[A. ST. CLAIR MACKENZIE]
Alastair St. Clair Mackenzie, author of The Evolution of Literature, was born at Inverness, Scotland, February 17, 1875. "Blue as a molten sapphire gleams the Moray Firth below Culloden Moor, under whose purple heather sleep some of the warrior ancestors of Alastair St. Clair Mackenzie, near which he was born." The University of Glasgow conferred the degree of Master of Arts upon him in 1892. He then did graduate work in English at the University of Edinburgh for a year, after which he studied for some months under Sir Richard C. Jebb of the University of Cambridge, and Edward Caird of Oxford University. Mackenzie met S. R. Crockett, Henry Drummond, William Black, Alfred Tennyson, and many other distinguished men of letters, before he came to America. After a brief residence in Philadelphia he came to the State University of Kentucky, at Lexington, in September, 1899, as head of the department of English, and under his supervision the curriculum has been extended from three courses to thirty. Among Kentucky educators he has been the pioneer in introducing Journalism, Comparative Philology, and Comparative Literature. In 1911 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Kentucky Wesleyan College, the only degree of the kind ever conferred by that institution. In 1912 Dr. Mackenzie was Ropes Foundation lecturer at the University of Cincinnati. He is now dean of the Graduate School of the University of Kentucky. Besides contributing many articles to periodicals, Dr. Mackenzie wrote, in 1904, the first history of Lexington Masonic Lodge, No. 1, the earliest in the West; and, in 1907, the article on Hew Ainslie, the Scottish-Kentucky poet, published in the Library of Southern Literature, and pronounced by many competent critics to be the finest essay in that great collection. His The Evolution of Literature (New York, 1911), the English edition of which was issued by John Murray, London, deals with the origins of literature, as its title indicates, and it has placed Dr. Mackenzie at the head of Southern students of this subject. Into this work went the researches and deliberate judgments of a lifetime; and that a scholar should produce such a work in the West or South, without a great library near at hand, is in itself remarkable. Dr. Mackenzie has done what will probably come to be regarded as the most scholarly production of a Kentucky hand, although the work is more suggestive than it is conclusive.
Bibliography. Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta, 1910, v. xv); Who's Who in America (1912-1913).
A KELTIC TALE[78]
[From The Evolution of Literature (New York, 1911)]
Here is an old Keltic tale of farewell. It was a night of mist, a low moon brooding over the braes, the heathery braes. The man sat by the seashore, as he sang quaint ballads of a land across the water, where men never see death. There was none to reveal the secrets of the glens, nor could any one tell him what the eagle cried to the stag at the corrie, while the burn wimpled on with its song of sobbing. He sat and listened, but he was knowing naught of sadness. To his ears came only the accents of the fairies of joy, and they called him to seek the fountain where song had its birth. Away from the sea he climbed till its voice came faint, faint across the bracken. At last, full weary, he slept. The night passed, and a leveret stood up, gazing upon his face without fear. A deer came to the stream, beheld the sleeping figure, and fled not. A grey linnet perched upon the pale hand lying across the bosom; it looked the sun in the face, and sang, but the man did not awake. Again the shadows melted into the night of stars, and the hills said to one another, "He has found Death and Life. For we know, and God knows, all his dreams. He has found the secret of the sea, the message of all the streams, and the fountain-head of song."
In quest of literary strivings and achievements, lowly as well as exalted, we have journeyed through all the principal lands of the globe. The forests of Africa have shaded us from the scorching sun, and the tang of the salt sea has smitten us off Cape Horn. Visions of scenes familiar have mingled with sights and sounds of cities that flourished forty centuries ago. Wherever we have gone, we have noticed that vitality is the quality which gives permanent value to all true art. Popular opinion, blind perhaps to the qualities of art as art, caring nothing about the more elusive charms of verse and prose, is quick to detect the presence or absence of a vital relationship between literature and humanity. Literary art voices life and gives life. The higher the art the more effectively does it fill the onlooker with a sense of life, personal and racial, dignified, wholesome, inexhaustible. Apparently it is the ideal within the real that becomes ever more manifest in the course of the evolution of literature.