My Ain Folk
Brother Scots. By Donald Carswell. (Constable. 12s.) THIS is unquestionably the most brilliant series of bit). graphical essays that has appeared since Mr. Lytton Strachey's Victorian studies, and they are much in the same vein and treat of much the same age. There is in this volume the same delicate rapier-work and the same iconoclastic spirit. With the sentiment and inferences of either of the two literary gladiators one cannot always agree, but always one is forced to admire the mastery they show over their weapons and the searching ingenuity of their thrusts, which, it must be con- fessed, are not always easy to parry.
Mr. Carswell offers impressionist biographical sketches of six not necessarily representative, but six prominent Scotsmen, who flourished during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and hopes that hiS account will supply at the same time a cultural picture of Scotland, which he believes will be found " interesting, especially by English readers." That it certainly will, for here we are presented- with a most frankly drawn picture, and one wholly contrary to accepted tradition, of the Scot as viewed by a fellow- countryman, and Mr. Carswell's presentation of the case will do much to dissipate " the superstition, still widely held north of the Tweed, that almost any Scotsman is superior to every Englishman whatsoever in intellect, morals and spirituality."
First of all, we are asked to note two facts : that the dark pre-Celtic race, shrewd but lackMg in insight, fantastic but little imaginative, forms in Scotland a much larger proportion of the population than it does in England, where the fair- haired Germanic type is much more common ; and secondly,' that whereas England is seasoned in civilization, Scotland has only become civilized since the Union in 1707, having suffered for centuries from dire poverty and political and social disorder, all of which has resulted for the Scot in a lack of moral perspective and in a character marked by rudeness, individualism, and a lawless spirit of faction. That spirit manifested itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in ecclesiastical schism, and is manifesting itself disagreeably to-day in politics and industry, especially in the Clyde valley, where the people, largely pre-Celtic in origin, are " intelligent and expressive, but volatile, deficient in the individual virtues, and • highly iukeptible to mass eMotions."
From these two facts or factors important results flow, and, without detailing Mr. CarssVell's argument (which, of course, is impossible here) the analysis of the Scottish character works out somewhat as follows. ." The Scottish
people have very little religious capacity," but base the whole of their Christianity on certain religious observances, of which, of course, the cult of the Sabbath is the most prominent—that spirit which has enabled the Church to disapprove of Sunday tramways, while it permitted the minister to travel to service in a cab. The tradition of discipline in Scotland is " a recent growth," _and it is often hard to persuade a Scot that certain things are " not done," and even yet the latent savage within him cherishes a " secret hankering for the loin-cloth and feathers" (for which the kilt is probably a compromise). Scotland in fact is still " the hermit Kingdom of Western 'Europe," and the Scot, mutatis mutandis, " has all the virtues and limi- tations of the Tibetan." Even the Scottish reputation for shrewdness Mr. Carswell finds it hard to understand, but lie would in this regard make an exception of the Aberdonian, " whose psyehology in-this as in other respects is by far the most ' English ' in Scotland " ! (It is we who venture to add the note of admiration here.) Composure is net often found in Scotsmen, and their proverbial caution is only a cloak for self-distrust. Professor Blackie is described as the " national genius made flesh," and Professor Blackie is also described (no doubt rightly) as " boisterous, bombastic, theatrical, affectionate and generous." So now we know our Scot.
The individual pictures of the six Scots, round which Mr. Carswell has framed this presentment of the national character, are brilliantly drawn. The study of Lord Overtoun, who paid his workmen 4d. an hour, worked some of them seven days per week and all of them twelve hours a day (with no time off for meals), and left £63,000 chiefly to charity and religious bodies, is a masterpiece of restrained irony. Enthralling, too, in its tragi-comedy is the account of the ecclesiastical cock-fight which resulted in the expulsion from his professorial chair of the great Orientalist, Robertson-Smith, because he dared to doubt the historicity of Deuteronomy ; while the career of Blackie furnishes a farcical entertainment of a high order. Yet still it must be remembered of Blackie that he provided Scotsmen of his generation with a " moral holiday." " Poor souls, they needed it "—is Mr. Carswell's comment. These three studies seem the best of the six. The others treat of Henry Drununond, author of that long- forgotten book Natural Law in the Spiritual World, an evangelical apostle who never made a disciple ; of Sir William Robertson Nicoll (" Claudius Clear "), a hard-bitten Aber- donian with " a multitude of interests and no enthusiasms," and one of the three great journalists of the nineteenth century, who remarked that " no educated man could stand the Dissenters," and yet founded The British Weekly ; and James Keir Hardie, " a bumptious woolly-witted Scotch collier," who by starting the I.L.P. initiated the destruction of the Liberal Party—a movement of revolt which Disraeli with uncanny prescience foretold would originate in the industrial West of Scotland.
If Mr. Carswell still continues to live in Scotland, or if ever he goes back there, the perfervidurn ingenium Scotorum is likely to let him hear with some plainness about his daringly provocative book, but he will well know how to defend himself.
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