by Unknown
I think, from what the Lord Provost said, that he rather expected me to say something about the old days, when I really was, although very insignificant, a part of Edinburgh — my student days. I am afraid I was unduly interested in myself in those days, because, although I remember myself vividly, I cannot remember the Castle at all. It is so long ago that perhaps there was not a Castle in those days. At any rate, there was a magazine — just about the best in the world then and now — Blackwood”s. No one can now tell whether it or the Castle came first—’Maga’ or the Castle — and no one knows which will outlast the other. But I had not been very long at the University before I sent to Blackwood’s my very first manuscript. I am afraid it was a satire on my Professor, not the little thing I published afterwards — just a satire, and with some rather strange portraits of the Professors, done by another and a better hand. Well, we finished it off, and we sent it to Blackwood’s.
The scene now changes to George Street. Two youths might be observed, walking up and down, past the famous literary portals of that firm. Who could they be there? At first the Blackwoods received us most courteously, but, after a time, they became a little dour. This was because we were so loath to have them miss such a good thing. Looking back on it now, I don’t think I am tremendously exaggerating if I say that, by the end of this touching visit, the Blackwoods were hurling that manuscript out upon the street from their upper windows, and we were down below, catching it and passing it in again by the door. I cannot remember now what it was called, but I can see very well that they were doing me a service. That manuscript has gone, screeching down the wind many a year, but some of the portraits, I believe, are still possessed by sympathetic friends, and several of them I framed and took with me for my first year in London. But it was a cold winter, and the fire burned low, and you know how beautifully those thin wooden sheets at the back burn. My tale is told. I only mention the incident lest perhaps to-day some voice in George Street is crying out:—’Ye Gods, he will have brought back the manuscript.’
I should like to say a word to you of the men under whose spell I fell in my student days, especially about one who was the ‘man of men’ to me. Without throwing discretion to the winds, I shall tell you about the woman. I would rather have had her here to-day than almost anyone I can think of. If she had been here, I am sure she would have been wearing a black silk dress, or something she considered uncommonly like it. She kept lodgings — fortunately for me. She was an old and poor widow woman, without kith or kin, but I think it would ill become me to stand up in Edinburgh without recalling the fragrant memories of Mrs. Edwards. In after years, when I used to go and see her, she would shake a playful fist at me and say:—’Yer play wis here, being acted by the play-actors, and I wis fain to go, but oh Mr. Barrie, I couldna daur!’
If she had lived into the war, I can conceive her forcing her way on to the Castle to fire Mons Meg at the enemy. I can hear her pausing after each shot, to shout out:—’ Count your men now, Mr. Kaiser!’ A short play of mine, ‘The Old Lady Shows her Medals,’ was written entirely thinking of Mrs. Edwards. Why is it that landladies are so much maligned? I think all we old Edinburgh graduates, who had good ones, might do worse than raise a statue in Edinburgh to the students’ friend.
My Edinburgh ‘man of men’ was Professor Masson. For one of my calling, a University, however pleasing, is just a stepping-off place into the void, with nothing to step on to. I remember, when I was a boy, once showing a set of photographs of the poets to a group of young women. They did not know anything about the poets, nor had they ever seen their pictures before. I spread them out and invited them to choose, and then the hand of every one of them laid grip upon Byron. One expressed the general sentiment by saying:—’That’s the billie for me!’
Such is the importance of physiognomy in the calling of letters. I do not know whether any of you noticed, but I noticed, that the Lord Provost, though he spoke in such an extravagantly kind way about me, took precious care not to say one single word about my personal appearance. Well, at any rate, Masson was ‘the billie for me.’ Do those of you who were under him remember the terrific appalling frown when something passed over his usual benign countenance. I was the student who found out what that frown meant. I have seen it on many Edinburgh men; I have seen it on some of you to-day; I have seen it on the Lord Provost. What it meant was that Masson, though favoured in many ways, had never met Walter Scott. The only charge I bring against Edinburgh is that it never managed somehow — I can see that the thing needed some doing, but it surely could have been contrived somehow — that David Masson should pass one evening with Sir Walter.
What fun, ladies and gentlemen, to choose the rest of the company! You do it. What age would you like? You can have them in which you like. Let us have them all young, and in the days before they were famous, at the time everyone could have got into Darnley’s waistcoat. And where should they meet? The White Horse Inn is too full of swaggering Jacobites tonight. Baxters Close? They may go on there later, because Burns, of course, is one of them. I think in Castle Street, at No. 39. Of course, it cannot be there; but it is; and the great thing about it is that the Shirra is in the Chair. Who else would you have? Drummond of Hawthornden? Pass! Hume — they come from all different ages — Robert Fergusson, Carlyle, the Ettrick Shepherd, Lister? We must have Robert Chambers, and we must be careful because the table is only seated for twelve. We cannot have any of our famous divines or merchants or scholars, and only the Shirra to represent Parliament House. We must have Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. They come in, looking as if they had come a long way. James Boswell, and he says he must bring a guest. We cannot have guests; but who is the guest? — and he gives his name. Pass! And I think I should like to choose a name representing the Edinburgh of to-day, though he has lately left it. I choose my beloved Walter Blaikie to join that company, sponsored, of course, by Prince Charlie. He sits down without waiting to be passed.
There is only room for one more, and, of course, we all agree it must be our Robert Louis. In such company, and with such a dearth of accommodation, he would be very willing tonight just to be the boy who runs backward and forward with the hot water.
There they are at dinner! Let us look at them. How much jollier they look before they were famous! They fade away if we look long at them, and longest at the Shirra. Ah! ladies and gentlemen, it is not they who fade away, but they who remain!
Now I have got through with it without once mentioning Mary Queen of Scots. You know that was a pretty near thing at the beginning, when we got on to Holyrood, and just now, at that dinner of Professor Masson’s, I got rather a scare, because, of course, if Edinburgh’s greatest inhabitants through the ages do ever meet together it must be in Holyrood, and all the invitations must come from her royal hand. Now you see why I wanted that key and the candle.
Up to this point the speaker — this is not meant for the company in general as much as for the gentlemen of the Press, just to help them a little — up to this point the speaker had been only noticeable by the woodenness of his face and his raucous voice — but at the mention of Mary Queen of Scots an extraordinary change for the better came over his appearance; his face lit up, his voice became dulcet, and all of us sitting beneath the platform saw quite clearly that his eyes were either hazel or blue.
So, ladies and gentlemen, goodbye! I am proud, indeed, to be one of you, and so to have the right with you to say to the mighty brood who make this city immortal—’ Hail, but never Farewell!’
Opening the Glasgow Health Exhibition
IN THE KELVIN HALL September 25, 1929
My Lord Provost,1 Ladies and Gentlemen, — Though I include the Lord Provost in that remark as if I still liked him, I don’t know. This is to be a model Exhibition, and I have been studying the explanatory papers that were issued about it for the guidance of exhibitors. I have been wondering what was to be shown in the space so promptly taken up by * J. Brown & Co., Glasgow.’
1 Sir David Mason.
I presume that it was probably secured by them in order to exhibit to rival cities a model Lord Provost. But now I am not so sure. He has been saying such nice things about me that I ought to be hiding my head, but he has not said the thing I hoped to hear him say — namely, how it comes about that I of all people should come here to ask you of all people to be more model than you are. I can tell you how it came about that I was asked, and you (turning to the Lord Provost) will be able to verify the truth of my account.
He, with two accomplices, came up in the lift to my flat in London one day, meaning to ask me to come here, and on the way up to the flat he said to those accomplices: ‘I believe we are making the great mistake of our lives; let’s go down again.’ But I heard them. The lift was then just halfway between my flat and the next. I stopped it, and told them that I knew what they had come for, and unless they proceeded with the business I would not let them down in the lift. There they hung suspended. First they refused to yield, and morning wore on to dewy eve, and then he sent up papers of capitulation. He said to me: ‘Will you come on the condition that you only speak for five minutes?’ I entreated him to make it ten minutes — eight, six — but he would not budge. And now he is sitting there with his watch in his hand. My time must be nearly up already — that is what he thinks. But I scrap all I may have said, I withdraw all I have said from circulation, and begin my five minutes over again.
This will put the Press in a hole, but it will be a score for Glasgow Academy, because I am an old Glasgow Academy boy. I was only eight or nine at the time. To-day, since my arrival in Glasgow, I have met a man who was with me there, a wellknown man to you, a wellknown Lord Provost here, Sir Archibald M’Innes Shaw. He thought I had forgotten all about it; it was so long ago. I said to him, ‘Dr. Morrison was the Rector,’ and he said, ‘Yes, and Marr was the teacher.’ I corrected him and said, ‘Billy Marr.’ Then he said, ‘The French master was Amours.’ And I said, ‘The German master was Scholack.’ And so we went on. At that time I was living in Burnbank Terrace, near the cricket ground of Glasgow Academicals — probably it is not there now. And I used to be allowed to throw up the balls to the fielders, and I dare say he used to be allowed to do it too. And if my five minutes had been ten minutes, I dare say I could have remembered how they sometimes let me bat for a little against his bowling, and I hit it all over the field.
There was one terrific event happened in those days. There was a horse show at the Glasgow Academicals’ ground, and I patronized it. I had lost a penny in the ground. I went back at night and climbed the paling and searched for my penny, and found threepence. No wonder I have friendly feelings for Glasgow. I cannot see all those places without emotion. I am not telling you this just to make you cast envious eyes in my direction. I wish it had happened to you instead of to me. I am only mentioning it because it seems to provide a moral for us all here to-day, and so to give me a text.
Last night I dreamed a dream — a five minutes’ dream. I dreamt I was only eight or so, that the years went rolling forward at a stupendous speed until I found myself a little veteran in the year 1929, wandering through the Glasgow Housing and Home Exhibition. It was a depressing experience. I saw that Glasgow had set out doggedly determined to let nothing stand in their way to become a model for mankind. I also saw that everything I had done all my life was wrong. Model houses! — when I began to write I first of all pulled down the chimney a number of old copies of The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman in order to see how the thing was done. But in model houses you won’t need to stuff your chimneys with newspapers, and so if I had to begin over again I should have to adopt some other calling. In my dream I pitied whoever it was who had to open this Exhibition. Then I awoke and found that I was the man — with five minutes still to go.
In that five minutes, says the Press, the speaker proceeded to give a spirited sketch of the rise and progress of Glasgow, its commerce, its Clyde resorts, its art, its municipal enterprise. He described it as a city in which, judging from his own experience, if he were investing money he would receive 200 per cent, profit. In conclusion, he predicted that the same rate of interest would accrue to all frequenters of the Exhibition — which I now declare open.
Just one moment, please, just one moment more to say goodbye. In the words of the poet Henley, ‘What is to be we know not, but we know that what has been was good.’ Do we? How many tortured souls and bodies must have gone out from Glasgow without knowing it; some of them perhaps are even to-day flitting from this mighty city — as indeed it is — this mighty and squalid city, as all great cities are. You have done more, the Town Council has done more, to mend matters than I suppose has been done in any other town in our country, and I am very proud of you all for that. But there is a lot more to do, and I think that what is to be will be better. In the belief that this Exhibition is to be one step more towards the great still-distant immaculate, I wish it God-speed.
To the Royal Literary Fund
Presiding over the 140TH Anniversary Dinner of the Fund, at the Hotel Victoria May 9, 1930 — his 70th birthday
I AM afraid that in the circumstances we are to have a very gloomy evening. I don’t mean what you mean. What depresses me is that the men around me all look so old. The toast, of course, is the Royal Literary Fund, but I have been instructed before I come to it tonight to be reminiscent. The story of my life. This brings us with startling quickness to Woman. Ladies, take heed to yourselves, for the devil is unchained. That, I think, was the warning sent out about himself by Richard Coeur de Lion, the character in history whom I feel I most resemble.
I made my speech from here a quarter of a century ago, and so this tonight is just the postscript. I am elated by your asking me to take this chair again, and still more surprised at your finding me. It was our president, Lord Crawford, who found me, but he has promised not to say where. He dusted me and brought me back.
Not for years and years have I written anything, and it is rather sad to know that nobody seems to have noticed this except myself. Of course, I don’t notice things much nowadays. I can’t find my way about even among my own characters. Instead of talking postscripts to you I should like to wander round these tables of half-familiar faces, putting my hand on a shoulder here and there, and asking the kindest looking ones to tell me who we all are. I hope you are all important persons, if that is what you like.
This is all leading up to Woman — and here, says the Press, he struck a more sombre note. I am not bringing any charge against women in general — ladies, how could your godfather do that? It is at most a charge against 70 of them, the 70 women, yes, and children and fairies, who between them have done for me by coming into my works absolutely uninvited and giving themselves qualities the very opposite of those with which I had labelled them. The characters we think we ‘create.’ That is surely the most comic word in an author’s vocabulary. The heroine, of course, is the worst one. Very obedient until she gets into your book, but you are a lucky writer if in a week thereafter you know her by sight. You may have taken the greatest pains with the woman, tearing her open, and then find her being quite civil to her father. It’s heartbreaking. You meant her to be a real woman. Those were the women in my notebooks, stern exposures of themselves, Jill the Rippers. It would scarify you to hear what I intended my Jills to divulge about their rhythms. But did they do it? No; they disregarded me and remained — respectable. It isn’t that I don’t understand women. Heavens, no! Someone here who has never written a novel may say, ‘Why don’t you lasso them out of your pages?’ Oh, my good man, do you think I have not tried?
Let us treat children and fairies in a more summary manner. I never could abide them. Mothers of one, take heed that I have made it a rule of my life to consider any three children of them as two. I leave you to work that out. Nowadays if in reading a book I come across a word beginning with’c’ or ‘f’ I toss it aside. Have you ever seen a lion at the Zoo unable to chase from his cage a mob of sparrows? I have sometimes though
t that children and fairies are my sparrows, and that I am that badgered lion. I came to the decision, and it is also open to you, that no author should ever write anything. I tried the drama. I felt that there might be some chance in it for my beloved Modernism. But the more I was behind the scenes the less Modernism did there seem to be. Woman — excuse me if I do not use that word again — the Ws and Fs and Cs — came pouring down on me as if from an excursion steamer. I disappeared from literature, and for a pocketful of years I have lived serenely in my new delightful calling. Then Lord Crawford dragged me back into the hurly-burly, making me a solemn promise that at last, at this dinner, I could stick to facts.
That was several weeks ago, and, baffling and changed as I have found the world, the air you breathe brought exhilaration; and an amorous hankering came over me to be one of you again. I searched out the first lodgings I had ever had in London — in Bloomsbury, at this corner, No. 6. I even found my old table there and the hole my feet had made in the matting. There once more I settled down in the old blissful way to fight it out with the stars. I think the days and nights that followed were the happiest of my life, except, perhaps, the other days and nights I had spent in the same place. You know the feeling — so many of you know it. The shabby room, as the night advances, becoming smaller and hazier and kindlier, the inkpot hoping to goodness it won’t give out, the candle stealing closer to help your poor eyes, all of them on your side, all peeping at your pages and whispering, ‘You are doing it this time — listen to the nightingale,’ and all ready to drop a lodging-house tear when it turns out to be a sparrow in the morning.