T. W. H. Crosland

“ Whiskey to breakfast, whiskey to dinner, whiskey to supper; whiskey when you meet a friend, whiskey over all business meetings whatsoever; whiskey before you go into the kirk, whiskey when you come out; whiskey when you are about to take a journey, whiskey all along the road, whiskey at the journey’s end; whiskey when you are well, whiskey if you be sick, whiskey almost as soon as you are born, whiskey the last thing before you die—that is Scotland. There is a cock-and-bull tale to the effect that all the finest clarets go to Leith and are drunk in Edinburgh. ”

“ And if one looks through his writings, one is forced to the conclusion that he owes his fame to the circumstances that he was a loose liver and a ploughman rather than to the circumstance that he was a poet. To take up the works of Burns in one volume and to glance through them haphazard, assaying here a page and there a page, is to come to a knowledge of him which is rather staggering. ”

“ Nothing that Scotland ever possessed has abided so firmly in the heart of the Scotchman as “the Bard”—Robert Burns, that is to say. An Englishman can forget that Shakespeare ever existed. A Scotsman never forgets that Robert Burns was a Scotchman. Morn, noon, and night he will talk to you of Burns if you give him half a chance. Till Dr. J. M. Barrie and Dr. Crockett came in, the Scotchman had no other book but a dog’s-eared Burns, from which work he gathered his views of life, including justification for his vices. ”

“ He is too Scotch to perceive that nobody wants him, and if he saw it he is too Scotch to go.
As for Lord Rosebery, the less said about him the better. He is of Scotch stock, and he had the good fortune to be born of an English mother. But the Scotch blood in him, the Scotch ineptitudes, the Scotch lack of force prevail. He does everything by turns and nothing long. Like Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, he failed as a leader. The statesman in him does not possess him; it was a mere detail and a small one. As an active politician he had to look around for a model upon whom to shape himself. ”

“ I should very much doubt whether there is a Scotchman in all Scotland who would not have made quite a different ending with much fist-shaking and calling down of curses in it.
Well, in the result, Burnbrae does leave his farm; anyway, there is a sale, or as the Scotch elegantly term it, a roup. And what happens? Why, the neighbours—good, honest bodies—turn up in their thousands and buy in Burnbrae’s farming stock at noble prices, bidding high for everything in order that Burnbrae may at least have a good roup. ”

“ Anyway it rather disposes of the gallant and debonair vision conjured up for us by the glowing pencils of the Old School. The generous, polite, refined, well-bred, civilised, and immortally honourable and glorious Scotchman of Dr. George Lockhart becomes, under the brush of Dr. Robertson Nicoll, another and a distinctly less beautiful personality. He is born on the rock. The amenities of life are not for him. He is haunted by constant fears. He will give nothing. He refuses to be gracious. He is none too gentle in dealing with his competitors. ”

“ Armed with a letter of introduction from Professor McMoss—whom you do not know—and with a sheaf of dog’s eared certificates picked up at Scotch universities, they descend upon you with the air of men who know for a surety that you are dying for their services, and when they go out, after wasting an altogether unnecessary amount of your time and temper, it is with black looks and a burning conviction that you refused to employ them because you know them to be so clever that they might supplant you in your own chair. ”

“ The contemporary world wants and will have what it chooses to call the “live” journalist, and the Scotchman who is a live journalist to the extent of evolving anything bright or subtle or suggestive or original has yet to be found. At the present moment he is managing to keep himself alive by imitation. As a plagiarist of ideas, necessity has made him a master. He knows that the reign of dulness is coming to an end, and that the auld wife journalism in whose benevolent presence he has prosed and prosed for so many years, is even now in her dotage and cannot last much longer. ”

“ I have not the smallest desire to suggest that there are not plenty of hard drinkers whose blood is more or less purely English, yet somehow there is no kind of man in the world who makes the drinking of furious spirit a cultus and a boast in the way that the Scotchman does. To be fou’ or as he would put it, to have a drappie in his eye, is the Scotchman’s notion of bigness and freedom and manly independence. ”

“ It is not too much to say that if you have a Scotchman in your place of business, you are, as a rule, all the weaker for it. If you go thoroughly into him you will find that his only quality is his capacity for plod; as against this he has many ugly traits—jealousy, over-reachingness, and greediness among them. Rarely, if ever, does he understand his business, and of initiative and originality he is, as a rule, devoid. ”

“ The Englishman who has been appropriated by a Scotch wife does not always succeed in profiting by the worldly wisdom with which his spouse would imbue him. Then there is trouble. For a Scotchwoman who cannot report to her kindred in Scotland that her husband is “getting on” feels that she has been robbed of the prime joy of existence. Her contempt for the man who cannot win and grip siller eats into her soul, until she has no other sentiment left. ”

“ It is not in the public interest that every newspaper one picks up should contain certificates of character for the Scotch; it is not in the public interest that he should be continually written down for a person of especial intellect, probity, shrewdness, humour, and the rest. His intellect, in point of fact, is middling; his probity merely average; his shrewdness questionable, and his humour neither here nor there. As a subordinate he is always a very doubtful bargain. As a person in authority he is just a bully—“a bad master,” as Dr. Nicoll puts it. ”

“ Send us portraits of yourself at all ages from three months to the present day, pictures of the modest tenement in which you were born, and of your present town house and little place in the country, and, bless your heart, we will do the rest. Do people say that the great novel, of which you have sold fifty million copies in England and America, is a pot-boiler and a stunner? ”

“ Robertson Nicoll that once upon a time it was the ambition of every Scotch youth to become a professor. Once upon a time, too, and one does not need to quote authority for it, every second child in kilts was devoted by his parents to the ministry, and did, no doubt, sooner or later attain to that admirable office. But latterly the supply of Scotch professors has been a good deal bigger than the demand, and it has dawned upon the slow Scottish intellect that £70 a year and a manse is after all not exactly one of the prizes of life. ”

“ If meanness were the only fault one might be able to put up with Barbie; but the inhabitants have graver failings. They are all dour; they are all bitter-hearted; they are all greedy; they are all merciless and full of the wickedest guile. Gourlay, who is the hero of the piece, counts among the most unpleasant persons one has ever met in a book. He has “the black glower in his een,” and all the [94] Scotch qualities of envy, hatred, overweening pride, and tyranny find full expression in him. For years he has trampled the rest of Barbie under his feet, and all Barbie hates him. ”

“ The mothers of most literary people have done as much. It has been left to Dr. Barrie to snatch away the decent veil which hides the sanctities of life from the common gaze, and to let all the world into the privacies of the filial and maternal relation at five shillings a time. If I understand Margaret Ogilvy aright, she would have cut off both her hands rather than permit some of the things in this book to become the property of strangers, sympathetic or otherwise. ”

“ You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him, for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. ”

“ The idiot who takes to wearing kilts and speaking with an accent for the mere sake of it is scarcely worth notice. But there are such people even outside Colney Hatch. What they see in the Scotch to admire to the point of spuriousness I cannot for the life of me make out. The garb of old Gaul is, no doubt, very fetching from the point of view of the weak-minded, but of its effeminacy there can be no doubt. Really, it is a costume for small and pretty boys who are too young to be breeched. ”

“ Under the inspiring tutelage of the national bard, Scotland has become one of the drunkenest nations in the world. Among the lower classes of the Scotch cities drunkenness is the preponderating vice. In the rural districts whiskey is the only beverage that finds any sort of favour. There is no occasion of life which does not provoke the average Scotchman to inhibition. Births, deaths, and marriages are all celebrated in drink. On Burns Day, Scotland rushes to the bottle as one man. ”

“ But just a drappie in our ee, is the great retort used by Scotchmen if one suggests that they have had enough or too much.
It is to the Scot’s amazing capacity for the consumption of spirit that one may fairly attribute some of his minor defects. Dourness, of which every Scotchman possesses a fair share, and of which he is invariably more or less proud, has always struck me as being in a great measure the outcome of too much whiskey overnight. It is not till he is properly exhilarated with drink that a Scot can unbend himself in the smallest degree. ”

“ It always is unfair to say anything to the detriment of Scotchmen. But the point I wish to insist upon is that Scotch clerks and Scotch managers and Scotchmen at large are no more trustworthy and no more to be depended upon and no less human than Englishmen. The Scotch themselves spare no effort to have it believed that if you want men of true probity, you must go to Scotland for them. ”

“ It is certain that the number of persons in Fleet Street employed upon the press either in literary capacities or as advertisement canvassers or printers is very considerable, and among the lower grades of them, the drinking of whiskey [176] appears to be considered a part of their duty to themselves and to mankind at large. At the same time it is only fair to say that a drunken Scotchman is not by any means a common spectacle, the reason being that the Scot is so inured to the consumption of whiskey from his youth up, that he can take almost any quantity without becoming drunk about the legs. ”

“ That he should desire to do his best for himself and for people of his own blood is also natural. But that he should put on airs and forget that, after all, he is an alien and a person who by good right is with us only on sufferance, is the mistake he makes. The power that he has got for himself has been won largely by combination and advertisement. The Scotch superstition is the oyster out of which he lives. That superstition was never more general than it is to-day, and the advertisement of Scottish virtues and Scottish capacities was never in merrier progress. ”

“ What work could a poor, tired critic take up outside the potter’s field of our accursed system? When a critic gets into that frame of mind he always thinks of the poets. Dr. Archer thought of the poets—the living poets—the poets of the younger generation. ”

“ Now journalism, though the Fourth estate, is the last of the professions. The journalist who is making £500 a year,—at any rate, the Scotch journalist who is making £500 a year,—is the exception and not the rule. Still, £500 a year, or, for that matter, £250 a year, is wealth to your average Scot, who, nine times out of ten, comes hitherward from a district where persons who once had a sovereign in their possession are looked upon with awe and reverence. ”

“ You ladies, if I may say so, are apt to imagine that, when once you have got an idea, a play can be improvised like a newspaper article or a six shilling novel. This is a mistake. A play, to have any solid value, must be carefully and laboriously built up. You will make false steps, find yourself in blind alleys, and have to try back and start afresh many and many a time. ”

“ One would hesitate to suggest that he should be got rid of entirely, for he has his uses and his good qualities. As a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, as a person fitted by temperament for the exercise of mechanical functions, he is all very well; but in matters where intellect and sparkle are required he [206] should be left severely alone. To rid the press of his influence would be an excellent thing for the press. It cannot be shown that he is of the least use in journalism, or that he does things any better, whether as reporter, sub-editor, or editor, than the average Englishman. ”

“ I do not hesitate to assert that the number of Scottish men of letters now living can be counted twice on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, with the persons who might be expected to count in such a category, in my mind’s eye, I have difficulty in admitting that any one of them is a man of letters in the strict sense of the phrase. ”

“ Douglas, the author of The House with the Green Shutters, is himself a Scotchman, and to malign his country is about the last thing you may expect from a Scotch writer; his tendency usually is the other way. To put Thrums, Drumtochty, and Barbie into one vessel, as it were, to mix them and make a blend of them is probably to get at the truth about the Scot as he lives and moves in his native element. ”

“ Any Scot who is feeling a desire to be particularly humble and to learn the real truth about [24] himself and his compatriots should read and read again the tragedy of Macbeth. Of course, Shakespeare does not count much in Scotland. Whenever a Scottish writer of the old school has to speak of him, he does so with a grumbling grudgingness as who should say, “The man was a genius, but not a Scot, what a peety!”
“Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plant,” warbled Burns. Think of it! And I have seen a Scotch reviewer complain that a certain author was cursed with a “Shakespearean smartness.” ”

“ To whatever department of activity one looks one finds therein, working his way up for all he is worth and by not over-scrupulous methods, the so-called canny Scot. In some professions, notably that of journalism, as I have shown, he has made himself more or less predominant. In banks, offices, and manufactories he is to be found as frequently as not, ruling the roost in the capacity of manager or overseer; and in the general atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon business life there is a persistent feel of him. ”

“ When I look back to my early years it seems to me that the whole atmosphere was laden with care, that the strain on the hearts of the people was so tightened by the material needs of those who depended on them that life was a taut rope on which only a trained acrobat could keep his balance. ”

“ Under some Scotch name, such as [175] the Scotch Stores, the Clachan, the Highland Laddie, and so forth, these places flourish and the proprietors of them wax fat. Here, any morning in the week, you will find brither Scots assembled, elbow on counter, indulging in the whiskey which delights their souls. All day there is plenty of company, plenty of Doric, plenty of discussion on politics and the questions of the hour, but more than all, a steady flow of whiskey. ”