SCOTTISH' LITERATURE.*

PROFESSOR GREGORY SMITH has long been known as a great authority on Scottish literature, his profound knowledge of which has been attested in many valuable and scholarly works. But his quality as a critic and writer has never been more conspicuously displayed than in this short volume containing ten connected essays on two subjects—"the character and habit of Scottish literature, and the influence exerted by that literature on others." It is "not offered as a history," though in places— as in his survey of the foreign elements, his fine study of the new poetic forces revealed in Thomson's Seasons, Macpherson's Fingal, and the Romantic Ballad, and his brilliant sketch of the Northern Augustans—it assumesthe form of a narrative. The aim of the book is mainly critical, and the special feature of the criticism is the insistence on the dualism which forms the national idiosyncrasy. In the opening chapter, after dismissing the conventional and superficial views of "tartan-haggis critics" and those who discover the authentic Scot in " an idealism tempered with Kirk-polities and a love of small change," he finds from earliest times two persistent, yet contradictory, moods. The first is " intimacy of style," " the zest for handling a multitude of details rather than for socking broad effects by suggestion." This mood is illustrated by a directness and realistic fullness traceable from the earlier writers, and Middle Scots " Makers " down to Burns and Scott. It is not necessarily pedantic, nor is the whole lost in the parts ; it is often lively in result and marked by movement. The second is the Mood of whimsicality and topsy-turvydom, of " flyting " ; the love of abrupt contrast between the real and the fantastic. It is an old fashion, that of the interruption of a plain tale of experience by the intrusion of the grotesque or uncanny, of the horns of Elfiand, sometimes by sheer nonsense or " skimble-skamble'' staff, but often by real poetry, as in the fantasies of Dunbar. (Incidentally Professor Gregory Smith gives an admirable Illustration of this kind of transition from the context of "The Isles of Greece in Don Juan.) But the origin of this freakish mood is not to be traced to the Celtic spirit. h is not found in the extant literature of the Scottish Gad, in the Ossianic corpus, or the oral tradition. Professor Gregory Smith decides against borrowing ; but does not altogether rule out the possibility of parody. He links up

this eccentric mixing of contraries, this easy passage from the natural to the supernatural, an essentially mediaeval habit, with the Scottish talent for the picturesque, with the prevailing sense of movement, energy, and variety in Scottish literature, and the humour which must be sharply distinguished from a limited " wut " or jocosity. Again, neither the preaching or arguing Scot of the seventeenth nor the neo-classical Scot of the eighteenth century represents the true facts of Scottish literature, " which at all periods has shown a readiness not only to accept the contrary moods more or less on equal terms, but te make the one blend imperceptibly into tate other." The great exemplar of this capacity among English writers is Coleridge. But down from the Border ballad and Makers' verse there has been a continuous witness in all types of literary Scot, and, as Professor Gregory Smith reminds us, the elements are combined in Stevenson and Andrew Lang, who, " though scholar, researcher, and bibliographer, is remembered as our chief Fairy-book maker," and was saluted by the creator of Peter Pan as having the Scottish quality of elvishness.

But " a literature so attracted by the intimacies of life and so fancy free runs some risk of exaggerating its enthusiasms." In his chapter on " Lets and Hindrances "—partly of its own making, partly the tyranny of circumstance—Professor Gregory Smith shows how Scottish literature has been thrown back on itself and has become too domestic or irresponsible. The charge of provinciality and parochiality brought against Burns, a charge in which Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, and Henley concurred, has been well met by Professor Nichol when he points out the confusion between provincialism in themes and provincialism in thought. Burns laid hold on the universal ; there is no narrowness of view in him. As for the patriotic bent, Professor Gregory Smith reminds us that it was absent from the Golden Age of Scottish poetry, and only became perfervid in the eighteenth century. Domesticity is characteristic of all Northern poetry ; the older poets were mostly homely persons, and dialect was a determining factor. But you can havotoo much homespun, and our critic has some mordant remarks on the dangers of dialect literatures suggested by the attempts to create a national drama in Ireland. The charge of rudeness and roughness is not denied. Honest frankness is one thing ; " sow-nosing " is another. The love of contrast, issuing in a protest against the orderliness of real life and the conventions of literary respectability, is illustrated over a long range by greater and lesser prose writers and poets, including Smollett and even Thomson. The most interesting part of the chapter is that in which the author deals with the charge of antiquarianism. Here, again, vindication is tempered by admissions. Outside Italy, nowhere does the past so grip the present as in Scotland. The Scot never forgets the past: it is not merely out of piety. He is an antiquarian by trade, a relic-hunter, a zealous compiler and keeper of family memoirs and Kirk records. The historical habit rules in all higher or imaginative work ; each poet is indebted to his predecessor, and Professor Gregory Smith subscribes to the " editorial " theory of Burns, while insisting on his wonderful personality and signal talent for writing well. This conservative tendency was helped by the deliberate return to the past in the eighteenth century, and, above all, by Scott. Yet the dangers of antiquarianism in literary studies are not denied. Especially has it weakened the sensitiveness to " borderland " effects by an extreme preoccupation with fact—a weakness shown even by Scott in his handling of the supernatural. And Professor Gregory Smith counts it as a limitation that Scottish literature has always been more sensitive to the sterner aspects of Nature. From the mediaevalists to Thomson, Scottishpoets were most natural and fresh in dealing with wintry themes. Burns was not deeply concerned with Nature for her own sake, but his deepest sympathy is with gloom, night, and storm.

In his examination of the foreign elements which flowed in upon Scottish literature' or controlled its life, Professor Gregory Smith is careful to make it clear that if at the shaping of an independent Scotland, the speech of the people, south and east of the Highland Line, was English, so too was the literature. The inroads came not from the Gaelic element but from the South. Three phases of this Anglicization are traced in the wholehearted yielding of the Scottish Muse to Chaucer ; in the " very

English or sometimes Italianate " product of the Anglo-Scottish poets of James's English Court, and the Anglicism of the historians and horailists, most pronounced in Knox ; and, thirdly, in the " untiring efforts " of Scottish writers in prose and verso

of the eighteenth century to compete with the Englishman in his own medium. Then followed the period of protest and revival, headed by Ramsay. But as Professor Gregory Smith acutely observes, the antiquarian reformers, though in the, ardour of their protest against the degenerate taste of the day they took no thought of the character and origin of the material—often ultimately English—which they offered as a corrective, " prepared the way for a work more truly Scottish, by restoring the national self-confidence, and had their reward in the sympathy of a wider public, both cultured and bucolic, and in the triumph of Burns." The sequel is described in a passage characteristic of the author's detached and critical temper :—

" Thereafter Scottish literature pursued a double course. English influence remained vigorous and grew, and grows to the confounding of the experts who must find a Northern or Southern label for every modern writer or book. The vernacular Muse piped on lustily for a time, till with the scattering of the village crowd and through the fussing of the Perfervids, her notes began to falter. Her self-confidence had been won on terms too narrow. Her neighbour, with larger purpose, sensitive and willing in discipline, snatched away her reward, to the greater honour of Weir common country."

Of the remaining foreign influences, Professor, Gregory Smith ranks Latin second, showing, by a wealth of apt illustration, how the weakness of Scots was the opportunity of Latin, which, even in the darkest hours, supplied an ideal and an artistic discipline.

And he gives good reasons for his deliberate opinion that French Literary influence was never strong, and hardly ever found outside the poets whose work was artificial or experimental. As for the alleged influence of the Gael on his Lowland neighbimr, he strongly maintains that the expression of racial antipathy lasted unbroken from the beginning of Scots literature till the middle of the eighteenth century, when England and Scotland welcomed the novelty and mystery of the Ossianic legends.

The causes why Scottish literature failed to produce a national drama or to achieve a vernacular prose—save in unexpected places, such as diaries, odd corners of historical accounts, and law records—are set forth in a penetrating analysis which leads on to a discussion of the problem of dialect and the hope of the Scottish vernacular. Here the author finds the best leading

in the practice of Burns and Scott, each of whom adopted a

compromise ; the former by using alternate layers or a mosaic of styles—Alloway parish and pure Southern—the latter by employing the device of " a delicate colouring of standard English with Northern tints." But the final test of the method must be literary. Professor Gregory Smith is dead against the free intrusion of untested colloquialism. " The parochial antiquaries are welcome to their view that Scott's art is but the bastardy of language. We prefer to think that by this handling of words he promised youth and adventure to a literature for which some people could hope for no happier fate than decent burial."

We have left ourselves no space to deal in detail with the author's masterly survey of the new poetic forces—the services of Ramsay and Thomson, Macpherson and Percy. He rightly ragards Percy's Reliques as the greatest of incentives to the work

of Scotland in leading the world's literature back to the fountains of Romance. Macpherson built better than he know ; he failed

to understand the true direction of his work. But " Europe, indifferent alike to his deceit and his wrong-headed criticism, thanked him, past the dreams of more ambitious bards, for the gift of Romance." In Fingal and Temora came the answer to

the yearning of young France and Germany. " Amid the imaginary mists of an imaginary Caledonia, Macpherson's heroes fought and loved and lamented as a Chateaubriand, a Goethe, or a Lamartine craved. . . . Here was Macpherson's trinmph, and with it the beginning of Scotland's literary reputation throughout Europe." The essays on Burns and Scott are at once generous and discriminating. For Professor Gregory Smith the true Burns is neither the popular idol of the January festival

nor the "friend of Humanity" (in no Anti-Jacobin sense), but " the artist, the lyrist of unsurpassed vigour and sweetness,

the guardian of a literary tradition and its renewer"; and Scott is " the most representative Scot, perhaps the greatest man whom Scotland has produced," who " holds his own by the sheer momentum of character which won for him the triumph of his lifetime," who gave not only to English but to the world's literature the Historical Novel, who, in fine, " by reason of his literary talent, his personality,and the opportunities offered in the early nineteenth century, became the mouthpiece of Scotticism to the would of letters,"

Professor Gregory Smith wears his learning lightly, and his style, distinguished without preciosity, and enlivened, with happy turns of phrase and an ironical wit freely exercised at the expense of Particularists, Kailyarders, and Perfervids, exerts a constant charm on the reader.