The Glasgow Herald - Saturday, March 9, 1895
The greatest of recent successes on the stage is "Charley's Aunt". The greatest of recent successes in fiction is "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush"...It is to the credit of "Ian MacLaren" that he has not attempted to reach such a depth of maudlin emotion as Dickens has descended to in "The Old Curiosity Shop". It would appear from one of the innumerable interview with him that have been published within the past few weeks, that it is men rather than women who are moved to the melting mood by the martyrdom of the young scholar of Drumtochty, and the self-sacrifice of the old doctor...When he has exhausted Drumtochty - and he says he will have exhausted it when he publishes his next volume - he informs us that he will proceed to deal with some aspects of English life with which he happens, as in the case of Drumtochty, to be familiar. And it may be assumed that his second success will be equal to his first, if like that it be a transcript of experiences with a background of "types" rather than individuals. Meanwhile Mr Watson appears to be enamoured of "locality" in fiction and of "variety" in character. He is satisfied with the extent to which decentralisation in fiction has gone so far as the provinces are concerned, but he would like to see more of it in London. "What we want to see", he says, "is the small grocer, the petit bourgeois, treated somewhat as Balzac treated him. The business is to show the human heart beneath a possibly squalid exterior, to get at its aspirations, its hopes, its aims".
...But is there not a very great danger lest, in the positive passion for minute psychological analysis, and for the reduction of fiction to moral and intellectual map-making, the novel of manners and of people whose manners are worth reproducing be left out of consideration altogether?...it does not necessarily follow that the future Scotch novel of manners would concern itself solely with manners in the grand style. Among the good things which have come in the train of the successes of the new Scotch writers - Mr Barrie, Mr Watson, and Mr Crockett - is a revival of interest in the works of John Galt...Perhaps after a surfeit of self-consciousness and self-sacrifice - of Dr Maclure and Hendry M'Quhumpha - a little of the worldly, but not at all sensual or devilish, wisdom of the Rev. Mr Balwhidder or Provost Pawkie may be welcomed...Balwhidder is an admirable specimen of the minister of the old school, who took life very much as he found it...One feels that he is a reality - much more of a reality, it is to be feared - than Ian MacLaren's Dr Maclure...Or take the central figure in "The Provost", who to me is quite as interesting as the central figure in "Annals of the Parish". "The Provost" is almost perfect, I should say, as a Scotch novel of manners - of the manners to be found in a small country town not so very many years ago...
The Provost
Provost Pawkie may not be so lovable a character as the heroes of the Scottish school, but he is probably much truer to life...our great municipalities have been built up and (which is more important) have been reformed and improved by men whose morality is much nearer that of Balwhidder and Pawkie than that of M'Quhumpha and M'Clure...
But a greater though not a minuter or more careful artist in the novel of Scotch manners than Galt was Scott. That novel indeed reached perfection in "The Antiquary", in the light-comedy portions of "St Ronan's Well", in the Bailie Nicol Jarvie section of "Rob Roy". It is in this connection that Stevenson is almost immeasurably Scott's inferior...Scott's method as the Homer of citizen life is of the simplest - so very simple as to encourage the belief that ere long there must be a revival of the northern novel of manners. The prattle of the barber, the gossip of the postmistress and her friends, in a small town, the humours of a spa, the self-revelations of a Glasgow magistrate, of the hostess of a country inn, or of a returned Indian nabob - it is out of such materials that Scott has made those stories which constitute his chief claim to gratitude at the hands and hearts of his countrymen. And - one cannot help asking - does not our modern life in Scotland, so much fuller, richer, more varied, alike in pleasure and avocation, than that which yielded such a treasure to a Galt, lend itself readily to the artist in manners?...the appetite for a generous meal must return, and with it the desire for the novel of manners, which is besides the best antidote to "the erotic, the neurotic, and the Tommyrotic", that infest literature at the present time.
Unfortunately, the article is by an anonymous writer. He/she has made me even more keen to start on Galt's novels as well as to continue with Scott's.
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