AULD LICHT IDYLLS.*

NOMINALLY an attempt to represent, by a series of " interiors " and cabinet photographs, a moribund ecclesiastical com- munity, this little volume by a new writer—at all events, by a writer new to us—is at once the most successful, the most truly literary, and the most realistic attempt that has been made for years—if not for generations—to reproduce that humble Scotch life which is saved from sodden misery by the cultivation of the domestic affections and by the occa- sional outbreaks of an essentially unconscious humour, and from moral, though not always from material, failure, by religion. For anything like (though in many respects exceedingly unlike) Mr. Barrie's book, we must go as far back as John Wilson's Lights and Shadows, or some of Thomas Aird's sketches in prose and verse. Bnt Wilson was more of a preacher of political and moral righteousness, according to his lights, than of an artist ; many of his characters were pegs on which he hung discourses (often excellent) against irreligion, laxity in morals, and demagogism, or excuses for raptures in which there is a great deal of genuine piety, but also net a little toddy. Aird is, as a rule, so anxious to wreathe Wordsworthian aureoles of simple dignity round the brows of his peasants, that he does scant justice to the wrinkles in their faces and the patches on their corduroys. Of living writers, the author of Thrawn Janet has perhaps the quickest eye to eccentricities in Scotch character ; the best • Amid Licht Idylls. By J. M. Barrie. London : Hodder and Stoughton. 1889. of him is Scotch, as his friend, Mr. Henry James, has recently maintained in the Century Magazine. But he• is, or thinks

himself, a Scotchman of the world. A collector of moral

vertu in the shape of Scotch types, he regards Robert Burns, Fleeming Jenkin's ancestors, and Alan Breck alike with curious, impartial, cosmopolitan eye. The author of Johnnie Gib is quite as realistic an artist as Mr. Barrie. But Mr.

Alexander never seems to have taken greater pains with his

pictures—and more's the pity—than to prepare them for some provincial Exhibition. Mr. Barrie has the Academy in his eye, perhaps a trifle too much. He gives us Auld Licht Idylls, but where is the "Auld Licht" itself ? His "Auld Licht" ministers

bang their Bibles, as they assail Original Sin or inveigh against the use of peppermints during worship. His " Auld Licht " laymen discuss the Immortality of the Soul before they slink into " The Bull." At a funeral, " We all fade as a leaf " pre- cedes a discussion on the habits and financial position of the deceased. But what of the faith, certainly simple, perhaps rude, which made the poor weavers of Thrums, " o'ercome by labour and bowed down by time," starve themselves to secure a preacher after their minds, which rendered a man of education willing to run the gauntlet of the petty economies and gossip of such a place, to spend and be spent, body and

soul, for £80 a year ? And the poor hovel of an " Auld Licht " kirk in dismal, mist-soaked, not infrequently snow-locked

Thrums, was it never transfigured, was there "never any hour —say, of moaning midnight—when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being was as if swallowed up of Darkness "P But although not a Scotch Rembrandt, Mr. Barrie is a pains- taking Scotch artist. He is conscientious in his work, and he is probably wise in his generation.

This volume is a series of sketches of an imperium in imperio, of the life spent by the members of a small and theologically

narrow body established in and leavening the lump of a com- munity of weavers located somewhere, apparently, between the towns of Aberdeen and Perth. Mr. Barrie, who writes in the character of schoolmaster in the glen of Quharity and Free- Church precentor in Thrums, and opens his volume with a description of his school-house, when isolated from the rest of

the world by a snowstorm, in a style which recalls the late Richard Jefferies, tells us that the scene of his Idylls— "Is the handful of houses jumbled together in a cup which is the town nearest the school-house. Until twenty years ago, its

every other room, earthen-floored and showing the rafters over- head, had a hand-loom, and hundreds of weavers lived and died Thoreaus ben tho hoose,' without knowing it. In those days the cup overflowed and left several houses on the top of the hill, where their cold skeletons still stand. The road that climbs from the square, which is Thrums's heart, to the north is so steep and straight, that in a sharp frost children hunker at the top, and are blown down with a roar and a rush on rails of ice. At such times, when viewed from the cemetery, where the traveller from the school-house gets his first glimpse of the little town, Thrums is but two church-steeples, and a dozen red stone patches standing out of a snow-heap. One of the steeples belongs to the new Free Kirk, and the other to the parish church, both of which the first Auld Licht minister I knew ran past, when he had not time to avoid them by taking a back wynd. Ho was but a pocket edition of a man, who grew two inches after he was called ; but he was so full of the cure of souls, that ho usually scudded to it with his coat- tails quarrelling behind him."

Here Mr. Barrie plants—or, having found planted,•he photo-

graphs—one of the few ultra-seceder communities known as " Auld Lichts " which are left in Scotland, and which used to regard the parish church, and even tolerably well-to-do Dissenting bodies, very much as these last used to regard Prelacy and Popery. Here is the history of the starting of a sect of the kind, as told by Mr. Barrie, without a tincture of exaggeration :-

" One Sabbath day, in the beginning of the century, the Auld Licht minister at Thrums walked out of his battered, ramshackle, earthen-floored kirk with a following, and never returned. The last words he uttered in it were, Follow me to the commonty, all you persons who want to hear the Word of God. properly preached ; and James Duphio and his two sons will answer for this on the Day of Judgments.' The congregation, which belonged to the body who seceded from the Established Church a. hundred and fifty years ago, had split, and as the New Lights (now the United Presbyterians), were in the majority, the Old Lights, with the minister at their head, had to retire to the am- monty (or common), and hold service in the open air, until they had saved up money for a church. They kept possession, how- ever, of the white manse among the trees. Their kirk has but a cluster of members now, most of them old and done ; but each is equal to a dozen ordinary church-goers, and there have been men and women among them on whom the memory loves to linger. For forty years they have been dying out, but their cold, stiff

pews still echo the Psalms of David, and the Auld Licht kirk will remain open so long as it has one member and a minister."

In Auld Lichtism, Scotch Dissent touches the bottom, so to speak. The professors of it, whom, on account of their paucity, Mr. Barrie is able to portray with the minute care of a Dutch painter, represent Presbyterian hair-splitting at its finest and dreariest. The present writer, although Thrums is unknown to him, can testify to the truth of the following as to the relations of an ultra-seceder minister to his congregation :- "Never was a man more uncomfortably loved than Mr. Dishart. Easie Haggart, the maid-servant, reproved him at the breakfast-table. Lang Tammas and Swag Mealmaker crouched for five successive Sabbath nights on his manse wall to catch him smoking (and got him). Old wives grumbled by their hearths when he did not look in to despair of their salvation. He told the maidens of his congregation not to

make an idol of him Twenty were his years when he came to Thrums, and on the very first Sabbath, he knocked a board out of the pulpit. Before beginning his trial sermon, he handed down the big Bible to the precentor, to give his arms freer swing. The congregation, trembling with exhilaration, probed his meaning. Not a square inch of paper, they saw, could be concealed there. Mr. Dishart had scarcely any hope for the Auld Lichts ; he had none for any other denomination. Davit Lunan got behind his handkerchief to think for a moment, and the minister was on him like a tiger. The call was unanimous. Davit proposed him."

And yet these Scotch weavers, who were so anxious to be admonished of the sinfulness of their condition, were frequently reduced to such poverty that they had to part with their minister simply because they could not keep him " When they were not starving themselves to support a pastor, the Auld Lichts were saving up for a stipend. They retired with compressed lips to their looms, and weaved and weaved till they weaved themselves another minister." Auld Lichtism may seem petty and pitiable, and yet it must have had its redeeming virtues, and, as we have already said, Mr. Barite's picture of it is incomplete, because he does not give sufficient

prominence to the spirituality and the faith which lay behind its censoriousness and poverty. " Strong was he that had a Church," says Carlyle, who, in his eagerness to discover and

promptitude to denounce Original Sin in his neighbours, is essentially a Seceder; "he stood thereby, though 'in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities,' yet manlike towards God and Man; the vague, shoreless Universe had become for him a firm city, and dwelling which he knew."

The Auld Lichts of Thrums are inglorious, though by no means mute Carlyles.

Mr. Barrie deals with the political, the amatory, the literary, and even the belligerent side of his Auld Licht community ; one of his most humorous chapters treats of a fight between its members and the inhabitants of a neighbouring parish who misspent their Fast Day by spending it in Thrums. Perhaps the most ambitious of his sketches is " The Courting of T' Nowhead's Bell," describing a race on a Sunday—in the

literal sense—between two rivals for the affections of a farm- servant, and the repentance of the winner ; and by Scotch readers it will probably be regarded as the most amusing. Yet it strikes us as too detailed, and a trifle farcical. But in his chapter on "Lads and Lasses," Mr. Barrie brings out admirably the curious diffidence of Scotch peasant-lovers. " At last, Will ye hae's, Bell ?' would have dropped from his half- reluctant lips; and Bell would have mumbled, ` Aye,' with her thumb in her mouth. Guid nicht to ye. Bell,' would be the next remark ; Guid nicht to ye, Jeames,' the answer ; the humble door would close softly, and Bell and her lad would have been engaged." But to our thinking, the best chapter in the book is "Cree Queery and Mysy Drolly," which tells of the affection between a poor grinder and his mother,

who were known in the community in which they lived by these uncouth nicknames. Mr. Barrie's most obvious literary faculty is a certain dry, almost granitically hard, humour. But here we have tenderness in addition to humour. Poor Cree Queery was accused of miserliness in his last years, because he was known to have been saving up odd sixpences. But the secret of his parsimony came out when he was on his death-bed, and when a friend sent him half-a- sovereign. Cree added the sixpences and coppers in his pocket to the half-sovereign. After all, they only made some two pounds ; but a look of peace came into Cree's eyes as he told the woman to take it all to a shop in the town. Nearly twelve years previously, Jamie Lownie had lent him two pounds, and though the money was never asked for, it preyed

on Cree's mind that he was in debt. He paid off all he owed, and so Cree's life was not, after all, a failure."

We have thought it positively our duty to call attention at some length to this book, because in its fidelity to truth, its humour, and its vivid interest, it is a complete and a welcome contrast to the paltry " duds " which are nowadays printed by the dozen as pictures of humble and religious life in Scotland.