When Elijah entered my room one morning—his clean-shaven, heavy-jawed face more determined than ever—I was certain that he had not come to talk over the weather, and prepared myself for faithful dealing.
“It is not my custom,” he began, “to read fiction, and I believe that the more people read novels the less will they want to read their Bibles; but I was recommended to read a book of yours, called The Days of Auld Lang Syne, by a friend, in whose judgment I have usually placed confidence, and I feel it my duty to call and remonstrate with you about that book.”
Was it the literary form that he wished to criticise, or the substance? In either case I hoped he would speak with all frankness, an encouragement which Mr. Higginbotham perhaps hardly needed.
“Well, I don't know anything about literature, for I thank God that my Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress are enough for me; but I did once read Scott—long ago before I knew the value of time—and your book is certainly not up to that sample.” This, I assured Elijah, was my own fixed and unalterable opinion, and I ventured to congratulate Elijah on the acuteness of his literary judgment—which compliment was passed over without acknowledgment—and then I pressed for his farther criticism.
“What I have to say is just this, that there are characters in the book who ought not to be introduced to a Christian family, and views which are sure to injure religion.”
Now it happened that I had been reading that morning an interesting and very caustic review, in which it was pointed out that no people had ever lived or ever would live so good as the inhabitants of Drumtochty: that I had confused together the (mythical) garden of Eden with a Scots village; that the places were really very different in morals and general environment; that it was a pity that the author did not know the limits of true art; that what was wanted was reality, not sentimental twaddle, and that in short—but this is not how the critic put it—let the writer of fiction stick to the ash-pit in a house, and not attempt the picture gallery. The critic—a young gentleman, I should say—was very severe on my London doctor, who had taken a servant girl to his own house that she might die there in peace, and assured me that such extravagant unrealities showed my hopeless ignorance, and proved my unfitness to be an artist in life. Up to this point I had been much humbled, and had been trying to profit by every word of wisdom; but now I laid down the paper and had a few moments of sinless enjoyment, for this incident had been lifted bodily out of life, with only some change in names, and was the only fact in the book. A poor puling idealist!—yet even in my most foolish flights I had kept some hold on life—but here was Elijah Higginbotham sitting calmly in my study and suggesting that I was a realist of such a pronounced and shameless character that my books were not fit for family reading.
When I pressed him for some evidence of his charge, he cited “Posty,” and spoke briefly but strongly about that unfortunate man's taste for alcoholic liquors.
“Could I reconcile it with my conscience to introduce such a man to the Christian public, and was I not aware of the injury which drink was doing in our country?”
“Mr. Higginbotham,” I said, “my business was to represent life in a Scots parish, within limits, as I had seen it, and although I say it with deep regret, and hope the matter will never be mentioned outside this room, every Scot is not a rigid and bigoted abstainer—a few, I hope fewer every year, do 'taste.'”
“We are all perfectly aware of that, and more than a few,”—which was not generous on his part,—“but that is not the question. It is whether you, as a respectable—and I would fain believe in spite of what I have read—Christian man, ought deliberately to condone and countenance this conduct.”