Adventures among Books
by
Andrew Lang
Part 1 out of 4
This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition.
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
by Andrew Lang
Contents:
Preface
Adventures Among Books
Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson
Rab's Friend
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mr. Morris's Poems
Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels
A Scottish Romanticist of 1830
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Smollett
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Paradise of Poets
Paris and Helen
Enchanted Cigarettes
Stories and Story-telling
The Supernatural in Fiction
An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher
The Boy
PREFACE
Of the Essays in this volume "Adventures among Books," and "Rab's
Friend," appeared in Scribner's Magazine; and "Recollections of
Robert Louis Stevenson" (to the best of the author's memory) in The
North American Review. The Essay on "Smollett" was in the Anglo-
Saxon, which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as
"The Confessions of Saint Augustine," in a periodical styled Wit
and Wisdom. For "The Poems of William Morris" the author has to
thank the Editor of Longman's Magazine; for "The Boy," and "Mrs.
Radcliffe's Novels," the Proprietors of The Cornhill Magazine; for
"Enchanted Cigarettes," and possibly for "The Supernatural in
Fiction," the Proprietors of The Idler. The portrait, after Sir
William Richmond, R.A., was done about the time when most of the
Essays were written--and that was not yesterday.
CHAPTER I: ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a
veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little
about people? I have often wondered that a Biographia Literaria
has so seldom been attempted--a biography or autobiography of a man
in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave
this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent
purpose into a world of alien disquisitions. The following pages
are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The
habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been
denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study
of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is the vice,
or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating,
though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises.
I try to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the
world, what teaching (not much), and what consolations.
In beginning an autobiographia literaria, an account of how, and in
what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever
above all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for
the sin of egotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of which
the author knows so much as of his own. On n'a que soi, as the
poor girl says in one of M. Paul Bourget's novels. In literature,
as in love, one can only speak for himself. This author did not,
like Fulke Greville, retire into the convent of literature from the
strife of the world, rather he was born to be, from the first, a
dweller in the cloister of a library. Among the poems which I
remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton's song, in the
"Bride of Lammermoor":-
"Look not thou on beauty's charming,
Sit thou still when kings are arming,
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
Speak not when the people listens,
Stop thine ear against the singer,
From the red gold keep thy finger,
Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die."
The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing
themselves to me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about
the age of ten, probably without quite understanding them, I had
chosen them for a kind of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the
fallentis semita vitae. This seems a queer idea for a small boy,
but it must be confessed.
"It takes all sorts to make a world," some are soldiers from the
cradle, some merchants, some orators; nothing but a love of books
was the gift given to me by the fairies. It was probably derived
from forebears on both sides of my family, one a great reader, the
other a considerable collector of books which remained with us and
were all tried, persevered with, or abandoned in turn, by a student
who has not blanched before the Epigoniad.
About the age of four I learned to read by a simple process. I had
heard the elegy of Cock Robin till I knew it by rote, and I picked
out the letters and words which compose that classic till I could
read it for myself. Earlier than that, "Robinson Crusoe" had been
read aloud to me, in an abbreviated form, no doubt. I remember the
pictures of Robinson finding the footstep in the sand, and a dance
of cannibals, and the parrot. But, somehow, I have never read
"Robinson" since: it is a pleasure to come.
The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy
tales, and chap-books about Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob
Roy. At that time these little tracts could be bought for a penny
apiece. I can still see Bruce in full armour, and Wallace in a
kilt, discoursing across a burn, and Rob Roy slipping from the
soldier's horse into the stream. They did not then awaken a
precocious patriotism; a boy of five is more at home in Fairyland
than in his own country. The sudden appearance of the White Cat as
a queen after her head was cut off, the fiendish malice of the
Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake of crocodile eggs and millet seed
which the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the Fairy of the
Desert--these things, all fresh and astonishing, but certainly to
be credited, are my first memories of romance. One story of a
White Serpent, with a woodcut of that mysterious reptile, I
neglected to secure, probably for want of a penny, and I have
regretted it ever since. One never sees those chap books now.
"The White Serpent," in spite of all research, remains introuvable.
It was a lost chance, and Fortune does not forgive. Nobody ever
interfered with these, or indeed with any other studies of ours at
that time, as long as they were not prosecuted on Sundays. "The
fightingest parts of the Bible," and the Apocrypha, and stories
like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical literature, read
in a huge old illustrated Bible. How I advanced from the fairy
tales to Shakespeare, what stages there were on the way--for there
must have been stages--is a thing that memory cannot recover. A
nursery legend tells that I was wont to arrange six open books on
six chairs, and go from one to the others, perusing them by turns.
No doubt this was what people call "desultory reading," but I did
not hear the criticism till later, and then too often for my
comfort. Memory holds a picture, more vivid than most, of a small
boy reading the "Midsummer Night's Dream" by firelight, in a room
where candles were lit, and some one touched the piano, and a young
man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespeare was a volume of
Kenny Meadows' edition; there are fairies in it, and the fairies
seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream into the music and the
firelight. At that moment I think that I was happy; it seemed an
enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing resembling it
remains with me, out of all the years.
We went from the border to the south of England, when the number of
my years was six, and in England we found another paradise, a
circulating library with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of
Shakespeare and of the "Arabian Nights." How their stained pages
come before the eyes again--the pleasure and the puzzle of them!
What did the lady in the Geni's glass box want with the Merchants?
what meant all these conversations between the Fat Knight and Ford,
in the "Merry Wives"? It was delightful, but in parts it was
difficult. Fragments of "The Tempest," and of other plays, remain
stranded in my memory from these readings: Ferdinand and Miranda
at chess, Cleopatra cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of
figs, the Friar and the Apothecary, Troilus on the Ilian walls, a
vision of Cassandra in white muslin with her hair down. People
forbid children to read this or that. I am sure they need not, and
that even in our infancy the magician, Shakespeare, brings us
nothing worse than a world of beautiful visions, half realised. In
the Egyptian wizard's little pool of ink, only the pure can see the
visions, and in Shakespeare's magic mirror children see only what
is pure. Among other books of that time I only recall a kind of
Sunday novel, "Naomi; or, The Last Days of Jerusalem." Who,
indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man who cried on
the battlements, "Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem!" I seem to
hear him again when boys break the hum of London with yells of the
latest "disaster."
We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it
were, to know the glories of our birth. We lived in Scott's
country, within four miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard
nothing of it. I remember going with one of the maids into the
cottage of a kinsman of hers, a carpenter; a delightful place,
where there was sawdust, where our first fishing-rods were
fashioned. Rummaging among the books, of course, I found some
cheap periodical with verses in it. The lines began -
"The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day,
He spurred his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way
That leads to Brotherstone."
A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to
be neglected. But they WERE neglected till we had learned how -
"The sable score of fingers four
Remains on that board impressed,
And for evermore that lady wore
A covering on her wrist."
We did not know nor ask the poet's name. Children, probably, say
very little about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight,
Sir Richard of Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the
east, and the moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind
ever since, and hardly need to be revived by looking at "The Eve of
St. John."
Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how great he was,
how good, how, like Napoleon, his evil destiny found him at last,
and he wore his heart away for honour's sake. And we were given
the "Lay," and "The Lady of the Lake." It was my father who first
read "Tam o' Shanter" to me, for which I confess I did not care at
that time, preferring to take witches and bogies with great
seriousness. It seemed as if Burns were trifling with a noble
subject. But it was in a summer sunset, beside a window looking
out on Ettrick and the hill of the Three Brethren's Cairn, that I
first read, with the dearest of all friends, how -
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade."
Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the
chase, till -
"Few were the stragglers, following far,
That reached the lake of Vennachar,
And when the Brig of Turk was won,
The foremost horseman rode alone."
From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of
Scott in one's pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection
of a boy's treasures. Scott certainly took his fairy folk
seriously, and the Mauth Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to
a small boy in wakeful hours. {1} After this kind of introduction
to Sir Walter, after learning one's first lessons in history from
the "Tales of a Grandfather," nobody, one hopes, can criticise him
in cold blood, or after the manner of Mr. Leslie Stephen, who is
not sentimental. Scott is not an author like another, but our
earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did not ask
who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of
Madame d'Aulnoy. Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides
with his reivers; the Fairy Queen came out of Eildon Hill and
haunted Carterhaugh; at Newark Tower we saw "the embattled portal
arch" -
"Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
Had oft rolled back the tide of war," -
just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very roofless
cottage whence Mungo Park went forth to trace the waters of the
Niger, and at Oakwood the tower of the Wizard Michael Scott.
Probably the first novel I ever read was read at Elgin, and the
story was "Jane Eyre." This tale was a creepy one for a boy of
nine, and Rochester was a mystery, St. John a bore. But the lonely
little girl in her despair, when something came into the room, and
her days of starvation at school, and the terrible first Mrs.
Rochester, were not to be forgotten. They abide in one's
recollection with a Red Indian's ghost, who carried a rusty ruined
gun, and whose acquaintance was made at the same time.
I fancy I was rather an industrious little boy, and that I had
minded my lessons, and satisfied my teachers--I know I was reading
Pinnock's "History of Rome" for pleasure--till "the wicked day of
destiny" came, and I felt a "call," and underwent a process which
may be described as the opposite of "conversion." The "call" came
from Dickens. "Pickwick" was brought into the house. From that
hour it was all over, for five or six years, with anything like
industry and lesson-books. I read "Pickwick" in convulsions of
mirth. I dropped Pinnock's "Rome" for good. I neglected
everything printed in Latin, in fact everything that one was
understood to prepare for one's classes in the school whither I was
now sent, in Edinburgh. For there, living a rather lonely small
boy in the house of an aged relation, I found the Waverley Novels.
The rest is transport. A conscientious tutor dragged me through
the Latin grammar, and a constitutional dislike to being beaten on
the hands with a leather strap urged me to acquire a certain amount
of elementary erudition. But, for a year, I was a young hermit,
living with Scott in the "Waverleys" and the "Border Minstrelsy,"
with Pope, and Prior, and a translation of Ariosto, with Lever and
Dickens, David Copperfield and Charles O'Malley, Longfellow and
Mayne Reid, Dumas, and in brief, with every kind of light
literature that I could lay my hands upon. Carlyle did not escape
me; I vividly remember the helpless rage with which I read of the
Flight to Varennes. In his work on French novelists, Mr.
Saintsbury speaks of a disagreeable little boy, in a French
romance, who found Scott assommant, stunningly stupid. This was a
very odious little boy, it seems (I have not read his adventures),
and he came, as he deserved, to a bad end. Other and better boys,
I learn, find Scott "slow." Extraordinary boys! Perhaps "Ivanhoe"
was first favourite of yore; you cannot beat Front de Boeuf, the
assault on his castle, the tournament. No other tournament need
apply. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, greatly daring, has attempted to
enter the lists, but he is a mere Ralph the Hospitaller. Next, I
think, in order of delight, came "Quentin Durward," especially the
hero of the scar, whose name Thackeray could not remember,
Quentin's uncle. Then "The Black Dwarf," and Dugald, our dear
Rittmeister. I could not read "Rob Roy" then, nor later; nay, not
till I was forty. Now Di Vernon is the lady for me; the queen of
fiction, the peerless, the brave, the tender, and true.
The wisdom of the authorities decided that I was to read no more
novels, but, as an observer remarked, "I don't see what is the use
of preventing the boy from reading novels, for he's just reading
'Don Juan' instead." This was so manifestly no improvement, that
the ban on novels was tacitly withdrawn, or was permitted to become
a dead letter. They were far more enjoyable than Byron. The worst
that came of this was the suggestion of a young friend, whose life
had been adventurous--indeed he had served in the Crimea with the
Bashi Bazouks--that I should master the writings of Edgar Poe. I
do not think that the "Black Cat," and the "Fall of the House of
Usher," and the "Murders in the Rue Morgue," are very good reading
for a boy who is not peculiarly intrepid. Many a bad hour they
gave me, haunting me, especially, with a fear of being prematurely
buried, and of waking up before breakfast to find myself in a
coffin. Of all the books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only
author whom I wish I had reserved for later consideration, and whom
I cannot conscientiously recommend to children.
I had already enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in
"Vanity Fair," about the Battle of Waterloo. It was not like
Lever's accounts of battles, but it was enchanting. However,
"Vanity Fair" was under a taboo. It is not easy to say why; but
Mr. Thackeray himself informed a small boy, whom he found reading
"Vanity Fair" under the table, that he had better read something
else. What harm can the story do to a child? He reads about
Waterloo, about fat Jos, about little George and the pony, about
little Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is happy and unharmed.
Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very different and very
disagreeable world of a master's house, I was lucky enough to find
a charming library there. Most of Thackeray was on the shelves,
and Thackeray became the chief enchanter. As Henry Kingsley says,
a boy reads him and thinks he knows all about life. I do not think
that the mundane parts, about Lady Kew and her wiles, about Ethel
and the Marquis of Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one.
Ethel was a mystery, and not an interesting mystery, though one
used to copy Doyle's pictures of her, with the straight nose, the
impossible eyes, the impossible waist. It was not Ethel who
captivated us; it was Clive's youth and art, it was J. J., the
painter, it was jolly F. B. and his address to the maid about the
lobster. "A finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never seen. Does
not this solve the vexed question whether lobsters are fish, in the
French sense?" Then "The Rose and the Ring" came out. It was
worth while to be twelve years old, when the Christmas books were
written by Dickens and Thackeray. I got hold of "The Rose and the
Ring," I know, and of the "Christmas Carol," when they were damp
from the press. King Valoroso, and Bulbo, and Angelica were even
more delightful than Scrooge, and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck. One
remembers the fairy monarch more vividly, and the wondrous array of
egg-cups from which he sipped brandy--or was it right Nantes?--
still "going on sipping, I am sorry to say," even after "Valoroso
was himself again."
But, of all Thackeray's books, I suppose "Pendennis" was the
favourite. The delightful Marryat had entertained us with Peter
Simple and O'Brien (how good their flight through France is!) with
Mesty and Mr. Midshipman Easy, with Jacob Faithful (Mr. Thackeray's
favourite), and with Snarleyyow; but Marryat never made us wish to
run away to sea. That did not seem to be one's vocation. But the
story of Pen made one wish to run away to literature, to the
Temple, to streets where Brown, the famous reviewer, might be seen
walking with his wife and umbrella. The writing of poems "up to"
pictures, the beer with Warrington in the mornings, the suppers in
the back-kitchen, these were the alluring things, not society, and
Lady Rockminster, and Lord Steyne. Well, one has run away to
literature since, but where is the matutinal beer? Where is the
back-kitchen? Where are Warrington, and Foker, and F. B.? I have
never met them in this living world, though Brown, the celebrated
reviewer, is familiar to me, and also Mr. Sydney Scraper, of the
Oxford and Cambridge Club. Perhaps back-kitchens exist, perhaps
there are cakes and ale in the life literary, and F. B. may take
his walks by the Round Pond. But one never encounters these
rarities, and Bungay and Bacon are no longer the innocent and
ignorant rivals whom Thackeray drew. They do not give those
wonderful parties; Miss Bunnion has become quite conventional;
Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters; Mr. Wenham does not toady; Mr.
Wagg does not joke any more. The literary life is very like any
other, in London, or is it that we do not see it aright, not having
the eyes of genius? Well, a life on the ocean wave, too, may not
be so desirable as it seems in Marryat's novels: so many a lad
whom he tempted into the navy has discovered. The best part of the
existence of a man of letters is his looking forward to it through
the spectacles of Titmarsh.
One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a
friend of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was
himself a graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write,
of poetic and humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the
"Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to
whom, in this place, I am glad to confess my gratitude after all
these many years. While we were deep in the history of Pendennis
we were also being dragged through the Commentaries of Caius Julius
Caesar, through the Latin and Greek grammars, through Xenophon, and
the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing play of Euripides, the
"Phoenissae." I can never say how much I detested these authors,
who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from being attractive.
Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing to say,
and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner. Then
Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes,
seems arid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in
Cowper, instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His
observations on public schools were not uninteresting, but the
whole English school-work of those days was repugnant. One's
English education was all got out of school.
As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one
invented for one's self all the current arguments against
"compulsory Greek." What was the use of it, who ever spoke in it,
who could find any sense in it, or any interest? A language with
such cruel superfluities as a middle voice and a dual; a language
whose verbs were so fantastically irregular, looked like a barbaric
survival, a mere plague and torment. So one thought till Homer was
opened before us. Elsewhere I have tried to describe the vivid
delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way, which St.
Augustine failed to appreciate. Most boys not wholly immersed in
dulness felt it, I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the real
beginning of study. One had tried him, when one was very young, in
Pope, and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner, his
"fairs," and "swains." Homer seemed better reading in the absurd
"crib" which Mr. Buckley wrote for Bohn's series. Hector and Ajax,
in that disguise, were as great favourites as Horatius on the
Bridge, or the younger Tarquin. Scott, by the way, must have made
one a furious and consistent Legitimist. In reading the "Lays of
Ancient Rome," my sympathies were with the expelled kings, at least
with him who fought so well at Lake Regillus:-
"Titus, the youngest Tarquin,
Too good for such a breed."
Where -
"Valerius struck at Titus,
And lopped off half his crest;
But Titus stabbed Valerius
A span deep in the breast," -
I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy's hand, the
words "Well done, the Jacobites!" Perhaps my politics have never
gone much beyond this sentiment. But this is a digression from
Homer. The very sound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable roll
of the most various music, was enough to win the heart, even if the
words were not understood. But the words proved unexpectedly easy
to understand, full as they are of all nobility, all tenderness,
all courage, courtesy, and romance. The "Morte d'Arthur" itself,
which about this time fell into our hands, was not so dear as the
"Odyssey," though for a boy to read Sir Thomas Malory is to ride at
adventure in enchanted forests, to enter haunted chapels where a
light shines from the Graal, to find by lonely mountain meres the
magic boat of Sir Galahad.
After once being initiated into the mysteries of Greece by Homer,
the work at Greek was no longer tedious. Herodotus was a charming
and humorous story-teller, and, as for Thucydides, his account of
the Sicilian Expedition and its ending was one of the very rare
things in literature which almost, if not quite, brought tears into
one's eyes. Few passages, indeed, have done that, and they are
curiously discrepant. The first book that ever made me cry, of
which feat I was horribly ashamed, was "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with
the death of Eva, Topsy's friend. Then it was trying when Colonel
Newcome said Adsum, and the end of Socrates in the Phaedo moved one
more than seemed becoming--these, and a passage in the history of
Skalagrim Lamb's Tail, and, as I said, the ruin of the Athenians in
the Syracusan Bay. I have read these chapters in an old French
version derived through the Italian from a Latin translation of
Thucydides. Even in this far-descended form, the tale keeps its
pathos; the calm, grave stamp of that tragic telling cannot be worn
away by much handling, by long time, by the many changes of human
speech. "Others too," says Nicias, in that fatal speech, when -
"All was done that men may do,
And all was done in vain," -
"having achieved what men may, have borne what men must." This is
the very burden of life, and the last word of tragedy. For now all
is vain: courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the
goodness of Nicias, the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended,
all wasted, nothing of that brave venture abides, except torture,
defeat, and death. No play not poem of individual fortunes is so
moving as this ruin of a people; no modern story can stir us, with
all its eloquence, like the brief gravity of this ancient history.
Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom more wise than that which
bids us do what men may, and bear what men must. Such are the
lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, in the
morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried
in words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and
triumph, hope and despair. The world, since their day, has but
followed in the same round, which only seems new: has only made
the same experiments, and failed with the same failure, but less
gallantly and less gloriously.
One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after
winning the friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and
Catullus. One's application was far too desultory to make a
serious and accurate scholar.
I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by
accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly
imperfect accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my
mind and my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod
Stoddart, and "The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and
I do not regret it. Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made
so, but you can, in no way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and
inaccurate intelligence. The true scholar is one whom I envy,
almost as much as I respect him; but there is a kind of mental
short-sightedness, where accents and verbal niceties are concerned,
which cannot be sharpened into true scholarship. Yet, even for
those afflicted in this way, and with the malady of being "idle,
careless little boys," the ancient classics have a value for which
there is no substitute. There is a charm in finding ourselves--our
common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings
of men severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf
of historical time--which no other literary pleasure can equal.
Then there is to be added, as the university preacher observed,
"the pleasure of despising our fellow-creatures who do not know
Greek." Doubtless in that there is great consolation.
It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what proportion
of people really care for poetry, and how the love of poetry came
to them, and grew in them, and where and when it stopped. Modern
poets whom one meets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all.
Byron's Murray ceased to publish poetry in 1830, just when Tennyson
and Browning were striking their preludes. Probably Mr. Murray was
wise in his generation. But it is also likely that many persons,
even now, are attached to poetry, though they certainly do not buy
contemporary verse. How did the passion come to them? How long
did it stay? When did the Muse say good-bye? To myself, as I have
remarked, poetry came with Sir Walter Scott, for one read
Shakespeare as a child, rather in a kind of dream of fairyland and
enchanted isles, than with any distinct consciousness that one was
occupied with poetry. Next to Scott, with me, came Longfellow, who
pleased one as more reflective and tenderly sentimental, while the
reflections were not so deep as to be puzzling. I remember how
"Hiawatha" came out, when one was a boy, and how delightful was the
free forest life, and Minnehaha, and Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis.
One did not then know that the same charm, with a yet fresher dew
upon it, was to meet one later, in the "Kalewala." But, at that
time, one had no conscious pleasure in poetic style, except in such
ringing verse as Scott's, and Campbell's in his patriotic pieces.
The pleasure and enchantment of style first appealed to me, at
about the age of fifteen, when one read for the first time -
"So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord."
Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a name. When a
child I was told that a poet was coming to a house in the Highlands
where we chanced to be, a poet named Tennyson. "Is he a poet like
Sir Walter Scott?" I remember asking, and was told, "No, he was not
like Sir Walter Scott." Hearing no more of him, I was prowling
among the books in an ancient house, a rambling old place with a
ghost-room, where I found Tupper, and could not get on with
"Proverbial Philosophy." Next I tried Tennyson, and instantly a
new light of poetry dawned, a new music was audible, a new god came
into my medley of a Pantheon, a god never to be dethroned. "Men
scarcely know how beautiful fire is," Shelley says. I am convinced
that we scarcely know how great a poet Lord Tennyson is; use has
made him too familiar. The same hand has "raised the Table Round
again," that has written the sacred book of friendship, that has
lulled us with the magic of the "Lotus Eaters," and the melody of
"Tithonus." He has made us move, like his own Prince -
"Among a world of ghosts,
And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream."
He has enriched our world with conquests of romance; he has recut
and reset a thousand ancient gems of Greece and Rome; he has roused
our patriotism; he has stirred our pity; there is hardly a human
passion but he has purged it and ennobled it, including "this of
love." Truly, the Laureate remains the most various, the sweetest,
the most exquisite, the most learned, the most Virgilian of all
English poets, and we may pity the lovers of poetry who died before
Tennyson came.
Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory bookish boyhood. It
was not in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one's
self. But those exercises were seldom even written down; they
lived a little while in a memory which has lost them long ago. I
do remember me that I tried some of my attempts on my dear mother,
who said much what Dryden said to "Cousin Swift," "You will never
be a poet," a decision in which I straightway acquiesced. For to
rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quite another. A good deal of
mortification would be avoided if young men and maidens only kept
this obvious fact well posed in front of their vanity and their
ambition.
In these bookish memories I have said nothing about religion and
religious books, for various reasons. But, unlike other Scots of
the pen, I got no harm from "The Shorter Catechism," of which I
remember little, and neither then nor now was or am able to
understand a single sentence. Some precocious metaphysicians
comprehended and stood aghast at justification, sanctification,
adoption, and effectual calling. These, apparently, were necessary
processes in the Scottish spiritual life. But we were not told
what they meant, nor were we distressed by a sense that we had not
passed through them. From most children, one trusts, Calvinism ran
like water off a duck's back; unlucky were they who first absorbed,
and later were compelled to get rid of, "The Shorter Catechism!"
One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish. Young
men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a
course of reading." Distrust a course of reading! People who
really care for books READ ALL OF THEM. There is no other course.
Let this be a reply. No other answer shall they get from me, the
inquiring young men.
II
People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love. One
may venture to doubt whether everybody exactly knows which was his,
or her, first love, of men or women, but about our first loves in
books there can be no mistake. They were, and remain, the dearest
of all; after boyhood the bloom is off the literary rye. The first
parcel of these garrulities ended when the author left school, at
about the age of seventeen. One's literary equipment seems to have
been then almost as complete as it ever will be, one's tastes
definitely formed, one's favourites already chosen. As long as we
live we hope to read, but we never can "recapture the first fine
careless rapture." Besides, one begins to write, and that is
fatal. My own first essays were composed at school--for other
boys. Not long ago the gentleman who was then our English master
wrote to me, informing me he was my earliest public, and that he
had never credited my younger brother with the essays which that
unscrupulous lad ("I speak of him but brotherly") was accustomed to
present for his consideration.
On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's Hall, in the
University of St. Andrews. That is the oldest of Scotch
universities, and was founded by a papal bull. St. Leonard's Hall,
after having been a hospitium for pilgrims, a home for old ladies
(about 1500), and a college in the University, was now a kind of
cross between a master's house at school, and, as before 1750, a
college. We had more liberty than schoolboys, less than English
undergraduates. In the Scotch universities the men live scattered,
in lodgings, and only recently, at St. Andrews, have they begun to
dine together in hall. We had a common roof, common dinners, wore
scarlet gowns, possessed football and cricket clubs, and started,
of course, a kind of weekly magazine. It was only a manuscript
affair, and was profusely illustrated. For the only time in my
life, I was now an editor, under a sub-editor, who kept me up to my
work, and cut out my fine passages. The editor's duty was to write
most of the magazine--to write essays, reviews (of books by the
professors, very severe), novels, short stories, poems,
translations, also to illustrate these, and to "fag" his friends
for "copy" and drawings. A deplorable flippancy seems, as far as
one remembers, to have been the chief characteristic of the
periodical--flippancy and an abundant use of the supernatural.
These were the days of Lord' Lytton's "Strange Story," which I
continue to think a most satisfactory romance. Inspired by Lord
Lytton, and aided by the University library, I read Cornelius
Agrippa, Trithemius, Petrus de Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled
with Iamblichus and Plotinus.
These are really but disappointing writers. It soon became evident
enough that the devil was not to be raised by their prescriptions,
that the philosopher's stone was beyond the reach of the amateur.
Iamblichus is particularly obscure and tedious. To any young
beginner I would recommend Petrus de Abano, as the most adequate
and gruesome of the school, for "real deevilry and pleesure," while
in the wilderness of Plotinus there are many beautiful passages and
lofty speculations. Two winters in the Northern University, with
the seamy side of school life left behind, among the kindest of
professors--Mr. Sellar, Mr. Ferrier, Mr. Shairp--in the society of
the warden, Mr. Rhoades, and of many dear old friends, are the
happiest time in my life. This was true literary leisure, even if
it was not too well employed, and the religio loci should be a
liberal education in itself. We had debating societies--I hope I
am now forgiven for an attack on the character of Sir William
Wallace, latro quidam, as the chronicler calls him, "a certain
brigand." But I am for ever writing about St. Andrews--writing
inaccurately, too, the Scotch critics declare. "Farewell," we
cried, "dear city of youth and dream," eternally dear and sacred.
Here we first made acquaintance with Mr. Browning, guided to his
works by a parody which a lady wrote in our little magazine. Mr.
Browning was not a popular poet in 1861. His admirers were few, a
little people, but they were not then in the later mood of
reverence, they did not awfully question the oracles, as in after
years. They read, they admired, they applauded, on occasion they
mocked, good-humouredly. The book by which Mr. Browning was best
known was the two green volumes of "Men and Women." In these, I
still think, is the heart of his genius beating most strenuously
and with an immortal vitality. Perhaps this, for its compass, is
the collection of poetry the most various and rich of modern
English times, almost of any English times. But just as Mr.
Fitzgerald cared little for what Lord Tennyson wrote after 1842, so
I have never been able to feel quite the same enthusiasm for Mr.
Browning's work after "Men and Women." He seems to have more
influence, though that influence is vague, on persons who chiefly
care for thought, than on those who chiefly care for poetry. I
have met a lady who had read "The Ring and the Book" often, the
"Lotus Eaters" not once. Among such students are Mr. Browning's
disciples of the Inner Court: I dwell but in the Court of the
Gentiles. While we all--all who attempt rhyme--have more or less
consciously imitated the manner of Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne,
Mr. Rossetti, such imitations of Mr. Browning are uncommonly
scarce. He is lucky enough not to have had the seed of his flower
stolen and sown everywhere till -
"Once again the people
Called it but a weed."
The other new poet of these days was Mr. Clough, who has many
undergraduate qualities. But his peculiar wistful scepticism in
religion had then no influence on such of us as were still happily
in the ages of faith. Anything like doubt comes less of reading,
perhaps, than of the sudden necessity which, in almost every life,
puts belief on her trial, and cries for an examination of the
creeds hitherto held upon authority, and by dint of use and wont.
In a different way one can hardly care for Mr. Matthew Arnold, as a
boy, till one has come under the influence of Oxford. So Mr.
Browning was the only poet added to my pantheon at St. Andrews,
though Macaulay then was admitted and appeared to be more the true
model of a prose writer than he seems in the light of later
reflection. Probably we all have a period of admiring Carlyle
almost exclusively. College essays, when the essayist cares for
his work, are generally based on one or the other. Then they
recede into the background. As for their thought, we cannot for
ever remain disciples. We begin to see how much that looks like
thought is really the expression of temperament, and how individual
a thing temperament is, how each of us must construct his world for
himself, or be content to wait for an answer and a synthesis "in
that far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves." So,
for one, in these high matters, I must be content as a "masterless
man" swearing by no philosopher, unless he be the imperial Stoic of
the hardy heart, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
Perhaps nothing in education encourages this incredulity about
"masters" of thought like the history of philosophy. The professor
of moral philosophy, Mr. Ferrier, was a famous metaphysician and
scholar. His lectures on "The History of Greek Philosophy" were an
admirable introduction to the subject, afterwards pursued, in the
original authorities, at Oxford. Mr. Ferrier was an exponent of
other men's ideas so fair and persuasive that, in each new school,
we thought we had discovered the secret. We were physicists with
Thales and that pre-Socratic "company of gallant gentlemen" for
whom Sydney Smith confessed his lack of admiration. We were now
Empedocleans, now believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in
Plato, now in Aristotle. In each lecture our professor set up a
new master and gently disintegrated him in the next. "Amurath to
Amurath succeeds," as Mr. T. H. Green used to say at Oxford. He
himself became an Amurath, a sultan of thought, even before his
apotheosis as the guide of that bewildered clergyman, Mr. Robert
Elsmere. At Oxford, when one went there, one found Mr. Green
already in the position of a leader of thought, and of young men.
He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on Aristotle, and of him
eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, "HE KNOWS! HE
KNOWS!" What was it that Mr. Green knew? Where was the secret?
To a mind already sceptical about masters, it seemed that the
secret (apart from the tutor's noble simplicity and rare elevation
of character) was a knack of translating St. John and Aristotle
alike into a terminology which we then believed to be Hegelian.
Hegel we knew, not in the original German, but in lectures and in
translations. Reasoning from these inadequate premises, it seemed
to me that Hegel had invented evolution before Mr. Darwin, that his
system showed, so to speak, the spirit at work in evolution, the
something within the wheels. But this was only a personal
impression made on a mind which knew Darwin, and physical
speculations in general, merely in the vague popular way. Mr.
Green's pupils could generally write in his own language, more or
less, and could "envisage" things, as we said then, from his point
of view. To do this was believed, probably without cause, to be
useful in examinations. For one, I could never take it much more
seriously, never believed that "the Absolute," as the Oxford
Spectator said, had really been "got into a corner." The Absolute
has too often been apparently cornered, too often has escaped from
that situation. Somewhere in an old notebook I believe I have a
portrait in pencil of Mr. Green as he wrestled at lecture with
Aristotle, with the Notion, with his chair and table. Perhaps he
was the last of that remarkable series of men, who may have begun
with Wycliffe, among whom Newman's is a famous name, that were
successively accepted at Oxford as knowing something esoteric, as
possessing a shrewd guess at the secret.
"None the less
I still came out no wiser than I went."
All of these masters and teachers made their mark, probably won
their hold, in the first place, by dint of character, not of some
peculiar views of theology and philosophy. Doubtless it was the
same with Socrates, with Buddha. To be like them, not to believe
with them, is the thing needful. But the younger we are, the less,
perhaps, we see this clearly, and we persuade ourselves that there
is some mystery in these men's possession, some piece of knowledge,
some method of thinking which will lead us to certainty and to
peace. Alas, their secret is incommunicable, and there is no more
a philosophic than there is a royal road to the City.
This may seem a digression from Adventures among Books into the
Book of Human Life. But while much of education is still orally
communicated by lectures and conversations, many thoughts which are
to be found in books, Greek or German, reach us through the
hearing. There are many pupils who can best be taught in this way;
but, for one, if there be aught that is desirable in a book, I
then, as now, preferred, if I could, to go to the book for it.
Yet it is odd that one remembers so little of one's undergraduate
readings, apart from the constant study of the ancient classics,
which might not be escaped. Of these the calm wisdom of Aristotle,
in moral thought and in politics, made perhaps the deepest
impression. Probably politicians are the last people who read
Aristotle's "Politics." The work is, indeed, apt to disenchant one
with political life. It is melancholy to see the little Greek
states running the regular round--monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny,
democracy in all its degrees, the "ultimate democracy" of plunder,
lawlessness, license of women, children, and slaves, and then
tyranny again, or subjection to some foreign power. In politics,
too, there is no secret of success, of the happy life for all.
There is no such road to the City, either democratic or royal.
This is the lesson which Aristotle's "Polities" impresses on us,
this and the impossibility of imposing ideal constitutions on
mankind.
"Whate'er is best administered is best." These are some of the
impressions made at Oxford by the studies of the schools, the more
or less inevitable "curricoolum," as the Scotch gentleman
pronounced the word. But at Oxford, for most men, the regular work
of the schools is only a small part of the literary education.
People read, in different degrees, according to their private
tastes. There are always a few men, at least, who love literary
studies for their own sake, regardless of lectures and of
"classes." In my own time I really believe you could know nothing
which might not "pay" in the schools and prove serviceable in
examinations. But a good deal depended on being able to use your
knowledge by way of literary illustration. Perhaps the cleverest
of my own juniors, since very well known in letters, did not use
his own special vein, even when he had the chance, in writing
answers to questions in examinations. Hence his academic success
was much below his deserts. For my own part, I remember my tutor
saying, "Don't write as if you were writing for a penny paper."
Alas, it was "a prediction, cruel, smart." But, "as yet no sin was
dreamed."
At my own college we had to write weekly essays, alternately in
English and Latin. This might have been good literary training,
but I fear the essays were not taken very seriously. The chief
object was to make the late learned Dr. Scott bound on his chair by
paradoxes. But nobody ever succeeded. He was experienced in
trash. As for what may be called unacademic literature, there were
not many essays in that art. There have been very literary
generations, as when Corydon and Thyrsis "lived in Oxford as if it
had been a great country house;" so Corydon confessed. Probably
many of the poems by Mr. Matthew Arnold and many of Mr. Swinburne's
early works were undergraduate poems. A later generation produced
"Love in Idleness," a very pleasing volume. But the gods had not
made us poetical. In those days I remember picking up, in the
Union Reading-room, a pretty white quarto, "Atalanta in Calydon,"
by A. C. Swinburne. Only once had I seen Mr. Swinburne's name
before, signing a brief tale in Once a Week. "Atalanta" was a
revelation; there was a new and original poet here, a Balliol man,
too. In my own mind "Atalanta" remains the best, the most
beautiful, the most musical of Mr. Swinburne's many poems. He
instantly became the easily parodied model of undergraduate
versifiers.
Swinburnian prize poems, even, were attempted, without success. As
yet we had not seen Mr. Matthew Arnold's verses. I fell in love
with them, one long vacation, and never fell out of love. He is
not, and cannot be, the poet of the wide world, but his charm is
all the more powerful over those whom he attracts and subdues. He
is the one Oxford poet of Oxford, and his "Scholar Gypsy" is our
"Lycidas." At this time he was Professor of Poetry; but, alas, he
lectured just at the hour when wickets were pitched on Cowley
Marsh, and I never was present at his discourses, at his humorous
prophecies of England's fate, which are coming all too true. So
many weary lectures had to be attended, could not be "cut," that we
abstained from lectures of supererogation, so to speak. For the
rest there was no "literary movement" among contemporary
undergraduates. They read for the schools, and they rowed and
played cricket. We had no poets, except the stroke of the Corpus
boat, Mr. Bridges, and he concealed his courtship of the Muse.
Corpus is a small college, but Mr. Bridges pulled its boat to the
proud place of second on the river. B. N. C. was the head boat,
and even B. N. C. did Corpus bump. But the triumph was brief. B.
N. C. made changes in its crew, got a new ship, drank the foaming
grape, and bumped Corpus back. I think they went head next year,
but not that year. Thus Mr. Bridges, as Kingsley advises, was
doing noble deeds, not dreaming them, at that moment.
There existed a periodical entirely devoted to verse, but nobody
knew anybody who wrote in it. A comic journal was started; I
remember the pride with which when a freshman, I received an
invitation to join its councils as an artist. I was to do the
caricatures of all things. Now, methought, I shall meet the Oxford
wits of whom I have read. But the wits were unutterably
disappointing, and the whole thing died early and not lamented.
Only one piece of academic literature obtained and deserved
success. This was The Oxford Spectator, a most humorous little
periodical, in shape and size like Addison's famous journal. The
authors were Mr. Reginald Copleston, now Bishop of Colombo, Mr.
Humphry Ward, and Mr. Nolan, a great athlete, who died early.
There have been good periodicals since; many amusing things occur
in the Echoes from the Oxford Magazine, but the Spectator was the
flower of academic journals. "When I look back to my own
experience," says the Spectator, "I find one scene, of all Oxford,
most deeply engraved upon 'the mindful tablets of my soul.' And
yet not a scene, but a fairy compound of smell and sound, and sight
and thought. The wonderful scent of the meadow air just above
Iffley, on a hot May evening, and the gay colours of twenty boats
along the shore, the poles all stretched out from the bank to set
the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of 'ten seconds more,' all
down from the green barge to the lasher. And yet that unrivalled
moment is only typical of all the term; the various elements of
beauty and pleasure are concentrated there."
Unfortunately, life at Oxford is not all beauty and pleasure.
Things go wrong somehow. Life drops her happy mask. But this has
nothing to do with books.
About books, however, I have not many more confessions that I care
to make. A man's old self is so far away that he can speak about
it and its adventures almost as if he were speaking about another
who is dead. After taking one's degree, and beginning to write a
little for publication, the topic has a tendency to become much
more personal. My last undergraduate literary discoveries were of
France and the Renaissance. Accidentally finding out that I could
read French, I naturally betook myself to Balzac. If you read him
straight on, without a dictionary, you begin to learn a good many
words. The literature of France has been much more popular in
England lately, but thirty years agone it was somewhat neglected.
There does seem to be something in French poetry which fails to
please "the German paste in our composition." Mr. Matthew Arnold,
a disciple of Sainte-Beuve, never could appreciate French poetry.
A poet-critic has even remarked that the French language is nearly
incapable of poetry! We cannot argue in such matters, where all
depends on the taste and the ear.
Our ancestors, like the author of the "Faery Queen," translated and
admired Du Bellay and Ronsard; to some critics of our own time this
taste seems a modish affectation. For one, I have ever found an
original charm in the lyrics of the Pleiad, and have taken great
delight in Hugo's amazing variety of music, in the romance of
Alfred de Musset, in the beautiful cameos of Gautier. What is
poetical, if not the "Song of Roland," the only true national epic
since Homer? What is frank, natural verse, if not that of the old
Pastourelles? Where is there naivete of narrative and unconscious
charm, if not in Aucassin et Nicolette? In the long normally
developed literature of France, so variously rich, we find the
nearest analogy to the literature of Greece, though that of England
contains greater masterpieces, and her verse falls more winningly
on the ear. France has no Shakespeare and no Milton; we have no
Moliere and no "Song of Roland." One star differs from another in
glory, but it is a fortunate moment when this planet of France
swims into our ken. Many of our generation saw it first through
Mr. Swinburne's telescope, heard of it in his criticisms, and are
grateful to that watcher of the skies, even if we do not share all
his transports. There then arose at Oxford, out of old French, and
old oak, and old china, a "school" or "movement." It was
aesthetic, and an early purchaser of Mr. William Morris's wall
papers. It existed ten or twelve years before the public "caught
on," as they say, to these delights. But, except one or two of the
masters, the school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing
at their own performances. There was more fun than fashion in the
cult, which was later revived, developed, and gossiped about more
than enough.
To a writer now dead, and then first met, I am specially bound in
gratitude--the late Mr. J. F. M'Lennan. Mr. M'Lennan had the most
acute and ingenious of minds which I have encountered. His
writings on early marriage and early religion were revelations
which led on to others. The topic of folk-lore, and the
development of custom and myths, is not generally attractive, to be
sure. Only a few people seem interested in that spectacle, so full
of surprises--the development of all human institutions, from fairy
tales to democracy. In beholding it we learn how we owe all
things, humanly speaking, to the people and to genius. The natural
people, the folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with the
stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: and genius has selected from
the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into
romance, myth into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery into
gorgeous ritual. The world has been educated, but not as man would
have trained and taught it. "He led us by a way we knew not," led,
and is leading us, we know not whither; we follow in fear.
The student of this lore can look back and see the long trodden way
behind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and over
burning sands. He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the
towns where the race has tarried, for shorter times or longer,
strange places many of them, and strangely haunted, desolate
dwellings and inhospitable. But the scarce visible tracks converge
at last on the beaten ways, the ways to that city whither mankind
is wandering, and which it may never win. We have a foreboding of
a purpose which we know not, a sense as of will, working, as we
would not have worked, to a hidden end.
This is the lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or
anthropology, which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It
may become the most attractive and serious of the sciences;
certainly it is rich in strange curiosities, like those mystic
stones which were fingered and arrayed by the pupils in that
allegory of Novalis. I am not likely to regret the accident which
brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness which led me
to examine the other fragments of antiquity. But the poetry and
the significance of them are apt to be hidden by the enormous crowd
of details. Only late we find the true meaning of what seems like
a mass of fantastic, savage eccentricities. I very well remember
the moment when it occurred to me, soon after taking my degree,
that the usual ideas about some of these matters were the reverse
of the truth, that the common theory had to be inverted. The
notion was "in the air," it had already flashed on Mannhardt,
probably, but, like the White Knight in "Alice," I claimed it for
"my own invention."
These reminiscences and reflections have now been produced as far
as 1872, or thereabouts, and it is not my intention to pursue them
further, nor to speak of any living contemporaries who have not won
their way to the classical. In writing of friends and teachers at
Oxford, I have not ventured to express gratitude to those who still
live, still teach, still are the wisest and kindest friends of the
hurrying generations. It is a silence not of thanklessness, but of
respect and devotion. About others--contemporaries, or juniors by
many years--who have instructed, consoled, strengthened, and amused
us, we must also be silent.
CHAPTER II: RECOLLECTIONS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TUSITALA
We spoke of a rest in a Fairy hill of the north, but he
Far from the firths of the east and the racing tides of the west
Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite southern sea,
Weary and well content, in his grave on the Vaea crest.
Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales,
Giver of counsel and dreams, a wonder, a world's delight,
Looks o'er the labour of men in the plain and the hill, and the
sails
Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night.
Winds of the west and the east in the rainy season blow,
Heavy with perfume, and all his fragrant woods are wet,
Winds of the east and the west as they wander to and fro,
Bear him the love of the lands he loved, and the long regret.
Once we were kindest, he said, when leagues of the limitless sea,
Flowed between us, but now that no range of the refluent tides
Sunders us each from each, yet nearer we seem to be,
When only the unbridged stream of the River of Death divides.
Before attempting to give any "reminiscences" of Mr. Stevenson, it
is right to observe that reminiscences of him can best be found in
his own works. In his essay on "Child's Play," and in his "Child's
Garden of Verse," he gave to the world his vivid recollections of
his imaginative infancy. In other essays he spoke of his boyhood,
his health, his dreams, his methods of work and study. "The
Silverado Squatters" reveals part of his experience in America.
The Parisian scenes in "The Wrecker" are inspired by his sojourn in
French Bohemia; his journeys are recorded in "Travels with a
Donkey" and "An Inland Voyage"; while his South Sea sketches, which
appeared in periodicals, deal with his Oceanic adventures. He was
the most autobiographical of authors, with an egoism nearly as
complete, and to us as delightful, as the egoism of Montaigne.
Thus, the proper sources of information about the author of
"Kidnapped" are in his delightful books.
"John's own John," as Dr. Holmes says, may be very unlike his
neighbour's John; but in the case of Mr. Stevenson, his Louis was
very similar to my Louis; I mean that, as he presents his
personality to the world in his writings, even so did that
personality appear to me in our intercourse. The man I knew was
always a boy.
"Sing me a song of the lad that is gone,"
he wrote about Prince Charlie, but in his own case the lad was
never "gone." Like Keats and Shelley, he was, and he looked, of
the immortally young. He and I were at school together, but I was
an elderly boy of seventeen, when he was lost in the crowd of
"gytes," as the members of the lowest form are called. Like all
Scotch people, we had a vague family connection; a great-uncle of
his, I fancy, married an aunt of my own, called for her beauty,
"The Flower of Ettrick." So we had both heard; but these things
were before our day. A lady of my kindred remembers carrying
Stevenson about when he was "a rather peevish baby," and I have
seen a beautiful photograph of him, like one of Raffael's children,
taken when his years were three or four. But I never had heard of
his existence till, in 1873, I think, I was at Mentone, in the
interests of my health. Here I met Mr. Sidney Colvin, now of the
British Museum, and, with Mr. Colvin, Stevenson. He looked as, in
my eyes, he always did look, more like a lass than a lad, with a
rather long, smooth oval face, brown hair worn at greater length
than is common, large lucid eyes, but whether blue or brown I
cannot remember, if brown, certainly light brown. On appealing to
the authority of a lady, I learn that brown WAS the hue. His
colour was a trifle hectic, as is not unusual at Mentone, but he
seemed, under his big blue cloak, to be of slender, yet agile
frame. He was like nobody else whom I ever met. There was a sort
of uncommon celerity in changing expression, in thought and speech.
His cloak and Tyrolese hat (he would admit the innocent
impeachment) were decidedly dear to him. On the frontier of Italy,
why should he not do as the Italians do? It would have been well
for me if I could have imitated the wearing of the cloak!
I shall not deny that my first impression was not wholly
favourable. "Here," I thought, "is one of your aesthetic young
men, though a very clever one." What the talk was about, I do not
remember; probably of books. Mr. Stevenson afterwards told me that
I had spoken of Monsieur Paul de St. Victor, as a fine writer, but
added that "he was not a British sportsman." Mr. Stevenson
himself, to my surprise, was unable to walk beyond a very short
distance, and, as it soon appeared, he thought his thread of life
was nearly spun. He had just written his essay, "Ordered South,"
the first of his published works, for his "Pentland Rising"
pamphlet was unknown, a boy's performance. On reading "Ordered
South," I saw, at once, that here was a new writer, a writer
indeed; one who could do what none of us, nous autres, could rival,
or approach. I was instantly "sealed of the Tribe of Louis," an
admirer, a devotee, a fanatic, if you please. At least my taste
has never altered. From this essay it is plain enough that the
author (as is so common in youth, but with better reason than many
have) thought himself doomed. Most of us have gone through that,
the Millevoye phase, but who else has shown such a wise and gay
acceptance of the apparently inevitable? We parted; I remember
little of our converse, except a shrewd and hearty piece of
encouragement given me by my junior, who already knew so much more
of life than his senior will ever do. For he ran forth to embrace
life like a lover: HIS motto was never Lucy Ashton's-
"Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die."
Mr. Stevenson came presently to visit me at Oxford. I make no hand
of reminiscences; I remember nothing about what we did or said,
with one exception, which is not going to be published. I heard of
him, writing essays in the Portfolio and the Cornhill, those
delightful views of life at twenty-five, so brave, so real, so
vivid, so wise, so exquisite, which all should know. How we looked
for "R. L. S." at the end of an article, and how devout was our
belief, how happy our pride, in the young one!
About 1878, I think (I was now a slave of the quill myself), I
received a brief note from Mr. Stevenson, introducing to me the
person whom, in his essay on his old college magazine, he called
"Glasgow Brown." What his real name was, whence he came, whence
the money came, I never knew. G. B. was going to start a weekly
Tory paper. Would I contribute? G. B. came to see me. Mr.
Stevenson has described him, NOT as I would have described him:
like Mr. Bill Sikes's dog, I have the Christian peculiarity of not
liking dogs "as are not of my breed." G. B.'s paper, London, was
to start next week. He had no writer of political leading
articles. Would I do a "leader"? But I was NOT in favour of Lord
Lytton's Afghan policy. How could I do a Tory leader? Well, I did
a neutral-tinted thing, with citations from Aristophanes! I found
presently some other scribes for G. B.
What a paper that was! I have heard that G. B. paid in handfuls of
gold, in handfuls of bank-notes. Nobody ever read London, or
advertised in it, or heard of it. It was full of the most
wonderfully clever verses in old French forms. They were (it
afterwards appeared) by Mr. W. E. Henley. Mr. Stevenson himself
astonished and delighted the public of London (that is, the
contributors) by his "New Arabian Nights." Nobody knew about them
but ourselves, a fortunate few. Poor G. B. died and Mr. Henley
became the editor. I may not name the contributors, the flower of
the young lions, elderly lions now, there is a new race. But one
lion, a distinguished and learned lion, said already that fiction,
not essay, was Mr. Stevenson's field. Well, both fields were his,
and I cannot say whether I would be more sorry to lose Virginibus
Puerisque and "Studies of Men and Books," or "Treasure Island "and
"Catriona." With the decease of G. B., Pactolus dried up in its
mysterious sources, London struggled and disappeared.
Mr. Stevenson was in town, now and again, at the old Saville Club,
in Saville Row, which had the tiniest and blackest of smoking-
rooms. Here, or somewhere, he spoke to me of an idea of a tale, a
Man who was Two Men. I said "'William Wilson' by Edgar Poe," and
declared that it would never do. But his "Brownies," in a vision
of the night, showed him a central scene, and he wrote "Jekyll and
Hyde." My "friend of these days and of all days," Mr. Charles
Longman, sent me the manuscript. In a very common-place London
drawing-room, at 10.30 P.M., I began to read it. Arriving at the
place where Utterson the lawyer, and the butler wait outside the
Doctor's room, I threw down the manuscript and fled in a hurry. I
had no taste for solitude any more. The story won its great
success, partly by dint of the moral (whatever that may be), more
by its terrible, lucid, visionary power. I remember Mr. Stevenson
telling me, at this time, that he was doing some "regular
crawlers," for this purist had a boyish habit of slang, and I THINK
it was he who called Julius Caesar "the howlingest cheese who ever
lived." One of the "crawlers" was "Thrawn Janet"; after "Wandering
Willie's Tale" (but certainly AFTER it), to my taste, it seems the
most wonderful story of the "supernatural" in our language.
Mr. Stevenson had an infinite pleasure in Boisgobey, Montepin, and,
of course, Gaboriau. There was nothing of the "cultured person"
about him. Concerning a novel dear to culture, he said that he
would die by my side, in the last ditch, proclaiming it the worst
fiction in the world. I make haste to add that I have only known
two men of letters as free as Mr. Stevenson, not only from literary
jealousy, but from the writer's natural, if exaggerated, distaste
for work which, though in his own line, is very different in aim
and method from his own. I do not remember another case in which
he dispraised any book. I do remember his observations on a novel
then and now very popular, but not to his taste, nor, indeed, by
any means, impeccable, though stirring; his censure and praise were
both just. From his occasional fine efforts, the author of this
romance, he said, should have cleared away acres of brushwood, of
ineffectual matter. It was so, no doubt, as the writer spoken of
would be ready to acknowledge. But he was an improviser of genius,
and Mr. Stevenson was a conscious artist.
Of course we did by no means always agree in literary estimates; no
two people do. But when certain works--in his line in one way--
were stupidly set up as rivals of his, the person who was most
irritated was not he, but his equally magnanimous contemporary.
There was no thought of rivalry or competition in either mind. The
younger romancists who arose after Mr. Stevenson went to Samoa were
his friends by correspondence; from them, who never saw his face, I
hear of his sympathy and encouragement. Every writer knows the
special temptations of his tribe: they were temptations not even
felt, I do believe, by Mr. Stevenson. His heart was far too high,
his nature was in every way as generous as his hand was open. It
is in thinking of these things that one feels afresh the greatness
of the world's loss; for "a good heart is much more than style,"
writes one who knew him only by way of letters.
It is a trivial reminiscence that we once plotted a Boisgobesque
story together. There was a prisoner in a Muscovite dungeon.
"We'll extract information from him," I said.
"How?"
"With corkscrews."
But the mere suggestion of such a process was terribly distasteful
to him; not that I really meant to go to these extreme lengths. We
never, of course, could really have worked together; and, his
maladies increasing, he became more and more a wanderer, living at
Bournemouth, at Davos, in the Grisons, finally, as all know, in
Samoa. Thus, though we corresponded, not unfrequently, I never was
of the inner circle of his friends. Among men there were school or
college companions, or companions of Paris or Fontainebleau,
cousins, like Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, or a stray senior, like Mr.
Sidney Colvin. From some of them, or from Mr. Stevenson himself, I
have heard tales of "the wild Prince and Poins." That he and a
friend travelled utterly without baggage, buying a shirt where a
shirt was needed, is a fact, and the incident is used in "The
Wrecker." Legend says that once he and a friend DID possess a bag,
and also, nobody ever knew why, a large bottle of scent. But there
was no room for the bottle in the bag, so Mr. Stevenson spilled the
whole contents over the other man's head, taking him unawares, that
nothing might be wasted. I think the tale of the endless
staircase, in "The Wrecker," is founded on fact, so are the stories
of the atelier, which I have heard Mr. Stevenson narrate at the
Oxford and Cambridge Club. For a nocturnal adventure, in the
manner of the "New Arabian Nights," a learned critic already spoken
of must be consulted. It is not my story. In Paris, at a cafe, I
remember that Mr. Stevenson heard a Frenchman say the English were
cowards. He got up and slapped the man's face.
"Monsieur, vous m'avez frappe!" said the Gaul.
"A ce qu'il parait," said the Scot, and there it ended. He also
told me that years ago he was present at a play, I forget what
play, in Paris, where the moral hero exposes a woman "with a
history." He got up and went out, saying to himself:
"What a play! what a people!"
"Ah, Monsieur, vous etes bien jeune!" said an old French gentleman.
Like a right Scot, Mr. Stevenson was fond of "our auld ally of
France," to whom our country and our exiled kings owed so much.
I rather vaguely remember another anecdote. He missed his train
from Edinburgh to London, and his sole portable property was a
return ticket, a meerschaum pipe, and a volume of Mr. Swinburne's
poems. The last he found unmarketable; the pipe, I think, he made
merchandise of, but somehow his provender for the day's journey
consisted in one bath bun, which he could not finish.
These trivial tales illustrate a period in his life and adventures
which I only know by rumour. Our own acquaintance was, to a great
degree, literary and bookish. Perhaps it began "with a slight
aversion," but it seemed, like madeira, to be ripened and improved
by his long sea voyage; and the news of his death taught me, at
least, the true nature of the affection which he was destined to
win. Indeed, our acquaintance was like the friendship of a wild
singing bird and of a punctual, domesticated barn-door fowl, laying
its daily "article" for the breakfast-table of the citizens. He
often wrote to me from Samoa, sometimes with news of native manners
and folklore. He sent me a devil-box, the "luck" of some strange
island, which he bought at a great price. After parting with its
"luck," or fetish (a shell in a curious wooden box), the island was
unfortunate, and was ravaged by measles.
I occasionally sent out books needed for Mr. Stevenson's studies,
of which more will be said. But I must make it plain that, in the
body, we met but rarely. His really intimate friends were Mr.
Colvin and Mr. Baxter (who managed the practical side of his
literary business between them); Mr. Henley (in partnership with
whom he wrote several plays); his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson;
and, among other literati, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr.
Saintsbury, Mr Walter Pollock, knew him well. The best portrait of
Mr. Stevenson that I know is by Sir. W. B. Richmond, R.A., and is
in that gentleman's collection of contemporaries, with the effigies
of Mr. Holman Hunt, Mr. William Morris, Mr. Browning, and others.
It is unfinished, owing to an illness which stopped the sittings,
and does not show the subject at his best, physically speaking.
There is also a brilliant, slight sketch, almost a caricature, by
Mr. Sargent. It represents Mr. Stevenson walking about the room in
conversation.
The people I have named, or some of them, knew Mr. Stevenson more
intimately than I can boast of doing. Unlike each other, opposites
in a dozen ways, we always were united by the love of letters, and
of Scotland, our dear country. He was a patriot, yet he spoke his
mind quite freely about Burns, about that apparent want of heart in
the poet's amours, which our countrymen do not care to hear
mentioned. Well, perhaps, for some reasons, it had to be mentioned
once, and so no more of it.
Mr. Stevenson possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of
making other men fall in love with him. I mean that he excited a
passionate admiration and affection, so much so that I verily
believe some men were jealous of other men's place in his liking.
I once met a stranger who, having become acquainted with him, spoke
of him with a touching fondness and pride, his fancy reposing, as
it seemed, in a fond contemplation of so much genius and charm.
What was so taking in him? and how is one to analyse that dazzling
surface of pleasantry, that changeful shining humour, wit, wisdom,
recklessness; beneath which beat the most kind and tolerant of
hearts?
People were fond of him, and people were proud of him: his
achievements, as it were, sensibly raised their pleasure in the
world, and, to them, became parts of themselves. They warmed their
hands at that centre of light and heat. It is not every success
which has these beneficent results. We see the successful sneered
at, decried, insulted, even when success is deserved. Very little
of all this, hardly aught of all this, I think, came in Mr.
Stevenson's way. After the beginning (when the praises of his
earliest admirers were irritating to dull scribes) he found the
critics fairly kind, I believe, and often enthusiastic. He was so
much his own severest critic that he probably paid little heed to
professional reviewers. In addition to his "Rathillet," and other
MSS. which he destroyed, he once, in the Highlands, long ago, lost
a portmanteau with a batch of his writings. Alas, that he should
have lost or burned anything! "King's chaff," says our country
proverb, "is better than other folk's corn."
I have remembered very little, or very little that I can write, and
about our last meeting, when he was so near death, in appearance,
and so full of courage--how can I speak? His courage was a strong
rock, not to be taken or subdued. When unable to utter a single
word, his pencilled remarks to his attendants were pithy and
extremely characteristic. This courage and spiritual vitality made
one hope that he would, if he desired it, live as long as Voltaire,
that reed among oaks. There were of course, in so rare a
combination of characteristics, some which were not equally to the
liking of all. He was highly original in costume, but, as his
photographs are familiar, the point does not need elucidation.
Life was a drama to him, and he delighted, like his own British
admirals, to do things with a certain air. He observed himself, I
used to think, as he observed others, and "saw himself" in every
part he played. There was nothing of the cabotin in this self-
consciousness; it was the unextinguished childish passion for
"playing at things" which remained with him. I have a theory that
all children possess genius, and that it dies out in the generality
of mortals, abiding only with people whose genius the world is
forced to recognise. Mr. Stevenson illustrates, and perhaps partly
suggested, this private philosophy of mine.
I have said very little; I have no skill in reminiscences, no art
to bring the living aspect of the man before those who never knew
him. I faintly seem to see the eager face, the light nervous
figure, the fingers busy with rolling cigarettes; Mr. Stevenson
talking, listening, often rising from his seat, standing, walking
to and fro, always full of vivid intelligence, wearing a mysterious
smile. I remember one pleasant dark afternoon, when he told me
many tales of strange adventures, narratives which he had heard
about a murderous lonely inn, somewhere in the States. He was as
good to hear as to read. I do not recollect much of that delight
in discussion, in controversy, which he shows in his essay on
conversation, where he describes, I believe, Mr. Henley as
"Burley," and Mr. Symonds as "Opalstein." He had great pleasure in
the talk of the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin, which was both
various and copious. But in these noctes coenaeque deum I was
never a partaker. In many topics, such as angling, golf, cricket,
whereon I am willingly diffuse, Mr. Stevenson took no interest. He
was very fond of boating and sailing in every kind; he hazarded his
health by long expeditions among the fairy isles of ocean, but he
"was not a British sportsman," though for his measure of strength a
good pedestrian, a friend of the open air, and of all who live and
toil therein.
As to his literary likings, they appear in his own confessions. He
revelled in Dickens, but, about Thackeray--well, I would rather
have talked to somebody else! To my amazement, he was of those (I
think) who find Thackeray "cynical." "He takes you into a garden,
and then pelts you with"--horrid things! Mr. Stevenson, on the
other hand, had a free admiration of Mr. George Meredith. He did
not so easily forgive the longueus and lazinesses of Scott, as a
Scot should do. He read French much; Greek only in translations.
Literature was, of course, his first love, but he was actually an
advocate at the Scottish Bar, and, as such, had his name on a
brazen door-plate. Once he was a competitor for a Chair of Modern
History in Edinburgh University; he knew the romantic side of
Scottish history very well. In his novel, "Catriona," the
character of James Mohr Macgregor is wonderfully divined. Once I
read some unpublished letters of Catriona's unworthy father,
written when he was selling himself as a spy (and lying as he
spied) to the Hanoverian usurper. Mr. Stevenson might have written
these letters for James Mohr; they might be extracts from
"Catriona."
In turning over old Jacobite pamphlets, I found a forgotten romance
of Prince Charles's hidden years, and longed that Mr. Stevenson
should retell it. There was a treasure, an authentic treasure;
there were real spies, a real assassin; a real, or reported, rescue
of a lovely girl from a fire at Strasbourg, by the Prince. The
tale was to begin sur le pont d'Avignon: a young Scotch exile
watching the Rhone, thinking how much of it he could cover with a
salmon fly, thinking of the Tay or Beauly. To him enter another
shady tramping exile, Blairthwaite, a murderer. And so it was to
run on, as the author's fancy might lead him, with Alan Breck and
the Master for characters. At last, in unpublished MSS. I found an
actual Master of Ballantrae, a Highland chief--noble, majestically
handsome--and a paid spy of England! All these papers I sent out
to Samoa, too late. The novel was to have been dedicated to me,
and that chance of immortality is gone, with so much else.
Mr. Stevenson's last letters to myself were full of his concern for
a common friend of ours, who was very ill. Depressed himself, Mr.
Stevenson wrote to this gentleman--why should I not mention Mr.
James Payn?--with consoling gaiety. I attributed his depression to
any cause but his own health, of which he rarely spoke. He
lamented the "ill-staged fifth act of life"; he, at least, had no
long hopeless years of diminished force to bear.
I have known no man in whom the pre-eminently manly virtues of
kindness, courage, sympathy, generosity, helpfulness, were more
beautifully conspicuous than in Mr. Stevenson, no man so much
loved--it is not too strong a word--by so many and such various
people. He was as unique in character as in literary genius.
CHAPTER III: RAB'S FRIEND
To say what ought to be said concerning Dr. John Brown, a man
should have known him well and long, and should remember much of
that old generation of Scotchmen to whom the author of "Rab and his
Friends" belonged. But that generation has departed. One by one
these wits and scholars of the North, these epigoni who were not,
indeed, of the heroes, but who had seen and remembered Scott and
Wilson, have passed away. Aytoun and Carlyle and Dr. Burton, and
last, Dr. Brown, are gone. Sir Theodore Martin alone is left. In
her memoir of Dr. Burton--the historian of Scotland, and author of
"The Book-hunter"--Mrs. Burton remarks that, in her husband's later
days, only Dr. John Brown and Professor Blackie remained of all her
husband's ancient friends and coevals, of all who remembered
Lockhart, and Hogg, and their times. But many are left who knew
Dr. Brown far better and more intimately than the author of this
notice. I can hardly say when I first became acquainted with him,
probably it was in my childhood. Ever since I was a boy,
certainly, I used to see him at intervals, especially in the
Christmas vacations. But he seldom moved from Edinburgh, except in
summer, which he frequently passed in the country house of certain
friends of his, whose affection made much of the happiness of his
latest years, and whose unfailing kindness attended him in his
dying hours. Living always in Scotland, Dr. Brown was seen but
rarely by his friends who resided in England. Thus, though Dr.
Brown's sweetness of disposition and charm of manner, his humour,
and his unfailing sympathy and encouragement, made one feel toward
him as to a familiar friend, yet, of his actual life I saw but
little, and have few reminiscences to contribute. One can only
speak of that singular geniality of his, that temper of goodness
and natural tolerance and affection, which, as Scotsmen best know,
is not universal among the Scots. Our race does not need to pray,
like the mechanic in the story, that Providence will give us "a
good conceit of ourselves." But we must acknowledge that the
Scotch temper is critical if not captious, argumentative, inclined
to look at the seamy side of men and of their performances, and to
dwell on imperfections rather than on merits and virtues. An
example of these blemishes of the Scotch disposition, carried to an
extreme degree in the nature of a man of genius, is offered to the
world in the writings and "Reminiscences" of Mr. Carlyle.
Now, Dr. John Brown was at the opposite pole of feeling. He had no
mawkish toleration of things and people intolerable, but he
preferred not to turn his mind that way. His thoughts were with
the good, the wise, the modest, the learned, the brave of times
past, and he was eager to catch a reflection of their qualities in
the characters of the living, of all with whom he came into
contact. He was, for example, almost optimistic in his estimate of
the work of young people in art or literature. From everything
that was beautiful or good, from a summer day by the Tweed, or from
the eyes of a child, or from the humorous saying of a friend, or
from treasured memories of old Scotch worthies, from recollections
of his own childhood, from experience of the stoical heroism of the
poor, he seemed to extract matter for pleasant thoughts of men and
the world, and nourishment for his own great and gentle nature. I
have never known any man to whom other men seemed so dear--men
dead, and men living. He gave his genius to knowing them, and to
making them better known, and his unselfishness thus became not
only a great personal virtue, but a great literary charm. When you
met him, he had some "good story" or some story of goodness to
tell--for both came alike to him, and his humour was as unfailing
as his kindness. There was in his face a singular charm, blended,
as it were, of the expressions of mirth and of patience. Being
most sensitive to pain, as well as to pleasure, he was an exception
to that rule of Rochefoucauld's--"nous avons tous assez de force
pour supporter les maux d'autrui." {2}
He did not bear easily the misfortunes of others, and the evils of
his own lot were heavy enough. They saddened him; but neither
illness, nor his poignant anxiety for others, could sour a nature
so unselfish. He appeared not to have lost that anodyne and
consolation of religious hope, which had been the strength of his
forefathers, and was his best inheritance from a remarkable race of
Scotsmen. Wherever he came, he was welcome; people felt glad when
they had encountered him in the streets--the streets of Edinburgh,
where almost every one knows every one by sight--and he was at
least as joyously received by the children and the dogs as by the
grown-up people of every family. A friend has kindly shown me a
letter in which it is told how Dr. Brown's love of dogs, his
interest in a half-blind old Dandy which was attached to him, was
evinced in the very last hours of his life. But enough has been
said, in general terms, about the character of "the beloved
physician," as Dr. Brown was called in Edinburgh, and a brief
account may be given, in some detail, of his life and ways.
Dr. John Brown was born in Biggar, one of the gray, slaty-looking
little towns in the pastoral moorlands of southern Scotland. These
towns have no great beauty that they should be admired by
strangers, but the natives, as Scott said to Washington Irving, are
attached to their "gray hills," and to the Tweed, so beautiful
where man's greed does not pollute it, that the Border people are
all in love with it, as Tyro, in Homer, loved the divine Enipeus.
We hold it "far the fairest of the floods that run upon the earth."
How dear the border scenery was to Dr. John Brown, and how well he
knew and could express its legendary magic, its charm woven of
countless ancient spells, the music of old ballads, the sorcery of
old stories, may be understood by readers of his essay on
Minchmoor." {3} The father of Dr. Brown was the third in a lineage
of ministers of the sect called Seceders. To explain who the
Seceders were, it would be necessary to explore the sinking
morasses of Scotch ecclesiastical history. The minister was proud
of being not only a "Seceder" but a "Burgher." He inherited, to be
brief, the traditions of a most spiritually-minded and most
spirited set of men, too much bent, it may appear to us, on
establishing delicate distinctions of opinions, but certainly most
true to themselves and to their own ideals of liberty and of faith.
Dr. Brown's great-grandfather had been a shepherd boy, who taught
himself Greek that he might read the New Testament; who walked
twenty-four miles--leaving his folded sheep in the night--to buy
the precious volume in St. Andrews, and who, finally, became a
teacher of much repute among his own people. Of Dr. Brown's
father, he himself wrote a most touching and beautiful account in
his "Letter to John Cairns, D.D." This essay contains, perhaps,
the very finest passages that the author ever penned. His sayings
about his own childhood remind one of the manner of Lamb, without
that curious fantastic touch which is of the essence of Lamb's
style. The following lines, for example, are a revelation of
childish psychology, and probably may be applied, with almost as
much truth, to the childhood of our race:-
"Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at what is
above them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, its
'red sodgers' and lady-birds, and all its queer things; THEIR WORLD
IS ABOUT THREE FEET HIGH, and they are more often stooping than
gazing up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see,
the ceilings of the rooms in the manse at Biggar."
I have often thought that the earliest fathers of our race, child-
like in so many ways, were child-like in this, and worshipped, not
the phenomena of the heavens, but objects more on a level with
their eyes--the "queer things" of their low-lying world. In this
essay on his father, Dr. Brown has written lines about a child's
first knowledge of death, which seem as noteworthy as Steele's
famous passage about his father's death and his own half-conscious
grief and anger. Dr. Brown describes a Scottish funeral--the
funeral of his own mother--as he saw it with the eyes of a boy of
five years old, while his younger brother, a baby of a few months -
"leaped up and crowed with joy at the strange sight--the crowding
horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse . . .
Then, to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers,
was placed over the dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the
unrolling of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often
enough seen since. My father took the one at the head, and also
another much smaller, springing from the same point as his, which
he had caused to be placed there, and unrolling it, put it into my
hand. I twisted it firmly round my fingers, and awaited the
result; the burial men with their real ropes lowered the coffin,
and when it rested at the bottom it was too far down for me to see
it. The grave was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell
us, that it might hold us all. My father first and abruptly let
his cord drop, followed by the rest. This was too much. I now saw
what was meant, and held on and fixed my fist and feet, and I
believe my father had some difficulty in forcing open my small
fingers; he let the little black cord drop, and I remember, in my
misery and anger, seeing its open end disappearing in the gloom."
{4}
The man who wrote this, and many another passage as true and
tender, might surely have been famous in fiction, if he had turned
his powers that way. He had imagination, humour, pathos; he was
always studying and observing life; his last volume, especially, is
like a collection of fragments that might have gone toward making a
work, in some ways not inferior to the romances of Scott. When the
third volume of Essays was published, in the spring of his last
year, a reviewer, who apparently had no personal knowledge of Dr.
Brown, asked why he did not write a novel. He was by that time
over seventy years of age, and, though none guessed it, within a
few weeks of his death. What he might have done, had he given
himself to literature only, it is impossible to guess. But he
caused so much happiness, and did so much good, in that gentle
profession of healing which he chose, and which brought him near to
many who needed consolation more than physic, that we need not
forget his deliberate choice. Literature had only his horae
subsecivae, as he said: Subseciva quaedam tempora quae ego perire
non patior, as Cicero writes, "shreds and waste ends of time, which
I suffer not to be lost."
The kind of life which Dr. Brown's father and his people lived at
Biggar, the austere life of work, and of thought intensely bent on
the real aim of existence, on God, on the destiny of the soul, is
perhaps rare now, even in rural Scotland. We are less obedient
than of old to the motto of that ring found on Magus Moor, where
Archbishop Shairp was murdered, REMEMBER UPON DETHE. If any reader
has not yet made the acquaintance of Dr. Brown's works, one might
counsel him to begin with the "Letter to John Cairns, D.D.," the
fragment of biography and autobiography, the description of the
fountainheads from which the genius of the author flowed. In his
early boyhood, John Brown was educated by his father, a man who,
from his son's affectionate description, seems to have confined a
fiery and romantic genius within the channels of Seceder and
Burgher theology. When the father received a call to the "Rose
Street Secession Church," in Edinburgh, the son became a pupil of
that ancient Scottish seminary, the High School--the school where
Scott was taught not much Latin and no Greek worth mentioning.
Scott was still alive and strong in those days, and Dr. Brown
describes how he and his school companions would take off their
hats to the Shirra as he passed in the streets.
"Though lame, he was nimble, and all rough and alive with power;
had you met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale
store farmer, come of gentle blood--'a stout, blunt carle,' as he
says of himself, with the swing and stride and the eye of a man of
the hills--a large, sunny, out-of-door air all about him. On his
broad and stooping shoulders was set that head which, with
Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the best known in all the world."
Scott was then living in 39 Castle Street. I do not know whether
the many pilgrims, whom one meets moving constantly in the
direction of Melrose and Abbotsford, have thought of making
pilgrimage to Castle Street, and to the grave, there, of Scott's
"dear old friend,"--his dog Camp. Of Dr. Brown's schoolboy days,
one knows little--days when "Bob Ainslie and I were coming up
Infirmary Street from the High School, our heads together, and our
arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how or why."
Concerning the doctor's character, he has left it on record that he
liked a dog-fight. "'A dog-fight,' shouted Bob, and was off, and
so was I, both of us all hot, praying that it might not be over
before we were up . . . Dogs like fighting; old Isaac (Watts, not
Walton) says they 'delight' in it, and for the best of all reasons;
and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. This is
a very different thing from a love of making dogs fight." And this
was the most famous of all dog-fights--since the old Irish Brehons
settled the laws of that sport, and gravely decided what was to be
done if a child interfered, or an idiot, or a woman, or a one-eyed
man--for this was the dog-fight in which Rab first was introduced
to his historian.
Six years passed after this battle, and Dr. Brown was a medical
student and a clerk at Minto Hospital. How he renewed his
acquaintance there, and in what sad circumstances, with Rab and his
friends, it is superfluous to tell, for every one who reads at all
has read that story, and most readers not without tears. As a
medical student in Edinburgh, Dr. Brown made the friendship of Mr.
Syme, the famous surgeon--a friendship only closed by death. I
only saw them once together, a very long time ago, and then from
the point of view of a patient. These occasions are not agreeable,
and patients, like the old cock which did not crow when plucked,
are apt to be "very much absorbed"; but Dr. Brown's attitude toward
the man whom he regarded with the reverence of a disciple, as well
as with the affection of a friend, was very remarkable.
When his studies were over, Dr. Brown practised for a year as
assistant to a surgeon in Chatham. It must have been when he was
at Chatham that a curious event occurred. Many years later,
Charles Dickens was in Edinburgh, reading his stories in public,
and was dining with some Edinburgh people. Dickens began to speak
about the panic which the cholera had caused in England: how ill
some people had behaved. As a contrast, he mentioned that, at
Chatham, one poor woman had died, deserted by every one except a
young physician. Some one, however, ventured to open the door, and
found the woman dead, and the young doctor asleep, overcome with
the fatigue that mastered him on his patient's death, but quite
untouched by the general panic. "Why, that was Dr. John Brown,"
one of the guests observed; and it seems that, thus early in his
career, the doctor had been setting an example of the courage and
charity of his profession. After a year spent in Chatham, he
returned to Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of his life, busy
partly with his art of healing, partly with literature. He lived
in Rutland Street, near the railway station, by which Edinburgh is
approached from the west, and close to Princes Street, the chief
street of the town, separated by a green valley, once a loch, from
the high Castle Rock. It was the room in which his friends were
accustomed to see Dr. Brown, and a room full of interest it was.
In his long life, the doctor had gathered round him many curious
relics of artists and men of letters; a drawing of a dog by Turner
I remember particularly, and a copy of "Don Juan," in the first
edition, with Byron's manuscript notes. Dr. Brown had a great love
and knowledge of art and of artists, from Turner to Leech; and he
had very many friends among men of letters, such as Mr. Ruskin and
Mr. Thackeray. Dr. Brown himself was a clever designer of rapid
little grotesques, rough sketches of dogs and men. One or two of
them are engraved in the little paper-covered booklets in which
some of his essays were separately published--booklets which he was
used to present to people who came to see him and who were
interested in all that he did. I remember some vivacious
grotesques which he drew for one of my brothers when we were
schoolboys. These little things were carefully treasured by boys
who knew Dr. Brown, and found him friendly, and capable of
sustaining a conversation on the points of a Dandy Dinmont terrier
and other mysteries important to youth. He was a bibliophile--a
taste which he inherited from his father, who "began collecting
books when he was twelve, and was collecting to his last hours."
The last time I ever saw Dr. Brown, a year before his death, he was
kind enough to lend me one of the rarest of his treasures, "Poems,"
by Mr. Ruskin. Probably Mr. Ruskin had presented the book to his
old friend; in no other way were it easy to procure writings which
the author withdrew from publication, if, indeed, they ever were,
properly speaking, published. Thus Dr. Brown was all things to all
men, and to all boys. He "had a word for every one," as poor
people say, and a word to the point, for he was as much at home
with the shepherd on the hills, or with the angler between Hollylea
and Clovenfords, as with the dusty book-hunter, or the doggy young
Border yeoman, or the child who asked him to "draw her a picture,"
or the friend of genius famous through all the world, Thackeray,
when he "spoke, as he seldom did, of divine things."
Three volumes of essays are all that Dr. Brown has left in the way
of compositions: a light, but imperishable literary baggage. His
studies are usually derived from personal experience, which he
reproduced with singular geniality and simplicity, or they are
drawn from the tradition of the elders, the reminiscences of long-
lived Scotch people, who, themselves, had listened attentively to
those who went before them. Since Scott, these ancient ladies with
wonderful memories have had no such attentive listener or
appreciative reporter as Dr. Brown. His paper called
"Mystifications," a narrative of the pranks of Miss Stirling
Graham, is a brief, vivid record of the clever and quaint society
of Scotland sixty years ago. Scotland, or at least Scottish
society, is now only English society--a little narrower, a little
prouder, sometimes even a little duller. But old people of
position spoke the old Scotch tongue sixty years ago, and were full
of wonderful genealogies, full of reminiscences of the "'45," and
the adventures of the Jacobites. The very last echoes of that
ancient world are dying now from memory, like the wide
reverberations of that gun which Miss Nelly MacWilliam heard on the
day when Prince Charles landed, and which resounded strangely all
through Scotland.
The children of this generation, one fears, will hardly hear of
these old raids and duels, risings and rebellions, by oral
tradition handed down, unbroken, through aunts and grandmothers.
Scott reaped a full, late harvest of the memories of clannish and
feudal Scotland; Dr. Brown came as a later gleaner, and gathered
these stirring tales of "A Jacobite Family" which are published in
the last volume of his essays. When he was an observer, not a
hearer only, Dr. Brown chiefly studied and best wrote of the
following topics: passages and characters of humour and pathos
which he encountered in his life and profession; children, dogs,
Border scenery, and fellow-workers in life and science. Under one
or other of these categories all his best compositions might be
arranged. The most famous and most exquisite of all his works in
the first class is the unrivalled "Rab and his Friends"--a study of
the stoicism and tenderness of the Lowland character worthy of
Scott. In a minor way the little paper on "Jeems," the door-keeper
in a Dissenting house of the Lord, is interesting to Scotch people,
though it must seem a rather curious revelation to all others.
"Her last Half-crown" is another study of the honesty that survived
in a starving and outcast Scotch girl, when all other virtues, as
we commonly reckon virtue, had gone before her character to some
place where, let us hope, they may rejoin her; for if we are to
suffer for the vices which have abandoned us, may we not get some
credit for the virtues that we have abandoned, but that once were
ours, in some heaven paved with bad resolutions unfulfilled? "The
Black Dwarf's Bones" is a sketch of the misshapen creature from
whom Scott borrowed the character that gives a name to one of his
minor Border stories. The real Black Dwarf (David Ritchie he was
called among men) was fond of poetry, but hated Burns. He was
polite to the fair, but classed mankind at large with his favourite
aversions: ghosts, fairies, and robbers. There was this of human
about the Black Dwarf, that "he hated folk that are aye gaun to
dee, and never do't." The village beauties were wont to come to
him for a Judgment of Paris on their charms, and he presented each
with a flower, which was of a fixed value in his standard of things
beautiful. One kind of rose, the prize of the most fair, he only
gave thrice. Paris could not have done his dooms more courteously,
and, if he had but made judicious use of rose, lily, and lotus, as
prizes, he might have pleased all the three Goddesses; Troy still
might be standing, and the lofty house of King Priam.
Among Dr. Brown's papers on children, that called "Pet Marjorie"
holds the highest place. Perhaps certain passages are "wrote too
sentimentally," as Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the
practice of many authors. But it was difficult to be perfectly
composed when speaking of this wonderful fairy-like little girl,
whose affection was as warm as her humour and genius were
precocious. "Infant phenomena" are seldom agreeable, but Marjorie
was so humorous, so quick-tempered, so kind, that we cease to
regard her as an intellectual "phenomenon." Her memory remains
sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of little Penelope
Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, and who
died very soon after she was thus made Immortal.
It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie Fleming;
every one knows about her and her studies: "Isabella is teaching
me to make simme colings, nots of interrigations, peorids, commoes,
&c." Here is a Shakespearian criticism, of which few will deny the
correctness: "'Macbeth' is a pretty composition, but awful one."
Again, "I never read sermons of any kind, but I read novelettes and
my Bible." "'Tom Jones' and Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'
are both excellent, and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by
the men." Her Calvinistic belief in "UNQUESTIONABLE fire and
brimston" is unhesitating, but the young theologian appears to have
substituted "unquestionable" for "unquenchable." There is
something humorous in the alteration, as if Marjorie refused to be
put off with an "excellent family substitute" for fire and
brimstone, and demanded the "unquestionable" article, no other
being genuine, please observe trade mark.
Among Dr. Brown's contributions to the humorous study of dogs,
"Rab," of course, holds the same place as Marjorie among his
sketches of children. But if his "Queen Mary's Child Garden," the
description of the little garden in which Mary Stuart did NOT play
when a child, is second to "Marjorie," so "Our Dogs" is a good
second to "Rab." Perhaps Dr. Brown never wrote anything more
mirthful than his description of the sudden birth of the virtue of
courage in Toby, a comic but cowardly mongrel, a cur of low degree.
"Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small
gardens before his own and the neighbouring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour,
two doors off, a bulky, choleric, red-faced man--torvo vultu--was,
by law of contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often
scowled Toby into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and
a glare of his eye. One day, his gate being open, in walks Toby
with a huge bone, and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two
minutes before been planting some precious slip, the name of which
on paper and on a stick Toby made very light of, substituted his
bone, and was engaged covering it, or thinking he was covering it
up with his shovelling nose, when S. spied him through the inner
glass door, and was out upon him, like the Assyrian, with a
terrific GOWL. I watched them. Instantly Toby made at him with a
roar too, and an eye more torve than Scrymgeour's, who, retreating
without reserve, fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his
own lobby. Toby contented himself with proclaiming his victory at
the door, and, returning, finished his bone-planting at his
leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass door, glared
at him. From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck at first
sight was lord of all . . . That very evening he paid a visit to
Leo, next door's dog, a big tyrannical bully and coward . . . To
him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and
walked about, as much as to say, 'Come on, Macduff'; but Macduff
did not come on."
This story is one of the most amazing examples of instant change of
character on record, and disproves the sceptical remark that "no
one was ever converted, except prize-fighters, and colonels in the
army." I am sorry to say that Dr. Brown was too fond of dogs to be
very much attached to cats. I never heard him say anything against
cats, or, indeed, against anybody; but there are passages in his
writings which tend to show that, when young and thoughtless, he
was not far from regarding cats as "the higher vermin." He tells a
story of a Ghazi puss, so to speak, a victorious cat, which,
entrenched in a drain, defeated three dogs with severe loss, and
finally escaped unharmed from her enemies. Dr. Brown's family
gloried in the possession of a Dandy Dinmont named John Pym, whose
cousin (Auld Pepper) belonged to one of my brothers. Dr. Brown was
much interested in Pepper, a dog whose family pride was only
matched by that of the mother of Candide, and, at one time,
threatened to result in the extinction of this branch of the House
of Pepper. Dr. Brown had remarked, and my own observations confirm
it, that when a Dandy is not game, his apparent lack of courage
arises "from kindness of heart."
Among Dr. Brown's landscapes, as one may call his descriptions of
scenery, and of the ancient historical associations with Scotch
scenery, "Minchmoor" is the most important. He had always been a
great lover of the Tweed. The walk which he commemorates in
"Minchmoor" was taken, if I am not mistaken, in company with
Principal Shairp, Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford,
and author of one of the most beautiful of Tweedside songs, a
modern "Bush aboon Traquair:"-
"And what saw ye there,
At the bush aboon Traquair;
Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed?
I heard the cushie croon
Thro' the gowden afternoon,
And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale o' Tweed."
There is in the country of Scott no pleasanter walk than that which
Dr. Brown took in the summer afternoon. Within a few miles, many
places famous in history and ballad may be visited: the road by
which Montrose's men fled from Philiphaugh fight; Traquair House,
with the bears on its gates, as on the portals of the Baron of
Bradwardine; Williamhope, where Scott and Mungo Park, the African
explorer, parted and went their several ways. From the crest of
the road you see all the Border hills, the Maiden Paps, the Eildons
cloven in three, the Dunion, the Windburg, and so to the distant
Cheviots, and Smailholm Tower, where Scott lay when a child, and
clapped his hands at the flashes of the lightning, haud sine Dis
animosus infans, like Horace.
From the crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley of
Yarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the "dowie dens," and
so, "through the pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to
the railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back
Tamlane from the queen of the fairies. All this country was
familiar to Dr. Brown, and on one of the last occasions when I met
him, he was living at Hollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel,
Scott's home while he was happy and prosperous, before he had the
unhappy thought of building Abbotsford. At the time I speak of,
Dr. Brown had long ceased to write, and his health suffered from
attacks of melancholy, in which the world seemed very dark to him.
I have been allowed to read some letters which he wrote in one of
these intervals of depression. With his habitual unselfishness, he
kept his melancholy to himself, and, though he did not care for
society at such times, he said nothing of his own condition that
could distress his correspondent. In the last year of his life,
everything around him seemed to brighten: he was unusually well,
he even returned to his literary work, and saw his last volume of
collected essays through the press. They were most favourably
received, and the last letters which I had from him spoke of the
pleasure which this success gave him. Three editions of his book
("John Leech, and Other Essays") were published in some six weeks.
All seemed to go well, and one might even have hoped that, with
renewed strength, he would take up his pen again. But his strength
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