I
The Scottish temperament is compounded of such various and unlikely ingredients that very many of those who charge Scots with hypocrisy and sentimentality are guilty of something like frigid intolerance. Hypocrisy, in the sense of self-deception, is too common a thing among all men to be charged particularly against the Scots; sentimentality, in the sense of false or artificially heightened emotion, is, in the same way, the prerogative of no particular nation or body of persons. It is very likely true that hypocrisy and sentimentality are among the failings of the Scots: but among their virtues may be found both integrity and sincerity as well as loyalty to an idea or to a conviction. What points the contradiction is that the Scots, in every meaning of that word, are very sensible. They are very clearly aware of all circumstances tending to their own advantage; they are very appreciative of good actions contributed by other persons to that advantage; and they are very easily moved. They are easily moved by encounter, in unusual circumstances, with the Scots tongue (by which I mean that accent in speaking English, and those terms, grammatical or verbal, which are peculiar to Scotsmen); and they are extraordinarily moved by the word “home,” by the thought of family and by certain sounds, such as music heard across water, or particular notes in the voice of a singer—especially when the singer happens to be the person who is moved. But they are not singular in these susceptibilities, although they may provide a notorious example of them. In each case the emotion is easy, sympathetic, instantaneous; in each case it takes the form of tears. Those who cry are, as it were, drunken with a certain impulse of humility; they may be as distressing as a drunken person grown maudlin; but, superficial though it is, their emotion is entirely genuine. It is of no use to call it sentimentality: it is simply objectless emotion, which may not be very stirring to those who do not feel it, but which is not therefore to be instantly condemned. It happens to be a tradition that Englishmen do not publicly show affection or weep: how hard it is that we should weigh in the balance of our own traditions the practices of our neighbours!
This point, however, is a most interesting one, because it helps to explain the dearth of great Scottish poets, and because it helps to explain why, in spite of every good intention, Stevenson never made any impression upon English readers by his three volumes of miscellaneous “grown-up” poetry. The fault was not a personal one; but was a part of the national character. The Scots are so easily moved, and their tears and enthusiasms flow so freely, that the authenticity of tears and enthusiasms is even disputed, and the power to go deeper is not vouchsafed them. They appear to us, as the Master of Ballantrae appeared to Ephraim Mackellar, compounded of “outer sensibility and inner toughness”; and Burns, the only great Scottish poet, triumphed because these constituents were granted to him in more overflowing and undiluted measure than has been the case with any other Scotsman. Outer sensibility and inner toughness is a phrase that would label a good many Englishmen; but of Englishmen the mixture makes charlatans, whereas of Scotsmen it makes journalists and novelists and lawyers of extraordinary skill and astonishing industry. That is why it seems to me important that we should be slow to charge a race that is impressionable with the insincerity (conscious or unconscious) which we might suspect in individual Englishmen. The failure of a Scotsman to be a great poet is another matter.