Memories and Portraits | Page 6

much, and to be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong
direction. Yet surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of
Englishmen is too often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of
the man too often withheld from the social commerce, and the contact
of mind with mind evaded as with terror. A Scotch peasant will talk
more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with

conversational counters and small jests; he will give you the best of
himself, like one interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is
vain, interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth
his thoughts and experience in the best light. The egoism of the
Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes
no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of
all, he does not care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of
going on and being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the
meantime, while you continue to associate, he would rather not be
reminded of your baser origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like
self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot
seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest. That you should continually try to
establish human and serious relations, that you should actually feel an
interest in John Bull, and desire and invite a return of interest from him,
may argue something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still
puts you in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the
lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the
head and shoulders.
Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English youth
begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up
those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and,
to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in
both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once
rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a
greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy,
and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The
boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives
himself to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily
transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in
mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser
and a less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more immersed
in present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are
younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and
perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scotch boyhood - days of
great stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth
of books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter
Catechism, the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The

typical English Sunday, with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric
afternoon, leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of
the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of
two divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two
first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring,
"What is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with,
"What is the chief end of man?" and answering nobly, if obscurely, "To
glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol
of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked
opens to us Scotch a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is
asked of all of us, from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly
together. No Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would
have had patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight
for Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days
kept their influence to the end. We have spoken of the material
conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying
everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of
the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone cities,
imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level streets, the
warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness of the architecture,
among which English children begin to grow up and come to
themselves in life. As the stage of the University approaches, the
contrast becomes more express. The English lad goes to Oxford or
Cambridge; there, in an ideal