“As for the ‘Letter to an Unsuccessful Literary Man,’ I would suggest that it be lithographed in order that the successful author may use it as a form with which to reply to the uninvited correspondent. If only Mr. Le Gallienne could induce amateurs to read this letter instead of writing letters of their own to that most baited of beings, the professional author, what a boon he would confer upon his fellow craftsmen! The essay, On Loving One’s Enemies, is scarcely written in the spirit which its title and its protestations of charity might lead us to suppose. It strikes me as somewhat self-conscious and defiant; but Death and Two Friends contains some really signal work. For the gem of the book, however, we must turn to A Seaport in the Moon. This and the opening chapter, A Seventh-Story Heaven, are in themselves worth the modest sum which the publishers ask for the volume. A Seaport in the Moon is an exquisitely beautiful fancy. Mr. Le Gallienne was in the right mood when he wrote it, and when he is in the mood he is a magician. His page glows like a painter’s palette with rich colours, and the pictures come and go before us like sunset pageant.”
Apart from the delicious Scotch snobbery which jumps at you from every line of this admirable piece of criticism, and leaving altogether out of the question the downright vulgarity and ineptitude of it, one would like to know what the Bookman would say if Mr. Le Gallienne published a similar book to-morrow. At the time when this review was published, Mr. Le Gallienne was in the zenith of his somewhat slender and rarefied popularity. He had captured the heart of Kensington with dainty vacuity. His locks were curled and perfumed; he figured prettily and replied to the toast of letters at the dinners of literary clubs, and was the delicate high priest of a little school of hot pressed poetry and vapid prose. The Bookman, of course, was bound to salute him with a chaste appreciation. Since then the world has gone on and left Mr. Le Gallienne somewhat behind it, also Mr. Le Gallienne himself has settled in America and cut off his hair. No more does he publish the booklet that takes the town; no longer does he write of the “Woman’s Third” or sigh over the deception of tender-hearted schoolgirls, who have provided one with a sonnet. In short, his laurel hangs dustily on a nail at the “Bodley Head,” and the raven locks that once bore it have probably by this time gone to help in the making of a mess of honest builders’ mortar. So that the Bookman knows him no more.
From the issue of the Bookman which contains the review above quoted I take a couple of “news notes.”
“Mr. J. M. Barrie has finished a book on his mother, which will be entitled Margaret Ogilvy. It is perhaps the most beautiful and exquisite piece of work he has yet accomplished. It is not a biography in the ordinary sense, but gives aspects and incidents of his mother’s life in the style which Mr. Barrie’s readers know, keeping close throughout to facts. The volume will be published in this country by Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, and in America by Messrs. Scribner.”
“Mr. S. R. Crockett’s new novel is to be entitled Lochinvar. Some eminent critics who have had the privilege of reading the portion already written are enthusiastic in their praise of the work. It is said to be more in the manner of The Lilac Sun-Bonnet than some of Mr. Crockett’s more recently published novels.”
So much for the Scotch journalist.
V
THRUMS AND DRUMTOCHTY
The Scot abroad, or at any rate the Scot that one knows and loves in London, is a creature so winning and delectable in character that one proceeds to the study of the Scot at home with anticipations of the most pleasurable kind. The best way to study the Scot at home is, of course, to consult the works of those eminent Scottish writers, Dr. J. M. Barrie and Dr. Ian Maclaren, with occasional reference to Dr. S. R. Crockett. Dr. Barrie and Dr. Maclaren (otherwise Watson) have been at pains to portray for us, with what Dr. Nicoll would no doubt call loving and exquisite fidelity, the peoples and manners and customs of two Scotch parishes, named respectively Thrums and Drumtochty. Both, one gathers, are the prettiest, most charitable, and most God-fearing communities to be found upon this globe of sinful continents. Butter will not melt, and ginger is not hot in the mouth either at Thrums or Drumtochty. The various books of the chronicles of that earthly paradise, Thrums, are of formidable number, and I do not profess to have read more than five of them. But I have read enough to know all that I want to know about Thrums. Here, it seems, “twenty years ago, hundreds of weavers lived and died Thoreaus ’ben the hoose without knowing it.” Here also lived “the dear old soul who originally induced me to enter the Auld Licht Kirk” and was “as sweet and pure a woman as I ever knew”; also Tammy Mealmaker, who died a bachelor and “had been soured in his youth by disappointment in love of which he spoke but seldom,” also Tibbie McQuhattay, “at whom you may smile, but, ah! I know what she was at the sick-bedside”; also Whinny Webster, who ate peppermints in church, and when detected in the act “gave one wild scream”; and “straightway became a God-fearing man”; also Hendry Munn, “who was the only man in Thrums who did not quake when the minister looked at him”; also Jess McQumpha, who “sat at the window for twenty years or more, looking at the world as through a telescope,” and who “was possessed of a sweet, untarnished soul”; also Leeby, who “died in the back end of the year I have been speaking of”; and Jamie, who did the home-coming, and gaed somebody “sic a look”; and last, but not least, in childishness, the Little Minister and Babbie. For blithering sentiment of the cheapest and most obvious sort, these personages have certainly never been equalled. The whole tone of the Thrums chronicles is as bathotic as it could be made even by a Scotchman, and wherever one turns one finds Mr. Barrie trotting out creatures of a sentiment so slobbery that it would be eschewed even by the scribbling, simpering misses at a seminary. And at Drumtochty, need one say, Dr. Ian Maclaren introduces you to the same set of silly figures. Dr. Maclaren, it is true, put in the front of his show a cunning Scotch farmer whose attempts to cheat his landlord, the worthy doctor,—parson as he is,—would evidently have you smile, but all the rest of his people are rare and radiant pieces of virtue, clothed round in Scotch flesh and sandy hair, and speaking the most uncompromising dialect. For example, there is Mrs. Elspeth Macfadyen. This lady’s claim to greatness is not exactly of a moral kind, being based on the circumstance that she obtained a penny above the market price for her butter. All the farmers’ wives of the Scotch romances invariably do this. Even Dr. Crockett’s lady of the lilac sunbonnet made the best butter in three parishes. The butter woman, however, is not intended to count, so that we will let her go by, and proceed duly to note the heavenly dispositions of the rest of the Drumtochtyans. In the first place, there is Baxter of Burnbrae. Burnbrae, it seems, “had to make the choice that has been offered to every man since the world began”; in other words, he had to choose between losing his farm and changing his kirk.