Memories and Portraits
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
Part 1 out of 3
Memories and Portraits - Robert Louis Stevenson. 1912 Chatto and
Windus edition. Scanned and proofed by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
NOTE
THIS volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better
to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random.
A certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and
youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle -
taken together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since
and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come
by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was
but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the
irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of
the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I
was the first to be surprised at the occurrence.
My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager
sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their
descendant, the person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not
because I love him better, but because, with him, I am still in a
business partnership, and cannot divide interests.
Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already
in THE CORNHILL, LONGMAN'S, SCRIBNER, THE ENGLISH ILLUSTRATED, THE
MAGAZINE OF ART, THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW; three are here in print
for the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he
regarded as a private circulation.
R. L S.
CONTENTS
I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
III. OLD MORALITY
IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER
VI. PASTORAL
VII. THE MANSE
VIII. MEMORIES OF AN ISLET
IX. THOMAS STEVENSON
X. TALK AND TALKERS: FIRST PAPER
XI. TALK AND TALKERS: SECOND PAPER
XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
XIII. "A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED"
XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE
CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
"This is no my ain house;
I ken by the biggin' o't."
Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on
France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set
people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such
thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to
inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different
stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its
extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to
the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of
Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad;
there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered
so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands
whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains
still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the
other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show
in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-
speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller
through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea
Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the
ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home
country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition. You may
go all over the States, and - setting aside the actual intrusion
and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese - you shall
scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty
miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the
hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has
gone round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms
of our fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its
own quality of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, local
custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on
into the latter end of the nineteenth century - IMPERIA IN IMPERIO,
foreign things at home.
In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his
neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a
domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but
neither curious nor quick about the life of others. In French
colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an
immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated
race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a
transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both. But the
Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance. He
figures among his vassal in the hour of peace with the same
disdainful air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm
for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot
impose upon his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a
monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any
patience. Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in
love, declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable - a
staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was
celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed
to give them solid English fare - roast beef and plum pudding, and
no tomfoolery. Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly.
We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the
chance, will we eager him to eat of it himself. The same spirit
inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands
of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their
ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant.
I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam
is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick.
For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and
nothing more. He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let
him try San Francisco. He wittily reproves English ignorance as to
the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten
Wyoming? The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used
over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach. The Yankee
States, of which he is so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the
bucket. And we find in his book a vast virgin ignorance of the
life and prospects of America; every view partial, parochial, not
raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper, at the largest, to
a clique of states; and the whole scope and atmosphere not
American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in
reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to
their cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the
silly rudeness of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where
to look when I find myself in company with an American and see my
countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog. But in the
case of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept. Wyoming
is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to
the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no better
justified than the Britannic.
It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most
ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the
States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his
opportunities, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own
door. There is one country, for instance - its frontier not so far
from London, its people closely akin, its language the same in all
essentials with the English - of which I will go bail he knows
nothing. His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described;
it can only be illustrated by anecdote. I once travelled with a
man of plausible manners and good intelligence - a University man,
as the phrase goes - a man, besides, who had taken his degree in
life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in. We were
deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; among other
things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had
recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things
were not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a
matter of law." He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he
choose to be informed. The law was the same for the whole country,
he told me roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle
matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal
body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in
question. Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in the face and
dropped the conversation. This is a monstrous instance, if you
like, but it does not stand alone in the experience of Scots.
England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in
religion, in education, and in the very look of nature and men's
faces, not always widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars
that struck Mr. Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less
forcibly; he and I felt ourselves foreigners on many common
provocations. A Scotchman may tramp the better part of Europe and
the United States, and never again receive so vivid an impression
of foreign travel and strange lands and manners as on his first
excursion into England. The change from a hilly to a level country
strikes him with delighted wonder. Along the flat horizon there
arise the frequent venerable towers of churches. He sees at the
end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails. He may go
where he pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and
lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment.
There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many
windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody
country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant
business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their
air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit
of romance into the tamest landscape. When the Scotch child sees
them first he falls immediately in love; and from that time forward
windmills keep turning in his dreams. And so, in their degree,
with every feature of the life and landscape. The warm, habitable
age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of the
country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy path-ways in the
fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frocks;
chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech -
they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to English airs
in the child's story that he tells himself at night. The sharp
edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt
whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the
more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have
been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to
enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.
One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye -
the domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the
quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm
colouring of all. We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient
buildings, above all in country places; and those that we have are
all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood has been sparingly used in
their construction; the window-frames are sunken in the wall, not
flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeper-pitched;
even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and permanent
appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of
cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the
Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously
on one of these brick houses - rickles of brick, as he might call
them - or on one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly
reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his
home. "This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And
yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money, the key of it
long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, and never will be,
thoroughly adopted by his imagination; nor does he cease to
remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native
country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.
But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count
England foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of
the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected
peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a
startling contrast with our own long-legged, long-headed,
thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A week or two in such a place
as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems incredible that
within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been
thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold our
own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with
a difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things
with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English
society is like a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes
looking for too much, and to be sure his first experiment will be
in the wrong direction. Yet surely his complaint is grounded;
surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous
ardour, the better part of the man too often withheld from the
social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with
terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own
experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters
and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one
interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is vain,
interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth
his thoughts and experience in the best light. The egoism of the
Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He
takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the
unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference.
Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all
he asks; and in the meantime, while you continue to associate, he
would rather not be reminded of your baser origin. Compared with
the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity
and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest. That
you should continually try to establish human and serious
relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull,
and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue
something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you
in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the
lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the
head and shoulders.
Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English
youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and
gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of
future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct.
I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys
of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once
more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance
chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider
extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South
seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to
games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily
transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in
mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser
and a less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more
immersed in present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing,
English boys are younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a
series of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of
Scotch boyhood - days of great stillness and solitude for the
rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the
intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and
senses prey upon and test each other. The typical English Sunday,
with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, leads
perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of the Scot
there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two
divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two
first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely
inquiring, "What is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very
roots of life with, "What is the chief end of man?" and answering
nobly, if obscurely, "To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." I
do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact
of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch a great field of
speculation; and the fact that it is asked of all of us, from the
peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together. No
Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would have had
patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for
Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days
kept their influence to the end. We have spoken of the material
conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying
everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of
the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone
cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level
streets, the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness
of the architecture, among which English children begin to grow up
and come to themselves in life. As the stage of the University
approaches, the contrast becomes more express. The English lad
goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens,
to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by
proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of
education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that
separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an
earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different
experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell
hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the
public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he
has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of
restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no
quiet clique of the exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten
borough of the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the greasy
benches. The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his
scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie from the parish school.
They separate, at the session's end, one to smoke cigars about a
watering-place, the other to resume the labours of the field beside
his peasant family. The first muster of a college class in
Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads,
fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish
embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades,
and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices. It was in
these early days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection
of his pupils, putting these uncouth, umbrageous students at their
ease with ready human geniality. Thus, at least, we have a healthy
democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work; even when there
is no cordiality there is always a juxtaposition of the different
classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of
each is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our tasks ended, we of
the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city. At
five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college
gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of
the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies
in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the
masters of the world; and some portion of our lives is always
Saturday, LA TREVE DE DIEU.
Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his
country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story
and from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck,
outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights;
much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters.
Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of
foraying hoofs. He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the
iron girdle and the handful of oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and
lived so sparely on their raids. Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise,
and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of his
country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland have been
tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history -
Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five were still either failures or
defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the
Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach
rather a moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is
altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire:
Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his
imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold,
sterile and unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once seemed
to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of
sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his
own. It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish
romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error
serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that
the heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by
paucity of number and Spartan poverty of life.
So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That
Shorter Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was
yet composed in the city of Westminster. The division of races is
more sharply marked within the borders of Scotland itself than
between the countries. Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber,
are like foreign parts; yet you may choose a man from any of them,
and, ten to one, he shall prove to have the headmark of a Scot. A
century and a half ago the Highlander wore a different costume,
spoke a different language, worshipped in another church, held
different morals, and obeyed a different social constitution from
his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north. Even the
English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the
Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the
Scotch. Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would
willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him
at the border, and he regarded England as a perilous, unhomely
land. When the Black Watch, after years of foreign service,
returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at
Port Patrick. They had been in Ireland, stationed among men of
their own race and language, where they were well liked and treated
with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed at
the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people who did not
understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and hanged
them since the dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most curious,
the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of
Europe. They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking,
not English, but the broad dialect of Scotland. Now, what idea had
they in their minds when they thus, in thought, identified
themselves with their ancestral enemies? What was the sense in
which they were Scotch and not English, or Scotch and not Irish?
Can a bare name be thus influential on the minds and affections of
men, and a political aggregation blind them to the nature of facts?
The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to answer, NO; the far
more galling business of Ireland clenches the negative from nearer
home. Is it common education, common morals, a common language or
a common faith, that join men into nations? There were practically
none of these in the case we are considering.
The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language,
the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the
Highlander. When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's
necks in spirit; even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy
in their talk. But from his compatriot in the south the Lowlander
stands consciously apart. He has had a different training; he
obeys different laws; he makes his will in other terms, is
otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home in an
English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to
remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the
Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the
mind.
CHAPTER II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES (2)
I AM asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what)
to the profit and glory of my ALMA MATER; and the fact is I seem to
be in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for
while I am willing enough to write something, I know not what to
write. Only one point I see, that if I am to write at all, it
should be of the University itself and my own days under its
shadow; of the things that are still the same and of those that are
already changed: such talk, in short, as would pass naturally
between a student of to-day and one of yesterday, supposing them to
meet and grow confidential.
The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life;
more swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the
quadrangle; so that we see there, on a scale startlingly
diminished, the flight of time and the succession of men. I looked
for my name the other day in last year's case-book of the
Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it near the end; it was
not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I began to think it
had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it, mounted on
the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that posture
like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the
dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is
likely, with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less
welcome; but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and
I am the more emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of
a parent and a praiser of things past.
For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it
has doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline
by gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming
embellishments, it does; and what is perhaps more singular, began
to do so when I ceased to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I
had the very last of the very best of ALMA MATER; the same thing, I
hear (which makes it the more strange), had previously happened to
my father; and if they are good and do not die, something not at
all unsimilar will be found in time to have befallen my successors
of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of advantage in the
past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on a near
examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the most
lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,
unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of
the whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes
of good, flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-
windy, morning journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during
lecture and unquenchable gusto in the delights of truantry, made up
the sunshine and shadow of my college life. You cannot fancy what
you missed in missing him; his virtues, I make sure, are
inconceivable to his successors, just as they were apparently
concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically alone in
the pleasure I had in his society. Poor soul, I remember how much
he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun)
seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune
and dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went.
And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in
their season, and that all clouds roll away at last, and the
troubles of youth in particular are things but of a moment. So
this student, whom I have in my eye, took his full share of these
concerns, and that very largely by his own fault; but he still
clung to his fortune, and in the midst of much misconduct, kept on
in his own way learning how to work; and at last, to his wonder,
escaped out of the stage of studentship not openly shamed; leaving
behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good deal of its
interest for myself.
But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is
by no means the only one whom I regret, or whom the students of to-
day, if they knew what they had lost, would regret also. They have
still Tait, to be sure - long may they have him! - and they have
still Tait's class-room, cupola and all; but think of what a
different place it was when this youth of mine (at least on roll
days) would be present on the benches, and, at the near end of the
platform, Lindsay senior (3) was airing his robust old age. It is
possible my successors may have never even heard of Old Lindsay;
but when he went, a link snapped with the last century. He had
something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and plain; he spoke
with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire; his
reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with
post-chaises - a Scotland before steam; he had seen the coal fire
on the Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own
grandfather. Thus he was for me a mirror of things perished; it
was only in his memory that I could see the huge shock of flames of
the May beacon stream to leeward, and the watchers, as they fed the
fire, lay hold unscorched of the windward bars of the furnace; it
was only thus that I could see my grandfather driving swiftly in a
gig along the seaboard road from Pittenweem to Crail, and for all
his business hurry, drawing up to speak good-humouredly with those
he met. And now, in his turn, Lindsay is gone also; inhabits only
the memories of other men, till these shall follow him; and figures
in my reminiscences as my grandfather figured in his.
To-day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a
prodigious deal of Greek; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is
a man filled with the mathematics. And doubtless these are set-
offs. But they cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has
retired, and that Professor Kelland is dead. No man's education is
complete or truly liberal who knew not Kelland. There were
unutterable lessons in the mere sight of that frail old clerical
gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a fairy godfather, and
keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of that very
kindness. I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class time,
though not for long, and give us glimpses of old-world life in out-
of-the-way English parishes when he was young; thus playing the
same part as Lindsay - the part of the surviving memory, signalling
out of the dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished
things. But it was a part that scarce became him; he somehow
lacked the means: for all his silver hair and worn face, he was not
truly old; and he had too much of the unrest and petulant fire of
youth, and too much invincible innocence of mind, to play the
veteran well. The time to measure him best, to taste (in the old
phrase) his gracious nature, was when he received his class at
home. What a pretty simplicity would he then show, trying to amuse
us like children with toys; and what an engaging nervousness of
manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed! Truly he
made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed, but
at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious,
troubled elder-boy who was working so hard to entertain us. A
theorist has held the view that there is no feature in man so tell-
tale as his spectacles; that the mouth may be compressed and the
brow smoothed artificially, but the sheen of the barnacles is
diagnostic. And truly it must have been thus with Kelland; for as
I still fancy I behold him frisking actively about the platform,
pointer in hand, that which I seem to see most clearly is the way
his glasses glittered with affection. I never knew but one other
man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so kind a spectacle;
and that was Dr. Appleton. But the light in his case was tempered
and passive; in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and flashed
vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual challenge to
goodwill.
I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason.
Kelland's class I attended, once even gained there a certificate of
merit, the only distinction of my University career. But although
I am the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor's
own hand, I cannot remember to have been present in the Greek class
above a dozen times. Professor Blackie was even kind enough to
remark (more than once) while in the very act of writing the
document above referred to, that he did not know my face. Indeed,
I denied myself many opportunities; acting upon an extensive and
highly rational system of truantry, which cost me a great deal of
trouble to put in exercise - perhaps as much as would have taught
me Greek - and sent me forth into the world and the profession of
letters with the merest shadow of an education. But they say it is
always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is its
own reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps, even upon
this I should plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with
more deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates for less
education. One consequence, however, of my system is that I have
much less to say of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor
Kelland; and as he is still alive, and will long, I hope, continue
to be so, it will not surprise you very much that I have no
intention of saying it.
Meanwhile, how many others have gone - Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know
not who besides; and of that tide of students that used to throng
the arch and blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into
the remotest parts of the earth, and how many more have lain down
beside their fathers in their "resting-graves"! And again, how
many of these last have not found their way there, all too early,
through the stress of education! That was one thing, at least,
from which my truantry protected me. I am sorry indeed that I have
no Greek, but I should be sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I
know the name of that branch of knowledge which is worth acquiring
at the price of a brain fever. There are many sordid tragedies in
the life of the student, above all if he be poor, or drunken, or
both; but nothing more moves a wise man's pity than the case of the
lad who is in too much hurry to be learned. And so, for the sake
of a moral at the end, I will call up one more figure, and have
done. A student, ambitious of success by that hot, intemperate
manner of study that now grows so common, read night and day for an
examination. As he went on, the task became more easy to him,
sleep was more easily banished, his brain grew hot and clear and
more capacious, the necessary knowledge daily fuller and more
orderly. It came to the eve of the trial and he watched all night
in his high chamber, reviewing what he knew, and already secure of
success. His window looked eastward, and being (as I said) high
up, and the house itself standing on a hill, commanded a view over
dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. At last my student drew up
his blind, and still in quite a jocund humour, looked abroad. Day
was breaking, the cast was tinging with strange fires, the clouds
breaking up for the coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless
terror seized upon his mind. He was sane, his senses were
undisturbed; he saw clearly, and knew what he was seeing, and knew
that it was normal; but he could neither bear to see it nor find
the strength to look away, and fled in panic from his chamber into
the enclosure of the street. In the cool air and silence, and
among the sleeping houses, his strength was renewed. Nothing
troubled him but the memory of what had passed, and an abject fear
of its return.
"Gallo canente, spes redit,
Aegris salus refunditur,
Lapsis fides revertitur,"
as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning Office. But to him
that good hour of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, had
brought panic, and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook
to think of. He dared not return to his lodging; he could not eat;
he sat down, he rose up, he wandered; the city woke about him with
its cheerful bustle, the sun climbed overhead; and still he grew
but the more absorbed in the distress of his recollection and the
fear of his past fear. At the appointed hour, he came to the door
of the place of examination; but when he was asked, he had
forgotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, they had not the
heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted him,
still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness, vain efforts. He
could only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant
of all, his mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day
and his own intolerable fear. And that same night he was tossing
in a brain fever.
People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with
excellent reason; but these are not to be compared with such
chaotic terrors of the mind as fell on this young man, and made him
cover his eyes from the innocent morning. We all have by our
bedsides the box of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough
shut; but when a young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have
a care, for he is playing with the lock.
CHAPTER III. OLD MORTALITY
I
THERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a
prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under
a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and
the scream of the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to
it all day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres
of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the
morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of many tall
memorials, fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth,
I came to be unhappy. Pleasant incidents are woven with my memory
of the place. I here made friends with a plain old gentleman, a
visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon
the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter
sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days
together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild
heart flying; and once - she possibly remembers - the wise Eugenia
followed me to that austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in
the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair
the braid. But for the most part I went there solitary and, with
irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name
after name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle
dates: a regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers,
and had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the
dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that
whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had
received a picture; and he, with his comely, florid countenance,
bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining fame and
popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of
phantom appellations. It was then possible to leave behind us
something more explicit than these severe, monotonous and lying
epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a painted picture and
what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable
than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed beneath
that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the
housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window,
the fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the
sea.
And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for
David Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions,
like Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and
volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to
recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of
routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with
contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk among the tombs
of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and after much
rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see
himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own
for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city
street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope.
In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces,
the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform - for there, on the most
thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will
continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the
forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to
the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot
bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He
cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and
by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do. The parable
of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in
life. Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be
taken gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of
time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the
inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is that sets
them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with strange
extremes of pity and derision, the memorials of the dead.
Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing
upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and
immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or
heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design,
shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we
all sit down, the hanger-back not least. But the average sermon
flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we
know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded,
and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the
average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-
hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he
should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann.
Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a
grudge. The day is perhaps not far oft when people will begin to
count MOLL FLANDERS, ay, or THE COUNTRY WIFE, more wholesome and
more pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism.
But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of
Obermann. And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the
graveyard, I began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-
diggers, and was weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of
visitors. This was dayspring, indeed, to a lad in such great
darkness. Not that I began to see men, or to try to see them, from
within, nor to learn charity and modesty and justice from the
sight; but still stared at them externally from the prison windows
of my affectation. Once I remember to have observed two working-
women with a baby halting by a grave; there was something
monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the
other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of
immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and,
drawing near, I overheard their judgment on that wonder. "Eh! what
extravagance!"
To a youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint
and pregnant saying appeared merely base.
My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was
unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the
red evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane
Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still
attended on his labours; how some would even perch about him,
waiting for their prey; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the
species varied with the season of the year. But this was the very
poetry of the profession. The others whom I knew were somewhat
dry. A faint flavour of the gardener hung about them, but
sophisticated and dis-bloomed. They had engagements to keep, not
alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with man-
kind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there
was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip,
foot on spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business;
they liked well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the
key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds
a calendar of names and dates. It would be "in fifty-twa" that
such a tomb was last opened for "Miss Jemimy." It was thus they
spoke of their past patients -familiarly but not without respect,
like old family servants. Here is indeed a servant, whom we forget
that we possess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at
the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the
mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of
our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial
touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he
attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps
it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English
sexton differs from the Scotch. The "goodman delver," reckoning up
his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts.
It is a pride common among sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count
his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare
upon him from the shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves.
He would indeed be something different from human if his solitary
open-air and tragic labours left not a broad mark upon his mind.
There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, among the
cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb,
he waits the continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like
minute drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts them; and this
enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul, in
the process of years and by the kindly influence of habit grows to
be his pride and pleasure. There are many common stories telling
how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will rather
tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffering
bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage built
into the wall of the church-yard; and through a bull's-eye pane
above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and
the upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a
Moderate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of
deathbed dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived
beyond man's natural years, that his life had been easy and
reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to
his care, and that it now behoved him unregretfully to gird his
loins and follow the majority. The grave-digger heard him out;
then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand
pointed through the window to the scene of his life-long labours.
"Doctor," he said, "I ha'e laid three hunner and fower-score in
that kirkyaird; an it had been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I
would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made out the fower hunner." But it
was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part
to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry
him.
II
I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the
ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting
of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It
is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are
forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if
pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and
personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every
part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to
forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable and tragic
fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus,
is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by-and-by his truant
interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather
flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise;
no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning
injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value
him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not
without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet
storing up.
The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble
fallibility. When we have fallen through storey after storey of
our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it
is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they
stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how,
linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential
circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary
life; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices
that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that at the last, when
such a pin falls out - when there vanishes in the least breath of
time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our
supply - when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the
faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard
with those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a
breath to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole
wing of the palace of our life.
III
One such face I now remember; one such blank some half-a-dozen of
us labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in
person, most serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words
and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the
air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to
the poorest student gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside
in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop to play with us, but held him
marked for higher destinies; we loved his notice; and I have rarely
had my pride more gratified than when he sat at my father's table,
my acknowledged friend. So he walked among us, both hands full of
gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most influential
life.
The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking
back, I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for
some shadow of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power,
breeding, urbanity and mirth, there was in those days something
soulless in our friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty,
innocent and inhumane; and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry,
demolish honest sentiment. I can still see and hear him, as he
went his way along the lamplit streets, LA CI DAREM LA MANO on his
lips, a noble figure of a youth, but following vanity and
incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high seas of
life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his self-
respect, miserably went down.
From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately
ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family
he had deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his
face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the
wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually,
with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only
from his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it
in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to
retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that
mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his
friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music;
and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which
he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, when his
bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying,
still without complaint, still finding interests; to his last step
gentle, urbane and with the will to smile.
The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to
him, the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no
one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost,
he seemed to think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for
others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that
impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret
was rare with him, and pointed with a jest. You would not have
dreamed, if you had known him then, that this was that great
failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a whole society
had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we gone to him, red-hot
with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our
princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and wisely
counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts that
we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we
disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the
garden of his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and
salted; silently awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by
the throat; and to see him there, so gentle, patient, brave and
pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in
admiration that we could not dare to pity him. Even if the old
fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost
battle, he should have still the energy to fight. He had gone to
ruin with a kind of kingly ABANDON, like one who condescended; but
once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom.
Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace,
rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they
repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that
repentance. But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: MENE,
MENE; and condemned himself to smiling silence. He had given
trouble enough; had earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right
to murmur.
Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of
strength; but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength
was gone that had betrayed him - "for our strength is weakness" -
he began to blossom and bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the
fight: the burden that he bore thrown down before the great
deliverer. We
"In the vast cathedral leave him;
God accept him,
Christ receive him!"
IV
If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and
the irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the
dead, these foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up
to glorify the difficult but not desperate life of man. This
ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat.
I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place;
pause, with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had
sunk. A pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most
uncalled for, and an ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him,
his memory shines like a reproach; they honour him for silent
lessons; they cherish his example; and in what remains before them
of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead. For this proud man
was one of those who prospered in the valley of humiliation; - of
whom Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had the hard hap to meet
in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former
times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and
have in this place found the words of life."
CHAPTER IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
I
ALL through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for
the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own
private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books
in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind
was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by
the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-
book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or
commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And
what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written
consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be
an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I
would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and
I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with
myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to
any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and
town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in
other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic
dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself
in writing down conversations from memory.
This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes
tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them
a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this
was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it
was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the
lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the
essential note and the right word: things that to a happier
constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training,
it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement.
So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more
effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a
passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or
an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some
conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must
sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was
unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again
unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain
bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction
and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous
ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to
Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.
I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called THE VANITY
OF MORALS: it was to have had a second part, THE VANITY OF
KNOWLEDGE; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names
were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first
part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghost-like,
from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of
Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a
passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas
Browne. So with my other works: CAIN, an epic, was (save the
mark!) an imitation of SORDELLO: ROBIN HOOD, a tale in verse, took
an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and
Morris: in MONMOUTH, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr.
Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many
masters; in the first draft of THE KING'S PARDON, a tragedy, I was
on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second
draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted
my allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a
less serious vein - for it was not Congreve's verse, it was his
exquisite prose, that I admired and sought to copy. Even at the
age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the
famous city of Peebles in the style of the BOOK OF SNOBS. So I
might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and down to
my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not
only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas,
but have met with resurrection: one, strangely bettered by another
hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the
other, originally known as SEMIRAMIS: A TRAGEDY, I have observed on
bookstalls under the ALIAS of Prince Otto. But enough has been
said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely
ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper.
That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have
profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and
there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it
was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and
that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded
by a cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some
one cry out: But this is not the way to be original! It is not;
nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born
original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the
wings of your originality. There can be none more original than
Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no
craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his
time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force
in letters: he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare
himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only
from a school that we can expect to have good writers; it is almost
invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless
exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish
the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly
prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible;
before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should
long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years
of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words
swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously
bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do
and (within the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it.
And it is the great point of these imitations that there still
shines beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him
try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old
and a very true saying that failure is the only highroad to
success. I must have had some disposition to learn; for I clear-
sightedly condemned my own performances. I liked doing them
indeed; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish. In
consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends; and such
friends as I chose to be my confidants I must have chosen well, for
they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me, "Padding,"
said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why you do lyrics so
badly." No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the way of a more
authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These were
returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained. If they had not
been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case,
there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been
looked at - well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must
keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune
which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see
my literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I
stood from the favour of the public.
II
The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has
counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner,
Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local
celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its
rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall,
Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at
night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room; a
passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages; and a
corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous
members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary.
Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance
of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks askance at
these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the
whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned
mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this
haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professorate.
I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a
very humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much
credit for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.;
proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in
particular, proud of being in the next room to three very
distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the
corridor fire. One of these has now his name on the back of
several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in the law
courts. Of the death of the second, you have just been reading
what I had to say.
And the third also has escaped out of that battle of in which he
fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They were all three, as I
have said, notable students; but this was the most conspicuous.
Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of
Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to one of
Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill
fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the COMEDIE
HUMAINE. He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the
time of which I write, he made a showy speech at a political
dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the COURANT, and the day
after was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in
the SCOTSMAN. Report would have it (I daresay, very wrongly) that
he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted, and that
the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own lips.
Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied
by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly
disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely tempered
spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took
flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk
of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For
years thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed,
always in good hotels and good society, always with empty pockets.
The charm of his manner may have stood him in good stead; but
though my own manners are very agreeable, I have never found in
them a source of livelihood; and to explain the miracle of his
continued existence, I must fall back upon the theory of the
philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind, "there
was a suffering relative in the background." From this genteel
eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out
in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I
best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop;
looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane
adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one
peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and
sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with
singular deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect.
After all these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich
student that he was of yore, to breathe of money; seemed still
perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end. Yet he was then
upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself to found
the strangest thing in our society: one of those periodical sheets
from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which young
gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line,
to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private
individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a
man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of
demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth,
as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on
railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger;
and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me.
Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would
sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite slave into the
foundations of their palace. It was with his own life that my
companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper
single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up
early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear-
wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of
courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and
doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love
also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he
succeeded. But he died, and his paper died after him; and of all
this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes
as if there had come literally nothing.
These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under
the mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former
secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and
thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and have no
more behind one than Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone
and have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and
foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and
glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech,
and perhaps for the love of ALMA MATER (which may be still extant
and flourishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some pence -
this book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and
Robert Glasgow Brown.
Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they
were all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to
them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken
with pride and hope. We were to found a University magazine. A
pair of little, active brothers - Livingstone by name, great
skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-
shop over against the University building - had been debauched to
play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors
and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own
works; while, by every rule of arithmetic - that flatterer of
credulity - the adventure must succeed and bring great profit.
Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home that morning
walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three distinguished
students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my first
draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my
fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I
could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the
bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I
knew it would not be worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that
nobody would read it; and I kept wondering how I should be able,
upon my compact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly,
to meet my share in the expense. It was a comfortable thought to
me that I had a father.
The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part
of it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in
undisturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number
was edited by all four of us with prodigious bustle; the second
fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and me; the third I
edited alone; and it has long been a solemn question who it was
that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be still more difficult
to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully
Livingtones' window! Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to
print a SHAKESPEARE on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with
nonsense; And, shall I say, Poor Editors? I cannot pity myself, to
whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the
wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled
into half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I
had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time
somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it; and
she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my cherished
contributions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased at
this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the
work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste.
I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary
interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my
share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed
their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than
formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the
enterprise with some graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the
whole episode, I told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor
the man ready; and to work I went again with my penny version-
books, having fallen back in one day from the printed author to the
manuscript student.
III
From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own
papers. The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done
my best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and
it remains invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine
would print the thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume,
not for any worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it
purports dimly to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves;
so that in this volume of Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the
Swanston gardener, may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanston
shepherd. Not that John and Robert drew very close together in
their lives; for John was rough, he smelt of the windy brae; and
Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the hollow.
Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the two;
he had grit and dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases
men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he was a way-farer
besides, and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may be, and
however Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that
follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom,
if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should like
well to draw again with a maturer touch. And as I think of him and
of John, I wonder in what other country two such men would be found
dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the
woody fold of a green hill.
CHAPTER V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER
I THINK I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in
the uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the southwestern
hills there may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone
good fellowship; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only
met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath
with Andrew Fairservice, - though without his vices. He was a man
whose very presence could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to
the baldest and most modern flower-plots. There was a dignity
about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled
face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who had come
through the training of the Covenant, and been nourished in his
youth on WALKER'S LIVES and THE HIND LET LOOSE.
Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take
this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he
can the infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so
difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as
a GENIUS LOCI. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old
straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks
overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid
breadth of champaign that one saw from the north-west corner. The
garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other. When I
take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for
me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that I can
say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me
it will be ever impotent.
The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old
already: he had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking
horse. Latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic,
considering a reference to the parish register worth all the
reasons in the world, "I AM OLD AND WELL STRICKEN IN YEARS," he was
wont to say; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the
argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were
not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener.
He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and reduced
gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry
figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger
days. He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity.
He told of places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks,
where there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and
wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not
help feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress your
humbler garden plots. You were thrown at once into an invidious
position. You felt that you were profiting by the needs of
dignity, and that his poverty and not his will consented to your
vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with the
swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen
who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen
Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and
metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he
extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He
would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most
favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that
none of us could eat, in supreme contempt for our opinion. If you
asked him to send you in one of your own artichokes, "THAT I WULL,
MEM," he would say, "WITH PLEASURE, FOR IT IS MAIR BLESSED TO GIVE
THAN TO RECEIVE." Ay, and even when, by extra twisting of the
screw, we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to his own
inclination, and he went away, stately and sad, professing that
"OUR WULL WAS HIS PLEASURE," but yet reminding us that he would do
it "WITH FEELIN'S," - even then, I say, the triumphant master felt
humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that
he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and that
the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient merit
of the unworthy takes."
In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting
sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses and holding in
supreme aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned or wild.
There was one exception to this sweeping ban. Foxgloves, though
undoubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but
loved; and when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand
and dexterously manipulated his bill in order to save every stately
stem. In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in that tone that
only actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use nowadays, his
heart grew "PROUD" within him when he came on a burn-course among
the braes of Manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies;
and not all his apprenticeship and practice for so many years of
precise gardening had banished these boyish recollections from his
heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all that
was bygone. He abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept
pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a
holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where
he had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite
reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might
have shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.
But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his
liking for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all
flowers together. They were but garnishings, childish toys,
trifling ornaments for ladies' chimney-shelves. It was towards his
cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His
preference for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were
found invading the flower-pots, and an outpost of savoys was once
discovered in the centre of the lawn. He would prelect over some
thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on
reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens. Yet even
then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed,
raised "FINER O' THEM;" but it seemed that no one else had been
favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were
mere foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount,
with perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had
wondered, and such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes.
Nor was it with his rivals only that he parted praise and blame.
If you remarked how well a plant was looking, he would gravely
touch his hat and thank you with solemn unction; all credit in the
matter falling to him. If, on the other hand, you called his
attention to some back-going vegetable, he would quote Scripture:
"PAUL MAY PLANT AND APOLLOS MAY WATER;" all blame being left to
Providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts.
There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with
his favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the beehive.
Their sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had
taken hold of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory
or no I cannot say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to
him by some recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood.
Nevertheless, he was too chary of his personal safety or (let me
rather say) his personal dignity to mingle in any active office
towards them. But he could stand by while one of the contemned
rivals did the work for him, and protest that it was quite safe in
spite of his own considerate distance and the cries of the
distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he was rather a man of
word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the
bees for text. "THEY ARE INDEED WONDERFUL CREATURES, MEM," he said
once. "THEY JUST MIND ME O' WHAT THE QUEEN OF SHEBA SAID TO
SOLOMON - AND I THINK SHE SAID IT WI' A SIGH, - 'THE HALF OF IT
HATH NOT BEEN TOLD UNTO ME.'"
As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read. Like the old
Covenanters, of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth
was full of sacred quotations; it was the book that he had studied
most and thought upon most deeply. To many people in his station
the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the only books of any vital
literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on
the draff of country newspapers, and the very instructive but not
very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational series. This was
Robert's position. All day long he had dreamed of the Hebrew
stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel
ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the
very expressions had become a part of him; so that he rarely spoke
without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a
raciness to the merest trivialities of talk. But the influence of
the Bible did not stop here. There was more in Robert than quaint
phrase and ready store of reference. He was imbued with a spirit
of peace and love: he interposed between man and wife: he threw
himself between the angry, touching his hat the while with all the
ceremony of an usher: he protected the birds from everybody but
himself, seeing, I suppose, a great difference between official
execution and wanton sport. His mistress telling him one day to
put some ferns into his master's particular corner, and adding,
"Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't deserve them, for he wouldn't
help me to gather them," "EH, MEM," replies Robert, "BUT I WOULDNAE
SAY THAT, FOR I THINK HE'S JUST A MOST DESERVIN' GENTLEMAN."
Again, two of our friends, who were on intimate terms, and
accustomed to use language to each other, somewhat without the
bounds of the parliamentary, happened to differ about the position
of a seat in the garden. The discussion, as was usual when these
two were at it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on both sides.
Every one accustomed to such controversies several times a day was
quietly enjoying this prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit - every
one but Robert, to whom the perfect good faith of the whole quarrel
seemed unquestionable, and who, after having waited till his
conscience would suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected
every moment that the disputants would fall to blows, cut suddenly
in with tones of almost tearful entreaty: "EH, BUT, GENTLEMEN, I
WAD HAE NAE MAIR WORDS ABOUT IT!" One thing was noticeable about
Robert's religion: it was neither dogmatic nor sectarian. He never
expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the doctrines of his creed,
and he never condemned anybody else. I have no doubt that he held
all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as considerably out
of it; I don't believe he had any sympathy for Prelacy; and the
natural feelings of man must have made him a little sore about
Free-Churchism; but at least, he never talked about these views,
never grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the
belief or practice of anybody. Now all this is not generally
characteristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects being churches
militant with a vengeance, and Scotch believers perpetual crusaders
the one against the other, and missionaries the one to the other.
Perhaps Robert's originally tender heart was what made the
difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour among
fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny creed than those
whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity; and the soft
influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit,
"Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade."
But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or
telling of his innocent and living piety. I had meant to tell of
his cottage, with the German pipe hung reverently above the fire,
and the shell box that he had made for his son, and of which he
would say pathetically: "HE WAS REAL PLEASED WI' IT AT FIRST, BUT
I THINK HE'S GOT A KIND O' TIRED O' IT NOW" - the son being then a
man of about forty. But I will let all these pass. "'Tis more
significant: he's dead." The earth, that he had digged so much in
his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the flowers that
he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new and
nearer way. A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished
to honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in
favour of its kind. "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing,
and yet not one of them falleth to the ground."
Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in the place of death
to greet him "with taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the
haughty Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker
and a servant of God.
CHAPTER VI. PASTORAL
TO leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing
light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr.
Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more
clearly the central features of the race; when once youth has
flown, each new impression only deepens the sense of nationality
and the desire of native places. So may some cadet of Royal
Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard about French
citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots-
Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides
upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of
peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all
men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and
Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of
Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers
about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of
Scotland are incomparable in themselves - or I am only the more
Scottish to suppose so - and their sound and colour dwell for ever
in the memory. How often and willingly do I not look again in
fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling
in its Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn
that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie! I think shame to
leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too
long if I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor
birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions,
that Water of Leith of the many and well-named mills - Bell's
Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of
pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless
trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed
from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss
under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a
rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then
kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of
the sea-beholding city in the plain. From many points in the moss
you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its
tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its
corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be breathed;
Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on
a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem
to the in-expert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a
bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would
take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the most
part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the
sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain GENIUS LOCI, I
am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the
nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my
pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me.
John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the
Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-
scattering, sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days,
when the drove roads, that now lie green and solitary through the
heather, were thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often marched
flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan;
and by his account it was a rough business not without danger. The
drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drovers met in the
wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea fishers meet off the banks in
the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the one as in the other case
rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes were committed,
sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of which
offences had a moorland burial and were never heard of in the
courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once
attacked, - by two men after his watch, - and at least once,
betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law
and was clapped into some rustic prison-house, the doors of which
he burst in the night and was no more heard of in that quarter.
When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter places, and he had
no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the inroads of
pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to wrath
these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by
snatches; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far
up the hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his
shoutings; and in the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced
late at night. This wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said
to haunt that quarter of the Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no
doubt it added to the fear in which men stood of John a touch of
something legendary. For my own part, he was at first my enemy,
and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural abhorrence.
It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only by some
sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot
amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this
ogre; I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the
Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my
questing dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities;
his hail at sight of me began to have less of the ring of a war-
slogan; soon, we never met but he produced his snuff-box, which was
with him, like the calumet with the Red Indian, a part of the
heraldry of peace; and at length, in the ripeness of time, we grew
to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone in these parts in
the winter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me a cry" over
the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and for me
to overtake and bear him company.
That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry,
fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of
honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently
Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a
sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from
a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff
with weathering; more like a picture than a face; yet with a
certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like
that of a man trained too fine and harassed with perpetual
vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard;
the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me,
so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new
acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master,
stalking a little before me, "beard on shoulder," the plaid hanging
loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and
guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems
peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best
talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem
incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned
it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as
he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a
colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans of
sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in
the yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionally
thinned and strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the
signs of the weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite
stupidity of sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he
could present so humanly, and with so much old experience and
living gusto, that weariness was excluded. And in the midst he
would suddenly straighten his bowed back, the stick would fly
abroad in demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his voice roll
out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the use
of that great wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the
hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and
raised faces, would run up their flags again to the masthead and
spread themselves upon the indicated circuit. It used to fill me
with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story. But
John denied these creatures all intelligence; they were the
constant butt of his passion and contempt; it was just possible to
work with the like of them, he said, - not more than possible. And
then he would expand upon the subject of the really good dogs that
he had known, and the one really good dog that he had himself
possessed. He had been offered forty pounds for it; but a good
collie was worth more than that, more than anything, to a "herd;"
he did the herd's work for him. "As for the like of them!" he
would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of his
assistants.
Once - I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being
born BRITANNIS IN MONTIBUS, indeed, but alas! INERUDITO SAECULO -
once, in the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in
Edinburgh, and on the way out, the road being crowded, two were
lost. This was a reproach to John, and a slur upon the dog; and
both were alive to their misfortune. Word came, after some days,
that a farmer about Braid had found a pair of sheep; and thither
went John and the dog to ask for restitution. But the farmer was a
hard man and stood upon his rights. "How were they marked?" he
asked; and since John had bought right and left from many sellers
and had no notion of the marks - "Very well," said the farmer,
"then it's only right that I should keep them." - "Well," said
John, "it's a fact that I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can,
will ye let me have them?" The farmer was honest as well as hard,
and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he had
all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's
dog into their midst. That hairy man of business knew his errand
well; he knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their
shame) lost them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the lord
knows how, unless by listening) that they were come to Braid for
their recovery; and without pause or blunder singled out, first one
and then another, the two waifs. It was that afternoon the forty
pounds were offered and refused. And the shepherd and his dog -
what do I say? the true shepherd and his man - set off together by
Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and "smiled to ither" all the way
home, with the two recovered ones before them. So far, so good;
but intelligence may be abused. The dog, as he is by little man's
inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue; and
John had another collie tale of quite a different complexion. At
the foot of the moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton, wise men say)
there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for washing
sheep. John was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, when he
was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the
deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth. He knew the dog;
knew him for a clever, rising practitioner from quite a distant
farm; one whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully
steering flocks to market. But what did the practitioner so far
from home? and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the
pool? - for it was towards the pool that he was heading. John lay
the closer under his bush, and presently saw the dog come forth
upon the margin, look all about him to see if he were anywhere
observed, plunge in and repeatedly wash himself over head and ears,
and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike homeward over
the hills. That same night word was sent his master, and the
rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence,
before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for
alas! he was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater;
and it was from the maculation of sheep's blood that he had come so
far to cleanse himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton.
A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of
life, in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a
hint of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use,
vocal or written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the
skill of him that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited
experience of him who reads; and when I hear with a particular
thrill of things that I have never done or seen, it is one of that
innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in past deeds. Thus
novels begin to touch not the fine DILETTANTI but the gross mass of
mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of
manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal with
fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and thus
ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields
the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift
romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things
have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much
to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and
aboriginal taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in
the process of the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an
eccentricity or a lost art which was once the fashion of an empire;
and those only are perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that
roused men in all epochs of the past. There is a certain critic,
not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known to set
before the best: a certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a
percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in
caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a
pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries - his wife, that
accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never heard,
but he is often described as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for
recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of
all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims
of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle
with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have
moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.
We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I
had one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me. But yet I
think I owe my taste for that hillside business rather to the art
and interest of John Todd. He it was that made it live for me, as
the artist can make all things live. It was through him the simple
strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant
scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-champ, was an affair that I
never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to
mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable
black blots of snow shower moving here and there like night already
come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the
snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings
of the wind along the moors; and for centre piece to all these
features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his
captain's eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a
spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is
thus that I still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of
the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish,
his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to
the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit
should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into
his easy, even conversation.
CHAPTER VII. THE MANSE
I HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that
dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it
again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should
be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is
there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so
that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown
obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited
by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling
merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy
eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly
steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was
young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been
busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must
be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as
the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale
may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may
seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am
standing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the season also,
so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the
songs of birds; - and the year of grace, so that when I turn to
leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants
unchanged.
It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into
provinces by a great hedge of beech, and over-looked by the church
and the terrace of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick,
and after nightfall "spunkies" might be seen to dance at least by
children; flower-plots lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the
great yew making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; the smell of
water rising from all round, with an added tang of paper-mills; the
sound of water everywhere, and the sound of mills - the wheel and
the dam singing their alternate strain; the birds on every bush and
from every corner of the overhanging woods pealing out their notes
until the air throbbed with them; and in the midst of this, the
manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish stature, as a
great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I
supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is
difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of
stalwart sons and tall daughters were housed and reared, and came
to man and womanhood in that nest of little chambers; so that the
face of the earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and
letters with outlandish stamps became familiar to the local
postman, and the walls of the little chambers brightened with the
wonders of the East. The dullest could see this was a house that
had a pair of hands in divers foreign places: a well-beloved house
- its image fondly dwelt on by many travellers.
Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him,
judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as
a man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the
display of what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a
lover of his life and innocent habits to the end. We children
admired him: partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for
none more than children are concerned for beauty and, above all,
for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn light in which we
beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers, in the
pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy,
of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind
of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or
letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a
library of bloodless books - or so they seemed in those days,
although I have some of them now on my own shelves and like well
enough to read them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the
greater gloom for our imaginations. But the study had a redeeming
grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young
eyes. I cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the greed
with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to say a
psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at
the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might
reward me with an Indian picture.
"Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will
He slumber that thee keeps,"
it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model
to set in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier,
and a task in recitation that really merited reward. And I must
suppose the old man thought so too, and was either touched or
amused by the performance; for he took me in his arms with most
unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly
sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we were clerk and
parson. I was struck by this reception into so tender a surprise
that I forgot my disappointment. And indeed the hope was one of
those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon
reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should
strip himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts and reminders of
his absent sons; nothing more unlikely than that he should bestow
it upon me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that
to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the rod
in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young.
The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He
had over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the
end of his many days. He sat by the dining-room fire, with his
white hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure;
and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine,
Dr. Gregory's powder. Now that remedy, as the work of a near
kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for the
imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the palate. The old
gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being
accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching
a "barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open
in her hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered
at once. I had had no Gregory; then I should have no barley-sugar
kiss: so he decided with a touch of irritation. And just then the
phaeton coming opportunely to the kitchen door - for such was our
unlordly fashion - I was taken for the last time from the presence
of my grandfather.
Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I
must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so
am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to
hear them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and
I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept
it, I am still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare,
whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my
Shakespeare also, and am persuaded I can read him well, though I
own I never have been told so. He made embroidery, designing his
own patterns; and in that kind of work I never made anything but a
kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which
was as black as the chimney before I had done with it. He loved
port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better
with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He
had chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may
possibly inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble
presence. Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the
reverend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write
the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and
sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being. In his
garden, as I played there, I learned the love of mills - or had I
an ancestor a miller? - and a kindness for the neighbourhood of
graves, as homely things not without their poetry - or had I an
ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he played himself?
- for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me
played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the
green avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk,
which was still a country place, and sat on the High School
benches, and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I
spent my youth was not yet thought upon; but we made holiday
parties among the cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and
cream near by at a gardener's. All this I had forgotten; only my
grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I have forgotten,
too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our first
Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of
Burns's Dr. Smith - "Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have
forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns
at first hand.
And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this HOMUNCULUS or
part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr.
Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other HOMUNCULOS or
part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a
lower order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I
went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil
man taking down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron; - we
may have had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain
carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon
some holiday excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a
cottage in a flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his
shuttle. And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side;
and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn
father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by
to college. Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young
student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in
that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated. It
would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the
lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural
metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a
grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed;
and some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year
or two longer in the person of their child.
But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of
fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that
we can follow backward the careers of our HOMUNCULOS and be
reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a
moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a
bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. And
though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or
I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-
surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal
Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted
the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying
from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a
West India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol
Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I
was with my engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and
oil man) when he sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise
that gave us the PIRATE and the LORD OF THE ISLES; I was with him,
too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the SMEATON had drifted
from her moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized
upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before his
tongue could utter audible words; and once more with him when the
Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the
tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading in his
Bible - or affecting to read - till one after another slunk back
with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes, parts of me
have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well.
And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up
can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of
ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly
preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the
legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on
Chaldaean plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that
fancy can see peering through the disparted branches? What sleeper
in green tree-tops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree?
Probably arboreal in his habits. . . .
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