In 2018 I’m tasked with exploring the unco calendar authors. This gives me the chance (and excuse) to read and re-read some unco Scots authors, mostly from the 19th century – what’s not to love. It’s the kind of exploration I relish.
The first of these is James Hogg. You can find my wee guide on www.unco.scot. But here at Gateway I’m offered the privilege of going into the author in a bit more depth and offering more of an opinion and bias than might be strictly acceptable over at unco. Previous to this task I’ve never really given James Hogg the space he deserved. I’ve fallen prey to reading the ‘bestseller’ and then never really exploring the lesser known paths. That’s something I’m in the process of rectifying. I say process because I have to alert you to the fact, you’ll not get to know James Hogg in an instant. So I got reading… and came across this: Brownie’s Here, Brownie’s there, Brownie’s with you everywhere. You’ve got to love that wee rhyme! It makes me smile and instantly I read it I thought Before Batman there was The Brownie of Bodsbeck. Somehow the rhyme just put me into the zap,pow, kaboom frame of mind. And folks, that’s just the start of Hogg’s box of tricks. Expect fireworks. His writing is contemporary with Scott which has its challenges. I’m up for much longer and more complex sentence constructions than 21st century or even 20th century fiction favours, and can more than hold my own with work from the second half of the 19th century. But when I head back to the early 19th century, and beyond that, into the spill over of the 18th century, I begin to struggle. Mostly I don’t bother. Mostly that’s because the content is as difficult for me to swallow as the form. But with Hogg this isn’t the case. Hogg is not your usual writer. He’s unapologetic in his use of Scots dialect. That can slow things down, but slowing things down can help you to savour them. And yes, he uses long and convoluted sentences so you have to hold onto your hat to try and keep up with the complex ideas. Unlike Scott (and most other late 18th/early 19th century writers) he’s not writing from the position of the upper ‘ gentle’ classes. Nor even from an emerging aspiring middle class. He’s writing, if not exactly from the position of the working class, (his Ettrick Shepherd routine is partially a construct) then at least he writes honestly about them and with a knowledge that is neither patronising nor damning. That’s enough to keep me reading. Hogg has lots to offer, and to readers who have substantially different interests to my own, I know that. So don’t just take my word for it. I’ll tell you what I like about him, but there’s plenty more to reward time spent in his company. My particular favourite at present is The Brownie of Bodsbeck. I’m not big into the supernatural, but I do love a good Aiken Drum/Brownie tale. I like the ‘outsider/community’ aspect of the tale. And in The Brownie of Bodsbeck Hogg is being really clever in his delivery. It’s actually the cover for a Covenanting Tale. So if you’re interested in the history of Covenanting (or indeed the history of Covenanting stories) as I am, it’s a must read. We are often sold our Covenanting history on the back of the Jacobites with ‘Whiggism’ constructed as a lackey of the Union. S.R. Crockett goes a long way to redress this balance, and he drew much of his inspiration from Hogg. It’s a connection which has not been explored nearly fully enough to date –let’s hope that changes some time soon. Without wanting to spoil the story for you, Hogg’s mysterious ‘Brownie’ is in fact a Covenanter, and the guts of the story is to do with the viciousness and violence visited on the ordinary folk of the Borders as part of the Killing Times. As such it’s raised far beyond a tale of the supernatural, and into an exploration of society and politics of the time. That’s what I love about it anyway. Hogg is a subversive writer. Brownie shows this, and as I am working my way through the Perils of Man and the Perils of Woman I am finding the same thing – though in ever different ways. He keeps you on your toes as regards structure. He deals with a load of complex ideas about people and society. He’s definitely no Walter Scott - and that, to my mind, is a good thing. But that said, if you like Scott (and can thole the dialect) you’ll probably like Hogg too. There’s enough reading in Hogg to keep you going all year – though perhaps you might want to pair him up with something easier and save him for the times you can spare a good few hours or days to really get your teeth into him at his own pace. He’s the complete opposite of the beach-holiday read, though for me, were I stuck on a beach for a week, Hogg is the man I’d want to take with me. His brand of escapism is for those who like to escape while keeping their brain engaged. Is he the thinking man’s (or woman’s of course) Walter Scott? I think he possibly is. The Orraman. James Leatham’s Pamphlet Publication of ‘The Brownie of Blednoch.’
William Nicholson, Supreme Type of the Wandering Minstrel. William Nicholson, the Galloway poet, was born at Tanimaus, in the parish of Borgue, Galloway on 15th August 1782. We ought to be surprised to learn that in his boyhood weak eyesight prevented his progress at school; but the handicap of childish lameness probably had much to do with giving Walter Scott’s mind a bookish turn; and the Ettrick Shepherd learned to read only after he had passed school age. He was herding at the age of seven. Unfitted, we are told, for the local callings of shepherd or ploughman, Nicholson became a packman, and for thirty years he traversed his native country, reciting and singing his own verses, which became popular in a way and to a degree that is now impossible. There are no Willie Nicholson’s now on the road and the fun and fact, the fancy and music and diablerie he and his class disseminated through rural Scotland are no longer in the scheme of things. Visiting a large Aberdeenshire farm, we looked into the bothy, which had recently been refitted internally. It was forbiddingly bare of any homelike decoration; not a picture on the walls, nor a book or even a page of a newspaper was to be seen. On the mantelpiece, however, we found, as sole symbol of the cultural heritage of the ages, a copy of the Rules of the Order of Buffaloes! To a halflin who stood by I remarked that in such a place we would at one time have expected to see at least a Burns, a bible and some number of the Tales of the Borders. ‘Na’ he said with a grin, ‘there’s nae billies o’ that kin’ here.’ In 1814 Nicholson issued a small 12mo book of ‘Tales and Verse Description of Rural Life and Manners,’ by which he is reported to have cleared £100. In 1828 a second edition appeared, with a memoir by his friend M’Diarmid, of Dumfries. But Willie missed all the chances he had of ceasing to be what he essentially was – the gaberlunzie piper, singer, and reciter; and at the age of sixty-seven he died in poverty at Kildarroch in Borge on 16th May 1849 – ‘a true man of genius,’ and the friend of all. Of Nicholson and his poems great-hearted Dr. John Brown says: ‘They are worth the knowing. None of them has the concentration and nerve of ‘The Brownie’ but they are from the same brain and heart. ‘The Country Lass,’ a long poem is excellent; with much of Crabbe’s power and compression. ‘Poor Nicholson, besides his turn for verse, was an exquisite musician, and sang with a powerful and sweet voice. One may imagine the delight of a lonely town-end when Willie the packman and piper made his appearance, with his stories and jokes and ballads, his songs and reels and ‘wonton wiles.’ ‘There is one story about him which has always appeared to me quite perfect. A farmer in a remote part of Galloway, one June morning before sunrise, was awakened by music. He had been dreaming of heaven, and when he found himself awake he still heard the strains. He looked out and saw no one; but at the corner of a grass field he saw his cattle and young colts and fillies huddled together, and looking intently down into what he knew was an old quarry.’ The farmer ‘put on his clothes and walked across the field, everything but that strange wild melody still and silent in this ‘the sweet hour of prime.’ As he got nearer ‘the beasts’ the sound was louder; the colts with their long manes, and the nowt with their wondering stare, took no notice of him, straining their necks forward, entranced. ‘There in the old quarry, the young sun glinting in his face, and resting on his pack, which had been his pillow, was our Wandering Willie, playing, and singing like an angel – ‘an Orpheus, an Orpheus.’ ‘What a picture!’ When reproved by the prosaic farmer for wasting his health and time, the poor fellow said; ‘Me and this quarry are long acquaint, and I’ve mair pleasure in pipin’ to thae daft cowts than if the best leddies in the land were figurin’ a way afore me.’’ Nicholson was an unmoneyed man; but that he should be so happily absorbed in his playing and singing did not call for the pitying epithet ‘poor.’ On a June night there may be a more uncomfortable bedchamber than a quarry-hole in the fields. We have known men and women of substance who could not tell one tune from another. They were born poor, and lived and died in that special condition of poverty, the most spiritual of the arts a closed book to them. The artist so rapt in the enjoyment of his art that nothing else counts, is happily still known among us. Walter Hamspon (“Casey”) was found playing his violin on a Yorkshire moor while an audience was assembling for him in the nearest town. Anthony Smith, a very fine cellist and an intelligent man, sat playing by the wayside in the station square of Aberdeen for hours on end, oblivious to the world, the collection, and the professional engagements he might have had, upon conditions with which he could not comply. How they love and live in their art, such men. William Nicholson is notable for us – a generation so different from his – because he, like Burns, was so unlike the traditional Scot. There are men of other nationalities who have the ‘defective sympathies’ which Charles Lamb found to be a characteristic of the Scots he knew. But neither north nor south of the Tweed are they the outstanding ones, these men who play for safety in all things, who keep their heads cool, their feet warm, and ‘never put out their hand further than they can conveniently draw it back again.’ The men who stand out in the life of Scotland have not been the traditional Scots. William Wallace, Robert Bruce, John Knox, the Admirable Crichton, Robert Burns, David Livingstone, Louis Stevenson, Chinese Gordon, Cunninghame-Graham, were none of them canny, careful, plodding, unimaginative men. Even Andrew Carnegie made his first success by ‘a piece of lawless initiative’ that served a good turn for other people. ‘The Brownie of Blednoch’ shows that in the mercenary calling of a pedlar it is possible to preserve and cultivate the supreme gift of imagination – that gift which, in one form or another, enables the dreamer of dreams to reason from what is or has been to the better things that are to be. William Nicholson, moving around with his music, his poetry, and his happy comradeship, welcomed wherever he was known, is in his life a challenge to the self-regarding one who dully thinks of success and of self, a taker rather than a giver at the table of life. Of the poem here reprinted, Dr. John Brown wrote: We would rather have written these lines than any number of Aurora Leighs, Festuses, or such like, with all their mighty ‘somethingness’ as Mr Bailey would say. For they, are they not ‘the native wood-notes wild’ of one of Nature’s darlings? Here is the indescribable impress of genius. Chaucer, had he been a Galloway man might have written it; only he would have been more garrulous and less compact and stern. It is like Tam O’Shanter in its living union of the comic, the pathetic, and the terrible. Shrewdness, tenderness, imagination, fancy, humour, word-music, dramatic power, even wit – all are her. I have often read it aloud to children, and it is worth anyone’s while to do it. You will find them repeating all over the house for days such lines as take their heart and tongue. Glasgow in the Limelight
What and Who Made Glasgow Socialist? One of the Pioneers Second Article. There was at one time a widely prevalent conception that Socialism was a creed held only by amiable idealists – ‘fools and poets,’ as it was breezily expressed. The opposite view is now epitomised in the epithet ‘Bolshevik,’ which aims at connoting an ogre thirsting for blood and loot, and ‘in need of a bath,’ as Lord Birkenhead in his more irresponsible days put it. Socialism undoubtedly has always drawn the poets, to its credit (and to theirs) be it said. But if Germany had its Freilligrath and Britain its Morris, before either of these poets were the ‘economists and calculators’ Rodbertus, the junker of Judgetnow; Lassalle, a wealthy and luxurious Jew, ‘the wundekind of philosophy’ (as Baron Hunboldt called him); Marx and Engels, the latter a prosperous and caustic cotton manufacturer and Marx certainly not a soft-hearted poet; and in England H.M.Hyndman, Oxford man, war correspondent, and latterly financier. Not much of the rapt, mooning dreamer about any of these latter, any more than there is today about ex-civil servants such as Sidney Webb and Philops Snowden, or bank inspectors like the late David Campbell, or shrewd manufacturers like Willie Leach of Bradford; France Littlewood of Huddersfield; and John Jackson, of Salford. To have constructive imagination, foresight, ‘the presentiment of the eve,’ belongs essentially to the character of the best type of business man. If the best type of business man in Glasgow does not turn to Socialism as a deliberate, declared movement, it is partly because churchianity is still very much of a manacle upon the mentality of the ‘respectable classes’ in Scotland as a whole. But if the very successful Glaswegian does not take up with Socialism in theory, he does so extensively in municipal practice. Glasgow has so long taken the lead in the Socialism of the Municipality that it was a standing marvel she did not until now strike out for the larger Collectivism of the State. It was because of the shrewdness of her business men that they adopted as much Socialism as suited them, while opposing the sort of Socialism that might not suit them. To municipalise gas, water, and tramways, to establish municipal lodging houses, crèches, washhouses, farms and a works department did not greatly disturb vested interests. The shareholders of the old tramways company did not depend on tramway dividends for a livelihodd and they were a specially grasping lot, and treated the public and their employees so badly that it was only human nature that there should be reprisals upon them. Then the corporation always owned the lines anyhow. So long as textiles, shipbuilding, or the metallurgical and chemical industries were not interfered with, the shrewd Glasgow business man, by reason of his very shrewdness was willing and even anxious to adopt Collectivism. Indeed if he could be sure that every other business could be socialised and his left alone, he might well be in favour of a process that would suit him so well as a consumer and a citizen. But just there comes the rub. He could not hope for anything of the sort, and his sympathy would naturally go out ot any form of threatened private enterprise from the consideration that his turn might come next. And so he has favoured the socialising of ‘monopolies,’ without stopping to define exactly what a monopoly is. Every business is a monopoly to those who are outside it. But if this consideration operates with the employer, it need have no weight whatever with the man who is not an employer and who is not likely ever to be. The capitalist municipalisers builded better than they knew. They gave a succession of object lessons proving how immensely successful large-scale managerial direction in the market, such as a public service can always command. They were so proud of these civic successes that they could not forbear stroking the t’s and dotting the I’s – in municipal reports and speeches, and the newspapers. Outsiders took up the cry. When in a Nineteenth Century article Mr John burns wished to state the case for London Collectivist Development as against company extortion and mismanagement, it was to the Collectivist triumphs of Glasgow that he turned for his examples of the better way. The thing, at last, was done. The wonder is that the intellectual and manual labour proletariat voted against their own obvious interests so long. There was no escaping the moral, sooner or later, that if better and cheaper service, better treatment of employees, and impressive money surpluses for the common good could be secured from a few services, the process was capable of indefinite extension, the personnel of local government being increased to cope with the additional work, and the conduct of a business simply transferred from a board of more or less amateur directors to a not more amateur committee of the city council. The largeness of Glasgow helped in many ways. For one thing, bigness makes for larger conceptions. Where large sums had to be spent, a certain amount of prospecting had to be done. Deputationists came back with enlarged ideas from what they saw being carried on elsewhere. Pro or con, they were obliged to think matters out, and ample revenues deprived cheeseparing of much of its motive. Local pressure and local criticism were much less felt than they would have been in a small town. A big job often had to go on, and heavy items of emergency expenditure had to be sanctioned by the convenor of a committee even if he was the only member who turned up at a meeting for the purpose. This on the administrative, public side. But bigness helped the mental growth of the private citizen too. In a small community , with small businesses, Jack and his master are much more closely in touch than where businesses belong to limited companies and Jack has no one master in particular. In the small community Jack may start in business more readily than in a city where the shipyards, foundries, shops, offices are on the big scale, with plant, buildings, and raw material beyond his means. His position as ‘hand’ is stereotyped. With the hands he must stand as a matter of course. Thus the evils attending the concentration of wealth work their own cure by causes inherent in the system. Not that the inevitable functions inevitably and without conscious direction. The movement which has given Glasgow an overwhelming Parliamentary majority for Socialism dates back to the eighties, when the Socialist movement was represented by branches of the Socialist League and the Social-Democratic Federation. The Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society were to come later in the day. These first-named branches were primarily for the workman, though even by 1887 there was a professor of Glasgow University in the attenuated ranks of the Socialist League. The petty bourgeois also had their Single Tax movement, with which a Lord Provost was connected, their bête noir being, not the capitalist but the landlord. I know no other provincial city in Britain where Georgeism had any following or influence as a movement; but Glasgow in the early nineteen-oughts had enough Single Taxers to maintain a journal and an office staff, and sent out a brilliant speaker in the person of John Paul, a small man in stature only. It is hardly likely that these Individualists have had any lot or part in the return of the Labour men. Of the men returned, I have met only two in my lecturing days. These are Mr George Hardie, the brother of Keir; and Mr Neil Maclean, who was the little secretary of the Clarion Scouts on at least two of my visits, twenty odd years ago. The earliest and best exponent of Socialism in Glasgow was J.Bruce Glasier, who was called away two years too soon to witness this great triumph for the principles (if not for the methods) he used to advocate with so much eloquence, at the street coerners chiefly. A native of the isle of Arran, Glasier attended school in Ayr, it seems , though somehow, amid all he told me, he never told me that. He was fairly well schooled and had good taste anyhow. He had little of the Glasgow cadence in his speech, but had a trick of leaving out oa syllable in some words, such as ‘bar’n’ or ‘baron.’ When I first met Glasier in Glasgow he had turned aside from his proper calling of architectural draughtsman, and was drawing iron grates and things of the kind for an ironfounder at Alloa. He preferred the Alloa connection because it left him with more freedom in Glasgow, to which he went home on Saturdays. In those days he needed all his freedom. His ideas were ardently revolutionary, and when in one of his frequent rhapsodies he threw back his high head with its shock of fair hair, and his blue eyes lighted up with splendid visions, you felt that this was the constructive Communist incarnate. He used to chaff me over my pedestrian sanity, and say of each succeeding pamphlet or article I published that it would be ‘appreciated by the trades unionists .’ His first connection with politics had been as secretary of a branch of the Irish National League, and he knew the Irish as few Scotsmen or Englishmen do. He married Katherine St. John Conway, a Girton girl who came to Manchester, where I already was, in 1893. For years he and Mrs Glasier moved around lecturing, lecturing, incessantly lecturing, putting up in workmen’s houses, and often not seeing each other for weeks on end. They were an absolutely disinterested, single-minded pair, caring nothing about money, and he at any rate very little about comfort, although both of them knew what pleasant surroundings were. Having great thoughts for his companions, he was apt to have spells of silence which passed for absent mindedness, combined latterly with a certain haughtiness which got him the reputation of being somewhat of a Captain Grand. Full of genuine fun and poetic rhodomontade, he nevertheless played at being a politician and had, indeed, some very just views, which he expounded in pointed and picturesque language. But Glasier was a dreamer, a propagandist and inspirer. Scorning propitiatory arts and the soft answer, no constituency would return him to Parliament, though he offered himself, and though smaller men were accepted. He was in turn editor of the Labour Leader and the Socialist Review and easily the best editor the Leader ever had; but, knowing his own mind, he was a fighting editor, and while his readers resented his sharpness, they did not appreciate his qualities of style and judgement. He was not a ready writer, but when the thought beat itself out it was worth while. He wrote a few pamphlets. He made a few witty songs. But in proportion to one’s feeling of his powers, his literary achievements are trifling. What was it that checked him? I have often speculated. Was it the lethargy of the dreamer? Was there a lack of physical emberance? Or is it simply that he allowed himself to be spent upon meetings? I say spent, not wasted, for it was those meetings that made the movement, in which others are reaping what he sowed. Glasier was an idealist; but his Idealism had suffered in Glasgow too. When I firest know him he was a ‘barricades man’ ; but on going to England he became very much of a politician in outlook, though never in personal diplomacy. His Idealism suffered in Glasgow by the depressing influence of his surroundings and the helplessness of his position as an employee in the iron-gate business. I who had always been on friendly and equalitarian terms with my bosses could not but be impressed by Glasier’s fear of ‘the governor.’ He once wrote in The Commonweal of a very bad half-hour he had when travelling one day with his Alloa employer. A soldier in the railway carriage (it must have been a third class one, and so the boss would have been no great nabob) hailed Glasier. ‘Aren’t you the block that spouts Socialism at Paisley Road Toll?’ Glasier confessed then in print and afterwards in private that he was greatly relieved when the journey came to an end. He once remarked to me that an employer ‘always has the advantage of you in an argument, even if you are relatively right. He can put you down by virtue of his position.’ This he said without any bitterness, as if recognising a certain propriety in such domination. This feeling of helplessness in the tremendous spider’s web of Glasgow’s commercial life showed itself in other ways. He would not spend money upon books, and used to refer to one who did so as ‘a collector.’ A delightfully kind and cultured journeyman trunkmaker, Dan MacCulloch, who liked to gather around him volumes of Carlyle, and to read you favourite passages from Rabelais, was the subject of a good deal of mild scoffing by Glasier, though Dan read the passages very well and had a pleasant voice, and sang very nicely. Glasier was nevertheless very ready to turn to one for a quotation or a verification. His last letter to me contained a request for the best version of a northern ballad which the wife of a Socialist doctor used to sing to us. He was then collecting an anthology of ‘Songs of Peace and War’ (some such title – I have not seen the book.) It is but natural that a man who loves books, and uses books, and is himself something of an author, should want to be surrounded by books. There are plenty of bookmen in Glasgow; but that the influence of the city is not friendly to study is surely reflected in Glasier’s conception, that a man was ‘a collector’ because he like to gather books about him and was not happy without them. It was not as if Dan MacCulloch and I did not read our books. It is possible to have lofty ideals as to mankind in the abstract and yet to be suspicious and chilly as regards individuals. It was some abatement of Glasier’s idealism – due, one feels sure, to his experience of Scotland’s largest city – that he was not trustful of the human unit. In this connection a disagreeable incident occurred in my own house. He had come north on a holiday to the Highlands, and took in Aberdeen on the way that he might see and have a long talk with me. We sat till the summer dawn was well in, and then slipped quietly to bed, feeling a little dissipated and guilty. I had decided to take the morning off from office work that I might see him embarked on the railway journey to Buckie, from which he proposed to take the boat to Inverness, or something of the kind. He emerged from his room looking a little anxious, and explained that he feared he had lost his purse. He had, he said, provided himself with sovereigns and thought he had put the net purse in which they were contained under his pillow on going to bed. He turned over the pillows but could see no trace of it. I mildly wondering that he could not have left his purse, if he needs must carry a purse, in his pocket. He then said that he must have left it behind at home, and that he would telegraph to his people in Glasgow. I lent him a few pounds in notes, without any clear recollection now of whether he was to go on or to stay on till he had a replyl to his telegram. We left the house, I feeling uncomfortable, and he doubtless a little dashed also, when my wife came running after us. He had pushed the purse so far under the pillow that it had fallen out at the end of the iron bed, and it was lying on the floor under the bed. He looked, naturally, greatly relieved and I shared his feeling so much that I forbore comment upon the incident. I am minded of it by the fact that the other day a directory tout from Glasgow came to the little town where I write, and hustled, apparently, a good deal of money out of women and shopgirls by calling in the absence of the menfolk and pretending that two years subscriptions were due. He got it from my assistant; and a letter to his employers has elicited an apology, but no return of the money. Glasgow figures largely in the newspapers in the annals of crime, and it is impossible to live in such surroundings without suffering by it. One of his majesty’s judges commented the other day on the alliance between crime and civic neglect; this a propos a heavy calendar for the assizes at Leeds, one of the most sordid towns in Britain. This is part of the Socialist case against Commercialism. How could Glasgow escape these consequences? The life of a large city makes men play for safety, and idealism and playing for safety are sworn foes. Country caution is founded, not on suspicion but on mere slowness. Still, there Glasier was, for years the greatest, most charismatic pioneer of Socialism in Glasgow – all the more admired because he was not in the least concerned about becoming an elected person or in any way getting kudos out of what was his religion and his heart’s desire. The title of his most typical lecture was ‘The Promise and Prophecy of Socialism.’ Not anything to do with wages or machinery of politics but a picture of a grand and gracious social system of beautiful buildings, beautiful streets and gardens, beauty in all the features and appurtences of life, and not least so in the men and women who were to enjoy and profit by the redemption of life from the multifarious blights of commercialism, moral and mental as well as physical. The Glasgow with which Glasier was familiar was essentially a Tory Glasgow. Picking up a reference book of those days I find that of the nine seats which the political city then consisted, three only were held by the Liberals and six by Tories, mostly of a peculiarly arid type. The one exception was Sir J.Stirling Maxwell, who sat for the College division and who had some of the characteristics that make the man of learning, leisure and culture very attractive to those who have none of these advantages. In the electoral statistics of these days Labour is represented by Mr Robert Smillie, with 696 votes against Mr Alex Cross’s poll of 3108 in CAmlachie. Shaw Maxwell with 443 in Blackfriars and Frank Smith with 368 in the Tradeston Division, as against Cameron Corbett’s 3373 votes. In spite of the Irish, Glasgow was a tory Town. I do not suppose the political revolution coincides with a mental revolution. Wullie Paterson and his wife have not become ‘intellectuals’ all at once. Mrs Burnett Smith (‘Annie Swan’) testified after her defeat that the Labour women who questioned her before voting against her were better informed than the women still attached to the old-fashioned parties. It was very pleasant to read that, especially as coming from one who had suffered by this spread of intelligence. Doubtless some part of the changeover is due to the specially large number of unemployed in the Clyde valley. This would not be a satisfactory foundation for steadiness in the future. The unfortunate feature of the shipbuilding industry is that it has depended largely upon the creation of battleships. The good of the world requires that there should be less and less of this production of illth as Ruskin called it to distinguish it from wealth. It was satisfactory to see that Mr Hardie declared for houses rather than battleships. It will be magnificent if the Clyde men can stick to that and still find a living, even if there should be some privation before the transfer to peace production is effected. With so little demand for freights, and much shipping laid up, there is no very cheering prospect ahead. Will the Clyde Valley men not only stick to their new politics but make sacrifices for the sake of their opinions? Lord Macleay alleges that shipbuilding costs on the Clye are too high, and although Glasgow ILP has taken up the challenge, one has seen no throroughly convincing reply to his statements. The disconcerting fact is that contracts have gone to the east-coast yards. One has had, from Socialist sources, disquieting accounts of the extent to which the policy of ‘Ca’ canny’ prevails, and wages are of course high as compared with those of some other shipbuilding districts. Glasgow cannot carry the Social Revolution itself, and till the world is changed, the Clyde men must reckon with outside competition. I do not labour the point, as I wish well to the lively men of the district, and hope for the best. But under capitalism, prevailing conditions must more or less be accepted. It may very well be that, with the building of battleships considerably reduced and orders going elsewhere, even house-building may not be needed in the Glasgow area. In all conscience, Glasgow is big enough already. We may have come to the turning point when the large centres must cease to grow, and the population fall back gradually upon the land, to find a living in new ways. The probability and desirability of this has long been foreseen. Anyhow, some amendment may be necessary in the spirit shown in the following incident witnessed by a devoted Social-Democrat. In a suburban train one day he found himself in the same compartment with two shipyard hands, once evidently something of an oracle to the other. The oracle decleard: ‘Things’ll never be richt till we have an aicht oors day an’ a poun’ a day for it.’ The other one queried doubtfully, ‘Div ye think it would staun’ it, Jeck?’ Jeck stoutly assured the doubting Thomas that it would, and Thomas seemed to be satisfied that a condition so satisfactory was also possible. The incident transpired some little time ago, when conditions were better. It is to be hoped that, pending other changes, the ideal will not be fixed so rigidly. In any case, the instransigent spirit over details under capitalism is no necessary part of the Labour ideal. Who are the Decadents? By way of a reply to an inquirer. (from Sept 1917)
A Berkshire correspondent, in the course of a hearty and friendly letter, says: What is meant by ‘The Decadents,’ in literature? Why are they decadent? I know the dictionary meaning of decadence but I can’t apply it to the work of men like Zola, Maeterlinck, Ibsen,Wilde, Strindberg, Dowden, Hardy, Shaw, Middleton, Francis Thompson and Frank Harris. All of these men may not be generally considered of the ‘decadent’ school, but, to me they represent a certain affinity of spirit – a new phase of literature and life. The list, too, may not be exhaustive; but these are they whose work I am, perhaps, the better acquainted with. At any rate, they occur to me at the moment without searching. And why decadent? I like reading the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Bjornson, Wilde and Shaw (although I never visit a theatre). I enjoy the word-mastery of Wilde, his affectation, his striving after effect, in short, if you will, his pose. I like the scorn and powerful satire of Francis Thompson, the devil-may-care abandonment of Dowden, the pessimism of Thomas Hardy, and the new spirit in the short stories of Frank Harris. All these men stir my emotions and cause me ‘furiously to think.’ Is this a sign of literary decadence or moral degeneration? I regard these men as delivering a necessary message – that is, all is not well with the world. I like the realism they pourtray. I feel the philosophy they preach. Temperamentally, I find an echo of my own pessimism – hence, I suppose, my appreciation of them. Grant Allen was a pessimist: was he a decadent? If not, why not? By what standard are these men, many of them men of real genius, judged decadent, and who are the judges that have condemned them to posterity? My query applies, perhaps more particularly to the so-called decadents of the ‘Nineties’ but what of our more contemporary decadents – Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Charles Garrice, and a host of other ‘popular’ writers whose books cover the railway bookstalls, and crowd out decent literature in the bookshops? If these contemporaries are not decadents because they do not deal in Realism, and preach only orthodox morality in hackneyed phrase and hoary platitude, is decadence a matter of orthodoxy only, or is it an attitude towards life? Oscar Wilde, I presume, was the arch-decadent. Was Walter Pater, who influenced him, also decadent? In short, what is decadence in literature and why? I have searched the pages of The Gateway from Vol 1. Onwards for some reference to decadence in literature, and, apart from a condemnation by you of the pessimism of Ibsen and Hardy in particular, and of the philosophy of pessimism in general, you do not appear to have dealt with this particular phase of literature. May I ask you to be good enough to enlighten me, and, I have no doubt, other of your readers, as to what is termed decadence in literature? As you may gather from this letter, I do not always agree with your point of view, or your conclusions (where I feel competent to judge between us), but you are always explicit, always interesting, always instructive, and I feel that, providing you have the time, here is an opportunity of explaining to your readers another phase of literature and life. I am writing to you on this question because 1. The Gateway is the only literary journal I know subscribe to, as it is the only one I know of for the ‘Man in the Street’ that is published at the ridiculous price of threepence. 2) I feel that your knowledge of general literature and your experience of the ‘Nineties’ fit you to deal with this particular phase of literature: 3) I rather think that you will give me a different impression of ‘decadence’ and of ‘decadents’ I have named to what my little knowledge tends to form for myself, and I want to know it: 4) your explanation would be of real value to my mental outlook. I am hoping that when times are again normal, you will see your way to making The Gateway a weekly instead of a monthly journal. Natural Ethics: As the word itself indicates, Decadence means a falling away from the natural impulses and motives of humanity at its best. A love of fresh air, movement, freedom, and right; the instinct of sex and parenthood; the social instinct (friendship) as manifested in the horror at murder and in zeal for the saving of life; pugnacity in the face of whatever interferes with the expression of these instincts – all these are natural, and the absence of them or the perversion of them is decadence. Everything of course has its limits, its just-enough and not-too-much. Charles Kingsley loved to sit and write in a draught, which to most people is unthinkable; most people prefer a cushioned seat or a bed to sitting or lying on the grass, which is flat and hard, has often stones or humps in it, and is always more or less populated by creepy things; and while one prefers rapid motion, one does not like to motor or cycle against the wind, and a rational being abominates the noise, smell, and jolting of a motor cycle. As regards fresh air, the limit on the one hand is the aviator who enjoys flying, even if he has afterwards to be thawed out of his frozen clothes, and on the other hand, the man of letters who likes to sit in a temperature of close on 90, declaring that his mind functions best when he is very hot. I like to write in a large, airy, book-filled room, having a wide outlook upon grass or corn lands, with trees, a river, or a sea in the distance; but one scribe found his mind worked best when he sat embedded in an atmosphere of rotten apples. I like to think that my taste is the natural and seemly one, and that the artists of the rotten apples and the Turkish bath temperature have degenerate tastes. The decadents are those who deviate from nature or long-established and salutary social practice. The moral decadent is one who does not play the game according to the approved rules, who bilks landladies, runs after other men’s wives, and shirks the maximum number of civic, domestic, and personal responsibilities. In literature the decadent is one whose writing tends to convey the impression that rules don’t matter. He pretends, as Shaw does, that people do what they want to do, and find the reason and justification for it afterwards, if at all. This is very largely true; but the tendency is none the less anti-social, and should not be stated without an accompanying protest. The fact that the wicked often flourish like the green bay tree makes it none the less, but all the more, necessary that we should pour foul scorn upon those who want a greedy handicap in the race; who will not accept the conditions which alone make the race decent, or tolerable, or worth running at all. There would be no sense in playing cards if half of one’s partners were cheats, whose success in gaining tricks did not prove that they were skilled players, but merely that they were unscrupulous ones. Decadence is another name for immorality, and we brand certain writers as decadent because they make a mock of the things that make life worth living. Thus Nietzsche says: ‘Neither good nor bad, but my taste.’ That is pig philosophy, and it was only natural that Nietzsche should finish up in a madhouse, where the inmates having done as they pleased out of doors, had now to do as their keepers pleased. Not to accept the rules of the game is a confession of weakness. It means that you believe you are so stupid and unskilful that if you play honestly you are sure to be beaten by other competitors. Now, a capable man would rather have the handicap against him than in his favour, because he has enough confidence in himself to believe that he can win even then. Decadence in Literature The history of the term Decadent as applied to literature does not seem to carry us far back. The word became noticeably current in the nineties, when the translation of Max Nordau’s book ‘Degeneration’ set people talking. I have not seen that book for over a score of years; but the argument was that literary decadence was insincerity as shown by rhapsody in prose, the use of meaningless refrains in verse, pessimism in outlook, and a tendency to coquet with the unwholesome or positively vicious. Extensive translation of the verse of Villon, Verlaine, and Baudelaire – men of diseased minds all of them – the poetry of James Thomson (‘BV’) and the prose of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Leopardi, Amiel, and Ibsen had prepared the atmosphere for an attack on pessimism, and, after the manner of modern warfare, it had to be a flank and not a frontal attack. To say of the pessimists that they were degenerates was a simpler way of casting discredit upon them than to analyse their claims and attitude. Old Judge Braxfield, at the end of a plausible speech from a man on trial for his life, disposed of the prisoner, if not his argument, by saying; ‘Ay, ye’re a clever chiel; but ye wad be nane the waur o’ hanging.’ The Natural History of the Pessimists. There was, anyhow, plenty of colour for the categorical dismissal of the pessimists as degenerates. Villon, the house-breaker and associate of sluts; Baudelaire, knowing all about opium and hashisch; Leopardi, partially blind and deaf with broken fortunes, bad heredity, and a debilitated body ; Schopenhauer, son of a suicide father and a queer mother; Thomson, with many fine characteristics, but a dipsomaniac whose life was ‘one long defeat’; Von Hartmann, crippled and incapacitated for the military career upon which he had set his mind; Ibsen, the faithless friend, son of a bankrupt, spendthrift father and a neurotic mother – have they not all something of the badge of degeneracy? The plain answer to the pessimists case is so obvious and so much a matter of detail that writers who would combat it fight shy of direct refutation, especially as they know full well that pessimism is a subjective condition of the mind rather than the result of objective conditions in the life of humanity at large or even in the environment of the dismal one himself. To the pessimist you may say that the duration of life is longer; that there is more freedom from disease; that medicine and surgery are more skilful; that pain is lessened; that crime and violence are less; that the pleasures of life are increasingly numerous and accessible; that laws and manners are both better; and that the outlook for humanity is more promising than ever it was. All that will be true as it is valueless. As Burns wrote: Human bodies are sic fools, For a’ their colleges and schools, That when nae real ills perplex ‘em They mak enow themsel’s to vex ‘em. Or as Punch more prosaically said in answer to the question ‘Is life worth living?’ it depends upon the liver. And it does and all, Albert. Sometimes a Nickname. Of course the epithet Decadent may sometimes be a mere nickname, intended to be ‘a nasty one’ for somebody whose ideas one does not like. Some of the names included in our correspondent’s list are surely not rightly there. Grant Allen, for instance, had none of the marks of the decadent. It is true he wrote ‘The Woman Who Did,’ but that tale is a warning rather than an example. For the rest, one cannot conceive of any man who showed more of the signs of enjoying and being interested in life at many and varied points. Man of science, letters, novelist by necessity, a Socialist of the chair who enjoyed scarifying in print the so-called Liberty and Property Defence League, Grant Allen appears to us as an outstanding type of optimist who, without any old-fogey illusions, is vastly absorbed in the Passing Show, and very hopeful that man is capable of working out a higher destiny for himself and gives signs that he will do it. All that is the opposite of decadence. The decadent says ‘What is the good of anything?’ and he answers ‘Why nothing.’ But Grant Allen bubbled over with fun and vitality, finding good in many things. As said, Nordau found the great mark of decadence in literature to be insincerity, as exemplified, for instance, in meaningless refrains and the tricks of the poseur in general. According to exponents of the Nordau view, Morris’s ballad ‘Two red roses across the moon,’ is decadent because the verse is written round the refrains instead of the refrain being a mere incident, a kind of dramatic pause to heighten the effect of the lines it followed and preceeded. But if a meaningless refrain be the mark of decadence, then the decay set in long ago, for the use of the refrain is as old as poetry itself; indeed it may be older – refrains of even less suggestion than ‘Two red roses across the moon.’ There are in the rural districts of Scotland man known as ‘diddlers’ which does not mean cheats, but men who are fond of singing meaningless words to old tunes or to improvised tunes of their own such as; Ring a riddle nick a dairie, Ring a riddle nick a dee Fal al de riddle al de ray Ha hey dum dirrum dey dum daa Hey the riddle and the oram Roostie rackety roo roo roo I give these ancient ones as having less sense than the consecrated Shakespearean Hey, ho, the wind and the rain. Or the Scottish Hey and the rue grows bonnie wi’ thyme With its companion The thyme it is withered, and rue is in prime. It is admitted by exponents of the Nordau view that Shakespeare has a good many refrains in themselves meaningless, but that they are always purely subordinate and triflingly incidental; whereas in the plays of his more immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, the meaningless refrain usurps quite a different place and importance and as time went on poetry declined from the strong naturalness of the Elizabethans till it almost disappeared in the laboured ‘conceits’ and fantasticalities of the age of John Donne. If this were all that was to be said on the subject of decadence in literature it would not be very damaging to those censured, and would certainly mean that decadence was no new and progressive blight that had overtaken literature. The truth is, the arts are mostly as sincere as ever they were. Prose and poetry are, indeed, more sincere than ever. Not only is the language more direct and flexible, from use and the good reading and good taste of writers, but artificiality in verse and ‘fine writing’ in prose are less common than they were even in the day of Dickens, who himself loved to stretch a topic out on the rack as if to see how much fanciful rhetoric he could spin over it. This from a true Dickens lover who would abate no jot even of the rhodomontade, now that we have it. No new thing in life. If decadence is no new thing in literature, neither is it new in life itself. Effeminacy, cowardice, pacifism, slavish subservience, and all the unnatural physical offences are thousands of years old. In spite of commercialism, wealth, ease, luxury, and the dodging of civic responsibilities in the political field, man is today as game in spirits as ever he was, and is certainly cleaner in his life and surroundings. Johnson drank nineteen cups of tea at a sitting, and declared that he ‘had no passion for clean linen.’ When a prosperous trader complacently showed him his new bathroom, the great doctor said: ‘Sir, are you well?... Then let well alone. I hate immersion.’ Gibbon took so little exercise that he grew unwieldily fat. One day at a country house he required his hat, but it could not be found, and he explained that he had not seen it since he came there six weeks before. That sort of festering slothfulness would be inconceivable now. Drunkenness is dying an natural death from the growth of a sheer physical repulsion against it; and there is also a turning away from rich, heavy, stodgy food. Man is developing a physical conscience in increasing degree; and that makes war against degeneracy. One might show in some detail how well-grounded are the objections to the teaching of some of the writers whose names are given. But Hardy and Ibsen have been dealt with in The Gateway and James Thomson is the subject of one of our pamphlets. One dislikes going over the same ground again. The Decadents are tired people whose tiredness might be pardonable if they did not seek to make a merit of it and induce other people to be tired also. There was a time when one felt like being out with a tomahawk and scalping-knife where they were concerned; but pessimism is itself a tiresome topic, from which one passes with great readi9ness to something constructive, cheerful and concrete. ‘My what a fine crop of potatoes you have,’ said an enthusiastic onlooker. ‘Ay,’ said the pessimistic cultivator, ‘it’s taking far too much out of the soil. Besides, there will be no little ones for the hens!’ Not much use arguing with that attitude is there? I begin by stating what is to me a proposition so self-evident that it would not be worth setting down if it were not habitually ignored or even denied in practice. My proposition is that, there is no single function discharged by the private landlord and capitalist that cannot be performed much more efficiently and satisfactorily by the organised community working through its servants. In any newspaper we pick up, indeed in whichever direction we turn our gaze, we see proofs of the elementary and clamorous truth that all the biggest jobs and all the best work are done by combinations; by the team rather than the individual, the choir and the band rather than the soloist, by the co-operative principle in stores, associations, trusts, and mergers as against the individual capitalist, and finally by the State and the Municipality as against all smaller and necessarily less powerful organizations. The Only Thing That Would Do. As I write, the chairman of the Midland and Scottish Railway Group has just been proclaiming, once again, the great savings that have been effected by the amalgamation of 120 competing companies into six trusts; and a few weeks ago the newspapers featured sensationally the great chemical combine of which Sir Alfred Mond is the head. From a Tory paper, whose opinions always run counter to the facts it has to record, I read that the City of Manchester employs over 25,000 persons and spends every year £4,000,o00, meaning, of course, that the corporation is by much the largest employer in a city of large concerns. What the Tory paper does not say, but what we all know, is that the Corporation of Manchester is not only the largest employer, but the best employer; that its work is done honestly - with neither scamping of the work nor profiteering as regards the price - and that this great system of public service has arisen strictly on its merits and in spite of the opposition of vested interests to every single advance. The State and the municipality as Public Servants have grown inevitably and notwithstanding all opposition because the principle under-lying Collectivism is as sound as the prejudices underlying Individualism are unsound and have been found to be unworkable in practice. The Collectivism of the State and the Municipality has grown because it was the Only Thing That Would Do. We need only look around us to see that private enterprise is responsible for such concrete evils as the slums, mean streets, poverty, ignorance, and squalor, while public enterprise is the cleansing authority, the order-keeper, the educator, the provider of parks, art galleries, libraries, the only builder now of working-class houses, the provider of pensions, poor law relief, unemployment pay, first aid, maternity benefit, and child-welfare services. The Puzzle. In view of all this evil from unregulated effort and all this good received at the hands of the organised community, the Twentieth Century Puzzle is that everyone should turn to the State for his own good while deprecating the office of the State in the general life of the community. Every class looks to the State for help and furtherance, nor does it look in vain. The capitalist, boasting of the superiority of capitalism, nevertheless turns to the State for subsidies – to bread, coal, dyes, housing, farming, shipping, cotton-growing, and the treatment of sugar beet. If it be answered that in all these cases the State gives only what it has first taken, at least it is obvious that the State has the power and the goodwill to help when of other aid there is none. But that would be the least part of the rejoinder. The fact is that the State can beat private enterprise on its own ground. Dr. Addison has made the latest public addition to our knowledge on this head. In his little book ‘Practical Socialism’ he has told us, on the basis of the public accounts of the Administration of which he was member, how the National Shell Factory at Dundee produced 18-pounder shells at 9/1, while the average contract price charged by the private firms was 20s. to 23s.; how the national factories produced tin cups at ¾d. as against the private-enterprise price of 2½d.; and how, on transactions totalling £12,000,000, the Ministry of Food, after meeting all expenses, including rationing, made a net profit of £6,391,365 (This seems excessive – fully cent. per cent.; but the figures are so given.); and how the national factories paid the cost of their erection in from two to three years. These items are only a few additional proofs of superior efficiency and economy of public enterprise. We had already heard and read of how much cheaper corporation electricity could be produced and sold than by private companies. The very best talent is at the service of State and the Municipalities; the larger scale of production tends to greater economy; and of course the element profit for the investor is eliminated. Wobbling. All that seems so obvious; and yet we proceed in ordinary industrial and commercial practice as if we had heard of none of these results. Even those who have accepted the Collectivist principle as a matter of party affiliation often argue as if they were not quite sure of the superiority of Collective practice. Thus Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, in censuring the Government for its failure to carry out the socialising recommendations of its own Coal Commission, is acclaimed in Liberal quarters because he favoured, not outright nationalization but what he called ‘a public utility organisation imposed upon a trust organization.’ Mr. Lloyd George seized this abandonment of principle as ‘very significant,’ and Captain Wedgwood Benn was so enamoured of it that he wrote an article for the Daily News about it. Now, there is no ‘public utility organization’ outside of public ownership and control. If Mr. MacDonald was thinking of concerns such as gas companies and railway companies, which are in different ways subject to a measure of public control, their ‘utility’ is limited to just exactly the extent that they fall short of being really controlled and operated by public servants. As I pointed out at the time Mr. MacDonald made his speech, gas companies are restricted to a five per cent. dividend, but there is no restriction upon the amount they can and do carry to reserve. I know of companies which regularly carry five times as much to reserve as they disburse in dividend. The object of the restriction - which is to keep down the price of gas - is not attained. The reserves belong to the companies. Railway rates are controlled by Act of Parliament and by the Railway Tribunal; but this does not serve the public interest in the way that national ownership has done and is doing. No private railway company in the world can show an increase in its earning capacity to compare with that which has taken place on the Canadian State Railways within the past four years, which Sir Henry Thornton, the manager, put at fifteen-fold – from 60 million dollars a-year under private enterprise to 900 million dollars a-year now. From a recent issue of the Railway Gazette I quote the following:- The 1925 report of the State-owned and operated Alsace-Lorraine lines shows a surplus of income over all expenditure of nearly 30,000,000 francs, which automatically goes into the Common Railway Fund. . . . The lines have the advantage of scarcely any debt, and have been realising profits ever since they were taken over from Germany. At one time there was talk of ceding them to the Est Company, but this idea has now been abandoned. While the British railways are steadily drawing upon the reserves they accumulated during the war years, and have just raised their rates 10 per cent., the Canadian State Railway has rates to which the United States traders in vain demand approximation from the private owners of their capitalistic railways, though these serve much more densely peopled areas than do the Canadian lines. The yearly surpluses from the German and Belgian State railways, in spite of very low rates, were the subject of frequent comment till, in the immediate post-war years, the ‘interests’ were allowed to wreck these lines as a preliminary to denationalising them. To leave fare and freight charges stationary while everything else was inflated sky-high was a short and easy method of reducing them to insolvency. But the old balance sheets stand, and they show benefits to the public such as no ‘public utility organization’ could be expected to equal, or has ever equalled. Mr. MacDonald might be expected to be more ardent than ever in the advocacy of a principle which is so satisfactory in practice and which is finding such increasing support in the constituencies. He has no mandate from the Party to suggest any form of public utility except in the form of public ownership. Mr. Maxton Also. But the leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party does not stand alone. Mr. James Maxton, the chairman of the Independent Labour Party, has stated the aim of his part to be the (a) ‘securing of political power by the ordinary political machine, (b) developing industrial power by the strengthening of the trade unions, and (c) increasing economic power by strengthening the co-operative movement.’ Is there not a disproportionate stressing of movements and machinery here as distinguished from what the movements and the machinery are to accomplish in the way of constructive change? Socialism at its best surely approaches the citizen with proposals of nationalization and municipalization. To his duty as a voter it is not really necessary that the citizen should be either a co-operator, a trade unionist, or a member of the Independent Labour Party. He may, indeed, be all three and not much of a citizen. National and municipal property already much exceeds in value all that the trade unions and the co-operators can muster in the way of accumulated assets; and to many of us the business and the charm and interest of active citizenship are not enhance by their associations with the soap and clothes-pegs of co-operation or the destructive tactics of trade unionism. When Mr. Maxton writes of the ‘industrial power’ of trade unionism we recall that trade unionism as such has no industrial power. It can stop industry, but as to the starting thereof it still waits for the investor to say the word and find the money. We are too near the disastrous General Strike, foredoomed to failure as it was from the first, to be impressed with the politics of trade unionism. That the Parliamentary representatives of Labour should be free to condemn an ill-judged strike, either after it has taken place or, better still, before it takes place, has become a necessity, not only of self-respecting leadership, but of ordinary citizenship. The spirit behind all strikes - even the me forlorn hope - is right; it is the hankering after better times, a fuller life; but the time, the occasion, and the mode of a strike may be, any or all of them, foolish to the verge of crime. So long as trade unionism functions through capitalism, as it does, it depends upon the success of the capitalist in finding markets for its products. Any market-spoiling strike, therefore, is suicidal. Again, the trades unionists of Woolwich, Chatham, Clydeside, Tyneside, etc., depend upon wars and armaments. A good Socialist wants wars and armaments abolished, and the thousands who live by these anti-social industries set to plough and sow and plant and build houses and make roads and develop electricity. But the good Socialist may well have grave doubts as to how far the confirmed city workman is prepared to travel along the road of de-urbanised progress. A man of so such social goodwill as John Galsworthy pictures two down-and-out city men as supremely miserable when taken out of their slums and set to work at poultry farming. One of them hangs himself because he feels he is degraded by the work and life to which he has been set. This is so much in accordance with what one hears of working-class opinion – even Socialist opinion - that one is not greatly heartened trade union alliance by which Mr. Maxton sets so much store. Nationalization and Municipalization. The good Socialist is so fully persuaded of the cogency and ultimate necessity of nationalization and municipalization that he is inclined to urge its acceptance upon all classes. He may do this hopefully and without misgiving, recollecting that the national and municipal services and property we have been secured with the assent and furtherance of citizens of all classes, sometimes in spite of the opposition of Labour men. Thus when the very successful Hull telephones were municipalised the Labour councillors voted against, while a Labour Government dismantled the nationally owned town of Gretna, which the Coalition had built. It very evidently needs to be repeated that nationalization and, municipalization are the essence of Socialism beyond and above co-operation, trade unionism, or even the Parliamentary Labour Party. This is the more necessary in view of the wobbling one sees in all quarters. The man who is very sure of the justice and ultimate necessity of his principles must always be sorry that matters of good citizenship should become party cries and arouse a merely partisan opposition; but if this is inevitable - human nature being what it is - at least let us be sure that the end is not lost sight of in the means. There seems to be some danger of that in the meantime. Even ‘The Social Democrat.’ If we might be prepared for a certain amount of trimming from the politicians of the I.L.P. (who always were politicians first and Socialists some way after), we might expect the Old Guard of the Social-Democratic Federation to be firm in the Socialist faith. I find, however, in two recent numbers of The Social-Democrat, the monthly organ of the S.D.F., a series of articles by the editor, Mr. Fred Montague, that give rise to some slight misgiving. In the December issue Mr. Montague, answering the question, ‘Can Capitalism Resolve its Contradictions?’ says:- There is no more essential difference between nationalization in and by a capitalist State and trustification than there is between the high wages of Fordism and the wage demands of the Minority Movement or the I.L.P. Organised Individualism. Let me say at once that I do not believe in ‘the wage-demands of the Minority Movement or the I.L.P.’ I do not say we could not have a State based upon the idea of capital and labour with their shares of the product regulated on a system of fixed percentages allocated by public officials on the ledger-evidence of the business done. But anything of the kind would be, not Socialism, but an artificial, complicated, empirical Individualism. Under such a system we should still have wasteful competition, the often incompetent management of private enterprise, the appalling workplaces which private enterprise thinks good enough for its workmen, and, among much else, probably a good deal of fraudulent book-keeping. Individualism, as a business bungle, is not worth preserving, and a system such as is indicated by Messrs, Hobson and Brailsford in ‘The Living Wage’ would be immensely more difficult to secure and cumbrous to run than Socialism pure and simple. The idea of it could have suggested itself only to men who either do not believe in socialization or who despair of ever securing it. It is worth noting that those who propound wire-drawn schemes of this kind are men of the study who do not take active part in public work and have no adequate sense of political possibilities. The working class is not incapable of taking a political lead if we do not darken counsel by the constant launching of novelties. Fordism. Between Henry Fordism and ‘The Living Wage’ policy there are the immense differences that Henry Ford pays high wages voluntarily, whereas the I.L.P. demands high wages compulsorily; that Henry Ford is a genius working a specialty, while the average employer is neither the one nor the other; and that Ford is working in and for a land of high wages, while the British capitalist is working for a poor Britain and a still poorer Europe. The Living-Wage policy assumes the continuance of Britain as a manufacturing and exporting country, whereas nothing can be clearer than that the outside world is more and more doing without our products and that every year we shall export less and less. I waive the mean-spiritedness that would seek to shirk the responsibility of communally organising production and distribution, but would leave it to the capitalist. The Trust. When we come to Mr. Montague's statement that there is no ‘essential difference between nationalization in and by a capitalist State and Trustification,’ we can offer only a complete negative. If we take the Post Office as an example of nationalization, and the Thread Combine as a type of the Trust, we see the ‘essential difference’ at once. The Thread Combine keeps prices up; the Post Office keeps prices down. The Thread Combine pays low wages; the Post Office pays wonderfully good wages, having regard to the nature of the work; it pays for holidays, gives medical attendance, uniforms, superannuation allowance, and the marriage ‘dot’ to clerkesses who wed. No one of these privileges is a feature of work for the Trust. The Trust dispenses millions in profits, and its directors are millionaires; whereas the Postal Service is the least remunerative of all public undertakings, doing an immense amount of work for the poor in old age and other pensions for nothing. The index figure still stands at 70 odd; but postal rates have never been more than 50 per cent. above the 1913 figures. The Post Office loses money on press telegrams professedly in the public interest; but what Trust runs any part of its business deliberately at a loss? The Post Office is amenable to public and Parliamentary criticism. The Postmaster-General is an elected public servant; but none of these considerations applies to the Trusts. The Post Office is public property; the Trust is not. The Post Office has no motive to profiteer. The Trust has profiteering as its sole real existing. The comparison is so hopelessly wrong that it may be taken as a type of a certain unfair and unwise attitude towards nationalization. In his editorial notes in the January number Mr. Montague, in the course of a long and very debatable passage, says: We are not bound by any ‘doctrine’ to support any and every form of capitalist State management, irrespective of considerations of efficiency, against forms of capitalist ownership which may in actual fact contain more socialization in embryo, neither are we called upon to prove that State ownership ‘pays.’ This, surely, is coming to bury Caesar rather than to praise him. I do not know what the writer means. State and municipal ownership do pay. State management is efficient. There may be more ‘socialization in embryo’ in the Brunner-Mond Merger than there is in the Post Office; but it will take a lot of looking for. Mr. Montague for the S.D.F., Mr. Maxton for the I.L.P., Mr. MacDonald for the Parliamentary Labour Party, either believe in nationalization or they do not. If they do they are dissembling their love with some considerable success. Direct Labour. There have, of course, been failures in both State and Municipal enterprise: Stubbs’ Gazette is full of the failures of private enterprise every week. Any business may fail if improperly handled or if industrial conditions change. But nothing can seriously invalidate the main advantages of public enterprise, namely, that a public concern can borrow money cheaply; can free the field from competition, as where corporation cars ran private buses off the streets; can secure the best managing talent; has claims on public support; and has no dividends to find for shareholders. Direct labour on the roads, in housebuilding, in the works departments of local imperial authorities has been a success all along the line as against capitalism. Every week brings its tale of Collectivist success. This week it is the report of £300,000 saved in five years by the Government Printing Works. If Mr. Lloyd George comes forward as the advocate of State enterprise, and cites facts and figures making good his claims, why should professed Socialists cast doubt upon their own principles? Speaking in the House of Commons while Premier (18th August, 1919), he said, after dealing with economies effected in the making of shells, guns, machine-guns and rifles:- When we took them [Lewis guns] in hand they cost £165, and we reduced them to £35 each . . . Through the costing system and the checking of the National Factories we set up, before the end of the war there was a saving of £440,000,000. . . . The Controller of Shipping saved hundreds of millions to this country. When you have to spend between £8,000,000,000 and £1o,000,000,000 of this country’s money, when you improvise great organisations, find your men where you can, find thousands of absolutely new men to work out these schemes, of course there may be extravagance, of course there may be errors of judgment. . . . But whatever is said about these little mistakes? I have seen the report of Parliamentary Committees. They are about comparatively small sums – I mean comparative to the gigantic expenditure. Those are advertised; those are flaunted. Leading articles are written about them. Never a word about these hundreds of millions that have been saved by these men! . . . Is it wise, when attacks are made upon systems of government . . . when all government is being challenged, if you get the democracy to believe that you get nothing but mistakes, nothing but what they call scandal, and there is no efficiency anywhere, how long do you think any system or institution can possibly continue in this country? If Mr. Lloyd George has forgotten these triumphs of nationalization, why should we? Their value as object lessons is as great as ever. And in such advocacy Mr. Lloyd George is talking more like a Socialist than is the Editor of The Social-Democrat, though I believe Mr. Montague is normally a capable and spirited man. When Sir Eric Geddes pointed out (Times, 11/12/19) that the Woolwich Arsenal produced 12-ton wagons £100 cheaper than the profit-making builders, he also was talking more like a Socialist than do professed Socialists when depreciate State enterprise. Even with a Tory Government in power we have had two instalments of nationalization carried within one year, the chief objection to the Broadcasting and Electricity schemes being that they are not Socialistic enough. If we had a Socialist Government in power, how much faster might not the process of socialization go forward? And not merely a Socialist Government at Westminster, but local bodies more and more composed of Socialists. Officials. Mr. Montague writes of ‘vast hordes of officials,’ as if under Socialism we should not have many fewer officials than now. An official is a man in office, and there are more offices and consequently more officials now than there would be under a more consolidated system of production and distribution. The officials, moreover, would not only know their job, but would be amenable to the public. They are not always capable now, and owe no responsibility to anyone save their employers, who are usually just amateur directors. As it is, men of goodwill welcome the experienced men of the Ministry of Health, who correct the ignorance and conservatism of local authorities. Personally I am always glad to see the Factory Inspector, from whom I have repeatedly got good suggestions and much useful information such as a travelled man seeing many workplaces might be expected to possess. Great Immediate Schemes. We are on the threshold of great public undertakings. With the mines nationalised, there will be subsidiary industries for the production of coke, tar, heavy oil, petrol, and gas for long-distance distribution under national auspices. National electricity from falling water can be made successful only under real national control from start to finish. House-building by national companies of masons - a building army! - could provide houses by the thousand in the new districts to be opened up in connection with the electricity works, schemes of afforestation, the making of new arterial roads, and the provision of cottages and farm buildings in connection with the overdue agricultural and horticultural developments required to keep in the country the hundreds of millions that go abroad for foodstuffs we might economically produce ourselves. Nothing save State ownership, expert management, abundant capital, and the grand, hopeful scale of State enterprise can arrest the deterioration of the Homeland. There is in Britain capital to burn. It is being wasted on risky foreign investments and on a hundred and one bubbles such as the buses that crowd our streets and roads, endanger the lives of the people, poison the atmosphere with petrol fumes, and eat up the savings of many simple souls who embark in a grossly overdone industry. In spite of the coal lockout and the General Strike, the new capital issues in Britain during 1926, exclusive of Government loans, were of the value of £253,266,000. France, with a much lower population, has 8,000,000 employed in agriculture and forestry, as compared with a million and a quarter in Britain. Naturally France has no unemployed and no emigration to speak of, while we, in the week in which I write, have 140,000 more unemployed than a week ago, and a quarter of a million more than in the corresponding week of last year. The electorate is more and more with the Labour Party, which stands for national ownership and control whatever some of its spokesmen may say. On the test of work done and results achieved, even by middle-class local and national government, we can go forward confidently with a programme which aims at making democracy master in its own house, owning the house and using all that belongs to it, instead of sponging upon capitalist organization and being mastered and driven by the blind and chaotic forces of greed and mismanagement. It will be no leap in the dark to extend the social services and develop our neglected country on lines that have proved so successful, to the limited extent they have been followed. The Co-operative Commonwealth. The Living Wage, like the Right-to-Work slogan of some years ago, is a novelty hatched by impatient people not weaned from Individualism. Co-operation is a side-show sometimes flattered by being called ‘a State within the State.’ Guild Socialism is the smallest of small stunts. The State can gulp all these without a cough, and serve the nation better for their absence. What’s the matter with Britain Unlimited, with international affiliations? - the Co-operative Commonwealth? Nothing else and nothing less will serve; and if make up our minds we may have it. The greater includes the less, my brethren; the whole is greater than the part. New Forms. We shall need new forms of Government, local and nation to run the Co-operative Commonwealth. These will come as the State and the Municipality add to their functions. Manchester City Council, with its 140 members functioning through 20 committees, has grown up entirely since the day of Richard Cobden, and it is a type of what will extend more and more in Manchester as elsewhere. We want as many citizens may be desirable actively and intelligently participating in the work of government - political, industrial, commercial - taking the most capable men out of their little shops and offices to lend a hand in bigger business. Not a Negation. Socialism is not merely or primarily a criticism of capitalism, but an affirmation of the power and beneficence of Society organised. It is not a thing of negations, denials, a defeatism, but a constructive policy, already very successful, that would bring all social functions within the Reign of Law and Order, enormously increasing the wealth, health, resources and powers of man united at last for peace and its victories. Its coming will be gradual: all growth is gradual. But it may be as steady and as rapid as intelligence, determination, and goodwill can make it. Two years ago this month we embarked upon the revival of James Leatham's work. The Commemorative edition of The Gateway was published in time for the re-launch of The Deveron Press on what would have been James Leatham's 150th birthday on December 19th 2015. The launch event was held in the Municipal Buildings, Turriff - in the very room Leatham served as Provost. Like Leatham's reputation, it had fallen into a parlous state. We have played our part in restoring both place and reputation. The Municipal Buildings is now a community owned Museum and Heritage Hub, managed by the Turriff and District Heritage Society. The Deveron Press has also published 'The Centenary Collection' of 10 Leatham related works including first publication of Leatham's unfinished autobiography as well as becoming a voice for contemporary North East and Scots writers. And every month we have brought you a selection of Leatham (and other writers) works in the New Gateway, free online. Leatham's Gateway ran for 361 editions over 30 volumes. We knew we could never compete with this. Our goal has been, and remains, to make Leatham's work as available as possible as widely as possible. On this, the second anniversary of the 'relaunch' we have taken the decision that we will bring out a total of 30 editions of the New Gateway. This will take us to June next year. (Volume 3) It's a small tribute to Leatham's prolific masterwork, but hopefully it has whetted the appetite of a few to read further and deeper. We have made hundreds of public domain articles available free on the internet and they will remain here. We will also list the complete index of all Gateway articles from all 361 editions of the magazine so that interested people can seek them down - at present complete sets are held at Special Collections, Aberdeen University Library, British Library and incomplete but extensive holdings at Aberdeenshire Library HQ in Old Meldrum. We will then focus on bringing 'compilations' of some of Leatham's political and cultural works together for publication as well as continuing our commitment to local and Scots contemporary writers - keeping the 'radical' view alive well into the future. So - there's another 6 editions to go... we hope you will enjoy them. And for our publications, please go to the Leatham Centenary Collection at www.unco.scot and the Contemporary unco authors section. Rab Christie The Dirty work of Data Mining is a Brave New World of Confusion.
You might not even know what Data Mining is. I didn’t. Time to live and learn! One of the highlights for me this year was the publication of Cally Phillips work Discovering Crockett’s Edinburgh. Following on from the 2 Volumes Discovering Crockett’s Galloway already published, I knew it would be a well-researched, informative and interesting work. I believe there is currently no better way to find Crockett ‘places’ and to relate them back to his literary works. For the uninitiated, Crockett first went to Edinburgh in 1876 as a bursary student and he lived there, on and off for the next decade. Edinburgh features in around a third of his seventy plus literary works and Phillips’ book takes the reader on a number of journeys through place and time in this work. With it you can explore and re-tread the steps of the young Crockett and his characters throughout five centuries of Edinburgh – either for real if you’re in Edinburgh, or virtually if you’re not. What a brilliant thing to be able to do. So what about Data Mining? A text, by any other name does NOT smell as sweet, believe me. I was recently made aware of an app which claims to offer people the opportunity to do a similar thing to Discovering Crockett’s Edinburgh, not just for Crockett, but for a plethora of Scots writers with Edinburgh connections. Right on your smartphone (or computer – I don’t have a smartphone!) The Barrie aficionado who alerted me to the app warned me though, telling me the Barrie links were far from accurate. I went to look at the shiny new toy. Amazed to find Crockett on the ‘app’ – since he’s barely known of in Edinburgh – I went straight to his author name. Massive disappointment. Now I know how Cally Phillips felt when she first started the Crockett ‘project.’ In 2012 she ‘discovered’ Crockett in the realms of project gutenberg. The quality of the digital texts were so poor (mostly unreadable) that she turned to and produced newly edited versions for ebook and paperback. In the process she became a publisher and is now one of the leading scholarly authorities on Crockett. The Litlong app (yes, time to name and shame) sadly relies on both Wikipedia – which is horribly inaccurate regarding Crockett – and project gutenberg texts. It is, dear reader, worse than useless, at least for Crockett. I haven’t had the heart to check it out for other authors. But I did have a look at how it is compiled. It’s called Text Mining. Which is effectively data mining. (I leave you to draw analogies to other forms of data mining) Be afraid. Be very afraid. Here is the description from the app: You can use LitLong to explore Edinburgh as a literary setting. Browse the map and zoom in and out to see how locations around the city have featured in literature. As you zoom further in, more pins will appear. Click on a pin to see excerpts of literature that mention that location. From there you can select a particular excerpt, save it to your library, add it to a path, or read more about the selected book and its author. Sounds great. Except you really can’t. Not if you want accuracy. Not with Crockett. LitLong uses natural language processing technology informed by literary scholars’ input in order to text mine literary works set in Edinburgh and to visualise the results in accessible ways. The problem is: There appears to be no literary scholars’ input in the Crockett selection. The explanation continues: What have we made? We have created a very large database of place-name mentions in more than 600 books that use Edinburgh as a setting. We have then extracted the sentences immediately surrounding each mention and included those as an excerpt in our database. The data has then been mapped onto the city via the place-name mentions, and can be explored through a mobile app and online interface. With LitLong, you can walk your own paths through the resonant locations of literary Edinburgh. Except you really can’t. Not with meaning. Not for Crockett. It’s more like a super drunken stumble at best. Our aim in creating LitLong was to find out what the topography of a literary city such as Edinburgh would look like if we allowed digital reading to work on a very large body of books. Edinburgh has a justly well-known literary history, cumulatively curated down the years by its many writers and readers. This history is visible in books, maps, walking tours and the city’s many literary sites and sights. Do we feel that perhaps they have just over-extended. Crockett isn’t really mainstream now, is he. But for me this is no excuse when they claim their desire to go beyond the mainstream: But might there be other voices to hear in the chorus? Other, less familiar stories? By letting the algorithms do the reading, we’ve tried to set that familiar narrative of Edinburgh’s literary history in the less familiar context of hundreds of other works. Failed on that score. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Well, you know, a vast amount of random words are even more dangerous. How did we do it? To create LitLong:Edinburgh we have used text-mining and georeferencing on extremely large and diverse collections of digitised books made available to us by – among others – the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the Hathi Trust. In addition, some publishers and authors have shared their lists with us. We searched these collections for texts which, in the range and frequency of their use of place-names, showed all the signs of making Edinburgh their setting. A combination of algorithmic and manual curation then filtered these texts for ones that matched our criteria, giving us a dataset of hundreds of narrative works which explore the city or use it as a backdrop for their action. The Edinburgh places mentioned in these texts were then georeferenced using a bespoke gazetteer created to register the very different ways in which place might be named in fiction or memoir.[i] Sound great? But it hasn’t worked. There’s is nothing like enough ‘human’ or literary input into this project. Issues with the Crocket entries include: Texts are sometimes inaccurately labelled (with the American editions being used -these often have different titles from the British versions) Crockett biographical information is very incomplete. Wikipedia editing is not a skill I possess, and until more Wiki-editors know more about Crockett it will not be updated accurately or comprehensively. Don’t hold your breath. Academics are still well out of step with Crockett, holding on to outmoded and ill-conceived notions of ‘Kailyard’ etc. Crockett needs a Wiki-advocate. Actual texts. If you are happy reading online it’s not too bad. When you try to download the problems commence. OCR is poor on many of the titles. The excerpts rarely give any real flavour or reason as to why they are attributed to a particular place – in stark contrast to Phillips’ work which integrates and weaves the stories, characters, places and Crockett himself into one meta-narrative. Sometimes you get what you pay for. The Litlong app is free. Which simply disproves a cliché – the best things in life are NOT always free. You may have to pay for Discovering Crockett’s Edinburgh. It’s well worth it. Beyond that, I would recommend if you want to read Crockett you read from a reputable source. Like Ayton Publishing’s ‘Galloway Collection’ available from www.unco.scot, Amazon and elsewhere. I am now looking out for a digital version of Discovering Crockett’s Edinburgh. It won’t be free but it will be worth every penny. And it’s what I will carry with me when I go Crocketeering in Edinburgh. So, Data mining. What do we think? It may (or may not) be a clever way to chew up and spit out industrial levels of words. But words without meaning… where is the point? The lesson to be learned is that keywords are not the same as literary analysis, critique or research. Data mining of this level cannot take the place of a human being. And that as humans we should be very wary of this kind of activity. We have got used to the idea that there are apps for everything. Please think twice when you If this represents a wonderful new way of ‘mining’ data then I fear for us all. Obviously as far as literature goes, dredging up data from the inner workings of digital archives leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that the Litlong app proves there is a definite need for the kind of skilled, painstaking research that Cally Phillips undertook in Discovering Crockett’s Edinburgh. But if you are introduced to Crockett (or Barrie, and doubtless others) via this app, I’d suggest neither does what it says on the tin, nor does credit to some unco Scots writers. ~~~ Lest you think I’m just being shirty, here is a wee comparative analysis: I’ve picked an ‘average’ map point. Place your pin on The Pleasance. Lit Long credits 4 Books to this location BOG-MYRTLE AND PEAT Samuel Rutherford Crockett, 1895 CLEG KELLY, ARAB OF THE CITY Samuel Rutherford Crockett, 1896 THE STICKIT MINISTER Samuel Rutherford Crockett, 1893 THE DEW OF THEIR YOUTH Samuel Rutherford Crockett, 1910 (actually 1909) The excerpts are of variable use and interest. But at least all books can be read online- if that’s your thing. In Discovering Crockett’s Edinburgh (DCEd) you have a whole chapter dedicated to the Pleasance (and Cowgate) since it is one of the most important of Crockett’s Edinburgh locations. It provides excerpts as well as critical analysis and reflection from Kit Kennedy, Lads’ Love, The Stickit Minister’s Wooing, Cleg Kelly and Kid McGhie. The Dew of their Youth and Bog Myrtle and Peat references found in Litlong are dealt with in Chapter 6 of DCEd titled ‘Student Characters.’ The Stickit Minister excerpt is from a Cleg Kelly story – given in more detail in DCEd The Litlong app doesn’t even mention nearby St Leonard’s Street which is perhaps one of the most important locations in Crockett’s Edinburgh. Not least because it’s where he lived for 10 years! DCEd has another complete chapter set here and guides the reader or explorer to walk from St Leonards down to the Old Town in the company of Crockett and his characters. This is considerably more enlightening and entertaining than that offered by the app. Should I term the phrase ‘an app is only as good as its map’ and the ‘map’ offered by LitLong for Crockett’s work is, I’m sorry to say, feeble! In DCEd St Leonard’s Street is hub from which you can go in many directions to find Crockett locations. I haven’t been comprehensively through all the LitLong listings, but there are many which are misplaced – one places a ‘South Side of Edinburgh’ in the middle of the Meadows when it is a Sunday School ‘southside’ of the Pleasance. In conclusion though, I suggest you don’t rely on data or text mining and georeferencing combined to experience Crockett’s literary Edinburgh. For some things, real human beings, putting in real hours of work will offer a much better result. 10/10 to Cally Phillips book 2/10 to the Lit Long app. Orraman [i] I have quoted ACCURATELY from Lit Long website – if only they could quote as accurately from Crockett’s work! A Labour Wave Succeeds a Crime Wave. Glasgow as seen by a Friendly Outsider First Article It is not for nothing that Glasgow is the Second City. One is not an admirer of big business or big populations. Quality and size are often in inverse ratio. But the majority does admire big things, and if other cities are not big it must be because they can’t help it. They may have done their best, and it just hasn’t been good enough. Glasgow is saturated with the spirit of business. It is probably the only city in Britain where there is a deliberate emulation of what we think of as the American spirit. Glasgow men are like Americans in respect of a fondness for novelties and long words. I knew one elderly man who liked to say he had ‘unified’ himself with a party when he joined it. Another man liked to call a soda-water bottle a gasogene. Yet another had got hold of a good work but he had evidently read it hurriedly; he referred to a meeting as having been ‘a b---y fissaco!’ A small political body just after the Russo-Japanese war, headed its advertisements ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ which I suppose most people have forgotten is Japanese for ‘Hurrah!’ One would be disposed to say that there are exceptionally few idealists in Glasgow. Glaswegians take up with ideals but their feeling for them would appear to be like Mrs Bardell’s admiration for Mr Pickwick – it is admiration at a distance. When a Glasgow lady returned from a visit to a married friend, the first question her people asked her was whether her friend’s husband ‘had a good business.’ A few people stood watching a poor man feeding the birds and squirrels in a public park. They r remarked as they turned away that the man seemed to enjoy the confidence the wild creatures had in him, and that he must be a kind man. But a Glasgow woman remarked, ‘He doesn’t seem to have made much by it!’ He looked, indeed, little better than a tramp; but his poverty was not deepened by the few handfuls of crumbs he dispensed, and it did not seem an aspect of the matter that would occur to one readily. Some months ago a Glasgow lady reader of The Gateway sent me a longish clipping from a newspaper. The article discussed Glasgow ‘Men and Manners’ with some point and wit, and, turning to the other side of the two-column strip to see if there was any indication of the name of the newspaper, I found the stop-press column blank save for a longish pencilled sum in simple addition which had four ha’pennies in it, and totted up to 3/9! We are amused by a thing so characteristic as that the Glasgow Labour M.P’s should already have raised the question of the inadequacy of their salaries. Dozens of lower-middle class Labour men –English, Irish, and Welsh, have managed to rub along on £400, even through the dear war years. £8 a week should enable a Glasgow man to live well in London, especially if he has recently been drawing ‘the dole’ in Glasgow, as one at least of the new M.P’s was doing up to the time of his election. Davie Kirkwood (as they have begun to call him) smokes a clay pipe, as Mr Robert Smillie does also. £8 would go some way to Swinyerds or Burns Cutties and the appropriate tobacco. However, Glasgow is a town of the cash nexus and it may well occur to even Labour men (if they come from Glasgow) that being an M.P.should have its commercial value also. It is an article of faith with Glasgow men and women that Aberdonians are the last word in greed. The theory has extended to London, and has doubtless been disseminated by the numerous Aberdonians on the London press, who are themselves the authors of the jokes embodying the Glasgow (and English) view of their fellow-citizens. It is a fine thing to have a currency for these japes and catchwords; the people to whom they are applied have to live them down, and that is good for the world, since they have to be generous to the people who jibe at them. It is probably from this cause that an Aberdeen woman of humble means gave the maid half-a-crown at the end of her short visit, without saying anything about it, while the well-off Glasgow woman discussed whether sixpence or a shilling was the proper tip to give. Which is probably the reason why the one is poor and the other ‘comfortable.’ The other day the Glasgow papers had the common-form remarks about Aberdeen’s modified generosity a propos of a students’ collection. Glasgow raised, with much whooping, £3000 and Aberdeen, I forget what – over £3000 anyhow. Had Glasgow given in the same ratio to population her contribution should have been nearer £20,000. Aberdeen had two separate universities, one of them with the full continental curriculum, four hundred years ago, when not another university in Britain had it. But the typical Glasgow man is a careful spender – careful of his property in every way. When the idealists of the rest of the country were smashing images and ‘dinging down kirks’ whose architecture savoured of Popery , the canny Glaswegians mustered to the defence of their cathedral, which still stands as Andrew Fairservice says – A brave kirk – nane o’ yer whigmaleeries, and curliewurlies, and open-sneck here about it – a’ solid, weel-jointed, masonwark that will stand as lang as the warld, keep hands and gunpowder aff it.’ The author of ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ was a Kirkcaldy man, but he taught in Glasgow University, which may thus be said to be the cradle of modern political economy. Robert Owen was a Welshman; but he married Davie Dale’s Glasgow ‘dochter,’ and made his only successful experiment at New Lanark, near by. Owen had the Glasgow man’s conviction that life is a matter of business; that any given social phenomenon can be separated from its antecedents and surroundings and dealt with by ad hoc methods. This is the Ford method, as it was, albeit more indirectly, the Carnegie method. It succeeds up to a point; but it did not carry very far with Robert Owen, nor is it carrying very far with the administrators of the Carnegie schemes. It is also the method of the Glasgow man who wanted to ‘smash that atmosphere’ – as if an atmosphere were a plate or a window pane. The atmosphere that was surrounding Black Rod, Goldstick, the Beefeaters, the King in his state coach, and the peers and peeresses in their robes. I daresay something needs to be done about it; though smashing is less a characteristic of good citizenship than building. ‘Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced,’ and the only way to expel the false is to instil the true. Men in the arms and dress of the Tudor period are out of date. Trunk hose and starched ruffs would not be comfortable. But the would-be smasher probably wasn’t thinking of that at all. I agree that the atmosphere is unreal. But there are bigger things to trouble about than a harmless piece of pageantry which at least serves to suggest how old and august the Mother of Parliaments is. The writer in the Glasgow paper, dealing with ‘a wave of crime,’ repudiated on behalf of the average Glasgwegian, all sympathy with Bolshevism, and respectfully washed his hands of John M’Lean, Bob Smillie, and Citizen Shinwell. He claimed that Glasgow men – the veriest wearer of a hooker-doon – borrowed a reflected dignity from the knowledge that Glasgow had ‘made’ the Clyde, and had an Orpheus choir, a Scottish Orchestra, and a Rangers football team, innocent as he might be of any personal share in these achievements. There ought to be something to account for the very good conceit Wullie Paterson has of himself. Aberdeen has twice shifted the bed of the Dee, and is the best-built city in Britain; but the Aberdonian is modestly personified. There are three Glasgows – at least. There is first, the appallingly depressing city, with the barbaric flummery carving on its grimy buildings, the hurrying crowds of distraught citizens, its black, fat, truculent-looking policemen, and its barefooted squaws that sell newspapers on the sloppy bridges. I never saw barefooted women till I went, a young man, to Glasgow. There are Glasgow men who don’t mind giving women votes and don’t mind seeing them barefooted even in winter time. The first results of giving the women the Parliamentary vote have been the return, twice over, of reactionary governments, many women having voted Tory while their husbands voted Labour. I would have kept the power to do mischief from them, but seen that they had boots. Then there is the kind, sprightly Glasgow, its banter a little prickly perhaps, its speech of corrugated cadences, up and down, up and down, like the furrows in a field, with sometimes a note of vehemence that to the couthy north-countryman or well-bred Englishman suggests anger. Dr Johnson objected to a certain Scotsman ‘Because he has no animation, no!’ He couldn’t have objected to the Glaswegion on that score. A Glasgow audience is the quickest in Britain. They have the habit of going to meetings, are trained listeners, and no audience could be more pleasant to speak to. Without shyness, they get up and speak, sometimes awful blethers, often good enough book stuff, sometimes really tactful, pleasant speech, despite the corrugations of the accent; and on jolly feature of a big Glasgow meeting is that a man may talk nonsense at it, but he will not do it for long; the audience will laugh him off or ruff him down. Even those who themselves talk nonsense recognise it when it comes from another. For it often happens that a Glasgow man whose talk is absurd will have read a great deal of capital stuff. There was Sandy Whiting, repeatedly a candidate, and at last an elected person of some sort. During an election campaign he would swear and threaten from the platform and once at least he did go down and chastise and interrupter. Sandy would say ‘He says says he,’ and he would invoke aphorisms of ‘the weyver o’ Kirkintilloch,’ and he would mis-attribute sayings, such as ‘As the Prophet Isaiah says, He that does not work, neither shall he eat.’ And when you protested sotto voce, that it was not Isaiah who said that, he would reply, aloud ‘Ach, what does it matter? It’s a’ in the ae book onywey.’ But going home with Sandy, you found he had a complete set of Ruskin’s books at a time when Ruskin was still copyright, and his books dear, and that he had read in them if he had not read them all. Sandy would mix metaphors – I have heard him describe a proposal as a ‘Rid herrin’ draws across the trail to blindfold people!’ But when you pointed out that red-herrings would not make good eye-bandages, none laughed more heartily than Sandy himself. He was nearly always a little absurd in public speech, but never so in private; and his heartiness and jolly laughter made him welcome wherever he came. Be it said, he would never be anywhere for very long without your knowing he was there. He had the quick, black eyes and quick temper so common in the west. ‘I’ll gie ye a slap in the mooth, an’ there it is!’ is an established pleasantry about Glasgow. Sandy illustrated Glasgow in respect of the tartness of his tongue, the carefulness of his habits, and the carelessness of his dress. He worked in a rolling mill and earned big money, while his wife ran a shop and made money too. Yet he wore hobnailed boots which struck fire from the pavement; on his head a black silk cap; and round his neck never a collar, always a muffler. Sandy abounded in the local free-flowing chaff. One Sunday night at a busy crossing he was addressing a crowd when some young dudes interrupted with banter. ‘There’s some fowk hae mair sterch in their collars than beef in their bellies!’ was his riposte. The cross-fire continued, however, Sandy with the advantage of position making good against the power of numbers. As the young men at last cleared out, Sandy’s parting shot was; ‘Ye needna be in ony hurry; the doss doesna close till twelve o’clock!’ One day we entered a restaurant together, and were waited upon by a smart, even stern young man. ‘Bring us two welsh rabbits, ‘ordered Sandy, ‘an’ bring them good – they’re for eat’n.’ Sandy is now quiet enough – at last – and there can be no harm in telling of an incident that concerns him and the damsel who became his wife and was grannie by the time I knew him. They were at the back of a dyke one night in their courting days and Sandy had one hand aloft vowing eternal fealty. The hand must have remained in position some time; for presently a man grasped it and shook it cordially from the other side! I detail such absurdities because instead of regarding Glasgow as a seat and centre of crime, one’s prevailing memory of it raises a smile rather than a shudder. Mr J.J.Bells Mrs McLeerie, the kindly old body who deranges her epithets, but, when corrected pleads that ‘It’s a’ yin,’ seems to an outsider the most typical of Glasgow characters. There is a third Glasgow of which I have little knowledge and would fain have less. I refer to the Philistine business world, which I knew chiefly from the bagmen it sends out. These people go to church, are keen on climbing, and have hardly, in my experience, one idea to rub on another on any matter apart from business. Of course it is the travellers who call. One does not meet the principals. It often happens that the great man is much more pleasant to meet than the great man’s man. But one has so little respect for the qualities that win success in huckstering that one is very willing to let the limited circle of acquaintances in the west end stand as it is – very nearly at zero. The writer on ‘Men and Manners’ already referred to is concerned about what an American author says of Glasgow’s underworld. The full sordor of Glasgow’s drunkenness and crime would not strike a native as it does a visitor. It never does. Travelling down to Glasgow one Saturday night from Yorkshire, the last stages of the journey were made with a carriageful of seafaring men returning from a trip, their vessel having been put into the Mersey instead of the Clyde. They all seemed to be sober; but with the best desire of a returning exile to be favourably impressed with the men of my mother country, it was impossible to resist a feeling that in looks and talk they were a very low set – oh, a memorably low set! Let us not dwell upon it. The sea has its own codes of morals and manners. The young trawling skipper was taking his boat up ‘the burn,’ and as he came within sound of his home he tooted his horn. An old skipper was on the boat. ‘That’s for the wife?’ he half-queried. ‘I used to dae that,’ he continued. ‘But I dinna dae’t now. I gang to the front door and gae twa lood knocks. Then I rin roond immediately tae the back. I meet him comin’ awa every time. In thirteen year I’ve never missed him yince.’ One Saturday night long ago I did a round of some of the Glasgow slums with Bruce Glasier, Keir Hardie and Cunninghame-Graham. We saw sights which I hope are not to be witnessed in any other town in Britain. It was after eleven, which was at that time the closing hour, and repeatedly we were asked, in the explosive gutterals of St Mungo’s ‘D’ye want a boattle o’ beer?’ the askers evidently having the liquor planted about them. Under the aegis of a stalwart bobby we were given one short horrific glance into an awful ken where, amid smoke and fetor, we could see on a seat an old grey-haired woman rocking in drink and perhaps in pain, the blood lying fresh upon her unreverend forehead from a recent wound, while wretched men and women swarmed around unheeding. In a side-street towards midnight a piper blew with the vigour of mid-day, while several prostitutes danced and whooped around him, their petticoats pulled up for the freedom of an abanadoned dance. A swarthy policeman stood gravely looking on. I have never had my pocket picked (except in the regular way of trade) but once, and that was in Glasgow another Saturday night, when for a little I got lost from my friends. So that I am naturally impressed with the idea that Glasgow’s underworld is something rather special. One Sunday night thirty years ago a Socialist speaker was addressing a thin crowd at the Jail Square entrance to Glasgow Green. When the crowd got even thinner than usual the speaker halted and looked around as if contemplating a full stop. A policeman standing by gave his advice. ‘Oh, man,’ said he, ‘what need ye waster yer wind on thae lads?’ Man, they a’ practise what you’re only preachin’!’ They would be mostly thieves. It was criticism as well as advice. It is of vast significance that this most commercialised of all British cities should have gone over to the party which stands for the negation of Commercialism, in motive and practice alike; and I shall return to the subject in further papers. For the rest, one has many pleasant memories of the Second City. PART TWO NEXT MONTH Another Story
The general tendency of Stevenson’s writing, the spirit, if any, as apart from the letter, of his essays and romances is a tempting topic; although it does not necessarily belong to a consideration of his style. Stevenson had the stock ideas of romance. Kidnapping, wrecking, piracy, mutiny at sea, treasure-hunting – these elements and elements such as these represent his stock-in-trade. Other novelists might write with a reforming purpose; Stevenson, well aware of what he was doing, was content to be an entertainer. Goldsmith, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Kingsley, George Eliot, Charles Reade, Thomas Hardy, all wrote with a social aim, and contrived to be entertaining as well. Walter Scott sought to illustrate life in various epochs. Save in ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ – a very absorbing and highly ‘moral,’ if also a very unpleasant tale – Stevenson is content to describe the adventures of pirates, smugglers, kidnappers, wreckers, beach-combers; Alan Breck, fighting Highlander of the eighteenth century; John Wiltshire, fighting trader in the South Seas; Dick Shelton, wholesale slayer of men in the fifteen century. He frankly admitted that he cared more for incident than for any other element of romantic interest. ‘Eloquence and thought, character and conversation,’ he says, Were but obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a certain incident like a pig for truffles… Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. With him the society or domestic novel represents ‘the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate.’ The Romantic Stevenson does not appear to realise that, to a grown man, there may be as much high zest in fighting an election and facing up hostile crowds, in engineering a seemingly desperate but laudable business undertaking, in furthering the public weal against the fierce hostility of a vested interest, in making forlorn experiments, and bringing an invention to a successful issue through many difficulties, as there is any of the boyish escapades in which he takes delight. His common sense and humanity made him espouse the cause of the Samoan as against German official muddling; and the speech to the Samoan chiefs in which he commended the making of roads and deprecated inter-tribal fighting was a triumph of the man over the romancer. But he is ashamed and apologies over these lapses into what he calls politics. Probably he himself realised that his work represented little beyond entertaining story-telling and fine English (though these, of course, represent a very great deal.) In a letter to Mr Colvin he comments bitterly on a statement made by a reviewer that he (Stevenson) is read chiefly by boys. His romances are typical boys’ books; but the fathers read them and enjoy them, it is to be feared, more than the sons, however little they may profit by them in any high sense. However Stevenson was latterly making four thousand a year; and it is not easy to make so much and still be doing the highest kind of literary work – the books that the public needs, but which it probably will not buy to any extent till the author is comfortably dead. Stevenson could not expect to have the solid pudding of public favour and the sounding praise of the discriminating reviewer as well. A Neglected Field Why have we no novelist to do for modern Scottish life – the life of the common people – what Zola has done for the French? That passionately serious and much misunderstood writer set out to illustrate the lives of certain industrial and professional classes in the Rougon-Mcquart series, being ‘the natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’ This he did in a score of tales, tracing his ‘family’ down through four generations and through many callings well into contemporary times under the Republic. To mention a few of his titles is to indicate the wide and fruitful fields of life-study opened up to survey. Thus ‘Germinal’ deal with the life of the miners, ‘La Terre’ (the land) with the life of the French peasantry, ‘L’Argent’ (money) with stock-exchange gambling, ‘L’assommoir’ (The Dram-shop) with the life of the Parisian working class, ‘Nana’ with the theatre and the demi-monde, ‘La Debacle’ (the Downfall) with the corruption and inevitable fall of the Empire as preparation for the Repubclis and a better future for France, ‘Rome’ and ‘Lourdes’ with the quackery and obscurantism of the Church, ‘Paris’ with the life of the workman touched at last by the redemptive influences of popular education, skilled and self-respecting craftsmanship, and the revolutionary spirit directed to social and economic ends rather than vague political strife. What is Done. Nothing of this kind has been done for Scotland, prolific in novelists as Scotland has been, and many of these with an artistic equipment much superior to Zola’s. The author of ‘The House with the Green Shutters’ has pourtrayed with somber power some phases of lower middle-class life in a small Scots town; and in one or two unique sketches Mr Cunninghame-Graham has flashed momentarily if vivid sidelights on the same unlovely existence. But George Douglas’s tragic tale stands alone, and Mr Cunninghame-Graham does not profess to be a novelist. Mr J.M.Barrie has shown himself capable, though all too rarely, of something beyond making good-natured game of his fellow-townsmen. One recalls a true and touching picture of the Scottish farm-hand and his Jean, made reckless and riotous by the conditions of life in which there is so little to lose. Crockett expends his best work on the Covenanters. Ian Maclaren does not get beyond consumptive students, lachrymose widows, and sedulous country doctors. The Scottish romancer usually avoids any period later than the ’45. Stevenson gets as near modern life as the times of Braxfield; but he discusses that execrable judge, and his shamed and resentful son, without reference to the field in which Braxfield earned his chief claim to infamy. He has nothing to say of those heroes of the Reform movement in Scotland whom ‘Braxie’ delighted to badger and insult before he sentenced them to transportation for life. The times of Thomas Muir, of Fyshie Palmer, and of Baird and Hardie were stirring and momentous days. Midnight meetings, pikemen drilled in secret in the fields around Edinbugh, stirring speeches, flight, pursuit, arrest, sensational trial, transportation, the pathos and romance of failure, all gather round the Scottish movement for political rights, long since won by other means. The modern Scottish writer of fiction shows no grasp of broad social phenomena, and nothing distinctively Scottish except the use of dialect, the gawkiness or pawkiness of some of their characters, and an occasional preachiness, as in the case of George MacDonald. But even in MacDonald’s case much that is manly and beautiful in his art and ideas appears in association with the traditional romanticisms, in the shape of the hidden staircase, the secret chamber, a demon horse, and that discovery of a blue-blooded origin for lowly situated characters which Gilbert satirised in the lines – When everybody’s someone else, The no one’s anybody. Wanted As a genuine, good-natured true picture of Scottish life and manners ‘Johnny Gibb o’ Gushetneuk’ still stands alone. But ‘Johnny Gibb’ and the excellent tales of Galt, Miss Ferrier and Neil Munro take no note of life in our squalid Scottish towns and cities. Imagine a Scottish Dickens doing for Glasgow what Charles did for London, a Scottish Thackeray exposing the snobbery of Edinburgh, a Scottish Zola or Mrs Gaskell lifting the lid off the domestic life of the miners, shipyard hand, and factory operatives, a Scottish Hardy, Hugo, George Eliot, or Tolstoy doing justice to rural society, including the inhabitants of hinds’ houses , farm kitchens and cottar houses as well as the folk of the manses and mansions with whom Scottish fiction has heretofore been so much concerned. If it be said that other countries have not had their common life depicted in this way, I can only say that England, France and Russia have had such service rendered to them to an extent far in excess of what has been done for Scotland. The point is that Scotland has produced many writers of prose fiction, and that they have devoted their powers to the dishing up of an unreal, effete romanticism, have dallied with lords and ladies and a limited set of adventures and ‘situations’ that are no longer novel. If it be the business of the novelist, as Shakespeare said it was of the dramatist, to hold the mirror up to nature, to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure, what Scottish novelist has ever performed this service for his own time and countrymen? Out of the experiences of a Socialist and trade union secretary, Mr Pett Ridge has made (in ‘Erb’) a realistic, amusing, and really novel story of London life. Are there no Scottish workmen, none of the devoted workers in the Labour movement who give their evenings to reading and committee work, their meal hours to correspondence, their week-ends and holidays to un-fee’d public speaking, their scanty means for election expenses and political publications, their working time to occasional canvassing and to service on public boards – are there none of those whose adventures, comic and tragic and useful, could be made similarly attractive in a fictitious narrative? ‘Wee MacGregor,’ the precocious boy; ‘Mrs M’Learie,’ the housewife who deranges her epithets, pleading that ‘it’s a’ yin!’ ‘Erchie,’ the waggish old waiter, who has a warm hert but a flet fit,’ are all of them sketches showing what fun can be made with the Glasgow dialect. But is the Second City such a paradisical spot, are the ‘lands’ of Edinburgh, the lanes of Dundee, and the ‘raws’ of the mining districts so entirely perfect as regards their surroundings and the life lived in them that they suggest nothing but ‘funniosities?’ The Scots workman, in his huddled two-row tenement, with his low wage, his poor food badly cooked, his Saturday-afternoon football match, his Saturday night ‘drunk,’ his Sunday-morning spell in bed, with a headache, a ‘cutter’ of whisky, and a ‘football’ edition – is he merely amusing? We require a writer of fiction who shall be passionately in love with fact, absorbingly interested in his own time and people, who shall write with art indeed, but with an art that holds the mirror up to contemporary life, a writer profoundly impressed wit the veracity of the saying that truth is stranger than fiction who has the heart and hand to show that there is romance and heroism in the mean street, and absorbing human interest in lives apparently commonplace. Importance of the Matter The matter is the more important because a hundred people will read even an indifferent novel for one who will tackle a similar body of facts and ideas brilliantly presented in a work not cast in the form of fiction. Stevenson himself recognised the importance of this aspect of the novelist’s art. Commenting on Victor Hugo’s great prose epic ‘Les Miserables,’ he says: - It is the moral intention of the great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be- for such awakenings are unpleasant – to the great cost of this society that we enjoy and profit by to the labour and sweat of those who support the litter Civilsation, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices to be once roughly just in general; that the bread we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death – by the death of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labour, and the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those revolutionaries sometimes called criminals. It is to something of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men’s eyes in ‘Les Miserable’; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those who are below presses on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Socity rejecting, again and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. It would have been too much perhaps to expect that the son of the well-to-do engineer and a cosseted only son at that, should have done for his own countrymen what Hugo, Zola, Upton Sinclair and others have done in their several times and places. But the work remains to be done nevertheless. There is in letters no work of greater moment. First published in the Westminster Review 1892.
SOME NEW THOUGHTS ON A WELL-WORN THEME. That the Press should now be so frequently placed in opposition and contrast to the Pulpit, and that it should be supposed the two institutions have enough in common to justify comparisons being made between them, indicates a new view of the functions of the pulpit at least. Until comparatively recent years it was generally considered that people went to church, not so much to be regaled with highly intellectual fare, as to join in praise and prayer and to hear passages of Scripture more or less passably expounded, and an application of the text given to one or other of a limited number of religious and moral questions-the homily being, as a rule, very general in its terms alike of reprobation and commendation. In short, people were supposed to go to church "to worship God." That this idea, with all it implies; is not yet wholly extinct is shown by the fact that laymen, and even clerics, possessed of learning, dialectical skill, and oratorical power, will attend a church in which the regular minister is much inferior to them in all of these qualifications. Those who regard the church in this now old-fashioned light may be said to consider it as a place where certain ceremonies have to be 'performed ; that it is necessary to have a master of those ceremonies- a fugleman to say the word at the proper time; that it is well to have a class of men specially trained for this work ; but that no very high standard of intellectual power is required of the fugleman, since all the worshippers know pretty well what they are likely to hear, how they are expected to feel, and what they are expected to do on a given occasion. The function of the press, on the other hand, surely is to chronicle events, to discuss politics, economics, art, science, literature, philosophy, commerce, and industry, and, in the doing of all this, to be informing, amusing, instructive, and improving. That the pulpit should be brought into comparison with an agency whose work is of this nature means that the critics of the pulpit as it is desire that it should perform more of the species of work done by the press, while 'doing it, of course, in the different manner necessitated by different circumstances. A newspaper or magazine is read in private: a sermon or lecture is heard in public-the hearer being one of a congregation through which the preacher, if master of his art, causes something like an electric current to run, uniting the listeners into an organic whole by the subtle sympathy born of unity of thought and feeling. The thought that you form one of 500 who are simultaneously listening to the same ideas and arguments as yourself lends a heightened dignity and adventitious importance to those ideas and arguments; so that a discourse which, if printed, would be read with but languid interest, may, when spoken with fitting accompaniment of look, gesture, and intonation, be followed with pleasure by a large assemblage. The church thus brings into play a social feeling which the press cannot possibly command, and, properly conceived and ordered, occupies an important place in the economy of society; but the question at present to be considered is whether the church makes as good use as it might do of this advantage which it possesses over the press. That it does not is shown by the circumstance that while everybody patronises and supports the press, comparatively few people patronise and support the church. A church connection brings a business connection: church membership gives a certain status of respectability. A church brings men and women together for social work, setting up many interests in common between the parties, apart from their interest in certain specific theological doctrines. There are mission agencies, meetings of matrons, meetings of young men and maidens, choir practisings, Bible classes, and literary societies-all having a tendency to bring people together and increase their attachment to the central institution around which these various activities are carried on: notwithstanding all this, however, church attendances, church membership, and church funds are relatively on "the down grade." While the religious sentiment is as strong as ever-probably stronger than ever-the clergy as a class are more and more subjected to unfavourable criticism; gatherings of a secular order-such as concerts and political and trade union meetings-are becoming more and more common on Sunday; and last, but not least, comparisons are more frequently drawn between the pulpit and the press. All this has doubtless to be attributed largely to the decay of religious belief; but the decay of religions belief has, in turn, to be attributed very largely to the failings and shortcomings of the pulpit. So long as literature was an expensive luxury, and the great body of the people were either absolutely unable to read, or had no taste and no time for reading, it was not remarkable that they should put up with a low standard of pulpit eloquence. That they were satisfied to dispense with literary grace and reasoning power on the part of the preacher is attested by the objection to "read " sermons which for a long time existed, and by the value placed upon mere fluency and fervour. But in these days of half penny papers and sixpenny magazines the humblest church-goer may, and often does, have a higher ideal of what a sermon should be than even well-to-do people had fifty years ago. For the masses not only have their judgment and taste cultivated by reading, but they attend the lecture-room and the theatre as well as the church; and, accustomed as they are to hear accomplished actors and brilliant platform lecturers, they are coming to expect from the pulpit entertainment and instruction as well as exhortations to "trust in God and do the right," which must always carry with them a certain platitudinarian sameness. Now, it is because the pulpit does not come up t0 the standard of excellence already attained by the press, the platform, and the stage, each after its own manner, that men stay at home and read on Sundays, go out and stroll while the morning service is being held, and go to some secular or semi-secular lecture hall at night. But, it will be asked', how should the pulpit be so behind other civilising agencies? Are not the clergy specially trained for the work of the church before entering upon their ministerial duties? and have they not the means of culture and refinement at command after they enter upon those duties ? Have they not a sound basis of scholarship to start with, and plenty of time to prepare for their Sunday ministration? Nay, the champions of the pulpit, warming to their theme, may say, are not clergymen better equipped intellectually than either press-men or platform speakers, to say nothing of actors, who may well be left out of account as persons who only patter other people's ideas? To this we reply that many of our clergymen of the Nonconformist churches have had no University training; that, besides a common school education, the only training they have had has been obtained at one or other of the Divinity Halls; and that even in the case of those who have attended college it has to be pointed out that men are not necessarily sound scholars, sagacious thinkers, or brilliant writers or speakers because they have had a University education. The only thing you can be moderately sure 0f with respect to a University degree is that it represents fees paid, and even that does not, of course, hold good of honorary degrees. It may readily be admitted that the clergy have abundant opportunities of storing their minds with ideas and cultivating literary graces, of doing their work of sermon-writing with care and finish, and embodying sound materials in that work. But do they avail themselves of these their opportunities? Before answering this question there are a few considerations I want to note. It must be borne in mind that while the professional journalist has to devote his undivided attention to journalism, the professional preacher has to baptise, marry, and bury; has to visit and gossip with the members of his flock; has to take part in mission work and the business procedure of his church; has to serve in church court, attend sick-beds, and take a share in the work of running charities.. He may have a Bible class, a weekly prayer meeting, a Sunday school, a seat on the School Board or the Board of Guardians. Yet despite the formidable appearance of this list or possible and probable pastoral duties, I do not believe that ministers as a class are hard worked. They are oftener to be seen taking a side at tennis or a hand at whist than are most professional men. They take more and longer holidays than professional men do. They are not under the same obligation as professional men are to devote steady and unremitting attention to their work. Country parsons may, and sometimes do, farm and raise stock without apparent interruption to their clerical duties. Parsons, whether in town or country, can, and do frequently, exchange pulpits-making an old sermon suffice, and so saving themselves of what ought to be a considerable amount of work if well-written sermons were the rule. After having held a charge for a number of years they may get a transfer, and they will then use up in the new pulpit the sermons written for the spiritual well-being of their former flock. If they are incapacitated for duty by sickness, there are always plenty of students, lay preachers, and unplaced clerical brethren to take their place. But while it cannot, I think, be contended that clergymen as a class are hard worked, yet, that they have so many matters to look after besides their chief work-the work of the pulpit-is often made an excuse for doing that work in a makeshift manner. If a newspaper editor goes on scamping his work-inserting weak, ill -digested, or plagiarised leading articles and stale news day after day, week after week-his circulation will fall, the directors to whom he is responsible will shortly bring him to book, and, if he cannot or will not render his employers more efficient service, he must make room for one who can and will do so. The same commercial principle will be applied to reporters and sub-editors, as well as to contributors on the staff of a magazine. But while the commercial principle is thus in active operation among the representatives of the press, it scarcely operates at all among the occupants of pulpits. A minister may for years go on gradually emptying a church by the feebleness of his hebdomadal performances; but unless matters get quite desperate, or our feeble brother gets implicated in some scandal, his employers do not suggest that he should make room for another. There are, as has been indicated, so many interests, associations, attachments connected with a church-there is, to put it bluntly, so much to be got out of a church besides religion-that a congregation will undergo a long-continued course of indifferent pulpit ministrations without breaking into open rebellion, and without its members individually leaving "the venerable house their fathers built to God." As a result of this indulgence the clergy have got spoiled. They do not feel called upon to keep up the high standard of excellence in their pulpit work which the press-man knows he must maintain in the columns of his paper, if it is to succeed, and he himself to keep his situation. And so, while I am not an admirer of all the results attending the operations of commercial principles, still I think it tolerably certain that if the ministerial calling were to a greater extent brought under the influence of those considerations which regulate the ordinary relations of employer and employee, it would tend to improve the quality of pulpit work. I do not say, however, that the introduction of this principle would accomplish all that is required for the reformation of the pulpit. To make the pulpit anything like the social force it once was- a result which I do not say I am desirous to see attained-a different class of men would be required, as well as different conditions of pulpit tenure. The clergy are largely drawn from the class of '' good young men," and the members of that class are not remarkable for either physical or mental vigour. There are, of course, many robust men amongst those who beat the "pulpit drum" ; but it is undeniable that a large proportion of the clergy come from the quarter indicated. Moreover, clergymen as a class are so removed from that ''storm and stress " of work-a-day life which give tone and fibre to other men, and they come so much in contact with women, both within their own domestic circle and in their pastoral work, that they show a tendency to develop very many of the traits of character usually supposed to be the distinctive attributes of the female mind. This want of robustness does much to lower the quality of pulpit work, and to lessen the influence of the Church. Knox and Latimer,Channing and Chalmer, were strong men, in touch with the life of their time, and capable of moving the multitude at will. In the struggle against abuses, shams, and tyranny, they took sides, as their Master did, and spoke out with fire and fervour, with manly strength and reason. You knew their position and intent: that they were with you or against you. But in these days when disputes between capital and labour are rife, and when great political movements are abroad in the land, the clergy take no side, show no colours. Although there is always one of the parties pretty surely in the right and the other just as surely in the wrong, the clergy sit on the fence. Assuming the role of Mr. Facing-both-ways, they pray that peace may be restored between the opposing factions ; but not one word is said as to the issues over which the conflict is being waged. It is true, there are journals that profess no political creed and advocate no fixed socioeconomic principles. But even if these were not, as they are, the exceptions to a 'Very general rule, they are not to be tried by the standard we apply to the pulpit. It is not necessary that a newspaper should have a "policy," or advocate a particular set of opinions. Its first and chief function is to record news; and if it does that fairly and faithfully we shall not grudge being left to form our opinions for ourselves on the evidence it supplies. On the other hand, it seems impossible that a religious teacher should have no "policy " on all questions involving the great moral issues at stake in important political and social controversies. Though it is extremely unlikely that we shall ever get rid of party journalism, it is, all the , same, a very qualified blessing. But if the pulpit has no pronouncement to make on the question of the hour, it is not easy to see what function of public benefit the pulpit has to discharge. With respect to the press again, whether partisan or non-partisan, one further advantage which it possesses over the pulpit deserves to be remembered. The correspondence columns of newspapers and the pages of the Reviews are open to all who have anything interesting to say and who can preserve the amenities of discussion. It may be said that the discussion of political differences and labour disputes lies outside the province of the clergy ; but if, as is usually the case, fundamental principles in the religion for which they stand are being violated on the one hand and upheld on the other, their duty and their province would seem to be alike tolerably clear. The fact is, the Church is behind the times. She has always something to say about the duties of her children as men and women, as son and daughters, as husbands and wives, as masters and servants, and especially as church members; but nothing to say about their duties as citizens, although the duties and powers of citizenship form one of the most important trusts given into human hands. The discussion of political, social, and economic questions is in most churches reckoned contraband. Jesus scourged the money-changers out of the Temple; but they are welcomed in today. Their contributions are wanted for the Sustentation Fund, their gold and notes for the church-door collections. The clergy invest their savings in a brewery or a death dealing match-factory as eagerly as if Jesus had not advised the rich young ruler to sell his superfluities and give to the poor. Or is it that there are no poor nowadays? And was Cardinal Manning proved to have been merely careless and improvident by the fact that he left but a beggarly £100? Jesus denounced the Scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites who devoured widows' houses, but made long prayer for a pretence. There are surely no lineal descendants of the scribes and Pharisees in the world today; for I have attended church twice a day for years, yet I never heard any attempt made to apply the passage to any class of men alive at the present time. Or is it that the Scribes and Pharisees of today are not within hearing of the pulpit? It was Jesus who told the parable of the vineyard; but how often do we hear any effort put forth to apply that parable to the labour problem?-an application which it will undoubtedly bear. The average church-goer inclines more and more to note these thing , and observation tends to increase his weariness with the pulpit. So far do the clergy carry their injunction of ''peace, peace," where peace is a wickedness, that they often fear to denounce publicly, or even admonish privately, the wealthy sinner who gives generously to church funds, and keeps an excellent table; although he grinds the faces of his workers, or rack-rents the tenants in his slum property, bullies his family and domestic servants, and inflames his body and besots his mind with drink. Of this, also, the average man takes note; and it disgusts him to find that the shepherd of souls lives at peace with this incarnation of iniquity. He compares the clergyman's practice with his precepts, and throwing many another grudge into the balance on the same side, he finishes not infrequently by absenting himself from churches and ministers, good or bad, altogether. The influence of the pulpit wanes because the preacher does his work in a slipshod manner ; because, while the pews are agitated by the questions of the hour, the preacher talks yet says nothing for fear he should offend the partisans of the side he happens to oppose. The influence of the pulpit wanes because its occupants are tied up to speak on old and outworn themes ; because the interest in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob pales before the interest in Tom, Dick, and Harry ; and Palestine is less to us than the most prosaic town in Britain where the tragi-comedy of life is now day by day enacted. The press is not perfect; but, with all its faults, it represents the people. Forced by the conditions of its existence to please those for whom it caters, it reflects every mood of the public. It is all things to all men. It finds out everything ; it tells everything it finds out. You go to the preacher, who is usually the same man, and you have to endure him for an hour at a time. The newspaper comes to you; it contains the thoughts of many men, and discusses many themes; you can change the man and the theme at will, or dismiss the press altogether if you tire of it, or other matters demand your attention. Yon hear the preacher, if you go to church, one day in seven. The press comes to you morning and evening, wet day and dry, in health and sickness, six days out of the seven. The press has accomplished much in a short space of time. The pulpit has accomplished less in a long career. 'What the press has done it has done despite the hostility of princes and the repression of Parliaments. What the pulpit has failed to do it has failed to do notwithstanding the favour of princes and the subsidies of Parliaments. In influence for civilisation and enlightenment, the press, with all its faults, leaves the pulpit helplessly, hopelessly, ignominiously in the shade. |
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June 2018
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