SCOTTISH HEROINES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2895, 8 September 1909, Page 79

SCOTTISH HEROINES.

By Jessie Mackay.

I.— MARY DOUGLAS. I It is the tongue of envy that tangs harshly oh the name of the Kailyard School. For tbe Kailyard has meant bulk and backbone to British literature, as the Celtic revival has meant glow and iride- j soence. And the Kailyard, past and pre- ] sent, has not failed to find its soul upon the power of woman, for the reason that it has ever sought to anchor on realities, castigating with Caledonian vigour current affectations in life and letters. And it is like looking on the time-yellowed picture of . child for the traits of later maturity to cast a backward glance towards the older creations of Scottish fiction and find there the faint lines of modern feminism. , Who remembens .Susan Ferrier now? — the strong, caustic,, conscientious Edinburgh Woman, whose friendship cheered the clouded last days of W^aJter Scott. A woman of force and, eke of humility was Miss Ferrier. Is it not of her the literary, legend runs th»V ■^fftving (Written three successful novels, «he_ coldly and finally met the dazzling dijtera offpubliehers with | one answer : " She had nothing to cay ; therefore she would not say it " ? I The friendship with Walter Scott was passed down from her father, who was clerk of session in the early legal days before the furore that followed "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion," Miss Ferrier was the aunt of the famous Professor James Ferrier, whose name is still remembered in the field of metaphysics. She had the entry to the best houses in Edinburgh, and made good use of opportunities of- travel when such opportunities were rarer than they are to-day. Hots was a life of ordered activity, in which the merely intellectual was by no meaofc suffered to usurp other functions. She wes the devoted house-daugh-ter of the family, the later nnree and companion of her aged father, and a power in her far from narrow world. She was about 36 when her first novel appeared, in 1818, and it owed nothing to social influence, *or she clung to anonymity with the tenacious grasp of the women of her time. Before the secret was at last divulged she had had the satisfaction of seeing her work ascribed to Scott by certain hasty judges, and the kindly Wizard of the North in graceful badinage called her "his sister shadow." Six years- after " Marriage " she published "The Inheritance," and in 1831 appeared " Destiny," her last and best. SJie died in 1854. In, selecting ac a heroine Mary Douglas, the paragon around whose rathei* shadowy presence revolve the incideriits and reflections depicted in "Marriage," one is consciously convicted of e&raining the word in modern acceptation. It may be taken for granted without more ado that abe has every virtue maiden can possess, and she is granted a fairly witty tongue at times into the bargain. Character drawing was much too ticklish a process 80 years ago to be tried safely on anything but professedly subordinate actors in tbe drama. The hero and heroine were, muoh too important to risk public esteem by a fake line or a smudge. They were drawn with rule and compass, and illuminated with all the gilding" and scroll-work of an old cburoh manuscript. Frankly, then, the immaculate • Mary Douglas is not mucn more than a key-name, to unlock for us a quaint old world of fancy. For one thing, the Btory dispenses with her altogether for fully" a third- of its length. That preliminary third is racily taken up with the disillusioning of a Scottish Rawdon Craw ley, Henry Dougla-s by name, and his flimsy EngLisn bride. Lady Juliana. The young pair bad eloped, and, failing th« solidity of a castle in Spain, were forced to decline upon the 6ordtid reality of the bridegroom's almost forgotten Highland home. The mordant writ of Miss Ferrier's presentment of the Highlands a century ago recalls two facts : First, the romance of the Highlands in the matter of most that spells romance to-day is a thing of modern growth ; ctesperate poverty and incredible igjiorar.ee :md narrownia=s characterised the downfall of the old northern feudality in the eighteenth century. Second, that Scott was the destined reconciler of Highlander i •'. I Lowlander, as well as of E-nglishman iiiul Soot, and that before his work had' reel lowed into popular thought the isolated untaught Celt had no critic more hostile than) his smug and canny Lowland neighbour. The picture of the dreary patrimony of Glenfern, " the three longchinned spinster aunts and five awkward purple young sisters " waiting in the dim smoky hall to fall with effusion on the neck of the unhappy runaway bride, the "few bToth " and the pease-bannocks proffered to tempt her delicate appetite, the "hard worsted shawl with a flowerpot at each corner proffered as a "hap," with clogs and pattens, when the lady ventured forth into tbe November mod — all this is Bet down with grim ard vigorous delight. No lees treneharetlv is the character of the dwellers of Olenfem hit off, with all their self-sufficient ignorance and ludicrous tag-ends of second-hand information. But the ladies of Glenfern, "clever" Miss Jacky. busy Miss Nicky, soft-headed and soft-hearted Miss Grizzy, with the five blowzed and red-armed cherubs their nieces, have not a particle of harm in their shallow being ; their virtues, negative though they be. Aow up the crass folly and selfishness of the new bride. And. like a Greek chorus gone mad, the three ancient maids keep up one strain— the glory, the virtues, the wisdom of the House of Maclaughlaoi. Sir Sampson Maclaughlan. M.P., the litt'e gouty baronet, bundled about like a sark of wheat in the arms of hi<* gigantic attendant. " the Philistine." is Olenfern's beau ideal of chivalry ; "Led'ly Maclauplilan," with her laboratory of jnostrums and

blisters, foer amazing candour, her perfect sang froid, and her mannish garb, is its quintessence of feminine excellence. Lady Maclaughlan is more than a side issue : she whirls through the whole book like a rotatory storm, and compels admiration by her utter lack of pretence and her indomitable driving power She chastises the hapless Douglas sisters with scorpions, for which they seem to love her the more. She is unwontedly late for breakfast while visiting them, and a chorus of dutiful inquiry greets her final appearance. She replies without the change of a muscle: "I rested very ill ; my bed was very uncomfortable ; and Sir Sampson's as yellow as a duck's foot— humph! " Lady Maclaughlan's " Humph," by the way, seems to prefigure the classic "What?" if latei fashionable interjection ; it is a particle of universal application. And there is no doubt that she had an eccentric original "somewhere. For what is said of "Middleniarch" is true in a lesser sense of "Marriage" ; it is not a tale, but a gallery of portraits. "Marriage" '..is ' the crudest of Miss Ferrier's bgpks, and yet in many respects it is the most amusing. Tbe screen is crowded with rough charcoal drawings of a rough time. In Glenfern is Mary Douglas born the ■unwelcome and delicate twin daughter of the 'oipossible Juliana, who gladly leaves h?r to bo adopted by a noble and religious woman, the wife of her husband's brother. So it happens that she grows up under tha best influence, seeing only the real homely virtues under the ridiculous exterior of her other aunts and grind-aunts. Nevertheless, she stands firm when they try to supplement her Jwnie education out. of the treasures of T/Ccomp'ishment and deportment they themselves had amassed in the provincial seminary of Miss M'Turk. One standing grievance they cherish ; Mary will have ncue of a mystic heirloom, named "Lady Girnachgowl's collar," after an ancestraas who had devised it for the bettering of the female figure. Apparently it was first cousin to a Corean cangue. Circumstances combine to throw Mary, now a winsome girl of 18, back into the unwilling arms of Lady Juliana, who is stil pursuing the bubble of this world under the Toof of the easy-going earl, her brother, while Henry Douglas dies in India. Mary's rsceplicn by her long-lost mother and beautiful twin sister is as waim and a<3 gracious as a fall intc a snowdrift. Miss Ferrier, who conveys so forcibly the Olympian calm of Lady Maclaughlan and the brcok-like gurgling of the Glenfern spinsters, finds it necessary to make her heroine faint with excels of emotion at the ( sight of her elegant and thoroughly unemotional parent; and, -aye in. the matter of attending a forbidden church, and, later, refusing an incidental ear, Mary maintains an angelic attitude of dutiful submission to the always and utterly impossible Lady Juliana. Plot is no feature of the book : but the mild love affair which faintly tinges (he latter pages has an unexpected feature of interest. For it is Lady Maclaughlan herself who is the Deus ex machina in the matter of Mary's happiness, so contriving to render late justice to a family who had long suffered by the petty malice of her minikin spouee. Nothing more characteristic of this redoutable lady can be quoted than her speech of congratulation to Mary. "You are going to 'be married to Charles Lennox. I am glad of it — I wished you to marry him. Whether y'ou'll thank me for that 20 years hence I can't tell — you can't tell — he can't tell — God knows — "humph ! Your aunts w'll tell you he is Beelzebub, because his father raid he could mate a Sir Sampson cut of a mouldy lemon. Perhaps ha could — I don't know — but your aunts are fooK There are plenty of fools in the wond, but if they had not been sent for some M'ise purpose they wouldn't have been here; <s»id since they are here they have as tjoo'l a right to have elbow-room in the world as the wisest. So now. God bless \ou. Continue as you are, and marry the man, you like, though the world .sbouh 1 set its teeth against you Farew-ell !'" Mary's mild adventures in England oefore this happy issue of her iiuls afford another group of characters. Her vivacious English cousin. Lady Emily, s a more sparkling, le?<s romantic. Ethel .Seweome. Mrs Pullens, n>ee Mao Fuss. dazzles for a moment bj- the sepulchral tpiercdour of her domestic economy, a* evin?el liy making irrelevant summer tarts of la^t y^ur's gco-el-errie*. and achieving other needless triumphs of culinary resurrection. And there is a spirited 'foreshadowing of Mrs Leo Hunter's salon in th* very superior tea-party of the inteirectual Mrs B'uemits, whose boast it was '"that nothing but conversation was spoke in her hous-i."' The whole Blueinit*' chapter, -ndeed. is very suggestive ; all the more as its literary effulgence is clouded ever and anon by the . Stygian utterances of poor Grizzy, anxious i to hold her own in this august a«emblv. I "Are you an admirer of Ci'abbe's j Tales?" asks one of the Muses of Bath. "Crabs" tails!" repeated Grizzy in astonishment. "I don't think ever I tasted them. Indeed, I don't think our crabs have tails; but I'm very ior.d of crabs' claws when there's anything in them!" Miss Ferrier has much in common with Jane Austen, though her toudi i« at once rougher and more didactic. Much in common, too, has she with the "moral Maria," as an irreverent modern critic terms Miss Edgewotth ; and here ihe comparison is not to the disadvantage of the J Edinburgh novelist. Like Dickens, she is primarily a caricaturist, but .(ler. (l er caricatures, like his, are sustained nnd clean cut; and there Is enough heart and real piety in her work to clear her of cynicism. Therefore, she still lives. *nd still makes live the world in which sh* dwelt. For woolpresses. windmills, pump?, and Dumping plants, consult Nimmo and Blair