HENLEY ON HIGHLAND MARY.

ROM an admirable criticism of Henley's Works, by

FROM admirable

Francis Watt, which appeared in the Glasgow Herald of July 9th, 1908, we give the following extract as appropriate appendix to the article on Highland Mary which appeared in the last issue of the Chronicle. Coming from such a competent critic and whole-hearted admirer of Mr Henley, it is all the more valuable as neutral testimony in a field of enquiry which for long has been obscured by the artillery fire of contending factions. Mr Watt's remarks are based ostensibly on Henley's Essay on Burns, but we think we are not far wrong in supposing that the article on "The Cult of Mary Campbell," signed "H. and H.,” which appeared in the New Review of June, 1897, was the main grounds of judgment when he enunciated the opinion that Henley was "hopelessly wrong on the Highland Mary episode." That article is in reality a fierce and sustained attack on the "Mariolaters " of Dunoon, in which all the dramatis person are roughly handled, particularly the heroine-so roughly, indeed, that the authors defeat their own purpose by sheer brutality of treatment. The Dunoon

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"Mariolater and Common Burnsite could surely have been soundly whipped for their provoking misdemeanours without wrecking the furniture and maltreating the whole household. But before proceeding further, let us see what Mr Watt says:

The

I turn to Henley's prose. I have here a divided mind. early work, though we have it but in extracts-to wit, in the Views and Reviews, not yet to hand-has again a sanity, clarity, above all, a perfection of form, not always afterwards visible. Contrast, for instance, the Balzac and the Hugo of the Views and Reviews with "Balzac as he was and the two Hugos, in the fourth volume, these last being not very edifying disquisitions on the little foxes that did not after all spoil the vines of the two masters. But then, he brought to his later work greater knowledge of life and letters, and

ચંદ્ર

you cannot deny the result.

He gets his effects sometimes strangely, hits you with a piece of slang, a French phrase, a word of his own coinage; but he always hits you, and he always gets the effect. His Fielding is delightsome, and so is his Hazlitt, and the brief, rapid thumbnail sketches in which he touches off Byron's crowded world. It is pure joy from beginning to end to read such things. And the easy manner of it all! The master is not speaking ex cathedra, he is chatting to you all the time with (you fancy) a whiff of a cigarette between. Yes, decidedly you give the palm to the later work, and for this if for nought else, because of the Robert Burns, a piece of prose which I don't quite see can ever go out of date as long as the glamour of Robin himself holds the thoughts of men. I never understood why this essay was abused of many. One poet, who is also a critic, with well-nigh absolute truth and justice speaks of another. Do you deny that Burns is in line with the earlier vernacular Scots, that his purely English or half English poems are poor ? "Scots wha hae is good popular stuff, but no more real letters than "God Save the King," or Rule Britannia," whilst his Scots is again and again absolute perfection. Do you deny that he was more pagan

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than saint? If you do, you are scarce worth confuting. And Henley is so ready to recognise Burns's abounding merits, his generous nature, the excuses-nay, more than the excuses, the inevitable note in all that happened. Nowhere are these last terrible years at Dumfries so kindly, so sanely, so delicately set forth, and the final touch is not of apology but triumph. · Burns had done his allotted work, he had drunk the cup of life to the lees, and death came as a deliverer and a friend. It may be that the common Burnsite," as he wrathfully named him, was now and again a little too much for Henley. He is hopelessly wrong on the Highland Mary episode. On no evidence at all, nay, as I hold, in spite of every evidence to the contrary, he will have Mary Campbell a myth or a light-skirts, and is scornfully contemptuous of those who raise her into a "barelegged Beatrice," as he puts it. As matter of fact his nickname was nigh the truth. I do not parallel Dante and Robin; the one walks the mountain tops, he speaks with the speech of the sea, of the thundercloud; the other is the sweet singer of the valley and the plain, who comes and sits with us on our hearthstone, and is to you and to me the dear familiar kindly brother and friend. But in sober truth Mary had that place in Burns's life that Beatrice had in Dante's, and Burns showed, once only, but once decisively, that he was capable of pure passionate admiration and veneration for a feminine ideal. I think Henley himself had no such feeling. "His Turkish contempt for women,' says Johnson of Milton; perhaps Henley's view was more Johnsonian than Miltonic. His detestation of humbug, of weak sentimentality, of "bleat" as he

phrased it, of the ridiculous, of the strained, was so nice, so keen that just now and again it made the truth seem a sham. I think it did here, and this makes his treatment of the episode a serious blot on an otherwise almost perfect piece of criticism. Perhaps, also, the common Burnsite" made him a little less generous to Burns than he would have been. I cannot say. Burns has a

But then

strange power over us Scots. He got so cunningly to our hearts that a word against him, however justly spoken, wounds as a word against our nearest and dearest. And then, does a stranger quite get his Burns? Perhaps no living Scotsman does. That old world wherein he dwelt has passed with its abounding frailties and its not less abounding heroisms in tongue and thought well-nigh beyond our touch. Does any of us use the words of that masterpiece where the old farmer talks to his “auld mare Maggie ? " Would any of us riddle it without his Jamieson or its like? Surely not. much is left, and can a stranger reach that as we do? Perhaps not, yet in the very detachment the stranger has his gain, his critical instinct is not warped. And so in Henley's essay you feel that Burns falls into his proper place in the radiant band of the poets. Also, not merely did Henley know his Scotland and Scotsmen to a degree quite uncommon with men of his race, but as poet and as man he had profound sympathy with Burns and with Burns's struggle. In short, take him all in all, I believe that you have your Burns in that essay as you never had him before, you will never have the portrait bettered.

We have no hesitation in saying that any "Burnsite," common or otherwise, would have no difficulty in answering Mr Watt's queries to that gentleman's complete satisfaction, with this proviso, however, that their acquiescence did not imply approval of the methods pursued by Mr Henley in dealing with the subject-matter of said queries. Burns is undoubtedly "in the line with the earlier vernacular Scots," but he was neither a cuckoo echoing neighbour cuckoos nor a sneak thief from stall-artists; if his touch is not so masterly in English as in Scots, his most trivial efforts in the former medium do not fall so far below the level of Henley, Pope, Shenstone, Beattie, Goldsmith, Gray, "and the rest of these distinguished beings" as to merit the ridicule poured upon his "Scots wha hae” by a man who happens to be a critic and a rival in the same line of business. Burns was no saint; he says so

himself.

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God knows I am no saint; I have a whole host of sins and follies to answer for; but if I could, and I believe I do it as far as I can, I would wipe away all tears from all eyes." There is more of the Christian than pagan in this; indeed, no pagan could write such a sentence. To make him, then, a pagan of the pagans-a veritable god in Pagandom-is to thrust too much honour of that kind upon him. The Henleyan method places him on the dissecting table, body and soul as he trod this earth; and the operator sets to work cutting, slashing, and tearing the flesh till he lays bare the grinning skeleton. His work done, he turns to a shadowy troop of "lewd, grimy, ribald old Scots and shouts, Behold your Poet, whom I have created in your own image.' True, he points out en passant the perfect shape of the heart and the magnificent proportions of the brain, yet the moral of it all is, 'twere pity beyond expression that the Creator ever clothed a poet's bones with clay of such poor quality.

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with a

Mary Campbell is treated in similar fashion, that is, so far as her case permits. Mr Watt tells us that Henley had neither admiration nor veneration for a feminine ideal"; further, he gives us a broad hint regarding his "Turkish contempt for women." That accounts for much. It is no use discussing a "feminine ideal " Turk-with a man obsessed with the idea that woman is merely a protoplasmic structure expressly designed for the exercise of the " primordial instinct." Let us therefore confine ourselves to what, in lawyer phrase, is termed the condescendence. The statement of the case covers much ground; advisedly so, that no chance be lost. Thus, we are told at the outset that Mary Campbell was either a nursemaid in Gavin Hamilton's, or a serving-maid in Mauchline-mistress of a Montgomerie; or the culprit of the Dundonald session record; or a mythical person named Mary Campbell; or something unknown. As it stands to reason that she could not have been all these personages at one and the same time, let us try to reduce the leet. The serving-meid, who was also a mistress, is

the creation of Train, Grierson, or Richmond (it does not matter which) pen-and-inked on certain discredited papers in the Edinburgh University Library, which have been proved to be unsubstantiated second-hand, lying gossip. It has been proved beyond cavil or question that 'the Mary Campbell of the Dundonald record is not Burns's Highland Mary.* Even her assailants (H. and H.) are forced to admit "that it has not been proved that the Mary Campbell of Burns was the Dundonald Mary Campbell." The last guess as to her identity is too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Which, then, are we shut up to? None other than the real Mary Campbell who was nursemaid in Gavin Hamilton's-the canonised Highland Mary of the "Castle o' Montgomerie" and the stackyard of Ellisland. To this end, or rather beginning, all investigators are bound to come, and Henley is no exception. High time, therefore, it is to clear the ground of rubbish, and stake out the plain path of truth.

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Henley's pleas are, that Highland Mary was either (1) a light-skirts, or (2) a kind of Scottish Mrs Harris. These he amends towards the end by other two—(1) she was either a paragon, or (2) she was not. The inference from the first pair is, of course, that she was all his fancy painted her, or she never existed at all. What reasons does he advance for shortening her skirts? He gives one, and one only—" that without hesitation and without halt, on the shortest possible notice, she betrothed herself to the father of one child by an unmarried woman, and discarded of late by another unmarried woman whose husband he supposed himself to have been," and so on, with much that is not to the purpose. Granting it all, is there no alternative to the "light-skirts" verdict? She may have been simple and innocent-plastic in Burns's strong hands, for we have the Duchess of Gordon's word that Burns was irresistible. Still, the negation of all the maidenly virtues does not follow from a weakness of that sort. Had Jean

* See Burns Chronicles, Vol. XIX. and XXIV. (1910 and 1915).