commerce, and accord- 
 ing to Gibbon used to import Indian spices 
 and Greek books by the same vessel, and that 
 admirable Bishop of Durham who was as 
 joyful on reaching Paris as the Jewish pilgrim 
 was when he went to Sion, because of the 
 books that were there, " O Blessed God of 
 Gods, what a rush of the glow of Pleasure 
 rejoiced our hearts, as often as we visited 
 Paris, the Paradise of the World ! There we 
 long to remain, where on account of the great- 
 ness of our love the days ever appear to us 
 to be few. There are delightful libraries in 
 cells redolent with aromatics, there flourishing 
 greenhouses of all sorts of volumes, there aca- 
 demic meads, trembling with the earthquake 
 of Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, 
 there the promontory of Parnassus and the 
 Porticoes of the Stoics." The Duke of Rox- 
 burghe and Earl Spencer, two gallant sports- 
 men whose spoils have enriched the land; 
 Monkbarns also, though we will not let him 
 bring any antiquities with him, jagged or 
 otherwise ; and Charles Lamb, whom we shall 
 coax into telling over again how he started 
 out at ten o'clock on Saturday night and 
 
28 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 roused up old Barker in Covent Garden, and 
 came home in triumph with " that folio Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher," going forth almost in 
 tears lest the book should be gone, and coming 
 home rejoicing, carrying his sheaf with him. 
 Besides, whether Bodley and Dibdin like it 
 or not, we must have a Royalty, for there were 
 Queens who collected, and also on occasions 
 stole books, and though she be not the great- 
 est of the Queenly bookwomen and did not 
 steal, we shall invite Mary Queen of Scots, 
 while she is living in Holyrood, and has her 
 library beside her. Mary had a fine collec- 
 tion of books well chosen and beautifully 
 bound, and as I look now at the catalogue it 
 seems to me a library more learned than is 
 likely to be found even in the study of an ad- 
 vanced young woman of to-day. A Book of 
 Devotion which was said to have belonged to 
 her and afterwards to a Pope, gloriously 
 bound, I was once allowed to look upon, but 
 did not buy, because the price was marked in 
 plain figures at a thousand guineas. It would 
 be something to sit in a corner and hear Monk- 
 barns and Charles Lamb comparing notes, 
 and to watch for the moment when Lamb 
 would withdraw all he had said against the 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 29 
 
 Scots people, or Earl Spencer describing with 
 delight to the Duke of Roxburghe the battle 
 of the Sale. But I will guarantee that the 
 whole company of bookworms would end in 
 paying tribute to that intelligent and very 
 fascinating young woman from Holyrood, 
 who still turns men's heads across the stretch 
 of centuries. For even a bookman has got a 
 heart. 
 
 Like most diseases the mania for books is 
 hereditary, and if the father is touched with 
 it the son can hardly escape, and it is not even 
 necessary that the son should have known his 
 father. For Sainte-Beuve's father died when 
 he was an infant and his mother had no book 
 tastes, but his father left him his books with 
 many comments on the margins, and the book 
 microbe was conveyed by the pages. " I was 
 born," said the great critic in the Consola- 
 tions, " I was born in a time of mourning; my 
 cradle rested on a coffin . . . my father 
 left me his soul, mind, and taste written on 
 every margin of his books." When a boy 
 grows up beside his father and his father is in 
 the last stages of the book disease, there is 
 hardly any powdr which can save that son, 
 unless the mother be robustly illiterate, in 
 
30 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 which case the crossing of the blood may make 
 him impervious. For a father of this kind 
 will unconsciously inoculate his boy, allowing 
 him to play beside him in the bookroom, 
 where the ajr is charged with germs (against 
 which there is no disinfectant, I believe, ex- 
 cept commercial conversation) , and when the 
 child is weary of his toys will give him an old 
 book of travels, with quaint pictures which 
 never depart from the memory. By and by, 
 so thoughtless is this invalid father, who has 
 suffered enough, surely, himself from this dis- 
 ease, that he will allow his boy to open parcels 
 of books, reeking with infection, and explain 
 to him the rarity of a certain first edition, or 
 show him the thickness of the paper and the 
 glory of the black-letter in an ancient book. 
 Afterwards, when the boy himself has taken 
 ill and begun on his own account to prowl 
 through the smaller bookstalls, his father will 
 listen greedily to the stories he has to tell in 
 the evening, and will chuckle aloud when one 
 day the poor victim of this deadly illness 
 comes home with a newspaper of the time of 
 Charles II., which he has bought for three- 
 pence. It is only a question of time when that 
 lad, being now on an allowance of his own, 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 31 
 
 will be going about in a suit of disgracefully 
 shabby tweeds, that he may purchase a The- 
 ophrastus of fine print and binding upon 
 which he has long had his eye, and will be 
 taking milk and bread for his lunch in the 
 city, because he has a foolish ambition to ac- 
 quire by a year's saving the Kelmscott edition 
 of the Golden Legend. A change of air 
 might cure him, as for instance twenty years' 
 residence on an American ranch, but even then 
 on his return the disease might break out 
 again: indeed the chances are strong that he 
 is really incurable. Last week I saw such a 
 case — the bookman of the second generation 
 in a certain shop where such unfortunates col- 
 lect. For an hour he had been there browsing 
 along the shelves, his hat tilted back upon his 
 head that he might hold the books the nearer 
 to his eyes, and an umbrella under his left 
 arm, projecting awkwardly, which he had not 
 laid down, because he did not intend to stay 
 more than two minutes, and knew indeed, as 
 the father of a family, that he ought not to be 
 there at all. He often drops in, for this is 
 not one of those stores where a tradesman hur- 
 ries forward to ask what you want and offers 
 you the last novel which has captivated the 
 
82 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 juicy British palate; the bookman regards 
 such a place with the same feeling that a phy- 
 sician has to a patent drug store. The dealer 
 in this place so loved his books that he almost 
 preferred a customer who knew them above 
 one who bought them, and honestly felt a pang 
 when a choice book was sold. Never can I 
 forget what the great Quaritch said to me 
 when he was showing me the inner shrine of 
 his treasure-house, and I felt it honest to ex- 
 plain that I could only look, lest he should 
 think me an impostor. " I would sooner 
 show such books to a man that loved them 
 though he couldn't buy them, than a man who 
 gave me my price and didn't know what he 
 had got." With this slight anecdote I would 
 in passing pay the tribute of bookmen to the 
 chief hunter of big game in our day. 
 
 When the bookman is a family man, and T 
 have sometimes doubts whether he ought not 
 to be a celibate like missionaries of religion 
 and other persons called to special devotion, 
 he has of course to battle against his tempta- 
 tion, and his struggles are very pathetic. The 
 parallel between dipsomania and bibliomania 
 is very close and suggestive, and I have often 
 thought that more should be made of it. It 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 33 
 
 is the wife who in both cases is usually the suf- 
 ferer and good angel, and under her happy 
 influence the bookman will sometimes take 
 the pledge, and for him, it is needless to say, 
 there is only one cure. He cannot be a mod- 
 erate drinker, for there is no possibility of 
 moderation, and if he is to be saved he must 
 become a total abstainer. He must sign the 
 pledge, and the pledge must be made of a 
 solemn character with witnesses, say his poor 
 afflicted wife and some intelligent self-made 
 Philistine. Perhaps it might run like this: 
 " I, A. B., do hereby promise that I will never 
 buy a classical book in any tongue, or any 
 book in a rare edition ; that I will never spend 
 money on books in tree-calf or tooled mo- 
 rocco ; that I shall never enter a real old book- 
 shop, but should it be necessary shall pur- 
 chase my books at a dry goods store, and there 
 shall never buy anything but the cheapest re- 
 ligious literature, or occasionally a popular 
 story for my wife, and to this promise I sol- 
 emnly set my hand." With the ruin of his 
 family before his eyes, or at least, let us say, 
 the disgraceful condition of the dining-room 
 carpet, he intends to keep his word, and for a 
 whole fortnight will not allow himself to en- 
 
34 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 ter the street of his favourite bookshop. 
 Next week, however, business, so he says at 
 least, takes him down the street, but he re- 
 members the danger, and makes a brave effort 
 to pass a public-house. The mischief of the 
 thing, however, is that there is another public- 
 house in the street and passing it whets the la- 
 tent appetite, and when he is making a brave 
 dash past his own, some poor inebriate, com- 
 ing out reluctantly, holds the door open, and 
 the smell is too much for his new-born virtue. 
 He will go in just for a moment to pass the 
 time of day with his friend the publican and 
 see his last brand of books, but not to buy^^ 
 I mean to drink — 'and then he comes across 
 a little volume, the smallest and slimmest of 
 volumes, a mere trifle of a thing, and not dear, 
 but a thing which does not often turn up, and 
 which would just round off his collection at 
 a particular point. It is only a mere taste, 
 not downright drinking; but ah me, it sets him 
 on fire again, and I who had seen him go in 
 and then by a providence have met his wife 
 coming out from buying that carpet, told her 
 where her husband was, and saw her go to 
 fetch him. Among the touching incidents of 
 life, none comes nearer me than to see the 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 35 
 
 bookman's wife pleading with him to remem- 
 ber his (once) prosperous home and his (al- 
 most) starving children. And indeed if there 
 be any other as entirely affecting in this prov- 
 ince, it is the triumphant cunning with which 
 the bookman will smuggle a suspicious brown 
 paper parcel into his study at an hour when 
 his wife is out, or the effrontery with which 
 he will declare, when caught, that the books 
 have been sent unbeknown to him, and he sup- 
 poses merely for his examination. For, like 
 drink, this fearsome disease eats into the very 
 fibre of character, so that its victim will prac- 
 tise tricks to obtain books in advance of a rival 
 collector, and will tell the most mendacious 
 stories about what he paid for them. 
 
 Should he desire a book, and it be not a 
 king's ransom, there is no sacrifice he will not 
 make to obtain it. His modest glass of Bur- 
 gundy he will cheerfully give up, and if he 
 ever travelled by any higher class, which is 
 not likely, he will now go third, and his top- 
 coat he will make last another year, and I do 
 not say he will not smoke, but a cigar will now 
 leave him unmoved. Yes, and if he gets a 
 chance to do an extra piece of writing, be- 
 tween 12 and 2 A. M., he will clutch at the op- 
 
36 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 portunity, and all that he saves, he will calcu- 
 late shilling by shilling, and the book he pur- 
 chases with the complete price — that is the 
 price to which he has brought down the seller 
 after two days' negotiations — anxious yet joy- 
 ful days — will be all the dearer to him for 
 his self-denial. He has also anodynes for his 
 conscience when he seems to be wronging his 
 afflicted family, for is he not gathering the 
 best of legacies for his sons, something which 
 will make their houses rich for ever, or if 
 things come to the worst cannot his collecion 
 be sold and all he has expended be restored 
 with usury, which in passing I may say is a 
 vain dream. But at any rate, if other men 
 spend money on dinners and on sport, and 
 carved furniture and gay clothing, may he not 
 also have one luxury in life? His conscience, 
 however, does give painful twinges, and he 
 will leave the Pines Horace which he has 
 been handling delicately for three weeks, in 
 hopeless admiration of its marvellous typog- 
 raphy, and be outside the door before a happy 
 thought strikes him, and he returns to buy it, 
 after thirty minutes' bargaining, with perfect 
 confidence and a sense of personal generosity. 
 What gave him this relief and now suffuses 
 
iJOOKS AND BOOKMEN 37 
 
 his very soul with charity? It was a date 
 which for the moment he had forgotten and 
 which has occurred most fortunately. To- 
 morrow will be the birthday of a man whom 
 he has known all his days and more intimately 
 than any other person, and although he has 
 not so high an idea of the man as the world is 
 good enough to hold, and although he has 
 often quarrelled with him and called him 
 shocking names — which tomcats would be 
 ashamed of — yet he has at the bottom a 
 sneaking fondness for the fellow, and some- 
 times hopes he is not quite so bad after all. 
 One thing is certain, the rascal loves a good 
 book and likes to have it when he can, and per- 
 haps it will make him a better man to show 
 that he has been remembered and that one per- 
 son at least believes in him, and so the book- 
 man orders that delightful treasure to be sent 
 to his own address in order that next day he 
 may present it — 'as a birthday present — to 
 himself. 
 
 Concerning tastes in pleasure there can be 
 no final judgment, but for the bookman it may 
 be said, beyond any other sportsman, he has 
 the most constant satisfaction, for to him there 
 is no close season, except the spring cleaning 
 
38 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 which he furiously resents, and only allows 
 one in five years, and his autumn holiday, but 
 then he takes some six handy volumes with 
 him. For him there are no hindrances of 
 weather, for if the day be sunshine he taketh 
 his pleasure in a garden, and if the day be 
 sleet of March the fireside is the dearer, and 
 there is a certain volume — Payne's binding, 
 red morocco, which was a favourite colour of 
 Payne's — and the bookman reads Don 
 Quixote with the more relish because the 
 snow-drift is beating on the window. During 
 the hours of the day when he is visiting pa- 
 tients, who tell their symptoms at intolerable 
 length, or dictating letters about corn, or com- 
 posing sermons, which will not always run, 
 the bookman is thinking of the quiet hour 
 which will lengthen into one hundred and 
 eighty minutes, when he shall have his re- 
 ward, the kindliest for which a man can work 
 or hope to get. He will spend the time in the 
 good company of people who will not quarrel 
 with him, nor will he quarrel with them. 
 Some of them of high estate and some ex- 
 tremely low; some of them learned persons 
 and some of them simple, country men. For 
 while the bookman counteth it his chief hon- 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 89 
 
 our and singular privilege to hold converse 
 with Virgil and Dante, with Shakespeare and 
 Bacon, and such-like nobility, yet is he very 
 happy with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Dandie 
 Dinmont, with Mr. Micawber and Mrs. 
 Gamp; he is proud when Diana Vernon 
 comes to his room, and he has a chair for 
 Colonel Newcome ; he likes to hear Coleridge 
 preach, who, as Lamb said, " never did any- 
 thing else," and is much flattered when 
 Browning tries to explain what he meant in 
 Paracelsus. It repays one for much worry 
 when William Blake not only reads his Songs 
 of Innocence but also shows his own illustra- 
 tion, and he turns to his life of Michael 
 Angelo with the better understanding after he 
 has read what Michael Angelo wrote to Vit- 
 toria Colonna. He that hath such friends, 
 grave or gay, needeth not to care whether he 
 be rich or poor, whether he know great folk 
 or they pass him by, for he is independent of 
 society arid all its whims, and almost inde- 
 pendent of circumstances. His friends of 
 this circle will never play him false nor ever 
 take the pet. If he does not wish their com- 
 pany they are silent, and then when he turns 
 to them again there is no difference in the wel- 
 
40 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 come, for they maintain an equal mind and 
 are ever in good humour. As he comes in 
 tired and possibly upset by smaller people 
 they receive him in a kindly fashion, and in 
 the firelight their familiar faces make his 
 heart glad. Once I stood in Emerson's room, 
 and I saw the last words that he wrote, the 
 pad on which he wrote them, and the pen with 
 which they were written, and the words are 
 these : " The Book is a sure friend, always 
 ready at your first leisure, opens to the very 
 page you desire, and shuts at your first fa- 
 tigue." 
 
 As the bookman grows old and many of his 
 pleasures cease, he thanks God for one which 
 grows the richer for the years and never fades. 
 He pities those who have not this retreat from 
 the weariness of life, nor this quiet place in 
 which to sit when the sun is setting. By the 
 mellow wisdom of his books and the immortal 
 hope of the greater writers he is kept from 
 peevishness and discontent, from bigotry and 
 despair. Certain books grow dearer to him 
 with the years, so that their pages are worn 
 brown and thin, and he hopes with a Birming- 
 ham book-lover. Dr. Showell Rogers, whose 
 dream has been fulfilled, that Heaven, having 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 41 
 
 a place for each true man, may be " a book- 
 man's paradise, where early black-lettered 
 tomes, rare and stately, first folios of Shake- 
 speare, tall copies of the right editions of the 
 Elzevirs, and vellumed volumes galore, un- 
 cropped, uncut, and unfoxed in all their ver- 
 dant pureness, fresh as when they left the 
 presses of the Aldi, are to be had for the ask- 
 ing." Between this man at least and his books 
 there will be no separation this side the grave, 
 but his gratitude to them and his devotion 
 will ever grow and their ministries to him be 
 ever dearer, especially that Book of books 
 which has been the surest guide of the human 
 soul. "While I live," says one who both 
 wrote and loved books and was one of our 
 finest critics, " while I live and think, nothing 
 can deprive me of my value for such treasures. 
 I can help the appreciation of them while I 
 last and love them till I die, and perhaps if 
 fortune turns her face once more in kindness 
 upon me before I go, I may chance, some 
 quiet day, to lay my overheating temples on 
 a book, and so have the death I most envy." 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 
 
 AS a writer on any subject Is apt to have 
 a partial mind, I desire to clear myself 
 at once from all prejudice by offering 
 to my judicial readers the assurance of my 
 profound conviction that a sense of humour 
 is a hindrance to practical success in life, but 
 of course they will notice the qualified form 
 of my statement. To have an eye for the re- 
 curring comedy of things, so that no absurdity 
 of speech or incident escapes, is a joy to the 
 individual, sustaining him wonderfully amid 
 the labours and stupidities of life, and very 
 likely it is also a joy to his friends, who have 
 learned from him to use the wholesome medi- 
 cine of laughter. But if you come to one's 
 daily calling and make the two exceptions of 
 literature and caricature in Art, who has not 
 suffered through the affliction of humour? If 
 the humorist, and I am not now speaking of 
 a merely jocose person, but of one who has a 
 real palate for comedy, happens to be a clergy- 
 man, then he runs the greatest risk in his as- 
 
 45 
 
46 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 sociation with good people, for with a few ex- 
 ceptions, which are only tolerated and apolo- 
 gised for, this class will say things in all seri- 
 ousness which such a man will not be able to 
 resist, and one brief break-down may ruin his 
 character for life. He will be afraid to at- 
 tend a religious meeting, lest some worthy 
 speaker, having raised his audience to the 
 highest pitch of pious expectation, should top- 
 ple over into an anti-climax; and funerals 
 will be to him a double trial, because comedy 
 lies so near to tragedy. It gets upon this poor 
 man's nerves when a neighbour whom he has 
 seen coming along the street, round-faced and 
 chirpy, enters the room with an expression of 
 dolorous woe, shakes hands with the under- 
 taker instead of the chief mourner, and is 
 heard to remark with much unction and a sigh 
 which stirs the atmosphere, " There to-day 
 and here to-niorrow, much missed." One un- 
 happy clergyman still blushes with shame as 
 he recalls an incident of his early days when, 
 in a northern city, he was sent to take a funeral 
 service in the kitchen of a workingman's 
 house. They sat round him, eight Scots ar- 
 tisans, each in his Sunday blacks, with his pipe 
 projecting from his waistcoat pocket, and his 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 47 
 
 hat below his chair, looking with awful, im- 
 movable countenance into the eternities. It 
 seemed irreverent to speak to any one of the 
 graven images, but the poor minister required 
 to know something about the man who had 
 died, and so he ventured to ask the figure next 
 him in a whisper what the deceased had been? 
 Whereupon the figure answered with a loud, 
 clear voice, " I dinna ken myself, for I jest 
 came here wi' a friend," and then, addressing 
 a still more awful figure opposite, and in a 
 still more aggressive tone, " Jeems, what was 
 the corpse to a trade? " After which the 
 trembling minister wished he had left the mat- 
 ter alone. 
 
 Will a medical man be acceptable to that 
 large class of patients who love to speak of 
 their ailments and have nothing wrong with 
 them, if they discover that he is laughing at 
 them, and especially if he allows himself the 
 relief of sarcasm? Is it not better for his in- 
 come, if not for his science, that he should be 
 able to listen with a murmur of sympathy to 
 old ladies of both sexes describing their symp- 
 toms, and prescribe the most harmless of mix- 
 tures with an owl-like countenance, beseeching 
 them not to lose heart, even in such desperate 
 
48 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 circumstances, and departing with the assur- 
 ance that he is at their service night and day, 
 and must be sent for instantly if the coloured 
 water gives no relief? They say two Roman 
 Augurs could not look at one another without 
 laughing, but how much more ought to be 
 pitied the consultant and the general practi- 
 tioner who meet over the case of a hypochon- 
 driac? 
 
 I challenge any one to mention a politician 
 of our time who, on the whole, has not lost, 
 rather than gained, through humour; and I 
 fancy no man should be more afraid of this 
 tricky gift than a leader of the democracy. 
 Had Mr. Gladstone possessed the faintest 
 sense of the ridiculous amid the multitude of 
 his rich and brilliant talents, he had not been 
 able to address a crowd from the window of 
 his railway carriage, and receive a gift of a 
 plaid, or a walking-stick, or, if my memory 
 does not fail me, a case of marmalade, until 
 his outraged fellow-passengers, anxious to 
 make connections, insisted the train should go 
 on, and it departed to the accompaniment of 
 the statesman's eloquent peroration. But it 
 was just because Mr. Gladstone could do such 
 things, and was always in the most deadly 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 49 
 
 earnest, that the people trusted him and hung 
 upon his words. Nothing was so dangerous 
 a snare to Lord Beaconsfield as his abounding 
 and delightful humour, for it lodged in the 
 minds of the English people a suspicion 
 which never departed, that that brilliant man, 
 who had been so f arseeing in his ideas and an- 
 ticipations of the trend of events, was little 
 else than a charlatan and a scorner; and I 
 fancy that Lord Salisbury's most devoted fol- 
 lowers would have been glad if some of his 
 mordant jests had never passed beyond his 
 study. Is there not another most accom- 
 plished and attractive personality in politics 
 who has forfeited the chance of supreme au- 
 thority, partly no doubt by a pronounced in- 
 dividualism, but partly also by a graceful 
 lightness of touch and allusion which are not 
 judged consistent with that fierce sincerity 
 which has been the strength of his party? 
 Toleration is never without a flavour of hu- 
 mour, but humour is an absolute disability to 
 fanaticism. With this genial sense of human- 
 ity no man can be a fanatic, and in a recent 
 book on French crime it is frequently men- 
 tioned that the principal miscreants were in- 
 tense persons with no humour, so that in this 
 
50 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 branch of life, quite as much as in politics, the 
 humorous person is severely handicapped. 
 One feels as if his money and his life were safe 
 in the hands of a person who can enjoy an hon- 
 est jest, but this may only prove that the per- 
 son is lacking in that determination and enter- 
 prise which are conditions of practical suc- 
 cess in a strenuous modern community. 
 
 So far as a layman in such affairs can judge, 
 humour is alien to the business mind, and 
 would forfeit any character for stability. 
 The looker-on, who, of course, may be a very 
 foolish person, is amazed at the substantial 
 success of dull men and the respect in which 
 they are held, and he is equally amazed at the 
 suspicion with which bright men, whose con- 
 versation sparkles and enlivens, are regarded 
 and the slight esteem in which they are held. 
 The former may be wooden to the last point of 
 exasperation, but his neighbours pronounce 
 him to be solid, and thrust him into director- 
 ships, chairmanships, the magistracy and Par- 
 liament, and after a long course of solidity 
 and success, with increasing woodenness, he 
 will likely reach the House of Lords. But 
 the other man, with whom you spent so pleas- 
 ant an evening, and who is as much at home 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 51 
 
 among books as " a stable-boy among horses," 
 is apt to be judged light metal ^ — a person 
 who may know his Shakespeare, but could not 
 be trusted with things of value like money. 
 There are times when one loses heart and al- 
 most concludes that the condition of tangible 
 success in English life is to be well-built, giv- 
 ing a pledge to fortune in a moderate stout- 
 ness, to have a solemn expression of face, sug- 
 gesting the possession of more wisdom than is 
 likely to have been given to any single person, 
 to be able to hold one's tongue till some in- 
 cautious talker has afforded an idea, and to 
 have the gift of oracular commonplace. If 
 to such rare talents can be added an im- 
 pressive clearance of the throat, there are few 
 positions in Church or State, short of the high- 
 est, to which their owner may not climb. My 
 advice, therefore, to younger men, if indeed 
 I am expected to give advice to anybody, is to 
 congratulate themselves that by the will of 
 Providence they have been cleansed from this 
 dangerous quality, or, if this be not their for- 
 tunate case, to hide the possession of humour 
 behind a mask of sustained impenetrable com- 
 mon sense. 
 
 Having niade this explanation, to protect 
 
52 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 both my subject and myself, I come to the 
 analysis of humour and would remind you of 
 its immense variety. It was, I think, George 
 Eliot who said that nothing was a more seri- 
 ous cause of diversion than incompatibility in 
 humour, and this observation may also remind 
 us that we ought to be most catholic in our 
 judgment of humour. It is fair to argue that 
 the complexion of humour in different coun- 
 tries can be referred, like many other things, 
 to the climate, and it were unfair to expect 
 the same quality from a Scot, brought up un- 
 der the grey skies and keen east wind and aus- 
 tere buildings of Edinburgh, as from a 
 Frenchman, nurtured amid the brightness and 
 gaiety of Paris, where the spirit of France is 
 at its keenest if not its strongest. If one de- 
 sired to pluck the finest flower of humour — 
 the rare and delicate orchid of this garden — 
 I mean wit, he must go to France and French 
 letters. In the French novelists and journal- 
 ists, but especially in the essayists, whether 
 he desire its more caustic form in Pascal, or 
 prefer it lighter and more cynical in Roche- 
 foucauld, one learns how swift and subtle, 
 how finished and penetrating is the spirit of 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 53 
 
 wit. Matthew Arnold, perhaps through his 
 devotion to French literature, and Mr. Birrell 
 through his native genius, proved that wit has 
 not been unknown in the English essays, that 
 fine form of literature whose decay always 
 means the decay of culture ; and Charles Lamb 
 was often so happy in his wit (it came more 
 nearly sometimes to the English fun), and 
 knew how dangerous it was to have a humor- 
 ous reputation, that he used to say, " Hush ! 
 look solemn. A fool is coming." 
 
 But it may be frankly admitted that wit is 
 not acclimatised in England, and that its 
 flavour is not often tasted in English litera- 
 ture; for instance, the following conversation 
 would hardly have been possible in London. 
 Two men were driving along a Boulevard of 
 Paris in an open carriage: one, the host, a suc- 
 cessful and sensible person, and the other light 
 and clever; and the conversation of the mil- 
 lionaire grew so ponderous that the other 
 could endure it no longer. He laid his hand 
 upon his host's arm and with the other pointed 
 to a man standing under a tree and just within 
 the furthest range of human vision. The man 
 was yawning, not with the restraint of polite 
 
54 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 society, but with the open enjoyment of our 
 canine friends. "Look!" said the bright 
 man, in his despair, " and I pray you silence. 
 We are already overheard." This seems to my 
 poor judgment so perfect an instance of wit 
 that I do not supplement it from literature, 
 though I do not offer it for indiscriminate use. 
 It is indeed a story which divides the sheep 
 from the goats, and you must take care to 
 whom you tell it. Once, in magnifying the 
 esprit of the French, I offered this to a lady 
 at dinner as an illustration, and she promptly 
 replied, " If that be all you can say for French 
 wit, I do not see much in it." I was desolated 
 not to have had the approval of her taste, and 
 ventured to ask wherein my poor story had 
 failed. " Well, for one thing," this excellent 
 lady, full of common sense and good works, 
 replied, " How could the man hear at that 
 distance? " Then, as Matthew Arnold said 
 about Benjamin Franklin, one knew the limits 
 of triumphant common sense, and as I had 
 been taught in the days of long ago never to 
 put any lady to confusion, it only remained to 
 confess that I had never thought of that, and 
 to thank her for her correction. But I was 
 fully aware that she would only be the more 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 55 
 
 firmly convinced that the French people and 
 myself were condemned in one abyss of stu- 
 pidity. 
 
 If, however, wit be one of the few uncon- 
 sidered trifles which the English people have 
 not picked up in their world mission of civili- 
 sation, we may congratulate ourselves upon the 
 loss, for no humour is more futile and more 
 dangerous for practical purposes. Wit is the 
 inhabitant of clubs and literary salons; it is 
 the child of cloistered culture, not of the stir- 
 ring market-place. Pity the candidate for 
 public suffrages who should employ this 
 tricky weapon. Suppose he give his best 
 point the keen edge of wit, it will doubtless 
 touch a handful in the crowd, and they will 
 flash back a quick response to him, but the 
 other ninety-nine per cent, who have felt noth- 
 ing will conclude there is a conspiracy be- 
 tween him and a few superior people to insult 
 them and shut them out, and they will regard 
 the speaker with silent resentment, as one who 
 has spoken in cypher to a few. You need not 
 expect any man's vote or any man's favour if 
 you have innocently suggested that he is a fool 
 and beneath your notice. And I dare to say 
 that nothing is more unpopular, as nothing is 
 
56 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 more undemocratic, than wit, which is the 
 aristocracy of humour. The most democratic 
 form of humour, and by that I mean the form 
 which affects the largest number of people in 
 the shortest space of time and carries them the 
 farthest distance, is the characteristic humour 
 of England which we call by the old-fashioned 
 name of fun. Fun has no marked intellec- 
 tual quality, and makes no demand upon the 
 hearer save that he be not cynical or misan- 
 thropical. It is a sense of the obvious com- 
 edy of life, its glaring contrasts, its patent ab- 
 surdities, its ridiculous mistakes, its mirth- 
 provoking situations. It is the humour of the 
 public schools, of the railway carriage, of the 
 market-place, and of the playroom. It is like 
 the air-bells which dance upon the surface of 
 the water and relieve the blackness beneath. 
 With a touch of fun a speaker can win his 
 audience to his side, a master can sweeten his 
 relations with his workmen, a clever person 
 who could make good fun might even stop a 
 riot; and where there is fun a father and his 
 sons are bound to get on together. Fun has 
 lent a certain geniality and joUiness to Eng- 
 lish life, and it has saved public life from that 
 rancorous bitterness which, as Mr. Bodley 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 57 
 
 points out in his admirable France, disfigures 
 French politics. Had there been more hon- 
 est and wholesome fun in the North, Scottish 
 life, both in the home and in the Church, 
 would not have been so grave and contro- 
 versial. This popular humour in its play on 
 words has its best exponents in Sydney Smith 
 and Tom Hood. When one recalls how 
 Smith told the little girl that she might as 
 well pat the roof of St. Paul's Cathedral in 
 order to please the Dean and Chapter as 
 stroke the shell of a tortoise in order to please 
 it, and how Hood was given a wine-glass of 
 ink instead of his black draught, and promptly 
 offered to swallow a piece of blotting-paper 
 as an antidote, one is simply selecting at 
 random from the bag two specimens of good 
 English fooling. The Pickwick Papers af- 
 ford a very carnival of rollicking humour in 
 incident, and with their plea for charity have 
 done more than a multitude of sermons to 
 cheer and sweeten English life. Whatever 
 may be said by superior persons who always 
 apologise for laughing, it is a good thing that 
 the people should be moved from time to time 
 to pure and kindly laughter, and when a mob 
 laughs after the English fashion the police 
 
58 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 may be withdrawn, and when a nation takes 
 to laughing at folly, then folly, whether in- 
 tellectual or moral, has lost half its danger. 
 In Art one has pleasure in citing our admir- 
 able Punch, which through a long career has 
 sustained an honourable tradition of purity 
 and dignity, and I dare to say we ought to be 
 thankful for the service our caricaturists have 
 rendered to the amenities both of public and 
 private life. Our English humour may be 
 simple, as a Frenchman or an American al- 
 lows himself to suggest, but it has its own ad- 
 vantage. If one compares Punch with the 
 daring illustrated papers of Paris, he will 
 have a fresh appreciation of purity, and be 
 thankful that what we laugh at in England 
 can be laid upon our family table. And if he 
 compares Mr. Punch with the exceedingly 
 clever caricaturists of America, he will have 
 a new idea of English good-nature, and be 
 thankful for artists who still believe in the ro- 
 mance of marriage and the beauty of simple 
 emotions. No one, for instance, can examine 
 the work of Dana Gibson, the American 
 " black and white " artist, without being im- 
 pressed both by its intellectual subtlety and 
 by its artistic finish. But he must also be de- 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 59 
 
 pressed by the constant suggestion of the 
 weakness, the sordidness, the hypocrisy, and 
 the hopelessness of human society. French 
 and American caricatures tend to lower one's 
 temperature, but English caricature in its 
 master hands tends to raise one's heart, and 
 to inspire one with faith in his fellow-crea- 
 tures. English humour may prick delusions, 
 but it spares us our dreams ; it may play round 
 a wilful peculiarity, it never jeers at an ir- 
 reparable calamity; it may exhibit the foibles 
 of humanity, it has a tear ready for its sor- 
 rows. It is the humour of a people which has 
 not yet lost faith in God and man, which is 
 not yet convinced that the law of life is a nerv- 
 ous scramble for gold ; it is a humour which 
 can give a hard blow, but always with the 
 fist and never with a stiletto, and forgets the 
 fight the moment it is over. Long may it 
 flourish in English life and English homes, 
 a check on absurdity of every kind, a cure for 
 melancholy, an incentive to humanity. 
 
 The Duke of Wellington was a good John 
 Bull in all his ways, and had his hours when 
 he enjoyed a bit of fun and found it not un- 
 useful. Louis Philippe introduced one of the 
 Marshals of the Peninsular War to our Iron 
 
60 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 Duke. They had met before but not in 
 Courts, and the Marshal, with a keen recol- 
 lection of his experiences at the hands of the 
 Duke, forgot the perfect manners of his peo- 
 ple and his own generosity. He refused, it is 
 said, to shake hands with his former oppo- 
 nent, and even allowed himself to turn his 
 back and to walk towards the door. The 
 King apologised profusely to the Duke for the 
 Marshal's discourtesy, but the Duke only 
 laughed with a big, hearty English laugh, 
 and, looking at the Marshal's retreating 
 figure with keen delight, said to His Maj- 
 esty, " Forgive him, Sire. I taught him that 
 lesson! " 
 
 When one passes from England to Ireland, 
 he finds himself in a country which has bred 
 a humour of its own — a plant which cannot 
 be grown in any other soil, and whose very 
 origin cannot be traced. Nothing can be 
 found on the face of the earth so captivating 
 and irresistible, so unexpected and unreason- 
 able, as Irish drollery. It seems as if Nature, 
 in creating that charming people, had in- 
 vested them with all kinds of bewitching 
 qualities, and then had been pleased, by way 
 of a merry jest and that the world might not 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 61 
 
 grow too solemn, to have inverted the Irish 
 intellect so that it stands upon its head and 
 not upon its feet, which, of course, is the cause 
 of bulls and all the other quips and cranks of 
 the Irish spirit. If any one is still young 
 enough to stand upon his head in his familiar 
 room, he will get a view of the place perfectly 
 novel and surprising, different from anything 
 he could have seen when standing on his feet, 
 and the account he will give of that room will 
 startle every person by its originality. In 
 like fashion it has been given to the Irish 
 mind to have an outlook on life absolutely its 
 own, to go into Wonderland with Alice, and 
 to live in a topsy-turvy world where in truth, 
 to quote an older classic, " the dish runs off 
 with the Spoon, and the cow jumps over the 
 moon." If the just and honourable, but per- 
 haps also over-sensible and somewhat phleg- 
 matic persons, who have in recent times had 
 charge of Irish affairs, and have been trying 
 to unravel the tangled skein, had appreciated 
 the tricky sprite which inhabits the Irish 
 mind, and had made a little more allowance 
 for people who are not moved by argument 
 and the multiplication table, but are touched 
 by sentiment and romance as well as vastly 
 
62 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 tickled by the absurdity of things, they might 
 have achieved greater success, and done more 
 good to a chivalrous, unworldly, quick-witted, 
 and warm-hearted people. 
 
 Lever, beloved by schoolboys in past days 
 and by many other people, admirably repre- 
 sents in fiction this gay, incalculable, irrespon- 
 sible humour (who has not rejoiced in Micky 
 Free?), and he is also supported by many a 
 short story teller, such as the author of Father 
 Tom and the Pope, which appeared in Maga 
 in the days when the Blackwood circle was 
 the admiration of the land. Some pessimists 
 fear that the excessive devotion of the Irish 
 people to politics in recent days, who are as 
 delightfully illogical there as in other depart- 
 ments, has had a depressing effect upon their 
 minds, and that we need no longer expect the 
 springs of Irish humour to make green the 
 wilderness. But this is taking too dark a 
 view of affairs. The Irish priest and the 
 Irish resident magistrate, and sometimes even 
 the tourist in Ireland, is still refreshed from 
 time to time, and goes on his way rejoicing. 
 It is not so long ago that an Irish peasant 
 dreamt he was visiting the late Queen Vic- 
 toria, and was asked by the Queen what he 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 63 
 
 would like to drink. When he expressed the 
 humble wish for a glass of the liquor associ- 
 ated with the name of Jamieson, and when the 
 Queen, still full of hospitality, wanted to know 
 whether he would take it hot or cold, he was 
 foolish enough to prefer it hot. As the kettle 
 was not boiling, Her Majesty in the dream 
 hastened to make up the fire with her own 
 hands, while her thirsty and loyal Irish sub- 
 ject waited anxiously. Alas ! when the water 
 came to the boil, the noise of the steam awoke 
 him. " Holy St. Patrick! " he said, with in- 
 finite regret, " I'll take it cold next time." 
 So far as I know, the Irishman is still living 
 who was sent by his master with a present of 
 a live hare to a neighbour. The hare es- 
 caped and the servant made no effort to pur- 
 sue it, but that was not for the reason which 
 would have affected a Scotsman, that he could 
 not have caught it, but for another reason 
 which could only have occurred to the Irish 
 mind, but to that mind was absolutely satis- 
 factory : " Ye may run and run and run, ye 
 deludhering baste, but it's no use, for ye 
 haven't got the address." 
 
 Various pleasant tales have been going 
 round about that genial Irish Judge who died 
 
64 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 a few years ago, and whose death diminishes 
 the gaiety of at least one nation, but I have 
 not seen it mentioned how he explained the 
 working of a new Act which lowered the 
 qualification for Grand Jurymen. " I will 
 tell you," he said, in his charming brogue, 
 " what happened at the first Assize I took 
 afterwards. I gave my usual charge to the 
 Grand Jury, and I said, * Gentlemen, you will 
 be pleased to take your accustomed place in 
 the Court,' and I give you my word for it, ten 
 of them went instantly into the dock." Nor 
 am I sure any one has placed on record a play 
 on words which it were an insult to call a 
 " pun," and which crosses the border of the 
 brightest wit. A man was tried for an 
 agrarian murder and witnesses swore that they 
 had seen him commit it, and there was, in fact, 
 no doubt of his guilt; but the jury promptly 
 brought him in " Not Guilty." Whereupon 
 the counsel for the prosecution asked the 
 judge whether such a verdict could be law. 
 " I am not prepared," said the judge, " to call 
 it law, but I am sure it is jurisprudence." 
 And it is only an Irish Member of Parlia- 
 ment who could congratulate an honourable 
 baronet, who had bored the House with an 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 65 
 
 interminable harangue, upon three things. 
 First, " upon speaking so long without stop- 
 ping " ; second, " upon speaking so long with- 
 out saying anything " ; and thirdly, " upon sit- 
 ting down on his own hat without his head 
 being in it." 
 
 It is natural to cross from Ireland to Amer- 
 ica, but it is not easy to estimate the humour 
 of our kinsmen, because, although we know 
 what it has been, we are not sure what it is 
 going to be. If environment gives the com- 
 plexion to thought, then one understands why 
 the American jests should be on a large scale, 
 ranging from Artemus Ward, who did so 
 much to delight us all and died in early man- 
 hood, to Mark Twain, who lived to complete 
 a task of the highest honour. But it is a ques- 
 tion whether the permanent humour of that 
 bright people, whose brain as much as their 
 atmosphere seems charged with electricity, 
 will not approximate in the end to the Sal 
 Atticum of France, as their women's talk and 
 dresses remind one of Paris. Any one who 
 reads Life, I mean the American Punch, can 
 recall a dozen instances of wit as finished, 
 as caustic and, I regret to say, sometimes as 
 profane as any in French modern letters. It 
 
66 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 seems as if American humour were between 
 the tides with the old school of the Bigelow 
 Papers and the Innocents Abroad closing its 
 happy career and the new school hardly yet 
 in evidence. American humour at least illus- 
 trates one characteristic of this hustling mod- 
 ern time; it is suggestive rather than exhaus- 
 tive, and never can be anticipated. Our 
 fathers not only endured but welcomed stories 
 the end of which they could see from the be- 
 ginning; they honoured every intermediate 
 station with a preparatory laugh, and when 
 the train finally entered the terminus fell al- 
 most into an apoplexy, and then, when they 
 had recovered, were willing, and almost ex- 
 pected that the train should be taken out and 
 make another entry, or perhaps two, and in 
 every case it would be received with fresh ap- 
 probation. This obvious jocosity is now in- 
 tolerable; the modern demands brevity and 
 surprise, that stories should, in fact, be con- 
 structed with a certain amount of art. The 
 modern indeed believes that while Nature in 
 the shape of an incident belongs to all, its ar- 
 tistic representation in the shape of a picture 
 is copyright, and that if a man has worked on 
 a story without which it is indeed not worth 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 67 
 
 hearing, he ought to be protected in his rights. 
 An old scholar whom I know holds that there 
 are only ten stories', and have only been ten in 
 human history, and that they can all be found 
 as protoplasm in the Greek comedians, and 
 that all the other stories are only evolutions, 
 skilful cross-breedings or adaptations to en- 
 vironment. Nothing, at any rate, is more in- 
 teresting from a technical point of view than 
 to see how a master in the craft will clothe the 
 barest skeleton of fact with flesh and blood, 
 or how, to vary the situation, he will take an 
 old house that has fallen into disrepair, and, 
 by throwing out a window here and a wing 
 there, by re-facing and re-painting and very 
 often, in the case of old stories, attending care- 
 fully to the sanitation (which was very bad 
 in some stories of the past), will astonish us 
 with a new house. The Americans are mas- 
 ters in the art of construction, and provided 
 you are not in the secret it would be a very 
 shrewd person who could tell where the Story 
 is to land him. 
 
 As, for instance, a lawyer is briefed to de- 
 fend a man charged with murder and discov- 
 ers that his client's case is almost hopeless. 
 Anxious to do his best, however, he interviews 
 
68 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 a genial Irishman who follows the calling of a 
 professional juryman, and pledges him to be 
 on duty when this case is tried. " And re- 
 member," said the lawyer, " whatever the 
 other jurymen want, you bring in a verdict of 
 manslaughter." Next day the evidence is 
 even worse than could have been imagined, 
 and the jury are so long in coming back the 
 lawyer is afraid that justice has miscarried. 
 But at last they return with the arranged ver- 
 dict of manslaughter. When the lawyer 
 called in the evening to recompense his ally, 
 he asked him what in the world had kept the 
 jury so long. " I never was shut up with 
 eleven such obstinate men in my life " (a very 
 ancient jest, mark you, introduced merely as 
 a foil) — " I never was shut up with eleven 
 such obstinate men in my life. They were 
 going to bring in the prisoner ' Not Guilty.' " 
 Before identifying the humour of the Scot, 
 which is a province by itself with a clearly- 
 marked frontier, it must be remembered that 
 there are two distinct races within the nation 
 of Scotland, and that although they have come 
 under the conformity of one land and largely 
 of one creed, yet the Scots Highlander and 
 the Scots Lowlander are quite opposite types ; 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 69 
 
 they share neither their virtues nor their vices. 
 The Lowlander, the man of Fifeshire or of 
 Ayrshire, is self-controlled, far-seeing, per- 
 severing, industrious, with a genius for the 
 accumulation of money. He fulfils the con- 
 ditions of success in the modern world, and 
 like " jingling Geordie " in the Fortunes of 
 Nigel, who was the pioneer of his race in suc- 
 cessful emigration, he gathers money wher- 
 ever he goes, and would make a fortune on a 
 desert island. But our Highlander is impul- 
 sive, imaginative, gallant to a fault, and re- 
 gardless of consequences, pure in life, cour- 
 teous in manner, chivalrous in ideals. He was 
 at home in the world which is dying, and 
 made the best of raiders and fighting soldiers, 
 as he was the most loyal of clansmen and the 
 child of lost causes, dwelling amid his moun- 
 tains and by the side of sea lochs in a country 
 of mists and weird, lonely moors, dominated 
 for centuries by a severe and unbending creed. 
 Fun and wit were impossible for him, and 
 yet under his sombre countenance struggled 
 something of. the ineradicable humour of the 
 Celt. His humour, so far as it can be defined, 
 is a kind of solemn and long drawn-out 
 waggery which he tastes without a smile, and 
 
70 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 of which one would suppose that he is some- 
 times unconscious. 
 
 " Who had this place last year? " asked a 
 shooting tenant of his keeper. 
 
 "Well," said Donald, "I'm not denying 
 that he wass an Englishman, and he wass a 
 good man, oh yes, and went to kirk and shot 
 fery well. But he wass narrow, fery nar- 
 row." 
 
 "Narrow," said the tenant in amazement, 
 for the charge was generally the other way 
 about. " What was he narrow in? " 
 
 " Well," said Donald, " I will be telling 
 you, and it wass this way. The twelfth wass 
 a fery good day and we had fifty-two brace, 
 but it wass warm, oh yes, fery warm, and 
 when we came back to the lodge the gentle- 
 man will say to me, ' It iss warm,' and I will 
 not be contradicting him. Then he will be 
 saying, * You will be thirsty, Donald,' and I 
 will not be contradicting him. Then he will 
 take out his flask and be speaking about a 
 dram, and I will not be contradicting him but 
 will just say, * Toots, toots.' And then when 
 the glass wass half full I will say, just for po- 
 liteness, ' Stop,' and he stopped. Oh yes, a 
 fery narrow man ! " In fact, as Donald sug- 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 71 
 
 gested, a mere literalist, held in the bondage 
 of the letter and without the liberty of the 
 spirit. 
 
 Another tenant was making arrangements 
 for the coming winter before he went South, 
 and told the keeper to get the woman who had 
 looked after the lodge the previous winter to 
 take charge of it again. 
 
 " You will be meaning Janet Cameron, but 
 I am not advising you to have Janet this year. 
 Oh, no! it will maybe be better not to have 
 Janet this winter." 
 
 " Why, what was wrong with her? " and 
 then, with that painful suspicion of the High- 
 lander which greatly hurts his feelings, " Did 
 she drink? " 
 
 " Janet," replied Donald with severity, " iss 
 not the woman to be tasting. Oh, no ! she iss 
 a good-living woman, Janet, and has the true 
 doctrine, but I will not be saying that you 
 should have her." 
 
 " I see. So you and she, I suppose, 
 quarrel?" 
 
 " It iss not this man who will be quarrelling 
 with Janet Cameron, who iss his wife's cousin 
 four times removed, and a fery good woman, 
 though she be a Cameron." 
 
72 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 " Well, ask her to take the lodge, and offer 
 her the same wages as last year, and a little 
 more, if that will please her, and tell me what 
 she says." 
 
 " It iss not for wages Janet Cameron will 
 work; oh, nol that iss not the kind of woman 
 Janet iss, and it iss no use asking her, for she 
 will not come." 
 
 "Well," said the Englishman, getting 
 nettled, " do as you are bid and give her the 
 chance, at any rate, and tell me what she says." 
 
 " No, sir, it will be wasting my time going, 
 and I will not be asking her." Then, after a 
 pause, " Ye would maybe not be knowin' that 
 Janet iss dead? " 
 
 Does any one say with impatience, why did 
 he not tell that at once? If you can answer 
 that question you can lay bare the secret of the 
 Celtic mind, which is the most complex thing 
 in psychology. An Englishman's idea of con- 
 versation is a straight line, the shortest dis- 
 tance between two points, but a Celt's idea is 
 a circle, a roundabout way of reaching the 
 same place. He has so long been stalking 
 deer, and other people, that the habit has 
 passed into his mind, and conversation be- 
 comes a prolonged stalk in which he is con- 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 73 
 
 sidering the wind and the colour of the hill- 
 sides, and avails himself of every bush, and 
 then comes suddenly upon his prey. His 
 mind is so subtle that he dislikes statements 
 of downright brutality and prefers to suggest 
 rather than assert, and the following is surely 
 a guarded delicacy of suggestion : 
 
 " Why, Hamish," said the Laird to a young 
 fellow whom he met on the road, " what are 
 you doing here? Have you left the situation 
 I got for you? " 
 
 " It is a great sorrow, sir, to this man, but I 
 could not be staying in that place, and so I 
 have just come back, and maybe I will be get- 
 ting something else to do." 
 
 " Look here, I don't understand this," said 
 the Laird. " Was the work too heavy, or did 
 they not pay you enough wagps? Tell me 
 what ailed you at the place." 
 
 " I would be ashamed to complain of work, 
 and there was nothing wrong with the wages ; 
 but it was just this way, and though I'm mak- 
 ing no complaint, maybe you will be under- 
 standing. There was a sheep died on the hill 
 of its own accord, and the master had it salted 
 and we ate that sheep. By-and-by there was 
 a cow died suddenly, and we did not know 
 
74 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 what was wrong with her, but the master had 
 that cow salted and we ate her. And then the 
 master's mother took ill, and we were feeling 
 very anxious, for we will not be forgetting the 
 sheep and the cow. And the master's mother 
 died, and I left." 
 
 Upon the English habit of a straight ques- 
 tion and a straight answer in the briefest form 
 of words, you can get no information in the 
 Highlands. If, for instance, you desired to 
 know whether the minister of a parish were 
 a man of high character and good preaching 
 gift, you would have to introduce your in- 
 quiry after a long conversation on things in 
 general, and then to mix it up with a multi- 
 tude of detail, and when the other man had 
 replied the words he used would in themselves 
 be quite useless for quotation, but you would 
 have found out his mind. One of our most 
 distinguished Highland ministers, who under- 
 stood his race through and through, desired 
 to know whether a certain candidate for a 
 parish had approved himself to the people 
 and was likely to be appointed. He called 
 upon one of the religious worthies of the dis- 
 trict, being perfectly certain that if he found 
 out his private opinion he would know the 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 75 
 
 position. Duncan knew quite well why the 
 minister had come, and the minister knew that 
 Duncan knew, but they talked on the weather 
 and the crop, and the last heresy case, and the 
 spread of false doctrine in the Lowlands, for 
 half-an-hour. After that they came as it 
 were by accident on the name of the candidate, 
 and Duncan simply covered him with praise. 
 The minister knew that that counted for noth- 
 ing, A little later the minister said to Dun- 
 can, " I would like to have your mind about 
 that young man "— his mind, you notice, be- 
 ing very different from his speech. Then 
 Duncan delivered himself as follows: 
 
 " Yesterday I wass sitting on the bank of the 
 river, and I wass meditating, when a little boy 
 came and began to fish. He wass a pretty 
 boy, and I am judging wass fery well brought 
 up. He talked fery nicely to me, and had the 
 good manners. He had a fery nice little rod 
 in his hand, and he did not fling his line badly. 
 It wass fery pleasant to watch him. But it 
 wass a great peety that he had forgot to put 
 a hook on the end of the line, for I did not 
 notice that he caught many fish, but he wass 
 a fery nice boy, and I liked him fery much. 
 And it iss a great mercy that we are getting 
 
76 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 good weather for the harvest, for we are not 
 worthy of such goodness, with all our sins and 
 backslidings." 
 
 Then the minister knew that that candidate 
 would not get the parish, but Duncan was en- 
 titled to say that he had never mentioned the 
 candidate's name, or said a single word 
 against him. 
 
 It may seem, perhaps, that the range of hu- 
 mour in its various kinds is exhausted, and 
 that no distinctive form is left for Scotland; 
 in which case it would be the first time that 
 Scotland has not had her share in the division 
 of spoil. As a matter of fact, there is one hu- 
 mour that has not been touched, which may 
 not be the brightest, nor the subtlest, nor the 
 kindliest, but which is the strongest and most 
 telling of all. It is that humour which came 
 to a height in Old Testament Scripture, when 
 a Hebrew prophet set himself down to the 
 elaborate, merciless, unanswerable mockery of 
 idolatry. When he describes the idolater, re- 
 solving to add a new god to the furniture of 
 his house, and anxious, like an economical 
 man, that this new piece of furniture should 
 be an heirloom to his children, choosing a tree 
 that will not rot, making a contract with a 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 77 
 
 clever artisan in the god-making trades, and 
 then dropping in to see the progress of his 
 work, watching the wood measured off, the 
 workmen resting after their labour on the 
 hard material, the finishing of the thing, and 
 then the inaugural feast when he worships the 
 god that has been made out of a log, and cooks 
 the feast with the shavings which are over, so 
 that one part of the tree gives him his god and 
 the other his dinner. It is a humour which 
 scorches like flaming fire and bites like vitriol. 
 And to this humour the Scot has been heir 
 in modern literature and life. The Satires of 
 Horace and even of Juvenal pale before the 
 unlicensed ridicule of Sir David Lindsay of 
 the Mount before the Reformation, and one 
 cannot mention a history seasoned with such 
 contemptuous mockery as Knox's famous His- 
 tory of the Reformation in Scotland. Burns's 
 Holy Willie and Carlyle's Latter-day Pam- 
 phlets show how permanent and how virile is 
 this spirit of hot indignation and sombre sar- 
 casm in the genius of the Scots people. 
 
 It has been difficult for a Scot to forgive the 
 good-natured and superficial English hu- 
 morist who not only denied to the Northern 
 folk any sense of humour, but enshrined his 
 
78 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 charge in a too memorable surgical illustra- 
 tion ; but the Scot is much comforted with the 
 reflection that if he has not always arisen to 
 the play of simple jocosity or the jingle of a 
 pun, this has only been that he preferred hu- 
 mour of a severer and intellectual kind. The 
 Scots are a serious people, with an admirable 
 gravity of mind and a keen literary con- 
 science, and their nature does not allow them 
 to take humour so lightly and irresponsibly as 
 their Southern neighbours. If a jest calls at 
 an English door, and especially if he be 
 dressed with an obvious simplicity, then it re- 
 ceives a ready welcome, and if the walls of the 
 house be also extremely Southern the people 
 next door will know their neighbour has been 
 amused, and next day the worthy man will be 
 introducing his jest in public conveyances, 
 and even impressing it upon friends with his 
 thumb. It is impossible not to admire this 
 childlike simplicity of nature, this willingness 
 to be amused on easy terms, but it is not the 
 blame of the Scot that his brain is somewhat 
 more complicated and that his demands are 
 more exacting. When a jest calls at a Scot's 
 door, he is inclined to look out at the upper 
 window and to inquire if it be a jest at all ; but 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 79 
 
 if he is finally convinced that it is no pre- 
 tender, which may not be for f our-and-twenty 
 hours of careful examination, none will give 
 the visitor more hearty welcome. Even then 
 he may not laugh, but may indeed look more 
 serious than before; but surely, if there be a 
 sorrow too deep for tears, there may be a hu- 
 mour too high for laughter, and in the very 
 earnestness of the Scot's face under the enjoy- 
 ment of a joke you have a proof of the sincer- 
 ity of his tribute to humour. 
 
 If fun be a sense of the delightful comedy 
 of things, irony, the humour of the Scots, is 
 a sense of the underlying tragedy of things, of 
 the contradictions and mysteries of life, which 
 have in them a sad absurdity. It is the sport 
 of the immortals. From this irony he never 
 quite escapes, and his humour therefore can 
 never have the gay abandonment and rollick- 
 ing exuberance of Southern people, but will 
 always be somewhat austere and restrained, 
 and move in the shadow rather than in the 
 light. The helplessness of men in the hands 
 of Almighty and inscrutable powers is always 
 present to the Scots mind and is a check upon 
 gaiety. If in a thoughtless moment you con- 
 gratulate a Scots mother upon her child with 
 
80 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 some freedom of speech, saying, "What a 
 bonnie bairn that is," the anxious mother will 
 instantly reply, " Her face is well enough if 
 her heart was right, but for ony sake be quiet, 
 for there's no sayin' what may happen. I 
 never saw a height without a howe." There 
 is a phrase common on Scots tongues which 
 illuminates the background of the Scots mind, 
 and is not intended to be profane, because it 
 is felt to be true. Any extravagance of 
 speech or any permissible satisfaction with 
 success is called a tempting of providence. 
 The idea is that if we walk humbly and 
 quietly the unseen powers will leave us alone, 
 poor creatures of a day, but if we lift our little 
 heads and make a noise, the inclination to 
 strike us down will be irresistible. 
 
 No man comes off so well at a wedding as 
 an Englishman, but none is so ill at ease at a 
 funeral, while a Scotsman has no freedom at 
 a marriage, since he does not know how the 
 matter may end, but he carries himself as to 
 the manner born, with an admirable dignity 
 and gravity, at a funeral. If it be not a para- 
 dox to say it, he delights in funerals and counts 
 them one of the luxuries of life, for our 
 piquant sensations may be got from sorrow as 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 81 
 
 readily as from joy. Upon the ceremonies 
 and the regulations of funerals he is an author- 
 ity, and is both very learned and very sensi- 
 tive. 
 
 " Peter," says one mourner to his neighbour 
 at the tail of a walking funeral, " div ye see 
 Jamie Thompson walking in the front, side by 
 side wi' the chief mourner, and him no a drop 
 o' blood to the corpse? " 
 
 " Fine I see him, a forward, upsettin', am- 
 beetious body; he would be inside the hearse 
 if he could," — the most awful and therefore 
 most enviable position for a sober-minded 
 Scot. 
 
 According, therefore, to the Scots idea, it 
 is more profitable to go to a funeral than to a 
 wedding, and anything that would detract 
 from the chastened satisfaction of such an oc- 
 casion is deeply resented. And the following 
 conversation between a dying wife and her 
 husband would only be possible in Scot- 
 land: 
 
 " I've been a guid wife to you, John, a' thae 
 years." 
 
 " I'm no denyin', Jean, ye hev'na been a 
 waster. I'll admit ye hae been economical, 
 and verra attentive to the calves and hens," 
 
82 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 " Ye'll no refuse me, then, my last re- 
 quest? " 
 
 " I will'na, Jean, if it's reasonable, but will 
 hear it first," 
 
 " Well, my mither has taken a terrible no- 
 tion o' gaein' to the funeral, and I canaa get 
 her oflf it. Noo, John, will ye promise to hev 
 her wi' ye in the first coach? " 
 
 " Oh ! wooman, ask somethin' else. I 
 canna do that." 
 
 " But, John, I'll never ask onything else 
 o' ye. Ye micht pit up wi' her, juist for my 
 sake." 
 
 " Weel, Jean, if you put it that way, I sup- 
 pose I maun agree; but I tell you plainly, 
 ye've spoiled the pleasure of the day for me." 
 
 It is recorded in an ancient history that 
 there was once a heresy trial, when men were 
 going to be sentenced unto death for denying 
 the orthodox doctrine of the Mass ^ — well-liv- 
 ing men, but, no doubt, heretics. Before sen- 
 tence was passed one of the prisoners, who 
 had been wearied with many questions, 
 thought that he might in turn ask one of the 
 judges a question. " My Lord Bishop," he 
 said, " how many wives have you? " As his 
 Lordship should not have had one even, it 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 83 
 
 was a very searching question, and his Lord- 
 ship was not prepared with an answer, nor 
 were the other judges anxious to be questioned 
 on their domestic affairs. 
 
 There went up from the crowd, it is told, 
 a " sair lauch," as they thought of the bitter 
 mockery of the situation, that such judges 
 should be condemning harmless men, free- 
 born Scots also, mark you, to death for differ- 
 ing on a mystery no one could understand ; at 
 the moral and logical contradiction of 
 it all the spectators sent up their laugh to 
 Heaven. Not the genial, happy laugh of an 
 English crowd tickled by a bit of simple fun 
 from judge or bar, but the fierce raillery of 
 men insulted in reason and outraged in con- 
 science. The men who laughed were not to 
 be trifled with, and their Lordships judged 
 it best to let the prisoners go, that day at least, 
 for when the Scots mob, the most resolute and 
 dangerous to be found anjrwhere, begins to 
 laugh, it is time for tyrants to hide themselves 
 behind iron doors and the swords of armed 
 men, and even then neither they nor their 
 strongholds might be safe, for this laugh is 
 stronger than steel. 
 
 There is therefore no humour so dry and 
 
84 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 stringent, with such a bite upon the palate, as 
 that of Scotland, and it there be any bit of it 
 more grim than this, I should like to hear it. 
 An unhappy Scot was condemned to death, 
 after a careful trial, for the murder of his wife 
 under circumstances of considerable provoca- 
 tion, and the verdict was no doubt a just one. 
 There is something good, however, in every 
 man if you walk around him long enough to 
 find it, and his counsel was so much interested 
 in his client that he visited him in the con- 
 demned cell. 
 
 " There is no hope, Robertson, of a re- 
 prieve," said the advocate frankly, " and you 
 know you don't deserve it; but if there is any- 
 thing else I can do for you, just tell me." 
 
 " Well," said Robertson, " I count it very 
 friendly to give me a cry like this, and if ye 
 could get me one thing, I would feel easier 
 on the occasion " — which was a rather felici- 
 tous name for the coming function. " Could 
 ye get me ma Sabbath blacks? for I would like 
 to wear them." 
 
 " Well," said the advocate, " I daresay I 
 could. But what in the world, Robertson, do 
 you want to wear your Sabbath clothes for on 
 the . . . occasion?" 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 85 
 
 " I thought maybe you would see that for 
 yourself, sir. Just as a mark of respect for 
 the deceased." 
 
 But I should not wish to part with Scots 
 humour in such a sombre atmosphere as that 
 of my last illustration, and the following 
 is lighter, though still touched beneath the 
 surface with the sense of the awfulness of 
 life. 
 
 Among all the ministers of the Scots Kirk 
 perhaps the most characteristic of the last gen- 
 eration was Dr. Norman Macleod, the chap- 
 lain of Queen Victoria and the friend of every 
 person in Scotland. Working-men turned 
 to look at him as he went down the street, say- 
 ing one to another, "There goes Norman. 
 He's looking well the day." And when the 
 people strip off a man's title and call him 
 among themselves by his Christian name, then 
 his place is in the people's heart. 
 
 One day the minister of the next parish to 
 that of Dr. Macleod was sent for to see a 
 working-man who was dangerously ill. 
 After he had visited him in his bedroom, he 
 came into the kitchen to have some conversa- 
 tion with the man's wife. 
 
 " Your husband is very low. I hope he 
 
86 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 may be spared. I am afraid it's typhus 
 fever." 
 
 " Aye, aye," the wife replied, with mourn- 
 ful pride. " It's no ordinary trouble." 
 
 " I didn't know your husband's face, and I 
 didn't want to ask him questions. Do you 
 attend St. Luke's Church?" 
 
 " Na, na," with a fine flavour of contempt 
 both for St. Luke's and its minister; " we gang 
 to Norman's." 
 
 "Well, that's all right; you couldn't go to 
 a better. But why did you send for me? " 
 
 " Losh bless ye, sir! div ye think that we 
 wad risk Norman wi' typhus fever? " 
 
 Whether humour be grim or gay, there are 
 certain conditions by which it ought to be 
 bound in the judgment of all right-thinking 
 folk. It must not be profane, tearing down 
 with a clown's hand the veil which hides the 
 holiest of all in human life, and turning life's 
 great mystery into a petty comedy. It must 
 not be unclean, bringing the blush to the cheek 
 of modesty, or offending the taste of self-re- 
 specting people. It must not be cruel, put- 
 ting the simple to confusion or wounding 
 those who, through their disabilities, suffer 
 enough already. It must be used to brighten 
 the day and make us forget the tedium of the 
 
HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 87 
 
 journey; to give us a better understanding of 
 life and its infinite varieties ; gentle to chasten 
 innocent foolishness and sharply to rebuke 
 wilful evil-doing. Humour must also be kept 
 in its own place and not be allowed to rob 
 life of its seriousness or speech of its dignity ; 
 and we may all lay to heart the story with 
 which George Eliot concludes her timely es- 
 say on " Debasing the Moral Currency": — 
 " The Tirynthians, according to an ancient 
 story reported by Athenaeus, becoming con- 
 scious that their trick of laughter at every- 
 thing and nothing was making them unfit for 
 the conduct of serious affairs, appealed to the 
 Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The 
 god prescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice, 
 which would be effective if they could carry 
 it through without laughing. They did their 
 best, but the flimsy joke of a boy upset their 
 unaccustomed gravity, and in this way the 
 oracle taught them that even the gods could 
 not prescribe a quick cure for a long vitiation, 
 or give power and dignity to a people who, in 
 a crisis of the public well-being, were at the 
 mercy of a poor jest." 
 
ROBERT BURNS: THE VOICE OF 
 THE SCOTS PEOPLE 
 
ROBERT BURNS: THE VOICE OF 
 THE SCOTS PEOPLE 
 
 WHEN one writes on Robert Burns 
 with the hope of interesting Scots 
 people, one is embarrassed by this 
 double difficulty that the subject of this article 
 presents so many different points of interest, 
 and the audience to whom it is addressed is es- 
 sentially though justly critical. Both diffi- 
 culties point to the same solution, and assist a 
 writer in bringing his subject to a focus. I 
 do not, therefore, propose to discuss the tech- 
 nique of Burns's poetry, as, for instance, his 
 metres, or to go into the history of his poems, 
 as, for instance, tracing some of them in their 
 ballad form, or to assign him his place in gen- 
 eral literature, or to review the work which 
 he did in English verse and prose. I shall 
 confine myself to one point, and shall speak of 
 Burns as the outcome of the Scots spirit, as the 
 representative of Scots character, as the Lyric 
 Poet of Scots life, as being as nearly as pos- 
 sible the voice of the Scots people. Scotland 
 
 91 
 
92 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 both in her strength and in her tenderness, 
 Scotland with her virile virtues and her virile 
 faults, not the handful of people at the top of 
 society, not the refuse at the base, not the saints 
 of Scotland, not her rascals either, but the na- 
 tion, as the nation is, and the nation has done, 
 and the nation has felt, and the nation has suf- 
 fered, that Scotland speaks out in Burns. He 
 was with emphasis a Scotsman, and stands 
 more perfectly for Scotland than any other 
 writer of the first order. When he wanders 
 into English verse or into English letter writ- 
 ing, he is not himself. " These English songs 
 gravel me to death. I have not the command 
 of the language that I have of my native 
 tongue, in fact I think that my ideas are more 
 barren in English than in Scotch. I have 
 been at * Duncan Gray ' to dress it in English, 
 but all I can do is desperately stupid." Some 
 of his literary friends at one time advised him 
 to compose in English lest he should cut him- 
 self off from the larger public, but both Mr. 
 William Wallace, for whose admirable im- 
 partial life of Burns every Scotsman and 
 every reading man should be most thankful, 
 and Matthew Arnold, for whose estimate of 
 
ROBERT BURNS 93 
 
 Burns Scotsmen at least are not quite so grate- 
 ful, both agree that in the English poems we 
 have not the real Burns. The real Burns is 
 the Burns who speaks the Scots dialect. 
 
 For the first feature in Burns which one 
 faces is the hardness of his life from beginning 
 to end. " Scarcely ever," says M. Taine, 
 " was seen together more of misery and of tal- 
 ent. He was born January 1759, amid the 
 hoar-frost of a Scottish winter, in a cottage of 
 clay built by his father, a poor farmer of Ayr- 
 shire — a sad condition, a sad country, a sad 
 lot. It is hard to be born in Scotland, it is so 
 cold there," concludes the Frenchman. 
 Well, it has been bracing cold and has made 
 strong men, but one may sadly admit it was a 
 cold country for Burns ; from his birth to his 
 death he might be said to have lived and died 
 in hoar-frost. One inevitably places Burns 
 side by side with Scott, because the two com- 
 pletely represent Scotland upon all her sides 
 and through all her traditions. Scott is pos^ 
 sibly the finest character Scotland has ever 
 produced, a gentleman without reproach and 
 full of charity, and to him Tennyson paid a 
 just tribute — 
 
94 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 " Oh ! great and gallant Scott, 
 
 True gentleman, heart, blood, and bone, 
 I would it had been my lot 
 To have seen thee and heard thee and known." 
 
 Before Scott died he suffered cruelly and 
 through suffering came to his height; but 
 Scott belonged to the class which is largely 
 shielded from hardship : he was not born into 
 the lot of the common people, and did not 
 taste of their cup. That cup Burns drank to 
 its dregs. The difference between English 
 and Scots character may be referred among 
 other causes to the bitter struggle which the 
 Scots race have had with their soil and with 
 their climate. Mr. Benjamin Swift says, 
 " The Scotsman expects the worst, even from 
 God . . .," while " the Englishman sees 
 no reason for doubting that the Union Jack 
 is flying at the gates of heaven." Whatever 
 was arduous in life or in religion Burns ex- 
 perienced, as he toiled six days of the week 
 and heard " black Jock Russel " thundering 
 eternal woe on the seventh. He was brought 
 up in a home where the wolf was ever at the 
 door; he served as a ploughman in his early 
 years; he was unsuccessful as a farmer; he 
 had finally a poorly paid post in the Excise; 
 
ROBERT BURNS 95 
 
 he never knew the meaning of ease; at one 
 time it seemed likely that he would have to 
 emigrate; he had frequently to borrow from 
 his friends ; he was afraid lest his body should 
 be seized for debt, and after his death a sub- 
 scription was raised for his wife and children. 
 He suffered at the hands of his father, whose 
 nature was soured by adversity; and he was 
 insulted by his future father-in-law, who did 
 not judge him worthy of his daughter. He 
 was disappointed of posts he wished to obtain, 
 and he was badly treated by people who 
 ought to have been kind to him. There was 
 hardly any care or humiliation of common 
 life which he did not share, and his life was 
 one long toil from beginning to end, redeemed 
 only by the affection of his wife and the loy- 
 alty of a few friends. When Scott visited 
 Ireland in his old age a woman begged alms 
 of him, and when he did not immediately re- 
 spond she made this plea, " I'm an ould strug- 
 gler," whereupon Scott turned. " An ould 
 struggler," he said, " and so am I." 
 
 Burns did not live to be old; he was worn 
 out soon as many poets have been, but 
 throughout his seven- an d-thirty years he was 
 a struggler. He had just one pure satisfac- 
 
m BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 tion and that was his work, the inspiration of 
 his soul, and he has described his own battle 
 and his own victory. 
 
 " Now Robin lies in his last lair, 
 He'll gabble rhyme, nor sing nae mair, 
 Cauld poverty, wi' hungry stare, 
 
 Nae mair shall fear him: 
 Nor anxious fear, nor cankert care, 
 
 E'er mair come near him. 
 
 To tell the truth, they seldom fash't him, 
 Except the moment that they crush't him; 
 For sune as chance or fate has hush't 'em, 
 
 Tho' e'er sae short. 
 Then wi' a rhyme or sang he lash't 'em. 
 
 And thought it sport. 
 
 Tho' he was bred to kintra wark. 
 
 And counted was baith wight and stark. 
 
 Yet that was never Robin's mark 
 
 To mak a man; 
 But tell him he was learn'd and dark. 
 
 Ye roos'd him than ! " 
 
 Akin to the severity of Burns's circum- 
 stances was the virility of his character. It 
 has not been for nothing that the thistle was 
 assigned to Scotland as her national emblem 
 and the rose to England, for through all their 
 
ROBERT BURNS 97 
 
 history the Scots people have been proud of 
 their independence, jealous of every neigh- 
 bour, rooted in their own ways, and difficult 
 to coerce either in politics or religion. If 
 they fought within their Kirk — and the Cal- 
 vinists and Arminians certainly fought hard in 
 Burns's day — they fought also for their Kirk 
 and their Kirk for them. If they had some 
 internal feuds in Scotland, they joined to- 
 gether almost as one man against their " auld 
 enemie," England. The Scots have been a 
 democratic people, and Burns is the poet of 
 democracy. There are two perfect war pieces 
 in existence, and in both the note is resistance 
 to tyranny and the victory of liberty. They 
 are not the jingoism of militarism, or the rant 
 of the pot-house, they are the song of patriot- 
 ism; one is "The Marseillaise," which cele- 
 brated the deliverance of France from cruel 
 and foul oppression tinder which neither the 
 honour of a woman if she were poor nor the 
 life of a man if he were a peasant was safe at 
 the hands of the nobles, and the other is that 
 war piece which Burns composed in a thun- 
 derstorm, and which stirs the blood like the 
 sound of pealing trumpets, " Scots, wha hae 
 wi' Wallace bled." Burns was not an an- 
 
98 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 archist desiring to destroy the foundations of 
 society, else he had not represented an orderly 
 and law-abiding people, neither was he a 
 cringing sycophant trembling before men of 
 high estate. He believed that every man had a 
 right to live and to think for himself, and that 
 the standard of judgment must be not gold 
 and silver, not titles and privileges, but mind 
 and character, or as Burns calls them, sense 
 and worth, and the very heart of the strong 
 Scots folk beats in these verses — 
 
 " A prince can mak a belted knight, 
 
 A marquis, duke, and a' that; 
 But an honest man's aboon his might, 
 
 Gude faith, he mauna fa' that! 
 For a' that, an' a' that, 
 
 Their dignities an' a' that; 
 The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, 
 
 Are higher rank than a' that. 
 
 Then let us pray, that come it may, 
 
 (As come it will for a' that,) 
 That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth. 
 
 Shall bear the gree, an' a' that. 
 For a' that, an' a' that, 
 
 It's comin' yet, for a' that, 
 That Man to Man, the world o'er, 
 
 Shall brothers be for a' that." 
 
ROBERT BURNS 99 
 
 Tyranny for Burns was embodied and local- 
 ised in the factor, who has possibly been more 
 detested in Scots country life than either Laird 
 or Lord or any other ruler. Burns never for- 
 got the threatening and insolent epistles which 
 his father used to receive from what he calls 
 the Scoundrel Tyrant, and which Burns de- 
 clares used to reduce the family to tears. He 
 was living then by himself in " the cheerless 
 gloom of a hermit with the unceasing toil of a 
 galley slave," and the " curse was clenched " 
 by the hard hand of the factor. One under- 
 stands what gave the spirit to " Scots wha 
 hae " and " A man's a man for a' that." Burns 
 is thinkifig of the humiliation and helplessness 
 of a small farmer's home when the hand of 
 the factor descends, and I do not know that 
 the bitterness of the Scots heart when the coun- 
 tryman is trembling for his home before the 
 local tyrant has ever been better described than 
 in one verse of " The Twa Dogs " — 
 
 " I've notic'd, on our laird's court-day, — 
 An' mony a time my heart's been wae, — 
 Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash, 
 How they maun thole a factor's snash; 
 He'll stamp an' threaten, curse an' swear 
 He'll apprehend them, poind their gear; 
 
100 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 While they maun stan', wi' aspect humble, 
 An' hear it a', an' fear an' tremble ! " 
 
 One cannot read the story of the elder Burns's 
 life, or Burns's own just protest against rural 
 tyranny, without praying that the day may 
 soon come when it will not be in the power 
 of any man to close fifty homes at his will on 
 a country side and drive forth fifty families of 
 healthy, contented, loyal. God-fearing people, 
 that the land be turned into a place of sport, 
 and let for the amusement of some rich alien. 
 There will never be perfect freedom in the 
 land till the people be rooted on the soil, and 
 the glens and straths of the land which God 
 has given unto the nation for a heritage be 
 studded with homes filled with country folk, 
 
 " wonderfu' contented, 
 An' buirdly chiels, an' clever hizzies." 
 
 The Jacobitism of Burns, which appears in 
 some of his most agreeable poems, such as 
 *',Wha hae we gotten for a king, but a wee 
 bit German lairdie," and " It was a' for our 
 rightfu' king," is due partly to his heredity, 
 since his people seem to have been out in the 
 Fifteen, but partly of variant on the stern 
 
ROBERT BURNS 101 
 
 and ineradicable independence of the Scots 
 people. The Scots are logical in their the- 
 ology and, although this may seem a paradox, 
 logical in their politics, for they fought the 
 Stuarts when they were in power, and then 
 they fought for them when they were in exile. 
 They could not abide either home tyranny or 
 alien tyranny, and being a romantic people 
 also, the most romantic royal house in history 
 appealed to their imagination much more than 
 the Hanoverian Georges. And Burns there- 
 fore felt no inconsistency in singing the praises 
 of the Stuarts in one poem and celebrating the 
 spirit of the French Revolution in the next. 
 
 Burns is distinguished even among poets 
 by the breadth and depth of his sympathy, 
 which indeed has no limits and no reserves. 
 It has not been given to many to have a range 
 which includes the " Cotter's Saturday 
 Night," wherein Bums celebrates the excel- 
 lence of simple family life — 
 
 " To make a happy fireside clime 
 To weans and wife, 
 That's the trae pathos and suhlime 
 Of human life " — 
 
 and " The Jolly Beggars," wherein he sings 
 
102 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 with utter abandonment the joys of Bohemian 
 life. Whatever is human appeals to Burns as 
 it did to Shakespeare, and therefore he num- 
 bers his clients among all classes, Puritans and 
 Cavaliers, strict livers and free livers together. 
 In the simple annals of the poor there never 
 has been painted a kindlier or purer interior 
 than that poem whose model is " The Farmer's 
 Ingle," by Fergusson, where the priest of the 
 family offers the evening prayer to God — 
 
 "The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, 
 
 They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; 
 The sire turns o'er, with patriarchal grace. 
 
 The big ha'-bible, ance his father's pride; 
 
 His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside. 
 His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare: 
 
 Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide. 
 He wales a portion with judicious care ; 
 And ' Let us worship God ! ' he says with solemn air." 
 
 And truly this is the highest side of Scots 
 life — 
 
 " From scenes like these, old Scotia's grandeur springs, 
 That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad: 
 Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 
 ' An honest man's the noblest work of God.' " 
 
 It was a genuine and sincere Burns who wrote 
 
ROBERT BURNS 103 
 
 those words, and in writing them he celebrated 
 one of the high virtues of his people. It was 
 also the same Burns expressing himself who 
 described that other interior in Poosie-Nan- 
 sie's lodging-house, where the vagabonds, 
 male and female, are gathered at their supper. 
 In this poem Burns lets himself go, and there 
 is no question he goes at a rattling pace. Many 
 have considered " The Jolly Beggars " the 
 strongest thing which Burns ever did, and it 
 were difficult to mention a piece with such an 
 irresistible swing and so much unreserved 
 sympathy with unredeemed humanity. Upon 
 this piece Matthew Arnold's balanced criti- 
 cism may be accepted. In " The Jolly Beg- 
 gars " there is more than hideousness and 
 squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a 
 superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, 
 and power which make the famous scene in 
 " Auerbach's Cellar " of Goethe's Faust seem 
 artificial and tame beside it, and which are 
 only matched by Shakespeare and Aristoph- 
 anes — 
 
 " A fig for those by law protected ! 
 Liberty's a glorious feast! 
 Courts for cowards were erected, 
 Churches built to please the priest. 
 
104 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 Life IS all a variorum, 
 
 We regard not how it goes; 
 Let them cant about decorum, 
 
 Who have characters to lose." 
 
 This one also knows is a side of life, even in 
 the Scotland of the Covenanters, 
 
 With nature in her every phase Burns's soul 
 kept tune. With the daisy turned over by 
 the plough on an April day, 
 
 "Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r," 
 
 in whose doom he sees the fate of an artless 
 maid by love's simplicity betrayed, and the 
 fate of a simple bard, 
 
 " On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd ! " 
 
 He feels for the field-mouse, whose little nest 
 had been turned up by the plough, 
 
 " Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie " ; 
 
 and again he moralises in words better known 
 than the perfect little poem itself — 
 
 " But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, 
 In proving foresight may be vain; 
 
ROBERT BURNS 105 
 
 The best-laid schemes o' mice and men 
 
 Gang aft agley, 
 An* lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, 
 
 For promis'd joy! " 
 
 And he is furious as a wounded hare limps 
 by which a fellow had shot -=• 
 
 " Go live, poor wand'rer of the wood and field, 
 The bitter little that of life remains." 
 
 He will write good-humouredly of a crea- 
 ture which is not named in polite society, but 
 which he detected airing itself upon a young 
 lady's bonnet in the kirk, and he points the 
 moral which is often quoted by pec pie who do 
 not know the subject of the poem — 
 
 " O wad some power the giftie gie us 
 To see oursels as ithers see us ! 
 It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 
 
 An' foolish notion: 
 What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us. 
 
 An' ev'n devotion ! " 
 
 He has a kindly thought for saints and sinners, 
 for beasts and men, for vermin and for out- 
 casts, for witches, and even the enemy of us 
 all is not outside his charity. And I will not 
 
106 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 say that Burns has not stirred an unconfessed 
 echo in certain hearts with a last verse of his 
 " Address to the Deil "— 
 
 " But fare-you-weel, auld * Nickie-ben ' ! 
 O wad ye tak a thought an' men' ! 
 Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — 
 
 Still hae a stake: 
 I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 
 
 Ev'n for your sake ! " 
 
 His sympathy with the wounded and the 
 helpless was quite consistent with his merci- 
 less satire of unreality and hypocrisy, and 
 therein he was a true Scot, for irony is the 
 characteristic form of Scots humour. One 
 can taste it in the poets before the Reforma- 
 tion, like Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, in 
 Knox's History of the Reformation, and in 
 modern days in Thomas Carlyle. The fla- 
 vour is not wanting in Stevenson and Barrie, 
 but there is only a faint suggestion in Scott, as 
 for instance in that pious smuggling merchant 
 of Redgauntlet. It is a pronounced and ap- 
 petising trait in Scots literature, and survives 
 pleasantly in a distinguished Edinburgh news- 
 paper, which every Scotsman away from home 
 reads with the greater relish because it has in 
 
ROBERT BURNS 107 
 
 its columns a breath of the snell east wind. 
 Whether it be Lindsay or Burns, the subject 
 of satire in Scots letters is almost always the 
 Kirk, and this is not because the Scots are ir- 
 religious, or because the Kirk has been alien, 
 but very largely because the Kirk has played 
 such a part in the history of Scotland. The 
 nation and the Kirk have been one, and the 
 history of the people has been largely shaped 
 by the Kirk; she has been a guardian of Scots 
 liberty in many a crisis, but she has also been 
 a very severe nurse of her children. The 
 Kirk and Burns had their own special quarrel 
 in which no one can justify the conduct of 
 Burns, and it may be admitted that the Kirk 
 was not very wise in her treatment of him. 
 Apart, however, from any provocation which 
 he gave to the guardian of morals in the land, 
 the Kirk in the eighteenth century, or perhaps 
 one may say conventional religion, presented 
 two vulnerable points which a satirist could 
 not resist attacking. Hypocrisy in its ele- 
 mentary sense of the double life had been 
 raised to the level of genius, when a man like 
 Lord Grange spent days in affecting exercises 
 of penitence before the sacrament, and other 
 days in immoral orgies. An extreme Calvin- 
 
108 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 ism was also preached which was an offence 
 both to the reason and to the conscience, and 
 one can easily trace the connection between the 
 high doctrine and the low morals, since many 
 were convinced that, as they were the elect of 
 God's purpose, they could do as they pleased 
 with His commandments. This was the na- 
 tional scandal which Burns pilloried in his 
 " Address to the Unco Guid," and his descrip- 
 tion of the " Holy Fair," which was said to 
 have been drawn to the life, and in the most 
 biting piece that came from his pen, where 
 indeed the parchment was the flesh of a man, 
 "Holy Willie's Prayer." Rabbi Duncan 
 used to say that there was only one heresy, and 
 that was Antinomianism, which really means 
 that if a man holds the right creed he may live 
 any kind of life, and this destructive delusion 
 was never scarified in literature with such final 
 success as in the prayer offered by the sancti- 
 monious and evil living Ayrshire elder. 
 
 Antinomianism is pierced through the heart 
 as with a dart when this worthless wretch lifts 
 up his voice in all confidence — 
 
 " O Thou, who in the heavens does dwell, 
 Who, as it pleases best Thysel', 
 Sends ane to heaven an' ten to hell, 
 
ROBERT BURNS 109 
 
 A' for Thy glory, 
 And no for ony guid or ill 
 
 They've done afore Thee! 
 
 I bless and praise Thy matchless might, 
 When thousands Thou hast left in night. 
 That I am here afore Thy sight, 
 
 For gifts an' grace 
 A burning and a shining light 
 
 To a' this place." 
 
 With this severity there has always gone in 
 Scots character an underlying tenderness, and 
 one makes bold to say that Strong as Burns was 
 in that fierce satire which played like a flame 
 of fire round the moral faults of his people, he 
 came to his height not in bitterness but in kind- 
 hess, not in comedy but in pathos. Matthew 
 Arnold, with all his fine insight, made several 
 memorable mistakes in criticism, and I think 
 he was not perfectly just in his treatment of 
 Burns. He gives him a high place, allowing 
 that although his " world of Scotch drink, 
 Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against 
 a poet," while the world of Chaucer is fairer, 
 richer, more significant than that of the Ayr- 
 shire poet, yet Burns " is by far the greater 
 force." He insists, however, that Burns is 
 
110 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 wanting in that note of high seriousness which 
 is the infallible mark of the great classics. 
 Arnold admits that Burns is not deficient in 
 the sense of the tears of things, and one would 
 hold that he has established his place among 
 those who have worthily and poignantly de- 
 picted the tragedy of life in " Ae Fond Kiss, 
 and then we sever," for has the vain regret 
 ever been so perfectly expressed as in these 
 lines — 
 
 " Had we never lov'd sae kindly, 
 Had we never lov'd sae blindly, 
 Never met, or never parted. 
 We had ne'er been broken-hearted " — 
 
 or in " Auld Lang Syne," especially in the 
 two verses — 
 
 " We twa hae run about the braes, 
 And pu'd the gowans fine; 
 But we've wander'd mony a weary foot 
 Sin auld lang syne. 
 
 We twa hae paidl'd i' the burn. 
 
 From mornin' sun till dine; 
 But seas between us braid hae roar'd 
 
 Sin auld lang syne." 
 
 It seems to me that in another poem which it is 
 true Burns did not so much create as adapt, 
 
ROBERT BURNS 111 
 
 and which is much less widely known, Burns 
 comes quite as near to the heart of things as 
 any man who ever wrote, and I think it is 
 worth full quotation ^-^ 
 
 " It was a' for our rightfu' King 
 We left fair Scotland's strand ; 
 It was a' for our rightfu' King 
 We e'er saw Irish land, 
 My dear; 
 We e'er saw Irish land. 
 
 Now a' is done that men can do, 
 
 And a' is done in vain ; 
 My love and native land fareweel, 
 
 For I maun cross the main, 
 My dear; 
 
 For I maun cross the main. 
 
 He turn'd him right and round about 
 
 Upon the Irish shore; 
 And gae his bridle-reins a shake. 
 
 With adieu for evermore. 
 My dear; 
 
 With adieu for evermore. 
 
 The soger f rae the wars returns. 
 
 The sailor frae the main; 
 But I hae parted frae my love, 
 
 Never to meet again. 
 
 My dear; 
 
 Never to meet again. 
 
112 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 When day is gane, and night is come, 
 
 And a' folk bound to sleep; 
 I think on him that's far awa', 
 
 The lee-lang night and weep, 
 My dear; 
 
 The lee-lang night and weep." 
 
 Matthew Arnold, in spite of certain disabili- 
 ties for the criticism of Burns, has done him 
 on the whole so much justice that it may seem 
 ungrateful to complain, but one must insist 
 that if sincerity be the criterion of classical 
 poetry, Burns is not wanting. 
 
 Here one is tempted to turn aside from the 
 main road and make a brief comparison be- 
 tween Burns and that English poet who es- 
 sayed the same task, and who owed himself so 
 much to Burns. Wordsworth set himself to 
 sing, " Of joy in widest commonalty spread," 
 and he certainly has dealt with common life 
 simply. There are those who object to poetry 
 being mixed up with philosophy and on that 
 account disparage Wordsworth, and there are 
 those who profess themselves unable to dis- 
 tinguish his poetry from prose, and who per- 
 mit themselves to make play with Words- 
 worth. On the other hand, a select number of 
 fine minds, fine perhaps rather than strong, 
 
ROBERT BURNS 113 
 
 Have always taken Wordsworth for a prophet, 
 and one critic firmly believes that the poetical 
 performance of Wordsworth is, " after that of 
 Shakespeare, the most considerable in our lan- 
 guagie from the Elizabethan age to the present 
 time." 
 
 Both Burns and Wordsworth dealt with 
 country life, both wrote plainly, both pointed 
 their moral, both had their message, and one 
 need not ask which is the greater — it is 
 enough for us to note the difference of tem- 
 perament. Wordsworth's gentle meditative 
 verse is like a garden lake with goldfish swim- 
 ming in it, Burns's strong stirring lines like 
 the mountain torrent carrying everything be- 
 fore it. Wordsworth is a pleasure ground 
 with simple flowers laid out in beds, but 
 Burns is the mountain side with the billows of 
 purple heather. One cannot forget that when 
 Burns met Scott, who was only then a lad, the 
 poet discerned coming greatness in him, and 
 laying his hand upon his head conveyed to 
 him the grace of literary succession. When 
 Wordsworth visited Scott he received with 
 much complacency Scott's generous tributes, 
 but had not the heart to make any return. 
 [And when Scott went out upon one of his 
 
114 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 rambles, Wordsworth remained in the house 
 in order to listen to the reading of his own 
 poems. Each poet has had his own reward; 
 Wordsworth's mission has been to an esoteric 
 circle of self-conscious cultured people and 
 anaemic ecclesiastics, while Burns has been the 
 poet of the people, and with his verse so arch, 
 so winsome, so tender, so merry, has thrust a 
 song into the mouth of the man who holds the 
 plough and the woman who milks the cow. 
 No nation has such love-songs as Burns has 
 given Scotland in " My luve's like a red, red 
 rose," " The rigs o' barley," " Green grow the 
 rashes, Ol " " O whistle and I'll come to ye, 
 my lad," " Comin' thro' the rye," besides 
 many more, or such songs of pathos as " To 
 Mary in Heaven," " Ye banks and braes o' 
 bonnie Doon," " John Anderson, my Jo," and 
 " Auld Lang Syne." It is his glory and his 
 claim upon national gratitude that he has made 
 a proud and reserved people articulate, and 
 has taught them to sing their loves and their 
 wars in lines which have few rivals in the 
 lyric poetry of the world. 
 
 When one is celebrating Burns, and espe- 
 cially when touching on his love-songs, one 
 remembers Lord Rosebery's words concerning 
 
ROBERT BURNS 115 
 
 " the eternal controversy which no didactic 
 oil will ever assuage, as to Burns's private life 
 and morality." There are those who have 
 done their best to minimise his faults, and I 
 sympathise with the pious effort of Mr. Wil- 
 liam Wallace in that direction, and there are 
 those who dwell upon his faults with gusto, 
 and that is why one resents certain passages in 
 the appreciation of Burns which concludes the 
 very scholarly edition of Henley and Hender- 
 son. Why should Burns be specially selected 
 for the pillory while the sins of other famous 
 men are passed over? 
 
 This is a question which Lord Rosebery 
 very justly asks, but which he does not answerl 
 Probably the causes for this unwelcome dis- 
 cussion are, the close connection between 
 Burns's poetry and his life, his poetry por- 
 traying its most deplorable passages in auto- 
 biography; and the other reason is that the 
 Scots Kirk was in the eighteenth century a 
 severe censor of morals, and Burns was not 
 able to sin in private. There never were such 
 Pharisees as in that century, and therefore 
 there never was a more bold Bohemian than 
 Burns. One does not wish to linger on the 
 subject, but I would offer with diffidence two 
 
116 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 remarks, certainly not by way of apology for 
 evil living, but in order to place Burns's char- 
 acter in its right light. We cannot apply the 
 same standard of judgment to every man, we 
 must make some allowance for temperament, 
 and especially for the rich and hot blood of 
 poets from David to Burns. It would have 
 been better without doubt for the world, for 
 Jerusalem long ago, and for Ayrshire in the 
 eighteenth century, if those two poets had been 
 men of cold nature and prim respectability. 
 They would not have sinned and they would 
 not have suffered, and it is likely that they 
 would not have written their masterpieces. 
 Concerning their sinning one is inclined to 
 quote the saying of a great Church Father re- 
 garding the fall of man, " O beata culpa." 
 The passion which sent Burns into the far 
 country opened his mouth in song, which is 
 one of the arresting paradoxes of human na- 
 ture. 
 
 One also would like to remind the public 
 that Burns was not a sheer Bohemian, and 
 to protest against the idea that unredeemed 
 profligacy is a necessary condition of literary 
 work. He was not a Scots Verlaine whose 
 life was one course of foul living, abject pau- 
 
ROBERT BURNS 117 
 
 perism, and occasional crime, varied by fits of 
 remorse and a fine play of genius. Burns 
 worked hard both in youth and manhood, he 
 celebrated in undying verse the foolishness of 
 sin and the virtues of domestic life. Amid a 
 conflict of temptation he married Jean Ar- 
 mour, and was on the whole a kind husband 
 to her, and a good father to his children. The 
 faults of his early youth were many, and he 
 never was a model of flawless perfection, but 
 he was true to the great tradition of Scotland 
 in magnifying the home, and his own home 
 he dearly loved. 
 
 When one tries to estimate Burns's place, 
 not in general literature, which is beyond the 
 scope of this article, but in the Scots depart- 
 ment, he has to guard against two ensnaring 
 tendencies. One is so to emphasise his origi- 
 nality as to leave him a solitary phenomenon 
 — an Ayrshire ploughman who by miraculous 
 inspiration suddenly opened his mouth and 
 burst into undying song, a Melchizedec in lit- 
 erature without father or mother, beginning 
 or end of days. The other is to treat him as 
 simply a ballad improver taking old Scots 
 verses and setting them in order. In fact 
 there is no man without an ancestry and few 
 
118 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 are without descendants. No great poet has 
 ever been the echo of other people, and yet 
 no great poet could detach himself from the 
 past. Burns was, in the genuine sense of the 
 Scots word for poet, " a maker." He 
 brought a mind of singular freshness and a 
 genius of marked individuality to his work. 
 It is also true that there stretched behind him 
 a line of Scots poets, writing in a dialect 
 which connects them with Chaucer. Burns 
 had his distant ancestry in Lindsay, 
 Montgomery, and Dunbar, and his nearer 
 forebears in Sempill, Allan Ramsay, and poor 
 unfortunate Robert Fergusson, whose grave 
 Burns watered with tears, and whose tomb he 
 built. Many of Burns's finest poems are 
 based on ballads which passed from mouth to 
 mouth among the Scots people, just as Shake- 
 speare obtained the plots of his plays from 
 many quarters, and Chaucer reproduces Boc- 
 caccio, while that great Italian was himself 
 only a collector. As Burns has been justly 
 censured for the coarseness of certain verses, 
 let it be never forgotten that every ancient 
 ballad which he touched he purified, so that 
 much Scots song which otherwise would have 
 to-day been buried out of sight, having passed 
 
ROBERT BURNS 119 
 
 through (Burns's hands like tainted water 
 through a gravel bed, has flowed in purity 
 into the main stream of literature. When 
 Burns began to write, Scots literature was 
 dead, for the brilliant Edinburgh school, 
 Hume the philosopher, and Robertson the his- 
 torian, and Blair the critic, were not writers of 
 Scots literature, but Scotsmen in English lit- 
 erature. Burns was the heir of the national 
 tradition, and he also was its climax. Per- 
 haps there one must correct himself: he relit 
 the torch of vernacular speech, and he passed 
 it on to Scott, ordained by Burns as his suc- 
 cessor. 
 
 One may never forget Burns's visit to Edin- 
 burgh, which is always a superior city, but 
 was then to the last degree high and mighty. 
 I do not say that Edinburgh treated Burns 
 badly, for it showed him much kindness, and I 
 do not say that Burns did not impress Edin- 
 burgh, for people never forgot his eyes, which 
 glowed like coals of fire, and men like Dugald 
 Stewart were enthusiastic about his conversa- 
 tion. But one is immensely tickled by the at- 
 titude of the Edinburgh critics to the Ayr- 
 shire poet, which was one of good-natured pat- 
 ronage. Dr. Hugh Blair, whose chief effort 
 
120 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 in criticism was affirming the authenticity of 
 Macpherson's Ossian, and who was a figure of 
 self-satisfied gentility, wrote a letter to Burns, 
 which is altogether delightful, on the poet's 
 return to Ayrshire. "You are now, I pre- 
 sume," says the old gentleman, " to retire to a 
 more private walk of life, and I trust will con- 
 duct yourself there with industry, prudence, 
 and honour. In the midst of those employ- 
 ments which your situation will render proper, 
 you will not, I hope, neglect to promote pub- 
 lic esteem by cultivating your genius." And 
 so on, concerning which one can only remark, 
 that the idea of Dr. Blair patting Burns on the 
 back is prodigious. 
 
 One is much interested in hearing Burns 
 upon Blair. " In my opinion," says the poet, 
 " Dr. Blair is merely an astonishing proof of 
 what industry and application can do ; he has 
 a heart not of the finest water, but far from be- 
 ing an ordinary one; in short, he is a truly 
 worthy and most respectable character." Ad- 
 mirable! That was just Dr. Blair — " a most 
 respectable character " ; and when it is remem- 
 bered that Blair, besides many lucrative posts, 
 such as minister of the High Kirk and Pro- 
 fessor of Rhetoric in the University of Edin- 
 
ROBERT BURNS 121 
 
 burgh, enjoyed a pension of £200 per year for 
 his literary attainments, one wishes that Robert 
 Burns had been as kindly treated. Poetry is 
 not reckoned a remunerative form of litera- 
 ture, and true poets are themselves rare. Why 
 should any poet like Burns be left to toil and 
 starve? One would not like to think of Burns 
 as a poet laureate, a kind of higher servant at- 
 tached to a palace, who comes at the summons 
 of a bell, and takes directions about an ode on a 
 birth or a marriage, but one would have been 
 thankful if Pitt, who, as Lord Rosebery points 
 out, passed on Burns " one of his rare and 
 competent literary judgments," had placed the 
 Scots poet beyond the reach of want, and since 
 it was his lot to die young, had at least secured 
 that Burns should have peace in his last days. 
 But there is a just fate, and Blair had his 
 good things in his own day and is now unread. 
 Burns tasted little else but misery and now 
 has come into his kingdom. " Don't be 
 afraid," Burns said to his wife, " I'll be more 
 respected a hundred years after I am dead 
 than I am at present." The hundred years 
 have more than passed, and Burns's hope has 
 been more than fulfilled. While he lived 
 Scotland had begun to love her chief poet. 
 
122 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 and now there is none born of woman, in her 
 long history, whom Scotland loves more 
 dearly, for Robert Burns was bone of her bone 
 and flesh of her flesh. He shared the lot of 
 the people to its last grain in his labours, his 
 sufferings, his sorrows, his sins. He has told 
 what the people think and feel, and love and 
 hate. An imperfect man, a sinning and fool- 
 ish man if you please, but one of the twelve 
 great poets of the human race, and in every 
 drop of his blood, and in every turn of his 
 thought, the poet of Scotland. We remem- 
 ber the joy he has brought to our lives, and the 
 expression he has given to our sorrow. We 
 remember how he stirs us as no other voice in 
 poetry. And for the rest of it, to quote a 
 passage of wise charity from a delightful book 
 of letters published within recent years, " the 
 most wholesome attitude is to be grateful for 
 what in the way of work, of precept, of ex- 
 ample these men achieved, and to leave the 
 mystery of their faults to their Maker in the 
 noble spirit of Gray's ' Elegy ' — 
 
 ' No farther seek his merits to disclose, 
 
 Or draw his frailties from their dread abode 
 
 (There they alike in trembling hope repose), 
 The bosom of his Father and his God.' " 
 
ROBERT BURNS 123 
 
 Burns himself was ever anticipating his trial 
 at the bar of human judgment, and he made 
 his own irresistible plea for frail mortal man 
 in the immortal words — 
 
 " Then gently scan your brother Man, 
 
 Still gentler sister Woman; 
 Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang, 
 
 To step aside is human: 
 One point must still be greatly dark, 
 
 The moving why they do it; 
 And just as lamely can ye mark, 
 
 How far perhaps they rue it." 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 ENGLISH literature, with all its wealth 
 of genius, does not afford another body 
 of fiction so wide in its historical range, 
 so varied in its types of character, so genial in 
 its humanity as the series of romances which 
 will be known while our speech lasts by the 
 felicitous title of the Waverley Novels — 
 felicitous not merely because it is a good- 
 sounding word, but because in Waverley Scott 
 struck the characteristic note of his fiction. 
 From Waverley, which appeared on the 7th 
 July 18 14, with an impression of one thousand 
 copies, to Castle Dangerous, which was pub- 
 lished at the close of November 1831, with 
 an introduction sent from Naples in February 
 1832, was a period of seventeen years and 
 twenty-seven books. Some of them were 
 written at white heat, the last two volumes of 
 Waverley in three weeks ; some of them were 
 written in agonising pain, as, for instance, The 
 Bride of Lammermoor; many were written to 
 pay a debt of honour. After the Fair Maid 
 
 187 
 
128 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 of Perth the first French critic of our day 
 considers a rapid decline and symptoms of 
 exhaustion were observed, and the same 
 writer believes that in dying Sir Walter had 
 not taken with him any great unfinished idea. 
 " He had said enough for his glory and our 
 delight . . . for the whole civilised 
 world, a generous wizard and a kindly bene- 
 factor." From Count Robert of Paris, 
 which is cast in the decadence of the Byzan- 
 tine period — " the tame worn-out civilisation 
 of those European Chinese" — and was a 
 burden which poor Scott's now " staggering 
 penmanship " could not carry, to St. Ronan's 
 Well, which was contemporary with himself, 
 embraces seven centuries. To the age of 
 chivalry belong The Betrothed, The Talis- 
 man, and Ivanhoe. The fourteenth century 
 has the Fair Maid of Perth, and the fifteenth 
 is represented by Quentin Durward. To the 
 sixteenth century are assigned The Abbot and 
 The Monastery and Kenilworth, while the 
 seventeenth lives before us in Woodstock and 
 Peveril of the Peak for England and Old 
 Mortality and the Legend of Montrose for 
 Scotland. The eighteenth century is richly 
 endowed by The Pirate, the Heart of Midlo- 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 129 
 
 thtan, Waverley, and Redgauntlet and Rob 
 Roy. It is an achievement of the first order 
 to travel through so many ages and in so many- 
 lands with unfailing sympathy and the most 
 intimate touch, so that whatever be the value 
 of Scott's history in the eyes of modern criti- 
 cism, nothing human was strange to him and 
 everything human was made to live in his 
 pages. As Frederic Harrison, one of the most 
 eloquent of our English critics, has said : *' We 
 see the dawn of our English nation, the de- 
 fence of Christendom against the Koran, the 
 grace and terror of Feudalism, the rise of 
 monarchy out of baronies, the rise of Parlia- 
 ments of monarchy, the rise of industry out 
 of serfage, the pathetic ruin of chivalry, the 
 splendid death struggle of Catholicism, the 
 sylvan tribes of the mountains (remnants of 
 our prehistoric forefathers) beating them- 
 selves to pieces against the hard advance of 
 modern industry. We see the grim heroism 
 of the Bible martyrs, the catastrophe of feud- 
 alism overwhelmed by a practical age which 
 knew little of its graces and almost nothing of 
 its virtues." 
 
 It was the distinction of Scott more, per- 
 haps, than any other writer, to originate the 
 
130 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 " renaissance of wonder " in the nineteenth 
 century, and his novels must be judged, not 
 by the standard of historical science, but from 
 the standpoint of imagination. It is per- 
 fectly true that he places Shakespeare's plays 
 in the mouths of men when, as some one pleas- 
 antly remarks, Shakespeare was hardly old 
 enough to rob an orchard, and on the other 
 hand he will make Shakespeare die twenty 
 years before his time. When Dr. Dryasdust 
 starts to examine Scott's romances with a mi- 
 croscope, I am prepared to believe he will 
 find a thousand inaccuracies in minute detail 
 and also some intrepid handling of the larger 
 facts, and I would offer this advice to the 
 young student of history, when he is intent 
 on dates and facts, to close his Scott and give 
 diligent ear to Freeman and Creighton and 
 Gardiner, and amongst contemporary Scots- 
 men to Hume Brown and Hay Fleming and 
 that fine young scholar, Mr. Rait. If you 
 desire to be introduced to the men and women 
 who made history and to see them live and 
 move, not pictures on a wall but actors on a 
 stage, till you catch the glint of the eye and 
 the flush on the face, till you hear the burst 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 131 
 
 of passion and start at the sudden glow, till 
 the tears come to your eyes at the real trag- 
 edy, and you laugh aloud at the pleasant com- 
 edy, then turn to this theatre where the play- 
 ers are ever at their best because they are sim- 
 ply human, and the play never wearies be- 
 cause it deals with the perennial drama of 
 humanity. When we desire to pass a meas- 
 ured judgment upon the political or religious 
 principles of any period, then must we seek 
 some other teacher than this romanticist, but 
 we have our own debt to pay to him. At the 
 wave of his magical wand, knights rise before 
 us in their steel armour; loyal blundering 
 Cavaliers drink " a health to King Charles " ; 
 grim fighting Covenanters sing their Psalm 
 as they face Claverhouse's dragoons; absent- 
 minded, kind-hearted antiquaries discourse 
 on their discoveries; hard-handed Scots, 
 soldiers of fortune like Dugald Dalgetty and 
 Balafre, and broken, thieving caterans like 
 Rob Roy, No one has ever given such a vivid 
 likeness of King James VI., our Scots Solo- 
 mon, with his awkward body, his foolish 
 mouth, his undoubted learning, his timid na- 
 ture, his kind heart, his mean ways, and his 
 
182 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 amazing self-conceit, and every student of 
 morals must be grateful for his masterly study 
 of Louis XI., so orthodox, superstitious, 
 treacherous, cruel, able, a man of rat-like cun- 
 ning, set amongst the gallant and honourable 
 gentlemen of his court. 
 
 Mr. Maurice Hewlett has delighted us with 
 an artistic portrait of Queen Mary, but there 
 is not in the Queen's Quair any passage so 
 commanding as that when Mary in Loch 
 Leven Castle is reminded by tactless Lady 
 Fleming of a certain masque in Holyrood; 
 and while many a modern novelist has tried 
 his hand upon King Charles II., it is in 
 Peveril of the Peak we get our most vivacious 
 picture of the charming manners, imperturb- 
 able good nature, political astuteness, unrec- 
 ognised cleverness, and unblushing immoral- 
 ity of the Merry Monarch. It sometimes oc- 
 curs to one that no writer has ever done more 
 absolute justice to the Stuarts than Sir Wal- 
 ter, and none has felt more evidently the ro- 
 mantic charm of that ill-fated house. He is 
 indeed in the first line of the great creative 
 minds of the world, for he has " definitely 
 succeeded in the ideal reproduction of histori- 
 cal types so as to preserve at once beauty, life, 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 133 
 
 and truth," a task which a sound critic de- 
 clares " not even Shakespeare himself entirely 
 achieved." 
 
 Out of this large and wealthy place, the 
 world of men, in which Scott was as much at 
 home as Shakespeare, Scotland was that 
 province where he was most familiar and 
 where his hand was firmest. " There is," said 
 La Rochefoucauld, " a country accent, not 
 in speech only, but in thought, conduct, char- 
 acter, and manner of existing, which never 
 forsakes a man," and no Scotsman was more 
 entirely Scots than Sir Walter. What he did 
 not know about Scotland, with one or two not- 
 able exceptions on which I shall touch, is not 
 knowledge. He had gone through the 
 length and breadth of the land, and had met 
 after a friendly fashion with all conditions. 
 Pawky Scots provosts like him of Dumfries, 
 who was a plain-spoken man, and kept right 
 with both sides, advising Allan Fairford to 
 keek into his letter of introduction before he 
 delivered it, and hurrying off to the Council 
 lest Bailie Laurie should be " trying some of 
 his manoeuvres " ; Bailie Nicol Jarvie, so in- 
 nocently charged with self-importance, and 
 so fearful that Bailie Graham should get a 
 
134 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 hold of the night's proceedings in the prison ; 
 border sheep farmers like big Dandie Din- 
 mont, ready for a fight with a neighbour 
 either at the fair or in the Law Courts, but 
 scornful of the idea that he should take away 
 his neighbour's land; local factors like Mac- 
 wheeble, keeping together with hard toil 
 their foolish clients' estates; Highland chiefs 
 like M'lvor, poor, proud, and passionate, yet 
 loyal to their cause and to their kinsmen; 
 country gossips like Meg Dods, the masterful 
 hostess of the Cleikum Inn; pragmatical 
 servants full of argument and advice, like 
 Richie Moniplies and Andrew Fairservice; 
 theological peasants, unwearied in contro- 
 versy and matchless in distinctions, like 
 David Deans; judges, advocates, sheriffs, 
 sheriff-substitutes, country writers, school- 
 masters, ministers, beggars, fisher-folk, gip- 
 sies. Highland clansmen, country lairds, 
 great nobles. How distinct, how vivid, how 
 convincing is each person in his album; as 
 you turn the pages you identify the likeness 
 by the representatives you have known your- 
 self. Scott's novels have been translated into 
 every civilised tongue, and Scott has become 
 the most valuable commercial asset of his 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 135 
 
 country, for the ends of the earth come to see 
 the land of which he is the cicerone, and 
 every third American is a lineal descendant 
 of Queen Mary. With the United States as 
 an annex of Scotland, through the conquer- 
 ing genius of Sir Walter, one may not make 
 an exclusive boast, but apart from Ameri- 
 cans, he may believe that Scott's genius 
 reached its height in the novels of his own 
 country, and that only a Scot can appreciate 
 the confident and faultless skill with which 
 he etches the character of his people. 
 
 Stevenson caught the romantic colour of 
 Scots life, and could describe it with a dis- 
 tinction of style to which our author had no 
 claim, and in his Weir of Hermiston Steven- 
 son has given us a powerful Northern type of 
 the morose order, but he was not in touch 
 with ordinary life, as Sir Walter was. With 
 Stevenson the people are apt to be picturesque 
 figures, whom he has lighted on and brought 
 into his study as artists find inspiration by ac- 
 cident, and turn it to account. With Scott 
 they are gossips, men and women whom he 
 has known, on the Tweed and the borders. 
 He does not thrust exquisitely turned phrases 
 into their mouths, but he lets them talk, and is 
 
136 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN- 
 
 pleased because they say the things which in- 
 terest him. One class only was alien to him, 
 the mercantile class, which was finding itself 
 and coming into its kingdom, and passing re- 
 form bills, and doing a hundred things which 
 Scott did not appreciate. He gives a kindly 
 part to " Jingling Geordie," because Heriot 
 was a benefactor to his country, and did not 
 pass from his own place at the beginning of 
 the seventeenth century. And he deals pleas- 
 antly with the Glasgow Bailie, but one knows 
 that he sympathises with Rob Roy's con- 
 temptuous rejection of a place in the Bailie's 
 business for one of the young Macgregors. 
 Scott did not set himself down to write the 
 novel with a purpose, and his stories owe part 
 of their charm to the fact that they are not 
 studies in theology or the sexual question, but 
 consciously or unconsciously they teach his 
 gospel about society. When Carlyle com- 
 plained that our highest literary man had no 
 message whatever to deliver to the world he 
 really is beside the mark, for Scott was 
 charged in the marrow of his bones, as Carlyle 
 used to say, with a creed, and it was one 
 which Carlyle detested. Every novelist of 
 the front rank who has produced an organic 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 137 
 
 body of fiction, whether Balzac or Thack- 
 eray, Flaubert or Zola, has a spinal cord run- 
 ning through his books. It may not be car- 
 ried to the tedious length of Balzac, or the 
 pedantic genealogies of Zola, but it dominates 
 the whole and is the pervading spirit. With 
 Scott it was the ancient and dying spirit of 
 feudalism. He was a stranger to the strug- 
 gle of the times; he was a lover of past ages. 
 His is the charm of autumn, the delicate 
 colouring of a summer that is over. He 
 touched no question of religious doubt and 
 stood for the simplicity of faith, and one 
 knows he is speaking for himself in the un- 
 questioning reverence of his cavaliers for au- 
 thority, and the submission of Scots peasants 
 to their ministers. According to his idea, so- 
 ciety was a graded order (he ought to have 
 been the novelist of the " Young England " 
 school) wherein each rank found its recog- 
 nised place, and had its own privileges in sub- 
 ordination to the whole. George IV. was, in 
 this simple faith, an almost supernatural per- 
 sonage, and the humble enthusiastic loyalty 
 with which he welcomed that obese and very 
 vulgar monarch to Scotland would have 
 greatly delighted the cynical humour of 
 
138 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 Thackeray and shows how perfectly qualified 
 Scott was to appreciate a cavalier's attitude 
 to Charles II. The Duke of Buccleuch was 
 his chief, whose sorrows he shared as his own, 
 and whose recognition, whenever the Duke 
 was pleased to write to him, he deeply valued. 
 For himself, he belonged to the gentry, the 
 third order after the King and the nobility, 
 and above the farmers and the tradesmen. 
 With him were lawyers and soldiers and the 
 professional classes generally. For some rea- 
 son he took little notice of medical men, and 
 indeed has only one good doctor in his Scots 
 novels (the apothecary in the Fair Maid of 
 Perth is detestable), and although he is alto- 
 gether admirable, I do not think that Gideon 
 Grey has touched the popular imagination. 
 It has been a bad tradition in literature either 
 to ignore or to depreciate the most beneficent 
 of professions, and one is thankful for the 
 slender mercy of The Surgeon's Daughter. 
 Each class in society was to be preserved in 
 its proper rights so long as it remained in its 
 own sphere. 
 
 Scott was most friendly with his inferiors 
 and most respectful to his superiors — ever on 
 the understanding that he knew his place and 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 189 
 
 they knew theirs. No person in his novels 
 rises and is made a hero because he has 
 climbed from poverty to riches. The self- 
 made man hardly appears, and when he does, 
 he is treated contemptuously. Christie 
 Steele, the prejudiced old housekeeper of the 
 Croftangrys, acknowledged that Mr. Tred- 
 dle's mill had given employment in the dis- 
 trict, but Mr, Treddle's efforts to be a coun- 
 try gentleman only excited her acidulous hu- 
 mour. When Mr. Gilbert Glossin, the coun- 
 try lawyer in Guy Mannering, conciliates the 
 pompous baronet and obtains a most conde- 
 scending invitation to dinner, the achievement 
 is understood to reflect credit on Glossin's 
 adroitness. And Sir Arthur Wardour is fu- 
 rious when a lawyer addresses him in a letter as 
 " Dear Sir "■ — ** He will be calling me * Dear 
 Knight ' next." The Lord Keeper in The 
 Bride of Lammermoor had scrambled up to 
 his high position from a low estate, and there- 
 fore he is a timid and propitiatory man, ill 
 at ease among country sports, and afraid in 
 the presence of the haughty young lord, who 
 on his part, poverty-stricken but ancient born, 
 dominates the Lord Keeper, as a hawk would 
 terrify a barn-door fowl. Lady Ashton, on 
 
140 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 the other hand, one detests for her cruelty, 
 but respects for her courage — the difference 
 was that she had good blood in her veins. 
 Dugald Dalgetty was a sturdy old blade and 
 carried a conscience in him, for he would 
 never take service with the other side till his 
 time had expired with their opponents; he 
 was a man of his hands, too, and one of the 
 most vivid scenes in all Scott's work is Dugald 
 seizing the Duke of Argyll in his castle. But 
 Dalgetty shows badly beside the Highland 
 chiefs, because, although he was a cock laird 
 in Aberdeenshire, you can see that after all 
 he was only a " body." Although Scott 
 laughs at Lady Margaret Bellenden for her 
 aristocratic prejudices and her recurring al- 
 lusions to Charles II., he has a sneaking fond- 
 ness for her, and drew her character from 
 some of the old Jacobite ladies he knew; and 
 although he makes play with Baron Bradwar- 
 dine, with his family tree, bears, boot-jack and 
 all, yet you feel that he would be just as much 
 concerned about his own pedigree. He be- 
 lieves in the better class showing kindness to 
 the poorer, and there is an atmosphere every- 
 where of good cheer, but it is the kindness of 
 a chief to his clansmen. His men drink, and 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 141 
 
 perhaps put away as much as Dickens's heroes, 
 which is saying a great deal, but they drink 
 like gentlemen, not like grooms. Mrs. Gamp 
 is very taking, and a philosopher in her own 
 way, but she would be quite out of place in 
 the Waverley Novels. There are homely 
 women in them, and Meg Dods had all Mrs. 
 Gamp's force of character and native resolu- 
 tion, but no person is vulgar. Among all his 
 peasants I do not remember one, with the 
 doubtful exception of worthy Andrew Fair- 
 service, who is mean. His poor Highlanders, 
 the " Dougal cratur " and the rest of them, 
 and his Lowland ploughmen, Cuddie Head- 
 rigg, for instance, all command respect, as 
 sound-minded and able-bodied men, just as 
 much as their masters in their place. One of 
 the finest and most discriminating things 
 Scott ever did is the story of the two drovers, 
 where the basal difference between the High- 
 land and the Lowland character is admirably 
 drawn, so that any one who reads it will un- 
 derstand that there is a gulf between, say a 
 Yorkshire man and a Ross-shire man. They 
 have different virtues and different vices, 
 their blood runs at a different heat, and their 
 eyes look on a different world. Scott rose to 
 
142 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 his height, and his imagination burned with 
 its purest flame, when he describes the loyalty 
 of a Highlander to his chief. " I was only 
 ganging to say, my lord," said Evan Mac- 
 combich, when both his chief and he had been 
 condemned to death at Carlisle Assizes, " that 
 if your excellent honour and the honourable 
 Court would let Vich Ian Vohr go free just 
 this once, and let him gae back to France, and 
 no to trouble King George's government 
 again, that ony six o' the very best of his clan 
 will be willing to be justified in his stead ; and 
 if you'll just let me gae down to Glennaquoich 
 I'll fetch them up to ye mysell, to head or 
 hang, and you may begin wi' me the very first 
 man." And when a sort of laugh was heard 
 in the Court, Evan looked round sternly. 
 " If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing," he 
 said, " because a poor man such as me, thinks 
 my life or the life of six of my degree, is 
 worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like enough 
 they may be very right ; but if they laugh be- 
 cause they think I would not keep my word, 
 and come back to redeem him, I can tell them 
 they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman, 
 nor the honour of a gentleman." He disliked 
 the change from the old to the new, when the 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 143 
 
 Treddles supplant the Croftangfys, and also 
 new-fangled fashions, and would rather share 
 the feudal and homely hospitality of Lord 
 Huntingtower's house in the Fortunes of 
 Nigel, than go with his profligate son, Lord 
 Dalgarno, to the French eating-house and the 
 gambling table. A clear distinction is drawn 
 between the two apprentices in the same 
 novel, because the one is only a London 
 trader's son, and the other belongs to a poor, 
 but gentle Northern house. 
 
 Some one was recently denouncing an in- 
 genuous woman writer, beloved of shop-girls, 
 and declaring her to be immoral, and his 
 ground was that she was fond of marrying 
 the shop-girl to the lord, or some other 
 achievement of the same kind. Scott cer- 
 tainly was cleansed from all immorality of 
 this kind (with the inevitable solitary excep- 
 tion), and no woman of gentle birth marries 
 beneath her in Scott, and no man aspires to a 
 woman above him. They marry and give in 
 marriage each within his own degree. It is 
 true that pretty Peggy Ramsay in the For- 
 tunes of Nigel does become Lady Glenvarl- 
 och, but this exigency of the story is relieved 
 by establishing some connection between the 
 
144 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 clockmaker's daughter and the great Dal- 
 housie family. If Morton in Old Mortality 
 marries Miss Bellenden, it is to be remem- 
 bered he is an officer's son, although his father 
 was a mean old laird, and that he does not 
 marry her till he himself is a distinguished 
 officer. The line between gentlefolk and the 
 rest of creation is kindly, quietly, but con- 
 stantly and firmly drawn. 
 
 His feudal gospel affords a more engaging 
 illustration for the majority of people when 
 he treats, as he loves to do, of the loyalty of a 
 servant to his master. One of his most de- 
 lightful minor creations is the " Dougal 
 cratur," the type of dog-like fidelity. When 
 he thinks it wise to fling up his post as turn- 
 key in Glasgow gaol, he is careful to leave 
 the doors unlocked so that his chief and Bailie 
 Nicol Jarvie may not be caught in a trap, and 
 when the Bailie is sore put to it in the public- 
 house, Dugald jumped up from the floor with 
 his native sword and target in his hand to do 
 battle for the discomfited magistrate. " Her 
 nainsell has eaten the town pread at the Cross 
 o' Glasgow, and py her troth she'll fight 
 for Bailie Sharvie at the Clachan of Aber- 
 f oyle — tat will she e'en 1 " Macwheeble was 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 145 
 
 an abject and a worm of the dust, and one of 
 the drollest scenes in Scott's vein of humour 
 is the worthy man wishing to take charge of 
 Vich Ian Vohr's purse on the campaign and to 
 lay the money out at interest; and there's no 
 end to the scheming and parsimony of the 
 Bailie, but there was the honest feudal heart 
 hid away beneath the dirt and dross. " If I 
 fall, Macwheeble," said his master, Brad- 
 wardine, " you have all my papers and know 
 all my affairs; be just to Rose," whereat the 
 worthy factor set up a lamentable howl. " If 
 that doleful day should come while Duncan 
 Macwheeble had a boddle it should be Miss 
 Rose's. He would scroll for a plack or she 
 kenn'd what it was to want." And Scott has 
 fewer more cunning scenes than Waverley's 
 visit to Macwheeble when the war was over, 
 and Macwheeble was suspiciously watching 
 every visitor. For a while he listened to 
 Waverley with anxiety lest he had come to 
 claim assistance, was greatly cheered when he 
 heard that it was well with him, and when he 
 declared his intention of sharing his fortune 
 with Miss Rose Bradwardine, the Bailie rose 
 to his height. " He flung his best wig out 
 of the window because the block on which it 
 
146 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 was placed stood in the way of his career, 
 chucked his cap to the ceiling, caught it as it 
 fell; whistled TuUochgorum ; danced a High- 
 land fling with inimitable grace and agility, 
 and then threw himself exhausted into a chair 
 exclaiming, "Lady Wauverleyl — ten thou- 
 sand a year, the least penny! Lord preserve 
 my poor understanding." And after making 
 a hurried note on a sheet of paper, " a sma' 
 minute to prevent parties fra resiling," he 
 broke forth again, " Lady Wauverley, ten 
 thousand a year! Lord be gude unto me 
 . . . it dings Balmawhapple out and out, 
 a year's rent worth of Balmawhapple, fee and 
 life rent. Lord make us thankful." Brad- 
 wardine himself lies concealed on his own es- 
 tate and not a tenant will betray him, and he 
 often finds " bits of things in my way that the 
 poor bodies, God help them, put there be- 
 cause they think they may be useful to me." 
 Richie Moniplies is a preaching and provok- 
 ing fool of a man-servant, but he is unflinch- 
 ingly loyal to Nigel, and therefore Scott gives 
 him a knighthood before he has done with 
 him. Edie Ochiltree, the beggar man, when 
 there is a threatening of invasion, lends a hand 
 for the defence of the land he loves, and 
 proves himself a dog of the old Scots breed — > 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 147 
 
 a fighting terrier — and not the shiftless, 
 treacherous, cowardly tramp of our highways. 
 It is a mistake to suppose that any novelist 
 can simply lift living persons into his pages. 
 This would be a violation of the technique of 
 his art, and were the same thing as if one 
 pasted a photograph into the middle of a pic- 
 ture. The characters in real fiction have been 
 his own creation, but his imagination has been 
 fed with the material of life. Scott lived 
 among the people of his novels before they 
 took service with him in literature. If he 
 deals very kindly with faithful Caleb Balder- 
 stone it was because his own household were 
 so faithful to him. He took a fancy to a 
 poacher that was brought before him for jus- 
 tice and passed him into his own service, and 
 Purdie was his loyal henchman hencefor- 
 ward. When evil days befell Scott and he 
 had to reduce his establishment, Pepe Mathie- 
 son, who used to be the coachman, was willing 
 to be the ploughman, and Scott was most 
 grateful for this fealty. " I cannot forget," 
 says Lockhart, " how his eyes sparkled when 
 he first pointed out to me Peter Mathieson 
 guiding the plough on the Haugh. * Egad,' 
 he said, * old Pepe and old Pepe's whistling 
 at his darg. The honest fellow said a yoking 
 
148 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 in a deep field would do baith him and the 
 blackies good. If things get round with me, 
 easy shall be Pepe's cushion." One of the 
 trials of Scott's life was the death of Thomas 
 Purdie, the ex-poacher and trusty servitor. 
 " I have lost," Scott writes, " my old and 
 faithful servant, and am so much shocked that 
 I really wish to be quit of the country and safe 
 in town. I have this day laid him in the 
 grave." This was the inscription on Purdie's 
 tomb — 
 
 IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE 
 
 OF 
 
 THE FAITHFUL 
 
 AND ATTACHED SERVICES 
 
 OF 
 
 TWENTY-TWO YEARS, 
 
 AND IN SORROW 
 
 FOR THE LOSS OF A HUMBLE 
 
 BUT SINCERE FRIEND, 
 
 THIS STONE WAS ERECTED 
 
 BY 
 
 Sir WALTER SCOTT, Bart., 
 OF Abbotsforo. 
 
 " Thou hast been faithful 
 Over a few things, 
 I will make thee ruler 
 Over many things." 
 
WAVERLY NOVELS 149 
 
 This is the heart of the Waverley Novels, 
 and Scott's sweetest note. 
 
 Thomson, the son of the minister of Melrose, 
 who became tutor at Abbotsford, won Scott's 
 heart because he lost his leg in an encounter of 
 his boyhood and refused to betray the name of 
 the companion that had occasioned the mis- 
 hap. " In the Dominie, like myself, accident 
 has spoiled a capital life-guardsman, and so 
 many were his eccentricities, so rich his learn- 
 ing, and so sound his principles, that he sat 
 for good Dominie Sampson." It may have 
 struck the reader of the Fair Maid of Perth 
 that the physical timidity of Conachar, the 
 young Highland chief, and the disgrace of 
 his flight from the battle on the North Inch 
 of Perth, where his henchmen had died so 
 bravely for him, was written with a certain 
 sympathy of feeling. That passage in which 
 one is made to pity the poor lad was Scott's 
 atonement for perhaps the one cruel deed of 
 his life, his contemptuous anger against a 
 brother who had refused to fight a duel (he 
 was willing to fight one in old age himself). 
 A lover of all dumb animals, he pays his trib- 
 ute to Maida and his other favourite dogs in 
 IBevis, the noble hound of Woodstock, and 
 
150 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 many another friendly fellow, whom his hand 
 touches gently in fiction. When the Baron 
 of Bradwardine comes down to Janet's cottage 
 and Waverley and he have their supper to- 
 gether, Ban and Buscar have also their share. 
 They play their loyal part, too, and Scott is 
 still teaching his lesson of fidelity as much as 
 when he wrote the epitaph on old Maida — 
 
 " Beneath the sculptured form, which late you wore, 
 Sleep soundly, Maida, at your master's door." 
 
 When the Antiquary came forward at the 
 young fisherman's funeral and said that, as 
 landlord to the deceased, he would carry his 
 head to the grave, it was Scott's own heart 
 speaking, and old Alison Breck, among the 
 fish-women, swore almost aloud, funeral 
 though it was. " His honour Monkbarns 
 should never want sax warp of oysters in the 
 season (of which fish he was understood to be 
 fond) if she should gang to sea and dredge 
 for them herself, in the foulest wind that ever 
 blew." It was when staying with a friend at 
 Loch Lomond that he bethought himself of 
 Rob Roy and laid out the scenery in his mind, 
 and among his acquaintances he found the de- 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 151 
 
 lightful Antiquary. The Epic of Jeanie 
 Deans he took from actual life, and even the 
 smugglers' secret cellars in Redgauntlet he 
 had found at Berwick. The Covenanters of 
 a later generation he had seen and not particu- 
 larly loved, and the old Scots gossips who 
 talk in the post-office scene — one of the 
 most successful interiors of Scott — he had 
 met in many a cottage. He is most convin- 
 cing when he is dealing with Scots life ; young 
 Waverley, the English squire, is a shadow be- 
 side the Antiquary, and Scott himself de- 
 scribes him as a sneaking piece of imbecility, 
 and declared his conviction that " if he had 
 married Flora M'lvor she would have set 
 him up upon the chimneypiece." The Eng- 
 lish peasant in Scott's novels is a wooden 
 figure beside Cuddie Headrigg, and the Lon- 
 don cashier a poor ghost in the presence of 
 Bailie Nicol Jarvie. If his Scots lairds, and 
 Scots peasants, and Scots women of the work- 
 ing class are not real, and do not carry them- 
 selves as flesh and blood, then there is no re- 
 ality in fiction. 
 
 With all his inherent nobility of soul and 
 personal elevation above everything mean, 
 Scott had a thorough appreciation of what 
 
152 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 has been called, and no word so accurately 
 describes it, the " pawkiness " of Scots char- 
 acter, which is shared in some degree by all 
 classes from ploughmen to ecclesiastics, and 
 of which a Bailie is often the perfect imper- 
 sonation. And this characteristic quality of 
 the Scots people has been immortalised in one 
 of Scott's most felicitous passages, when Niel 
 Blane gives directions to his daughter how to 
 manage the public-house in the trying days 
 of Claverhouse and the Covenanters. " Jenny, 
 this is the first day that ye are to take 
 the place of your worthy mother in attending 
 to the public; a douce woman she was, civil 
 to the customers, and had a good name wi' 
 Whig and Tory, baith up the street and doun 
 the street. It will be hard for you to fill 
 her place, especially on sic a thrang day as 
 this; but Heaven's will maun be obeyed. 
 Jenny, whatever Milnwood ca's for, be sure 
 he maun hae't, for he's the captain o' the 
 Popinjay, and auld customs maun be sup- 
 ported ; if he canna pay the lawing himsell, as 
 I ken he's keepit unco short by the head, I'll 
 find a way to shame it out o' his uncle. — The 
 curate is playing at dice wi' Cornet Grahame. 
 Be eident and civil to them baith — clergy 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 153 
 
 and captains can gie an unco deal o' fash in 
 thae times, where they take an ill-will. — The 
 dragoons will be crying for ale, and they 
 wunna want it, and maunna want it — they are 
 unruly chiels, but they pay ane some gate or 
 other. I gat the humle-cow, that's the best 
 in the byre, frae black Frank Inglis and 
 Sergeant Bothwell for ten pund Scots, and 
 they drank out the price at ae downsitting. 
 . . . Whist! ye silly tawpie, we have 
 naething to do how they come by the bestial 
 they sell — 'be that atween them and their 
 consciences. — Aweel. — Take notice, Jenny, 
 of that dour, stour-looking carle that sits by 
 the cheek o' the ingle, and turns his back on 
 a' men. He looks like one o' the hill folk, 
 for I saw him start a wee when he saw the 
 redcoats, and I jalouse he wad hae liked to 
 hae ridden by, but his horse (it's a good geld- 
 ing) was ower sair travailed; he behoved to 
 stop whether he wad or no. Serve him can- 
 nily, Jenny, and wi' little din, and dinna 
 bring the sodgers on him by speering ony 
 questions at him; but let him no hae a room 
 to himsell, they wad say ye were hiding him. 
 * — For yoursell, Jenny, ye'll be civil to a' the 
 'folk, and take nae heed o' ony nonsense and 
 
164 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 dafEng the young lads may say t'yc Folk in 
 the hostler line maun put up wi' muckle. 
 [Your mither, rest her saul, could put up wi' as 
 muckle as maist women — but oflf hands is 
 fair play; and if onybody be uncivil ye may 
 gie me a cry. — Aweel, when the malt begins 
 to get aboon the meal, they'll begin to speak 
 about government in kirk and state, and then, 
 Jenny, they are like to quarrel — let them be 
 doing — anger's a drouthy passion, and the 
 mair they dispute, the mair ale they'll drink; 
 but ye were best serve them wi' a pint o' the 
 sma' browst, it will heat them less, and they'll 
 never ken the difference." 
 
 Scott's religious position has been, as was 
 inevitable, the subject of keen controversy, for 
 Scotland has ever been a land of theological 
 debate, and is to-day living up with spirit to 
 her ancient character. When Sir Walter 
 opened the novel of Old Mortality on the 5th 
 of May 1679, and plunged into the life of that 
 day in the West of Scotland, he took his cour- 
 age in both his hands, for he chose the period 
 and the scene of the hottest conflict in Scots 
 history. Owing partly to the wildness of the 
 scenery and partly to the intensity of the peo- 
 ple, the history of Scotland has been one long 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 155 
 
 romance, and from the Reformation, religion 
 was the original cause and burning fire of 
 every controversy. No one can understand 
 Scots history without fixing in his mind that 
 religion has played the chief part in the mak- 
 ing of Scots life, and that the Scots have been 
 ready to argue and to fight, not only about the 
 great principles which have divided, say the 
 Roman from the Protestant faith, but also 
 about the jots and tittles of their creed. Fine 
 scruples have created parties within the Scots 
 Kirk which are almost innumerable, and 
 which certainly are now unintelligible to the 
 modern mind. Sir Walter has crystallised 
 the perfervidum ingenium of the Scots folk 
 in this book, and staged not the politics only 
 but the theology of Scotland. There were 
 the Cavaliers under Claverhouse hunting the 
 Presbyterians, who were hiding on the moors, 
 and meeting in Conventicles for worship, and 
 the Covenanters growing ever more bitter and 
 determined under this persecution, till at last 
 they were ready to renounce allegiance to the 
 King, as well as to denounce the Bishops, and 
 there were the less extreme Presbyterians who 
 thought that their brethren had gone too far, 
 and endeavoured to reconcile their own reli- 
 
156 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 gious principles with loyalty to government. 
 This was the situation of Old Mortality, and 
 these the feelings which moved its characters. 
 Scott's insight and fairness must be judged by 
 his studies of Claverhouse on the one hand, 
 and the Presbyterian ministers on the other, 
 and it has been difficult to satisfy every per- 
 son about Claverhouse. Macaulay, who is 
 neither a Covenanter nor an advocate of their 
 particular case, asserts that Claverhouse 
 goaded the peasantry of the Western Low- 
 lands into madness, and murdered a pious 
 Covenanter called Brown before his wife's 
 eyes, while in Napier's Memoirs of Dundee 
 Grahame is represented as a patriotic Scots- 
 man as well as a gallant soldier, and this was 
 also the portrait drawn by another Jacobite 
 man of letters, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. 
 " Bloody Claverhouse " was the Covenanting 
 nickname, and " Bonnie Dundee " was the 
 Cavalier description of the same man, and it 
 is only less dangerous to hold the scales of 
 justice in the life of Claverhouse than in that 
 of Queen Mary. It was to his credit that he 
 was on bad terms with the drunken politicians 
 of the day, and that he remained to the end of 
 his career an unselfish loyalist, doing all that 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 157 
 
 in him lay for the Stuart family, with very 
 little thanks from either them or their ad- 
 visers, and that he died at the battle of Kil- 
 liecrankie fighting for a lost cause. It was 
 not the least of his exploits that he won 
 the heart of Lady Jean Cochrane, whose 
 mother was an extreme Covenanter; but there 
 seems little doubt that behind a fair face and 
 graceful manner he hid a determined and un- 
 swerving purpose, that to his friends he was 
 tender and true, and to the enemies of his 
 cause absolutely murderous, and that in spite 
 of the apologies of his biographer, Napier, 
 and the glamour cast round him in Lays of the 
 Scottish Cavaliers, he treated the Covenanters 
 with great cruelty and did not shrink from 
 military murders. Upon the whole I am in- 
 clined to think that the study of Grahame in 
 Old Mortality, although it has been so se- 
 verely criticised in Covenanting quarters, is 
 not far from the truth, for full justice is done 
 to his personal attractiveness and disinterested 
 loyalty, ^hile his disregard of popular rights 
 and his indifference to suffering are clearly 
 represented. 
 
 Whether Scott has rendered equal justice to 
 the other side is another question, and per- 
 
158 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 haps he ought not to have prejudiced the case 
 by caricaturing the names of the Covenanting 
 ministers. One is inclined beforehand to laugh 
 at clergymen who are called Poundtext or Ket- 
 tledrummle, or Habakkuk Mucklewrath. 
 The reader must, however, remember that the 
 names are only the license of a novelist, and 
 that the Presbyterian minister did not pound 
 his text any more clumsily, and that he was 
 not any more a kettledrum in the matter of 
 noise than the Episcopalian curate of the day. 
 One cannot tell who sat for Poundtext, but 
 for Kettledrummle and Mucklewrath one sus- 
 pects that Scott depended upon the lives of 
 Peden and Cameron, as told with remarkable 
 felicity of style by Patrick Walker, in the 
 book called Biographia Presbyteriana. Pat- 
 rick Walker could tell a story with engaging 
 vigour, and was a great favourite with Rob- 
 ert Louis Stevenson, who, in his Letters, vol. ii. 
 p. 312, says: " I have lately been returning to 
 my wallowing in the mire. When I was a 
 child, and indeed until I was nearly a man, I 
 consistently read Covenanting books. Now 
 that I am a grey-beard — or would be if I 
 could raise the beard — I have returned, and 
 for weeks back have read little else but Wod- 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 169 
 
 row, Walker, Shields, &c." McBriar, whom 
 Scott treats with more respect, is almost cer- 
 tainly Hugh McKail, a young clergyman of 
 delicate constitution and beautiful character, 
 who threw himself into the Covenanting 
 cause, and was involved in the " Pentland 
 Rising." He was taken prisoner and put to 
 death in Edinburgh in the twenty-sixth year 
 of his age. During his trial he was tortured 
 in the " boots," and Scott has used the scene 
 in Old Mortality. McKail was a high-spir- 
 ited enthusiast, and his last words on the scaf- 
 fold were : " I ascend to my Father and your 
 Father, to my God and your God — to my 
 King and your King, to tlie blessed Apostles 
 and Martyrs, and to the city of the living 
 God, the Heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumer- 
 able company of Angels, to the general as- 
 sembly of the first-born, to God the Judge of 
 all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, 
 and to Jesus the mediator of the new cove- 
 nant ; and I bid you all farewell, for God will 
 be more comfortable to you than I could be, 
 and He will be now more refreshing to me 
 than you could be. Farewell, farewell in 
 the Lord!" 
 From the moderate Presbyterian clergy, so 
 
160 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 poorly represented by Poundtext, Scott might 
 have taken men like Robert Douglas, of whom 
 it was written: "He was a great state 
 preacher, one of the greatest of that age in 
 Scotland, for he feared no man to declare the 
 mind of God to him, yet very accessible and 
 easy to be conversed with." Or Lawrence 
 Charteris, who was described by Bishop Bur- 
 net as " a perfect friend and a most sublime 
 Christian. He did not talk of the defects of 
 his kind like an angry reformer, but like a 
 man full of a deep but humble sense of them." 
 He used to say the defection among them has 
 been " from the temper and conversation 
 which the Gospel requires of us." Above all 
 he could have chosen Leighton, who was first 
 of all a Presbyterian minister and then a 
 Bishop, but above all a Christian; and Car- 
 stairs, who was persecuted before the Refor- 
 mation, and after the Reformation became the 
 most powerful man in Scotland, who showed 
 the greatest kindness to the party that had 
 persecuted him, and was beyond question the 
 ablest clergyman of his day. It is always a 
 misfortune, and one may find a contemporary 
 illustration, when any body of men are driven 
 into extreme views and desperate actions, for 
 they become either absurd or fanatical, and 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 161 
 
 the real conscience and courage of the Cove- 
 nanters have been much disfigured by a want 
 of charity in their utterances and common 
 sense in their policy. But it is well to re- 
 member that they were not all Kettle- 
 drummles, and Scott declares in a note to Old 
 Mortality, that if he had to rewrite the tale 
 he would give the Moderate Party a better 
 representative than Peter Poundtext, and even 
 the severest critic of Scott from the Covenant- 
 ing side must admit that in Jeanie Deans 
 he drew a perfect type of humble Scots 
 piety. 
 
 Is it wonderful that the extreme wing of 
 Scots religion, which has not always been in 
 profound sympathy with literature, has found 
 some difficulty in accepting Scott as an 
 interpreter of our nation, when Thomas Car- 
 lyle, who was by instinct a man of letters, has 
 not dealt so generously with his distinguished 
 fellow-countryman as those who love both 
 men could desire. Among certain admirable 
 doctrines of the Roman faith there is one 
 called " invincible ignorance " which ought to 
 be allowed greater play in every controversy, 
 theological or political, and not least in racial 
 misunderstandings. By our heredity and en- 
 vironment, by the books we have read and the 
 
162 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 men who have taught us, by the blood in our 
 veins dnd the people among whom we have 
 lived, we are apt to be so impressed and so 
 biassed as to be blinded to the truth of a creed 
 which is not ours, and the excellence of men 
 who are of another type. It were a counsel 
 of perfection to ask from a Puritan justice to 
 Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell, and al- 
 though it was a fine achievement of Erasmus 
 to appreciate at their value both Luther and 
 Pope Leo X., that humanist is a rare figure 
 in history, and I am sorry to say not a force 
 in affairs. People full of the strong wine of 
 Scots controversy are apt to speak as if there 
 has been only one Scotland ; the Scotland cre- 
 ated by John Knox and the ministers of the 
 Kirk, by the theology of Calvin and the demo- 
 cratic education of the parish school, and rep- 
 resented admirably and successfully by that 
 middle class which has supplied the elders to 
 the Kirk and the traders to foreign parts, and 
 up to this time has made Scotland intelligent 
 and prosperous. They forget that there has 
 been always another Scotland since the days 
 of Queen Mary, of Catholics, Episcopalians, 
 Jacobites, and Moderate Kirkmen, like that 
 excellent man of sincerity and courtesy, who 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 168 
 
 ended a note to John Knox, " Farewell in 
 Christ, and endeavour to let truth prevail and 
 not the man," and Archbishop Leighton who 
 was weary of wrangling, and Carstairs who 
 held the scales level between both sides, and 
 the literary men who, at the close of the 
 eighteenth century, made Edinburgh glorious 
 through the world. Unto this Scotland be- 
 longed for the most part the soldiers, the great 
 lawyers, poets, and scholars, and of this line 
 Scott had come. He was a Cavalier whose 
 heart was with Prince Charles, though his 
 reason was with King George, who could ap- 
 preciate the courage of the Covenanters, but 
 whose own attitude would have been that of 
 Young Morton in Old Mortality. Scott in 
 his geniality and charity, his sympathies with 
 the virtues of a chivalrous past, and his in- 
 stinctive dislike of religious extremity, was a 
 Moderate, and has behind him a minority, 
 perhaps, of the Scots people, but a minority 
 commanding respect for its appreciation of a 
 storied past, its devotion to Art and Letters, 
 its love of peace and its principle of charity. 
 It is to the credit of Sir Walter that he, the 
 descendant of those border raiders, has been 
 as comprehensive and as tolerant. 
 
164 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 Carlyle, on the other hand, whatever may 
 have been his former creed or his local sur- 
 roundings, was all his days a Calvinist and a 
 democrat, with the narrowness and sincerity, 
 the strength and intolerance of the peasant 
 class from which he sprung. It is natural for 
 Carlyle to ridicule Sir Walter's desire to es- 
 tablish a county family, and one recognises 
 that the ambitions of Abbotsford and Eccle- 
 fechan were hopelessly at variance, but as one 
 who received his first literary inspiration from 
 Carlyle's address to the students of Edinburgh 
 University, and who has felt the iron of Car- 
 lyle's virile gospel pass as a tonic into his 
 blood, I cannot but regret that Carlyle in his 
 well-known essay did such poor justice to 
 Scott and the Waverley Novels. When he 
 speaks of him as writing daily "with the 
 ardour of a steam-engine, that he might make 
 fifteen thousand a year and buy upholstery 
 with it," and pronounces that " his work is 
 not profitable for doctrine or reproof or edi- 
 fication or building up or elevating in any 
 shape," one knows that he has seen Scott in 
 a glass darkly, and that because he had not 
 come with open face. When he enlarges 
 upon Scott as one of the healthiest of men, 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 165 
 
 and allows with condescension that amuse- 
 ment in the way of reading can go no further 
 than his tales, one wishes that Carlyle had 
 left Scott alone and confined himself to Burns, 
 whom he understood from the heart out, for 
 they were by heredity of the same breed. 
 Compare Lockhart's Scott; one of the most 
 wholesome biographies in our literature, and 
 the Life of Carlyle. . Carlyle complains that 
 Scott's biography had run to seven volumes, 
 but his in one shape or other has run to 
 several volumes more, and no one can be 
 sure when it will be finally concluded, and 
 his grave be left in peace. Carlyle is in 
 serious doubt whether Scott was a great 
 man, and while he admits he was a demi- 
 god among the circulating heroes of the 
 library, he sees no likelihood of a place for 
 him among the great writers of all ages. 
 Well, the books stand together upon the 
 shelf of every student of literature and Scots 
 history; we can form our own judgment 
 of greatness. It is a means of grace to read 
 Scott's life, in which, if nothing is set down 
 in malice, nothing is extenuated, for his stain- 
 less purity in which there was no touch of au- 
 sterity, his winsome good nature which never 
 
166 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 seemed to fail, his kindliness to every person 
 and creature that came into contact with him, 
 his too generous help to second-rate writers 
 and rash publishers, his generous forgiveness 
 of the wrongs which he suffered in business 
 affairs, his heroic endurance of the cruellest 
 pain, his early romantic attachment which 
 was the shadow on his life, his chivalrous serv- 
 ice of his wife who was not his real love, his 
 courage in the great crash of his affairs, his 
 persistent toil to pay other men's debts, and 
 his gentle, believing death, bring us into an 
 atmosphere in which it is good to live. No 
 woman had ever cause to complain of Scott's 
 rudeness, no man heard him whine about his 
 illnesses, no fellow-writer was contemptuously 
 treated by him, no man was afraid to speak to 
 him. He had no affectations, either in style 
 or manner; he had neither grudges nor jeal- 
 ousies; every one loved him — his wife, his 
 children, his friends, his printers, his serv- 
 ants, his dogs. " Scott," says Lord Tenny- 
 son, " is the most chivalrous literary figure of 
 this century, and the author with the finest 
 range since Shakespeare." His was the great- 
 ness of faith and charity, and one may hold 
 with reason that Scotland has never produced 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 167 
 
 a finer instance of practical and persuasive 
 religion. 
 
 The subtle quality of a man's character 
 passes into his work and becomes its preserving 
 salt, but a great writer must submit his work 
 to the arbitrament, not of the popularity of his 
 day, but of the criticism which is above every 
 day. There are books which catch the ear of 
 the people and pass away having served their 
 purpose, there are books which remain and 
 they are the classics. " The last discovery of 
 modern culture," a competent writer says, *' is 
 that Scott's prose is commonplace. The 
 young men at our universities are too critical 
 to care for his artless sentences and flowing 
 descriptions. As boys love lollipops, so these 
 juvenile fops love to roll phrases under the 
 tongue, as if phrases in themselves had any 
 value apart from thoughts, feelings, great con- 
 ceptions of human sympathy." From the cir- 
 culars of publishers I learn that new editions 
 of Scott are ever appearing, but from private 
 observation I do not find the younger genera- 
 tion is reading Scott, and without any disre- 
 spect to the literary craftsmen of the day, this 
 seems to me a calamity. It reminds me of 
 Ruskin's saying, about wondering, not how 
 
168 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 much people suffer, but how much they lose. 
 It may be that Scott has indulged too much in 
 introductions, and has dared to add notes 
 which are full of instruction, but which, on 
 that account, this generation does not desire. 
 Or it may be that he has not the trick of sen- 
 sational plot, and did not strike upon the in- 
 vention of the detective story. There is, how- 
 ever, good ground for believing that his hold 
 is permanent, and that in the end his vogue 
 will be universal. When estimating Scott we 
 must remind ourselves what he essayed to do, 
 and his was that which is the first and will be 
 the last form of literature. When the first 
 half-dozen humans gathered in a cave one 
 told how he had killed some monstrous beast, 
 and that was the beginning of letters ; when the 
 last half-dozen huddle together on the cold 
 earth some one will tell of his battle with a 
 seal, and that will be the end of letters. Litera- 
 ture began with a story, and nothing so holds 
 the human mind, and the igenius of Sir Wal- 
 ter Scott was the genius of the story. Let us 
 grant that his style was not " precious," let us 
 even grant that it was sometimes redundant, if 
 you please slipshod, he could afford even if he 
 chose to be ungrammatical. His was the easy 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 169 
 
 undress of one whose position was assured and 
 who was indifferent to little conventionalities. 
 Between the books of precocious moderns and 
 the Waverley Novels there is the same differ- 
 ence as between the trim kwn and the neat 
 little beds of a villa garden, and the mountain 
 side with the swelling waves of purple heather 
 and the emerald green between. It partakes 
 of a debating society to inquire which is his 
 greatest book, but I suppose his mightiest 
 three are Old Mortality, the Antiquary, and 
 the Heart of Midlothian. With those three 
 and his Shakespeare a man might be content. 
 For this is the large and wealthy place of lit- 
 erature, where you breathe the air of Homer 
 and of Virgil, of Dante and Milton. And 
 for a single passage of passion and pathos I 
 can only remember one other from Thackeray 
 to be compared with the plea which Jeanie 
 Deans made with the Queen for her sister's 
 life:— 
 
 " O, madam, if ever ye kend what it was 
 to sorrow for and with a sinning and a suffer- 
 ing creature, whose mind is sae tossed that she 
 can be neither ca'd fit to live or die, have 
 some compassion on our miseryl Save an 
 honest house from dishonour, and an unhappy 
 
170 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 girl, not eighteen years of age, from an early 
 and dreadful death! Alasl it is not when 
 we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves that 
 we think on other people's sufferings. Our 
 hearts are waxed light within us then, and we 
 are for righting our ain wrangs and fighting 
 our ain battles. But when the hour of trouble 
 comes to the mind or to the body — and sel- 
 dom may it visit your leddyship — and when 
 the hour of death comes, that comes to high 
 and low — • lang and late may it be yours — 
 O, my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune 
 for oursels, but what we hae dune for others, 
 that we think on maist pleasantly. And the 
 thought that ye hae intervened to spare the 
 puir thing's life will be sweeter in that hour, 
 come when it may, than if a word of your 
 mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at 
 the tail of ae tow." ^ 
 
 And yet, and I quote a modern: "This 
 glorious poet, without whom our very con- 
 ception of human development would have 
 ever been imperfect, this manliest and truest 
 and widest of romances, we neglect for some 
 hothouse hybrid of psychological analysis, for 
 the wretched imitators of Balzac and the 
 
 ^ Heart of Midlothian, vol. ii. chap. xii. p. 2io. 
 
WAVERLEY NOVELS 171 
 
 jackanapes phrasemongering of some Osric of 
 our day, who assure us that Scott is an " abso- 
 lute Philistine." It remains, however, that a 
 man may be greater than his work. If there 
 be any goodness throughout the Waverley 
 Novels, it was the inspiration of their writer. 
 They have added to the company of our 
 friends many high-spirited women and many 
 gallant gentlemen, they have taught us to 
 think more kindly of human nature and to 
 seek after the highest things, but they have 
 introduced us to no braver or truer man than 
 Scott himself. Unintoxicated by prosperity 
 and unbroken in adversity, toiling to redeem 
 that dreadful debt while his wife lay dying, 
 and after her death going back to his work 
 without any public moan, he did his part 
 right knightly. With Shakespeare he is the 
 chief creative genius of our English literature, 
 and with Burns he is the proud glory of Scots 
 letters. And now, if in jealous affection we 
 have complained that Carlyle did less than 
 justice to Scott's work, we gladly accept his 
 beautiful tribute to Scott's character. " When 
 he departed he took a man's life along with 
 him. No sounder piece of British manhood 
 was put together in that eighteenth century of 
 
172 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its 
 shaggy honesty, sagacity, and goodness, when 
 we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, 
 was all worn with care, the joy all fled from 
 it: ploughed deep with labour and sorrow. 
 We shall never forget it; we shall never see it 
 again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scots- 
 men, take our proud and sad farewell." 
 
 THE END