Luckily, as a starter, I remembered a book I bought a few years ago - Barrie and the Kailyard School by George Blake (Arthur Barker, 1951 in its The English Novelist Series). Blake (1893-1961) was a Scottish journalist, literary editor and writer as well as a well-known BBC broadcaster from the 1930s onwards. His novel The Shipbuilders (Faber and Faber, 1935) was typical of his work, described as resolutely realistic, serious, socialistic, and nationalistic, in that it addressed industrialisation and urban poverty.
George Blake
No wonder he had such a strong animus for the Kailyard 'School', thinking it led to a cheapening, evasive, stereotyped view of Scottish life. Certainly, he does not hold back in his criticisms. He argues that, although the bulk of the Scottish people were condemned, by the Industrial Revolution, to a purely urban and mainly ugly sort of life during the 19th century, what had the Scottish novelists to say about it? The answer is - nothing, or as nearly nothing as makes no matter. Moreover, the general literary culture of Scotland was in a sad state of decline after two centuries of the influence of a fundamentalist Kirk... The novel of manners did not develop at all, in spite of the inclination that way of Susan Ferrier...The Scots storyteller either followed Scott and Stevenson through the heather with a claymore at his belt, or he lingered round the bonnie brier bush, telling sweet, amusing little stories of bucolic intrigue as seen through the windows of the Presbyterian manse.
Blake argues that a group of sentimental, some gifted, Scots gratified Victorian sentimentality by representing the real life of the country in terms that were hopelessly out of date,victims of the chronic Scots disease of nostalgia. He singles out three writers - Rev. John Watson, Rev. Samuel R. Crockett, James Barrie, and a journalist/editor, Sir William Robertson Nicoll. He further details the influence the Scottish clergy had in the golden age of Presbyterianism. This was the near-monopoly of academic learning. Moreover, this coincided with an expansion in religious journalism along popular lines. Here, he propels Nicoll to the fore.
Nicoll's father was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland in a remote village in Aberdeenshire. Progressing through Aberdeen Grammar School and the University of Aberdeen, he was ordained minister of the Free Church in 1874, aged 24. Writing frequently for the Christian Leader, he moved to editing for Hodder & Stoughton a series of volumes called The Clerical Library and then founded The British Weekly in 1886. Robertson Nicoll was born to be the last perfect expression of Liberal Nonconformity, strict in moral intention but with a very nice eye for profits...he soon became, and for more than thirty years remained, the Grand Panjandrum of popular literary journalism...He was also founding editor of Hodder's The Bookman in 1891. One cannot think that there would ever have been a Kailyard School without him.
Sir William Robertson Nicoll The Bookman of November 1912
George Blake devotes his next three chapters respectively to Watson, Crockett and Barrie, and none emerges unscathed. He castigates 'Ian Maclaren's' first book - and best seller - Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, for a complete absence of plot, being rather a thin collection of "blameless" sketches. He argues that Maclaren was the least gifted with real literary qualities of the Kailyard triumvirate...the modern world (1951) would say with complete justice,[he] simply could not write. Crockett's annus mirabilis was 1894: he published two novels. One was pure Kailyard, The Lilac Sunbonnet; the other aping Stevenson's romance with a bit of Kailyard thrown in, The Raiders.
Samuel Rutherford Crockett
Blake finds The Lilac Sunbonnet hard to digest! It deals with the placid rural existence of nineteenth-century Galloway, a region of green fields and quiet villages...[with] an appropriate sprinkling of grave elders and sharp-tongued old wifies. It is hard for any reasonably literate adult of the mid-twentieth century to read [it] without nausea... One is tempted to say that The Lilac Sunbonnet is too gloriously bad to be true. Oh dear! Blake thinks The Raiders was far the better. Crockett displayed a sufficient capacity for invention and the creation of suspense.
Unfortunately for Crockett, he never repeated these early 'successes'. I have a copy of the signed Illustrated edition (limited to 250 unnumbered copies) of The Grey Man (1896). It is a large book, in navy blue buckram and I have never read it, although buying it over two decades ago. Notwithstanding Blake's strictures on Crockett, I must try it. He at least called the novel, and Men of the Moss Hags, still readable. It is interesting/apt that the book is dedicated to Robertson Nicoll - are affectionately inscribed these Chronicles of a Stormy Time - in memory of unforgotten Days of Peace and Quietness spent with him and his.
I will leave Blake's Chapter V on J.M. Barrie for another time. I have never been drawn to Barrie, with his mother fixation, his rather creepy involvement with the Davies boys and his disregarding of truth in many of his early novels. Peter Pan is not one of my favourites, either. Blake's final Chapter, which summarises his views on the Kailyard writers (There was a strange lack of literary talent in Scotland between 1830 and 1880...a process of decline which led to the fantastic success of the vestigal Kailyard-delvers...) and ropes in Harry Lauder as an assiduous cultivator of the genre. It is interesting that nowhere does Blake mention O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) and her works. But I mustn't tread on toes!! He ends with a brief comment on George Douglas [Brown], which I will attach to a previous Blog.
Now to read Beside the Bonny Bush!
ADDENDUM
I have just re-read an interview which John Buchan gave to the magazine The Book Window for their 1927 Christmas Number. He is asked for his opinion on the Kailyard School.
Without qualification, I have no use for them. The only utilitarian function the people you speak of accomplished was to precipitate a very striking rejoined to their own mawkish misinterpretation of life.
Yes, I do mean The House with the Green Shutters. A terrible book, certainly. The swing of the pendulum. For that reason, also untrue. But not so untrue as the other stuff, and not like that, invertebrate.
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