My Contemporaries In Fiction

by David Christie Murray

  IX.--DR. MACDONALD AND MR. J. M. BARRIE

  When one calls to mind the rapid and extensive popularity achieved bythe latest school of Scottish dialect writers, one is tempted to wondera little at the comparative neglect which has befallen a real master ofthat _genre_, who is still living and writing, and who began his workwithin the memory of the middle-aged. With the single exception of 'AWindow in Thrums,' none of the new books of this school are worthy to becompared with 'David Elginbrod,' or 'Alec Forbes of Howglen,' or 'RobertFalconer.' Yet not one of them has failed to find a greater vogue orto bring to its author a more swelling reputation than Dr. Mac-donaldachieved. Perhaps the reasons for these facts are not far to seek. Tobegin at the beginning, Sir Walter, who created the Scottish characternovel, had made, in other fields, a reputation quite unparalleled in thehistory of fiction before he took broadly to the use of Scottish ruralidiom, and the depiction of Scottish character in its peculiarly localaspects. The magic of his name compelled attention, and his genius gavea classic flavour to dialects until then regarded as barbarous and ugly.The flame of Burns had already eaten all grossness out of the rudestrusticities, and in the space of twenty years at most the Auld BraidScots wore the dignity of a language and was decorated with all thehonours of a literature. But this, in spite of the transcendent geniusof the two men to whom northern literature owes its greatest debt,brought about very little more than a local interest and a local pride.Scott was accepted in spite of the idiom which he sometimes employed,and not because of it, and one can only laugh at the fancy presented tothe mind by the picture of an English or a foreign reader who for thefirst time found himself confronted by Mrs. Bartlemy Saddletree's queryto her maid: 'What gart ye busk your cockernony that gait?' To thishour, indeed, there are thousands of Scott's admirers for whom thequestion might just as well be framed in Sanscrit.

  In Sir Walters own day and generation he had one considerable imitatorin Galt, whose 'Andrew Wylie of that Ilk' and 'The Entail' can stillafford pleasure to the reader. Then for a time the fiction of Scottishcharacter went moribund. The prose Muse of the North was silent, orspoke in ineffectual accents. After a long interregnum came GeorgeMacdonald, unconsciously paving the way for the mob of northerngentlemen who now write with ease. He brought to his task an unusualfervour, a more than common scholarship, a more than common richness,purity, and flexibility in style, a truly poetic endowment ofimagination, and a truly human endowment of sympathy, intuition, andinsight. It would be absurd to say that he failed, but it is certainthat he scarcely received a tithe either of the praise or the puddingwhich have fallen to the share of Mr. S. R. Crockett, for example, whois no more to be compared with him than I to Hercules. Such readers aswere competent to judge of him ranked him high, but, south of the Tweed,such readers were few and far between, for he employed the idiomaticScotch in which he chose to work with a remorseless accuracy, and inthis way set up for himself a barrier against the average Englishman.His genius, charming as it was, was not of that tremendous andcompulsive sort which lays a hand on every man, and makes the breakingdown of such a barrier an essential to intellectual happiness. There wasa tacit admission that he was, in his measure, a great man, but that theaverage reader could afford to let him alone. And then, things werevery different with the press. The northern part of this island, thoughactive in press life, had nothing like its influence of to-day. To-daythe press of Great Britain swarms with Scotchmen, and the 'boom' whichhas lately filled heaven and earth with respect to the achievements ofthe new Scotch school has given ample and even curious evidence of thatfact. The spoils to the victor, by all means. We folk from over theborder are a warlike and a self-approving race, with a strong familyinstinct, and a passionate love for the things which pertain to our ownpart of the world. If Scotchmen had been as numerous amongst pressmen asthey are to-day, and as certain of their power, they would have boomedDr. Macdonald beyond a doubt. Such recognition as he received camemainly from them. But if only the present critical conditions hadexisted in his early day, with what garlands would he have beenwreathed, what sacrifices would have been made before him!

  Apart from that rugged inaccessibility of dialect (to the merely Englishreader) which so often marks Dr. Macdonald's work, there is in the maintheme of his best books a reason why he should not be widelypopular. The one issue in which he is most passionately interested istheological. He has been to many a Moses in the speculative desert,leading to a land of promise. He has preached with a tender andpersuasive fire the divine freedom of the soul, and its essentialoneness with the Fatherhood of God. He has expended many beautifulfaculties on this work, and his influence in the broadening anddeepening of religious thought in Scotland is not to be denied. Buthis insistence on this great theme has naturally scared away theempty-headed and the shallow-hearted, and many also of the carelessclever. There must be somewhere a fund of sincerity and of reason inthe reader to whom he appeals. There is a public which is prepared toencounter thought, which can be genuinely stirred by a high intellectualpassion, which is athirst indeed for that highest and best enjoyment,but it is numerically small, and the writer who deals mainly withspiritual problems, and who, in doing so, is reticent and reverent, canscarcely hope to draw the mob at his wheels. In each of his three bestbooks, Dr. Macdonald has traced the growth of a soul towards freedom.His conception of freedom is a reasoned but absolute submission to aDivine Will; a sense of absorption in the manifest intent of a guidingPower which is wholly loving and wholly wise. To all who are able toread him he is exquisitely interesting and delightful, and to some heappeals with the authority of a prophet and divinely-appointed guide.Along with this experience of abiding faith in him goes a dash ofmysticism, of pantheism. He is essentially a poet, and had he chosen toexpend more labour upon his verse he might have risen to high rank onthat side. But with him the thing to be said has seemed vastly moreimportant than the way of saying it, and he has, perhaps rightly,disdained to be laborious in the mere texture of his verse. It isrational to argue that if the poetic, inspiration is not vital enoughto find an immediate expression it is not true enough to make it worthwhile to remould and recast it. It would seem--judging by results--thatDr. Macdonald's conception of a lyric is of something whollyspontaneous. Be this as it may, the poetic cast of his mind is revealedin his prose with greater freedom and a completer charm than in hisverse. The best of him is the atmosphere he carries. It is not possibleto read his books and not to know him for a brave, sincere, and loyalman, large both in heart and brain, and they purify and tone the mindin just such fashion as the air of mountain, moor, or sea purifies andtones the body.

  The worthiest of his successors is Mr. J. M. Barrie, who has much incommon with him, though he displays differences of a very essentialkind. Mr. Barrie has no such spiritual obsession as besets his elder. Hehas the national reverence for sacred things, but it is probably ratherhabitual and racial than dogmatic. I think his greatest charm lies inthe fact that he is at once old and new fashioned. He loves to deal witha bygone form of life, a form of life which he is too young to rememberin all its intricacies, whilst he is not too young to have heard of itplenteously at first hand, or to have known many of its exemplars. Fewthings of so happy a sort can befall a child of imagination as to beborn on such a borderland of time. About him is the atmosphere of thenew, and dotted every here and there around him are the living mementoesof the old--a dying age, which in a little while will cease to be,and is already out of date and romantic. Steam and electricity andthe printing-press, and the universal provider and the cheap clothing'emporium,' have worked strange changes. It was Mr. Barrie's fortune tobegin to look on life when all these changes were not yet wrought;to bring an essentially modern mind to bear on the contemplation of avanishing and yet visible past, to live with the quaint, yet to be able,by mere force of contrast, to recognise its quaintness, and to bein close and constant and familiar touch with those to whom thedisappearing forms of life had been wholly habitual. That the mereenvironment thus indicated was the lot
of hundreds of thousands makeslittle difference to the especial happiness of the chance, for, as Ihave said already, we can't all be persons of genius, and it is only tothe man of genius that, the good fortune comes home.

  If there is one truth in relation to the craft of fiction of which Iam more convinced than another, it is that all the genuine and originalobservation of which a man is capable is made in very early life. Thereare two very obvious reasons why this should be so. The fact that theyare obvious need not prevent me from stating them here, since I am notwriting for those who make a business of knowing such things. In thefirst place, the mind is at its freshest; and all objects within itsscope have a keen-edged interest, which wears away in later life. Inthe next place, the earliest observations are our own, unmixed with theconclusions and prepossessions of other minds. A child has not learntthe Dickens' fashion, or the Thackeray fashion, or the Superior Personfashion of surveying particulars and generals. He has not begun toobscure his intelligence by the vicious habit of purposed note-takingsfor literary uses. He looks at the things which interest him simply,naturally, and with entire absorption. It is true of the mostcommonplace people that as they grow old their minds turn back tochildhood, and they remember the things of half a century ago with moreclearness than the affairs of last week. Lord Lytton's definition of aman of genius was that he preserved the child's capacity for wonder.

  One of the astutest of living critics tells me that he finds a curiously_logical_ characteristic in Mr. Barrie's humour, but I confess that I amnot wholly clear as to his meaning. I find it characteristically Scotch,and perhaps at bottom we mean the same thing. It is often sly, and soconscious in its enjoyment of itself as to be content to remain unseen.Often it lies in a flavour of the mind, as in whole pages of 'My LadyNicotine,' where it is a mere placid, lazy acquiescence in the generallyhumorous aspect of things. Here the writer finds himself amused, and somay you if you happen to be in the mood. At other times the fun bubbleswith pure spontaneity, as in the courtship of 'Tnowhead's Bell, whichis, I make bold to believe, as good a bit of Scotch rural comedy as wehave had for many a day. The comedy is broad, and touches the edge offarce at times, but it is always kept on the hither-side by its drollappreciation of character, and an air of complete gravity in thenarrator, who, for any indication he gives to the contrary, might bedealing with the most serious of chronicles.

  As I write I have before me a letter of Mr. Barrie's, written to afellow-workman, in which he speaks of the 'almost unbearable pathos'of an incident in one of the latter's pages. The phrase seems to fitaccurately that chapter in the 'Window in Thrums' where Jamie, after hisfall in London, returns to his old home, and finds his own people deadand scattered. The story is simple, and the style is severe even todryness, but every word is like a nail driven home. It would be hardto find in merely modern work a chapter written with a more masterlyeconomy of means, than this. And this economy of means is the moststriking characteristic of Mr. Barrie's literary style. It is asdifferent from the forced economy of poverty as the wordy extravaganceof Miss Corelli is different from the exuberance of Shakspeare. It isa reasoned, laborious, and self-chastening art, and within its ownlimitations it is art at its acme of achievement What it has set itselfto do it has done.

  These two, then, Dr. George Macdonald and Mr. J. M. Barrie, are themen who worthily carry on, in their separate and distinct fashions, thetradition which Sir Walter established. In a summary like this, whereit is understood that at least a loyal effort is being made to recogniseand apportion the merits of rival writers, the task of the criticoccasionally grows ungrateful. Nothing short of sheer envy can grudgeto Mr. Barrie a high meed of praise, but I think that his elder is hisbetter. The younger man's distinction is very largely due to a fineself-command, a faculty of self-criticism, which in its way cannoteasily be overpraised. He has not Stevenson's exquisite and yet daringappropriateness in the choice of words, but his humour is racier andscarcely less delicate, and in passages of pathos he knows his waystraight to the human heart As the invention or discovery of new themesgrows day by day less easy--as the bounds of the story-teller's personaloriginality are constantly narrowing--the purely literary faculty, themere craft of authorship in its finer manifestations must of necessitygrow more valuable. Mr. Barrie is a captain amongst workmen, and thereis little fear that in the final judgment of the public and his peershe will be huddled up with Maclarens and Crocketts, as he sometimes isto-day. But Dr. Mac-donald, though he has not sought for the finenessesof mere literary art with an equal jealousy, has inherited a biggerfortune, and has spent his ownings with a larger hand. He has perhapsnarrowed his following by his faithfulness to his own inspiration, buthis books are a genuine benefaction to the heart, and no man can readthem honestly without drawing from them a spiritual freshness and purityof the rarer sort. There is an old story of a discussion among thestudents of their time as to the relative merits of Schiller and Goethe,The dispute came to Schiller's ears, and he laughingly advised thecombatants to cease discussion, and to be thankful that they had both.I could take a personal refuge there with all pleasure, but the criticalrush to crown the new gods is a new thing, and, without stealing a leaffrom the brow of the younger writer, I should like to see a fresher anda brighter crown upon the head of his elder and bigger brother.