always be the note of the original writer. Scottish literature must just be, for our present purpose, the literature written by Scotchmen with a direct or indirect bearing on Scottish life. This of course excludes, as is desirable, any idea of parocliial rivalry between Scotchmen and Englishmen in matters of unlocalised art or thought ; there being no question as to how the two kingdoms compare in the literature of the sciences or of philosophy ; nor even any
comparison on the side of pure poetry. By Scottish
Belles Lettres one naturally means those works of
imagination inspired by things Scotch ; and perhaps, in addition, Scottish history.
How then do we stand ? Mr Stevenson has con- tributed to Scotch letters by way of vernacular verse, prose fiction, and historic and other criticism. On the first head he is facile princeps, by virtue of the universal ineptitude of our home-staying lyric patriots, whose common distinction is treason to the very idiom they gratuitously elect to employ, whether because of sheer ignorance or of dulness of sense let us not linger to ask. Vernacular apart, however, Mr. Stevenson is less of a Scottisli poet than Mr. Robert Buchanan, whose Idylls and Legends of Inverhurn, if not the sort of book that one confidently counts on re-reading, figures in one's memory as a creditable attempt in a given genre ; so that, his output of Scottish criticism and strictly Scottish essay being inconsiderable, the novus homo takes his asserted rank mainly on the score of his fiction. Now, if his rank be really allowed, this fact is a remarkable reflection on the other fictional literature of the country. We have three novelists of popular standing, Mrs. Oliphant, Mr. George Mac Donald, and Mr. William Black — all of whom, while dealing with life other than Scotch, yet have repeatedly handled that : the two last having indeed mainly won their reputation in this direction. If then Mr. Stevenson be the most notable fictionist of the four, whether as regards Scotch or as regards English characterisation, it would seem to follow that the others, with their much larger product, are of little account as makers of native literature, however popular as public entertainers. And this is really the opinion one is led to after a critical comparison of the authors in question. Nobody can deny them ability and industry ; and yet no roomful of Scotchmen is ever found to pronounce favourably on their presentment of Scotch life and character. Between treatment and choice of theme they have contrived to avoid any convincing repro- duction of the life of their time, and to live for us in Scotland as agreeable or suggestive romancers, who happened to lay the scene of their romances more or less in Scotland, and to give their characters Scotch names. To realise how entirely destitute we are of real contemporary Scotch fiction, we have but to contrast the treatment of American life by Mr. Howells and Mr. James with the Scotch work of our Scotch novelists. In the American cases we feel we are at least partially introduced to a living society.
Americans may indeed dispute over the representation; and Bostonians may repudiate Mr. Howells' accounts of them; but any one can see that Mr. Howells, up to his limits, has his eye on something; and if Bostonians knew when they are well off they would be grateful for the element of culture involved in the possession of a school of fiction which makes their normal life an art subject. A composition of normal Boston experiences has become a matter that can interest, more or less, an instructed reader in any civilised country. Can anything similar be said of the fiction of contemporary Scotland?
It is with a curious sensation that we thus realise our exclusion from part of the world's literary heritage. People living in any of the important towns of continental Europe are accustomed, like those of London and New York and Boston, to see their society treated with some measure of confidence and competence of portraiture in novel after novel: we in Glasgow and Edinburgh have to turn back to Scott to get a similar sensation. Some sections of our community, indeed, can have it after a fashion; they get it in stories in which an impersonal detective of Ulyssean craft and experience tracks conventional criminals through streets of known name and runs them to earth in closes of supposed actuality. Those of us whose palates are too nice for that fare must just get along without the desired pabulum. We have a society full of characters and experiences, ups and downs, comedy and tragedy, as well as Boston; but there lacks for us the vates sacer, and our whole human polity will die unremembered, or dimly inferred from the faint cartoons of our idealistic novelists. If we turn from fiction to drama, the case becomes overwhelming. We no longer attempt to represent Scotch life on the stage at all. Rob Roy, the Lady of the Lake, and Jeanie Deans, those compositions out of compositions, conventionalised at the second remove from imagination, keep our boards with a perdurable hold: they have come to stay; but of any attempt to 'make' afresh from the native life of to-day there is not even a whisper. Mr. Stevenson, indeed, did once perpetrate, in complicity with Mr. Henley, a melodrama on the history of a murderous deacon dear to tradition; of which the withdrawal is only to be explained on a hypothesis of conscientious motives, since it cannot conceivably have been too
