bad, as melodramas go. But beyond this, one remembers nothing worth an allusion. We get our plays, such as they are, from London; and the battered metropolitan play-manufacturer, despicable to the eye of the literate playgoer, becomes in contrast with our provincial paralysis an energetic and imaginative figure, looking at life for himself and in a manner concerned with the representation of it. We cannot even make our own rubbish. And for a number of years one of the most popular representatives of Jeanie Deans in the minor theatres has been a lady who does not even pretend to speak Scotch.
To say that this state of things means degeneration is not provincialism, but the reverse of provincialism. It is provincial, if you like, to let use and wont override reason in law, or to think the rustic cackle of your bourg the murmur of the world.' It would be provincial to prefer your own man of science, or imaginative painter, or musical composer, on parochial grounds, to the great scientists, painters, and composers of the period. But it is not provincial to desire that the life of your province should form subject-matter for fictional and dramatic art, any more than it is provincial to want a painting of your own landscape. Rather this is to seek that the life of the province shall acquire cosmopolitan value; the true provincialism consisting in a contented fall below cosmopolitan standards, whether the content come from an over-estimate of the existing environment or a blindness to its lacuruje. The Scotchman, who is unalterably complacent over the music of his country, is on all fours with him who conceives the novel as a form of art properly concerned with any society save that at his own doors—not to speak of him who thinks it is brought to his own doors by the cheaj) serials.
To thus found a charge of literary degeneration on destitution in the two fields of fiction and drama, may seem a course implying a false idea of moral proportion; but let the objector squarely ask himself whether there are any lines of literary production that can better give clues to the mental life of the time. If further tests be demanded, there remains the department of history, in which the phenomena are closely similar. Some fresh research there has been of recent years on the periods of Mary and the Restoration; but we are at this moment barely able to produce a single historical scholar of the highest rank; and the epoch which for many reasons might be supposed most to appeal to our literary men for treatment —the century and a half since the Union, or the century since the Rebellion—remains much less familiar than the corresponding period of English life to the Scottish generation which has grown up with Mr. Stevenson. One goes back, however, to the question of novel and play, satisfied that these give a decisive criterion. That country, one says, whose current imaginative literature includes no first-rate or fair second-rate presentment of its own contemporary life is on that side of human effort behind the age, and is inferentially backward in its general culture. And this is the present condition of imaginative literature in the land of Scott, our most brilliant contemporary littérateur shining in other walks than that of present-day naturalist fiction.
It is much easier, of course, to point out the shortcoming than to suggest how it is to be made up. But at least, supposing any cure to be in store, we shall be a little the likelier to come by it if we realise how the trouble arose. The kind of decline that, alongside of much material improvement, has overtaken Scotch life, is of course nothing different from the tendencies set up in the provincial towns of England by the drift of intellectual activity to London. Our defect on the side of the novel, taken with our sterility in drama, is the best evidence of what has happened to us since Scott's day, because the novel has since Scot’s day become the typical literary form of the age, and because it is, as before noted, that form of literary art which, positively or negatively, best reports local colour. In the two generations covered by Scot’s life, we see in Scotland a peculiarly ample crop of intellectual and literary capacity, in which not only does Scott produce Scotch fiction of the most important order, but Gait and Miss Ferrier (to cite no other names), seem to promise a persistence of native art. But just as our literary men in general have since tended to drift to London, so has our fiction tended to disappear. Carlyle's work could be done better—thanks partly to libraries — in London than in Edinburgh; so, in him and in a number of lesser men, we lost the culture-force of a local literary atmosphere; and defect superinduces defect, till it becomes almost a matter of course that our best men, unless tethered by professorships, go south. Edinburgh has become provincial as Manchester, and Birmingham, and Bristol are provincial, not for lack of Scotch capacity, but because London is the Scotch as well as the English capital, and drains all the provinces alike. All round there is locally lacking, with the literary atmosphere, that cosmopolitan inspiration which makes all the best fiction of the world; and thus it comes that, just as the best English fiction plays freely on London life, and much on the life of the country and the small towns, but never on that of Birmingham or Liverpool, so what tolerable Scotch fiction we have tends only to
