Ian Maclaren (Dr. John Watson D.D.) and 'Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush'

"There grows a bonnie brier bush in our kail-yard,

And white are the blossoms on't in our kail-yard."

I have already posted George Blake's rather caustic comments on 'Ian Maclaren's' literary (in)ability. Now I have read his first, and most famous, book Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894), I can add a few reflections of my own. I had forgotten until I reopened my copy of the first edition, that there was a letter from John Watson pasted on the inside of the front cover:

Blake was merciless in his criticism of Maclaren (but so he was of Rutherford, Barrie and Robertson Nicoll) - so much so that it makes one wonder why the publishers asked him to write the book. He does permit himself a few, more positive, points: So far as dialect and dialogue are interesting, this is able enough work, often amusing. However, Blake then pushes the knife in, in the very next sentence: But the connecting passages of narrative and of scenic descriptions are flat...John Watson, the modern world would say with complete justice, simply could not write...  Blake, a nationalist and journalist, whose works (drama, essays, fiction) stretched from 1921 to 1958, was categorised as a 'social realist' - far removed from Maclaren. His 'modern world' was 1951, so different from that of 19th century Scotland away from the industrial belt. I think he was not the right critic for the Kailyard School of Maclaren, whom he accused of entertaining the 'guileless' Americans on his reading tours.

Maclaren, for a brief period the Free Kirk minister of Logiealmond, (used as a template for the fictitious Drumtochty of his tales) some few miles north-west of Perth, recalled this time in his homely yarns with a religious (didactic?) bent. Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush is made up  seven sketches:

• Domsie, tells of A Lad o' Parts - the story of young Geordie Hoo's elevation from parish school to the University of Edinburgh. He does well - First Prize (and Medal) in both Humanity and Greek. "Eh, I was feareds o' thae High School lads. They had terrible advantages. Maisters frae England, and tutors, and whatn'a, but Drumtochty carried aff the croon." The last chapter has pathos (not bathos, as it is not ridiculous, but stays within Maclaren's version of the sublime) writ large. The successful scholar returns home to die - the ark hass gone over Jordan, and George will have come into the Land of Promise.                                                     

I genuinely appreciated Maclaren's touches of humour (homespun, often for didactic reasons - but 'so what'?) An annual letter came from the British Museum to Domsie (the schoolmaster) from "Bumbee Willie" now the famous Dr. Graham, the greatest living authority on beetles. - as Domsie counselled, if any clever lad did not care for Latin, he had the alternative of beetles. Then there's Marget Howe, Geordie's mother, whose intellectual contempt for the Conservative party knew no bounds: "Sall she saw him slip (the Tory agent) aff the road afore the last stile, and wheep rood the fit o' the gairden wa' like a tod (fox) aifter the chickens."

• A Highland Mystic deals with the forbidding (for any visiting preacher) presence of Donald Menzies: [his] face was piteous to behold. It haunted the minister for months, and brought to confusion a promising course of sermons on the contribution of Hegel to Christian thought. Donald sat in front of the pulpit with a face which seemed non-conducting, upon which the nervous probationer's best passages would break like spray against a rock. 
• His Mother's Sermon would clearly mark the dividing line between the thousands who revelled in Maclaren's books and the sceptics of the George Blake ilk. The sketch is, admittedly, rather too full of purple passages and the most like a caricature of the Kailyard. It is also lacking in the humour which relieves the piety of the other stories.
• The Transformation of Lachlan Campbell  - here, we are back with the whimsical humour:  Lachlan had arrived from the privileged parish of Auchindarroch, where the "Men" ruled with iron hand and no one shaved on Sabbath...Lachlan was a little man...with whiskers carefully arranged, a keen, old-fashioned face sharpened by much spiritual thinking, who was a shepherd to trade...but his life business was theology. Woe betide a minister who strayed from Lachlan's doctrinal path: "No, I will not be saying that John Carmichael does not love Christ, for I hef seen the Lord in his sermons like a face through a lattice...but I am not liking his doctrine..." His daughter escapes to London and, as the tale unfolds, the stern patriarch bends and it is a prodigal's return, a sheep that was nearly lost to a transformed shepherd.
• The cunning speech of Drumtochty is the shortest of the sketches, but not uninteresting. No one died in Drumtochty - "he slippit awa." When someone was seriously ill, he was said to be "gey an' . One native boy, newly returned from America, fled again, after being called a "daidlin', thowless, feckless, fushionless wratch", which drew blood at every stroke, like a Russian knout.
• A wise woman is a humorous (and probably not inaccurate) story of one Mrs Macfadyen, who could memorize and regurgitate all the heads (points) of any sermon. Then the day came when one preacher gave out so many headings and returned to them in no particular order or logic, that she 'collapsed' under the too many 'trumpets'!
• A Doctor of the Old School is different from the others, in that it was re-published three years later as a separate volume. Moreover, this time it was furnished with 56 Illustrations by Fred. C. Gordon, and had an extra, final chapter The Mourning of the Glen. It is a powerful tale of a local doctor, wedded to his profession and his people, who literally regularly goes beyond the first mile, often in atrocious weather. I think it is the strongest and most true-to-life of all the stories. Maclaren, in a Preface to the later single volume, responded to his readers' question of whether the doctor was 'real': Not one man, but many in Scotland and in the South country. It has been one man's good fortune to know four country doctors...who, each one, might have sat for my hero... From all parts of the English-speaking world letters have come in commendation of Weelum MacLure, and many were from  doctors who had received new courage. And I believe him. * The story ends with the doctor's death - the peace on the doctor's face was of one who rested from his labours.

  

 Having read George Blake's diatribe first, I was quite prepared to curl my own lip at Maclaren. But I didn't. In fact, however heretical and old-fashioned it may seem, I warmed to him rather than to the cynicism of Blake. Maclaren's book is  'Tales in pairts'; it is not a novel. It does not set out to be driven by narrative (although narrative there is) or drenched in scenic descriptions. It is homespun (I cannot vouch for its accuracy and, frankly, do not care) and laced with humour. It does not deserve the obloquy thrown at it by the smart arses of the 1950s. I may well return to more of Maclaren later in the year - The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895) appears to be next!

* I am reminded of the dedication at the beginning of one of O. Douglas's books - Taken by the Hand (1935) - to Clement Bryce Gunn, for nearly fifty years Doctor of Medicine in the town of Peebles. Gunn's reminiscences -  Leaves from the Life of a Country Doctor  (1935) -  perhaps aptly edited by  Miss Rutherford Crockett, daughter of the Kailyard novelist, describes, from the late 1870s onwards, true-life stories often very similar to the fictional Dr. MacLure's.