"They will say that we are dull, of course," Bute wrote to his editor in 1887, discussing the contents of a forthcoming number of the Scottish Review. "But they say that anyhow, without reading us, whatever we put in or leave out." Bute did not always feel sure that his own contributions, written as they were with an immensity of care and painstaking, were not open to this charge. "I feel rather low about the 'Coronations,'"[[1]] he wrote a few weeks later. "It seems to me dull, very long, and intensely technical.... It is true that the Lord Lyon has returned my proof with a note calling the article 'most valuable,' and saying he could scarcely suggest any improvement. So far so good; but then he is a professional State Master of Ceremonies."
At other times Bute appeared rather to resent the charge of "heaviness" not infrequently applied to his Review. "They call us ponderous—it is their favourite adjective," he wrote in this mood a little later. "It is easy to bandy epithets, but I should say that we are positively light in comparison with some other quarterlies I could name. I was drowsing for two hours last night over one of them, which I can designate by no other word than stodgy." Nevertheless it must be frankly admitted that Bute did not possess the power of treating with any kind of light touch (or perhaps of inspiring others to do the same) the various interesting and important subjects which were the staple of the Review. The gift of humour he certainly possessed, and in a high degree: he could see as well as any man the incongruous and ridiculous side of the most serious subject: he liked a good story, and could tell one himself, with a sort of solemn jocosity which, combined with his singular felicity in the choice of language, added vastly to the effect of the anecdote. Moreover, he could write as well as talk wittily, as is evident from the caustic and sometimes mordant humour which characterises many of his letters. But this feature is almost or wholly absent from his published writings; and in these he seems to have adopted the principle which Dr. Johnson certainly practised as well as preached: "The dignity of literature is little enhanced by what passes for humour and wit; and the true man of letters will do well to reserve his jests for the ears of his private friends, and to treat serious subjects, on the printed page, in a serious manner."
Bute hardly seemed to realise that the following of the sage counsel just quoted could be any bar to the popularity of the Review with the general reader; and he was at times almost querulous with what he called the "unaccountable apathy" of the Scottish public in particular. "I think," he wrote to a literary friend, "you ought to pitch strongly into the Scottish people for their distaste for anything like serious reading. I am told that of the books borrowed from the Edinburgh Public Library for home perusal, more than 75 per cent. are works of fiction. One thing which I have particularly noticed about them is crass ignorance of their own history, to a point which is really quite astonishing."
In order to increase the circulation of the Review, and make it if possible self-supporting ("a state of things which, for the sake of the principle involved," wrote Bute, "I am extremely desirous to bring about,") the desperate expedient was proposed of transferring the Review to London, following the precedents of the Edinburgh and the North British. But this was too much for Bute's amor patriæ. He wrote to the Oxford friend from whom the suggestion had emanated:
October 1, 1887.
One might, of course, do better business by dropping it as a Scottish review, and starting another English magazine in London under the same name, and with a continuity of numeration. This, however, would be to destroy in its very essence the attempt to keep going a Scottish quarterly in Scotland. It must be owned that the apathy of the Scottish public is quite enough to drive any one to such a course, and it would be entirely their own fault if it were taken.
1888, Bute's historical method
A typical example of Bute's method of treating subjects drawn from the byways of history may be seen in his studies on the trial and execution of Giordano Bruno,[[2]] whose memory a noisy party in Italy was at that time (1888) endeavouring to exalt as that of an innocent victim and martyr. The opinion of educated Catholics might have been thought pretty well made up as to the justice of the sentence on the notorious Neapolitan philosopher and ex-Dominican, of whom not a Roman Inquisitor, but a Protestant divine, had said that he was "a man of great capacity, with infinite knowledge, but not a particle of religion." Bute, however, approached the subject in his usual attitude of complete intellectual detachment, with no trace of parti pris. "There is much obscurity about the whole matter," he wrote from Sorrento on March 21, 1888, "but I flatter myself that my paper will at least be a triumph of impartiality, of absolutely colourless neutrality." It is sufficient to record here that his conclusion, after many months of patient sifting of evidence, much of it drawn from contemporary sources hitherto unexplored, was much the same as that of Bruno's accusers and judges in Venice and in Rome. He wrote as follows to Dr. Metcalfe, before his articles appeared in print:
What I fail to understand is why they executed him at all. If the Church Courts had kept him to themselves and imprisoned him for life, he could not have done any one any harm, and might with advancing age have repudiated and repented some of his blasphemous utterances (one being that Christ was not God, but only a magician of extraordinary cunning).[[3]] In the case of this obscure and repulsive vagabond, whose chief literary work could not be printed to-day without the author being prosecuted for obscenity, there was surely no need of a terrible public example, such as might have been (and was) urged in the case of the burning of Servetus.