BESIDE THE BONNIE BRIER-BUSH.*
THE Scotch peasantry have never lacked those among their own countrymen who could describe and appreciate them, and what is more, make their Southron brethren appreciate them also. Never have there been more such writers than es the present day, when so many write up to much the sane level of excellence and so much on the same lines that one is • Eva, as Bonds Brio-Bush. By lea Maclaren. Loudon t Hodder an Stoughton. tempted to ask, "Who first set the ball a-rolling P" Foremost among painters of Scottish character, Scott stands pre-eminent. The great master, with his keen and humorous insight into the excellencies and limitations of the national character, painted his pictures in broad and sweeping lines, which give a sense of breezy manly freedom, though gentler touches of most affect- ing pathos are not wanting. Placed side by side with his writings, those of Barrie, Ian Maclaren and his contemporaries are like charming miniatures, where every touch is carefully considered and minutely put in, as compared with the free and vigorous handling of a portrait by Romney or Sir Joshua Reynolds. Yet they are none the less true and delightful for all that, and there are not wanting those who prefer the clear and delicate painting on ivory to the larger picture on canvas. Why Ian Maclaren should have called the present volume Beside the Bonnie Brier-Bush—unless for the sake of the alliteration—we are at a loss to discover, for it gives the reader no guide as to what to expect between its covers. What he will find is a collection of stories dealing with various episodes in the lives of the people belonging to the Parish of Drumtochty. It is, in the best sense, an ideal society into which he is introduced. That is to say, all that may be sordid and commonplace in the everyday life of the peasantry is kept in the background, while the frequent cultivation of mind and refinement of heart, coupled with strong religious feeling, which are marked characteristics of the best Scotch peasantry, but which might pass almost unnoticed beneath their impassive bearing and humble pursuits, are dwelt upon and developed with unerring skill. It is difficult to choose where all are so good, but, looked at all round, " Domsie " is, we think, the finest of these stories, for here we have Domsie himself, the dominie of the little village school-house, built among the sweet pine-woods, giving all his love and nearly all his money, too, to the children, and helping, as far as in him lay, any "lad o' pairts " to college. At times administering the tawse to a boy, but never once to a girl :— " He kept the girls in as their punishment, with a brother to take them home, and both had tea in Domsie's house, with a bit of his best honey, departing much torn between an honest wish to please Domsie, and a pardonable longing for another tea But it was Latin Domsie hunted for as for fine gold, and when ho found the smack of it in a lad he rejoiced openly. He counted it a day in his life when he knew certainly he had hit on another scholar, and the whole school saw the identification of George Howe. For a winter Domsie had been at point,' racing George through Cresar, stalking him behind irregular verbs, baiting traps with tit-bits of Virgil. During these exercises Domsie surveyed George from above his spectacles with a hope that grew every day in assurance, and came to its height over a bit of Latin prose. Domsie tasted it visibly, and read it again in the shadow of the firs at meal-time, slapping his leg twice. 'He'll dae ! he'll dae ! " cried Domsie aloud, ladling in the snuff. George, ma mannie, tell yir father that I'm coming up to Whinnie Knowe the nicht on a bit o' business.' Then the •schule ' knew that Geordie Hoo was marked for college, and pelted him with fir-cones in great glad- ness of heart."
George's mother Marget is, we think, the most gracious figure in the book, though given with fewest touches. Of more intellectual power, and having other thoughts and a wider horizon than her neighbours, destined to have her heart's desire—the desire of most Scottish mothers—that her only son should be a minister of Christ, dashed to the ground just when it was almost fulfilled, she leaves upon the mind the impression of a sweet and noble woman. Side by side with ?target and Domsie, in our minds, stands Maclure, "a doctor of the old school," rough in manners and almost grotesque in figure, yet as tender as a woman with the children or in cases of suffering. He is ready to face any hardship at the call of duty with unconscious heroism, when he and his faithful com- panion and friend Jess '—the old white mare who died a week after her master—would set out, no matter what the distance, time, or weather, with the medicine and instruments that might be needed strapped before and behind upon the saddle :— "it was not that he rode beautifully, for he broke every canon of the art, flying with his arms, stooping till he seemed to be speaking into Jess's ' ears, and rising in the saddle beyond all necessity. But he could ride faster, stay longer in the saddle, and had a firmer grip with his knees than any one I ever met, and it was all for mercy's sake. When the reapers in harvest time saw a figure whirling past in a cloud of dust, or a family at the foot of Glen Urtach, gathered round the fire of a winter's night, heard the rattle of a horse's hoofs on the road, or the shepherds, out after the sheep, traced a black speck moving across the snow to the 'Upper Glen, they knew it was the doctor, and, without being conscious of it, wished him God speed." Poorly paid, hard worked, "he did his best for the need of every man, woman, and child, in this wild straggling district, year in, year oat, in the snow and in the heat, in the dark and in the light, without rest and without holiday for forty
years." At the end of those forty years comes his one long holiday and rest; but we must send the reader to Ian Maclaren himself for that last touching scene in the good doctor's life.
His " Mother's Sermon" and" The Transformation of Lachlan Campbell" are among the best of these stories; indeed, the only one that does not seem to us up to the high level of the rest, is that entitled "A Wise Woman," where, in spite of some good things, the humour seems to us forced. Mrs. Mac- fadyen, the recognised village critic and sermon-taster, is amusing when we meet her popping in and out of the other stories, but somehow, when she comes to be the heroine of one herself, she strikes us as rather a failure,—in fact, she bores us. As a rule, however, Ian Maclaren's humour and pathos seem to spring spontaneously out of the situations and characters described, and are so subtly interwoven that hardly has the smile passed away before one is surprised to find something very like tears taking its place. "Never mind me," says the minister, walking up and down, and blowing his nose like a trumpet, on being told how the old doctor had fought for hours, over a patient, with death, and had won at last. "I've a cold in my head to-night,"—and most of the readers of these stories, we imagine, will be apt to find them- selves overtaken suddenly by the same troublesome com- plaint. It is difficult to give any example of this in the space at our command ; but perhaps we cannot do better than quote the description of the minister's prayer at the funeral of George Howe, whose death has almost broken the hearts of his mother and father, not to mention that of poor old Domsie and many a one besides :—
"The Doctor's funeral prayer was one of the glories of the parish, compelling even the Free Kirk to reluctant admira- tion, although they hinted that its excellence was rather of the letter than the spirit, and regarded its indiscriminate charity with suspicion. It opened with a series of extracts from the Psalms, relieved by two excursions into the minor prophets, and led up to a sonorous recitation of the problem of immortality from Job, with its triumphant peroration of the fifteenth chapter of I. Corinthians. Drumtochty men held their breath till the Doctor reached the crest of the bill (Hillocks disgraced himself once by dropping his staff at the very moment when the Doctor was passing from Job to Paul), and then we relaxed while the Doctor descended to local detail. It was understood that it took twenty years to bring the body of this prayer to perfection, and any change would have been detected and resented. The Doctor made a good start, and had already sighted Job, when he was carried out of his course by a sudden current, and began to speak to God about Marget and her son, after a very simple fashion that brought a lump to the throat, till at last, as I imagine, the sight of the laddie working at his Greek in the study of a winter night came up before him, and the remnants of the great prayer melted like an iceberg in the Gulf Stream. Lord, has peety upon us, for we a' lured him, and we were a' prood o' him.' After the Doctor said 'Amen' with majesty, one used to look at his neighbour, and the other would shut his eyes and shake his head, meaning, There's no use asking me, for it simply can't be better done by living man.' This time no one remembered his neigh- bour, because every eye was fixed on the Doctor."
No one can lay down this book,—which, we are aware, has already been noticed in these columns, but hardly, we think, at sufficient length,—without feeling that, though he has been made to laugh often, he has at the same time been brought within sound of that " Virgilian cry,—The sense of tears in mortal things."
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