I was coming the other day along a great valley road that strikes out of the westland counties about Glasgow,more or less towards the east and the widening of the Forth.It may,for all I know (I amused myself with the fancy),be the way along which Wallace came with his crude army,when he gave battle before Stirling Brig;and,in the midst of mediaeval diplomacies,made a new nation possible.Anyhow,the romantic quality of Scotland rolled all about me,as much in the last reek of Glasgow as in the first rain upon the hills.The tall factory chimneys seemed trying to be taller than the mountain peaks;as if this landscape were full (as its history has been full)of the very madness of ambition.The wage-slavery we live in is a wicked thing.But there is nothing-in which the Scotch are more piercing and poetical,I might say more perfect,than in their Scotch wickedness.It is what makes the Master of Ballantrae the most thrilling of all fictitious villains.It is what makes the Master of Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains.It is poetry.
It is an intensity which is on the edge of madness or (what is worse)magic.Well,the Scotch have managed to apply something of this fierce romanticism even to the lowest of all lordships and serfdoms;the proletarian inequality of today.You do meet now and then,in Scotland,the man you never meet anywhere else but in novels;I mean the self-made man;the hard,insatiable man,merciless to himself as well as to others.
It is not "enterprise ";it is kleptomania.He is quite mad,and a much more obvious public pest than any other kind of kleptomaniac;but though he is a cheat,he is not an illusion.He does exist;I have met quite two of him.Him alone among modern merchants we do not weakly flatter when we call him a bandit.Something of the irresponsibility of the true dark ages really clings about him.Our scientific civilisation is not a civilisation;it is a smoke nuisance.Like smoke it is choking us;like smoke it will pass away.Only of one or two Scotsmen,in my experience,was it true that where there is smoke there is fire.
But there are other kinds of fire;and better.The one great advantage of this strange national temper is that,from the beginning of all chronicles,it has provided resistance as well as cruelty.In Scotland nearly everything has always been in revolt--especially loyalty.If these people are capable of making Glasgow,they are also capable of wrecking it;and the thought of my many good friends in that city makes me really doubtful about which would figure in human memories as the more huge calamity of the two.In Scotland there are many rich men so weak as to call themselves strong.But there are not so many poor men weak enough to believe them.
As I came out of Glasgow I saw men standing about the road.They had little lanterns tied to the fronts of their caps,like the fairies who used to dance in the old fairy pantomimes]They were not,however,strictly speaking,fairies.They might have been called gnomes,since they worked in the chasms of those purple and chaotic hills.They worked in the mines from whence comes the fuel of our fires.Just at the moment when I saw them,moreover,they were not dancing;nor were they working.
They were doing nothing.Which,in my opinion (and I trust yours),was the finest thing they could do.
