As for Lord Rosebery, the less said about him the better. He is of Scotch stock, and he had the good fortune to be born of an English mother. But the Scotch blood in him, the Scotch ineptitudes, the Scotch lack of force prevail. He does everything by turns and nothing long. Like Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, he failed as a leader. The statesman in him does not possess him; it was a mere detail and a small one. As an active politician he had to look around for a model upon whom to shape himself. No Scotchman can make the smallest sort of mark, whether it be in politics or anything else, without such a model. And in his middle and later periods, at any rate, Lord Rosebery has modelled himself upon Mr. Augustine Birrell, and as is usual with Scotchmen, he has practically ousted Mr. Birrell from the position of wit-monger to the Liberal party. In the House of Commons Mr. Birrell made a reputation, not because he was a statesman or an orator, but because he had a habit of firing off a kind of loose wit which passes in the House of Commons for epigram. When he spoke, the House was sure to be in a roar within the half-hour, and one or two of the phrases he made became texts for leader-writers and made good “quote” in Liberal speeches. With true Scottish enterprise, Lord Rosebery determined to be a second and a greater Birrell. He has succeeded. In the House of Lords he enjoys a reputation for saying things. He is also credited, as was Mr. Birrell, with a nice taste in letters. And, like Mr. Birrell, he is not infrequently asked down to Little Puddlington in order to help in the celebration of the centenaries of Little Puddlington’s locally born geniuses. He dare no more make a serious speech, either in the House of Lords or at Little Puddlington, than he dare call Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman out of his name. Fireworks are expected from him, and if they were not forthcoming, there would be no Lord Rosebery. He passes for a great empire builder, and along with the worthy Dr. Jameson he figures among the executors of the late Mr. Rhodes’s will. He is the founder and President of the New Liberal League, which will have nothing to do with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, but his personal friendship with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman continues, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is certainly not mentioned in Mr. Cecil Rhodes’s will. In effect, Lord Rosebery amounts to little more than nothing. The Liberal League, which was to make a great to-do in most matters appertaining to Liberalism and government, fizzled like a bad squib for three or four weeks, and then Lord Rosebery went to Nice. That is exactly the man. When his time comes, when the country wants him, when Liberalism wants him,—when, in fact, anybody wants him,—he says, “Yes, yes, I am here,” and immediately starts either for Nice or Epsom. Scotch modesty overcomes him. Scotch caution says, “You know you are a fool; be careful to avoid ultimate risks.” Scotch cowardice says, “If you go into battle you may get hurt. Nice is much nicer.” In newspaper columns Lord Rosebery’s speeches read admirably, providing you do not study them too closely, but any person who has been present in the House of Lords what time his Lordship was on his legs must have gone away with shattered illusions. Even as C.-B. stutters and blunders and grabs for his words in the circumambient air, so Lord Rosebery cackles and sentimentalises. In appearance he is of about the build and body of a draper. His voice is that of an anæmic curate. There are always tears in it at the wrong places, and on the whole it makes you laugh. And having spoken, he trots out like a Scotch sparrow, and with hat a-tilt and arms under his coat-tails poises himself perkily on the steps of the entrance to St. Stephen’s Hall, and waits for his carriage to take him off to the station, and so to Epsom or Nice. On the turf his reputation is exactly the same in kind as his reputation in politics. He is as variable as the shade and as changeable as the moons. Sometimes he does brilliant things, but he cannot keep them up. In brief he is half Scotch and half soda.
It is to these redoubtable Scotch persons that England is looking for good government, and hence it comes to pass that of late she has had to govern herself. Out of Scotchmen you can get little that is business-like and little that is dignified, at any rate where statesmanship is concerned. Their ambitions are illimitable, but their powers of execution not worth counting. They will fight from behind cover to more or less bitter and ignominious ends, but, like the Boer farmers, to whom in many large respects they bear the most striking resemblances, they never know when they are beaten, and their warfare deteriorates into mere brigandism and filibustering. When Britain was ruled by Englishmen she wore the epithet Great by good right; since she has been ruled by Scotchmen she has well nigh lost it.
IV
THE SCOT IN JOURNALISM
We have seen on the word of Dr. Robertson Nicoll that once upon a time it was the ambition of every Scotch youth to become a professor. Once upon a time, too, and one does not need to quote authority for it, every second child in kilts was devoted by his parents to the ministry, and did, no doubt, sooner or later attain to that admirable office. But latterly the supply of Scotch professors has been a good deal bigger than the demand, and it has dawned upon the slow Scottish intellect that £70 a year and a manse is after all not exactly one of the prizes of life. Therefore your stern, calculating Scotch peasant has during late years dedicated his son to the practice and service of journalism. Now journalism, though the Fourth estate, is the last of the professions. The journalist who is making £500 a year,—at any rate, the Scotch journalist who is making £500 a year,—is the exception and not the rule. Still, £500 a year, or, for that matter, £250 a year, is wealth to your average Scot, who, nine times out of ten, comes hitherward from a district where persons who once had a sovereign in their possession are looked upon with awe and reverence. Furthermore, journalism suits the Scot because it is a profession into which you can crawl without inquiry as to your qualifications, and because it is a profession in which the most middling talents will take you a long way. The reporting staffs and sub-editorial staffs of both the London and provincial journals can, I think, boast a decidedly decent leaven of Scotchmen. In Fleet Street, if you do not happen to possess a little of the Doric, you are at some disadvantage in comprehending the persons with whom you are compelled to talk. “Hoo arre ye the noo?” is the conventional greeting in most newspaper offices. Also a large proportion of the persons who come up the stairs on personal business which usually turns out to be the personal business of the persons, and resolves itself into a request for reviewing, or an offer to do another man’s work at a cheap rate, are very Scotch indeed; and while they drop the Doric word with fair success, they cannot for the life of them get out of the Doric idiom and the Doric accent. Armed with a letter of introduction from Professor McMoss—whom you do not know—and with a sheaf of dog’s eared certificates picked up at Scotch universities, they descend upon you with the air of men who know for a surety that you are dying for their services, and when they go out, after wasting an altogether unnecessary amount of your time and temper, it is with black looks and a burning conviction that you refused to employ them because you know them to be so clever that they might supplant you in your own chair.
Ten years ago it was the man from Oxford or Cambridge that was considered the essential thing in journalism. Nowadays the attitude of newspaper proprietors in want of a smart man amounts to “No university man need apply.” I do not think that we are very far from the day when the tune will be changed to “No Scotchman need apply.” Numerically the Scotch journalist is unquestionably strong. He possesses, too, certain solid qualities which are undoubtedly desirable in a journalist. For example, he is punctual, cautious, dogged, unoriginal, and a born galley-slave. You can knock an awful lot of work out of him, and no matter how little you pay him he may be depended upon to sustain the dignity of the office in the matter of clothes, external habits of life, and a dog-like devotion to the hand that feeds him and the foot that kicks him. In short, he is a capital routine man, and if you have a journal which you wish to maintain on the ancient lines of stodge and flat-footedness, the Scotchman does you admirably. But it is impossible to get away from the fact that the vogue of the stolid, arid, stereotyped, sleepy sort of journalism which satisfied the last generation is rapidly going to pieces. The contemporary world wants and will have what it chooses to call the “live” journalist, and the Scotchman who is a live journalist to the extent of evolving anything bright or subtle or suggestive or original has yet to be found. At the present moment he is managing to keep himself alive by imitation. As a plagiarist of ideas, necessity has made him a master. He knows that the reign of dulness is coming to an end, and that the auld wife journalism in whose benevolent presence he has prosed and prosed for so many years, is even now in her dotage and cannot last much longer. So that he has taken thought and determined to aim higher. What man has done, a Scot can do. It is not given to him to be witty and brilliant and unhackneyed on a little oatmeal, but, thank Heaven! he can always play sedulous ape, and sedulous ape it shall be.
These remarks, of course, apply only to the lower reaches of journalism, to the sub-editorial, reportorial, contributorial, and contents bill making departments. When it comes to a question of editors, matters assume quite a different complexion. A Scotch editor is, as a rule, a sight for gods and little fishes. Dr. Nicoll will tell you that the Scot makes a good servant but a bad master. This is the truth. Mercifully, you can count the Scotch editors of London on the fingers of one hand. So far as I am aware, there are only two of them—Dr. Robertson Nicoll and Dr. Nicol Dunn. Of one of them—him of the Morning Post—you hear little, save that he is a good fellow of no great parts, and that he holds at his office a daily reception for raw, unlicked Scotch youths who are come newly over the border and crave the benefits of his advice and assistance. Politically, his paper can scarcely be considered a power; its views on most questions are of no great consequence, but it appears to have an enormous circulation among the blue-blooded and the wealthy, whose doings it chronicles with touching fidelity and regularity, and without the smallest reference to the notoriously independent guinea stamp of Dr. Nicol Dunn’s favourite poet. The other Dr. Nicoll is a horse of another colour. He is all for Nonconformity and the appraisement of healthy and improving literature. Each of his papers is a paper for the bosom of the family and the ministers’ Monday, and warranted to do all that can be done for the unco’ guid of North Britain, for all Scottish writers of whatever degree of merit or demerit, for Dr. Nicoll’s English admirers, and Dr. Nicoll himself. On every issue of these remarkable publications Dr. Nicoll stamps the impress of his own engaging personality. I have heard it said by an admirer of his that he is three men—a Scotch divine, a judge of letters, and a journalist who never forgets that his main business in life is to sell papers. These three Dr. Nicolls are, I am assured, quite different persons, inasmuch as the Doctor possesses the blessed gift of detachment and thinks nothing of dictating an article on the genius of Dr. Parker, a kindly appreciation of the latest gory detective story, and a set of Sunday afternoon verses or so in a single morning. Of his lucubrations as a divine I shall say nothing, because I have not studied them. As a judge of letters, however, I take him to be the most catholic scribbler in Europe. Any author who is doing well—that is to say, any author whose record of sales entitles him to be considered a success—may always reckon on a large hospitality in Dr. Nicoll’s journals, and will always find Dr. Nicoll and his merry men beaming round the corner, hat in hand. It is a case of what would you like, sir? all the time. Are you spending your holiday cruising on the blue Mediterranean in the Duchess of Puttleham’s yacht? Very good. Paragraph in the column signed “Man of Kent,” with a delicate reference to your last great novel. Have you projects? Equally good. “Mr. So-and-So is, I understand, hard at work on his next great novel.” Will your new book, 30,000 copies of which have been sold before the day of publication, make its appearance on April 1? Capital. Send us portraits of yourself at all ages from three months to the present day, pictures of the modest tenement in which you were born, and of your present town house and little place in the country, and, bless your heart, we will do the rest. Do people say that the great novel, of which you have sold fifty million copies in England and America, is a pot-boiler and a stunner? Dear, dear me! You have our heartiest sympathies, sir, and if you would like to vindicate your character as an artist in a couple of pages of the British Weekly, why, my dear sir, we are at your service. I do not say that there is any terrific harm in this species of enterprise; that it pleases the mass of mankind and therefore sells papers goes without saying. On the other hand, it is quite subversive of the best interests of letters, and therefore I am inclined to think—and I set it down with great sorrow—that Dr. Nicoll, in spite of his devotional connection is, if he have any force in letters at all, a distinctly dubious and undesirable force.