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AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN
Pencil Portraits from College Life
by
J. M. BARRIE
Author of
"The Little Minister," "A Window in Thrums," "When a Man's
Single," "Auld Licht Idylls," etc.
New York
Lovell, Coryell & Company
5 And 7 East Sixteenth Street
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. LORD ROSEBERY, 7
II. PROFESSOR MASSON, 19
III. PROFESSOR BLACKIE, 31
IV. PROFESSOR CALDERWOOD, 41
V. PROFESSOR TAIT, 53
VI. PROFESSOR FRASER, 67
VII. PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL, 77
VIII. PROFESSOR SELLAR, 91
IX. MR. JOSEPH THOMSON, 105
X. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 115
XI. REV. WALTER C. SMITH, D.D., 129
LORD ROSEBERY.
I.
LORD ROSEBERY.
The first time I ever saw Lord Rosebery was in Edinburgh when I was a
student, and I flung a clod of earth at him. He was a peer; those were
my politics.
I missed him, and I have heard a good many journalists say since then
that he is a difficult man to hit. One who began by liking him and is
now scornful, which is just the reverse process from mine, told me the
reason why. He had some brochures to write on the Liberal leaders, and
got on nicely till he reached Lord Rosebery, where he stuck. In vain he
walked round his lordship, looking for an opening. The man was
naturally indignant; he is the father of a family.
Lord Rosebery is forty-one years of age, and has missed many
opportunities of becoming the bosom friend of Lord Randolph Churchill.
They were at Eton together and at Oxford, and have met since. As a boy,
the Liberal played at horses, and the Tory at running off with other
boys' caps. Lord Randolph was the more distinguished at the university.
One day a proctor ran him down in the streets smoking in his cap and
gown. The undergraduate remarked on the changeability of the weather,
but the proctor, gasping at such bravado, demanded his name and
college. Lord Randolph failed to turn up next day at St. Edmund Hall to
be lectured, but strolled to the proctor's house about dinner-time.
"Does a fellow, name of Moore, live here?" he asked. The footman
contrived not to faint. "He do," he replied, severely; "but he are at
dinner." "Ah! take him in my card," said the unabashed caller. The
Merton books tell that for this the noble lord was fined ten pounds.
There was a time when Lord Rosebery would have reformed the House of
Lords to a site nearer Newmarket. As politics took a firmer grip of
him, it was Newmarket that seemed a long way off. One day at Edinburgh
he realized the disadvantage of owning swift horses. His brougham had
met him at Waverley Station to take him to Dalmeny. Lord Rosebery
opened the door of the carriage to put in some papers, and then turned
away. The coachman, too well bred to look round, heard the door shut,
and, thinking that his master was inside, set off at once. Pursuit was
attempted, but what was there in Edinburgh streets to make up on those
horses? The coachman drove seven miles, until he reached a point in the
Dalmeny parks where it was his lordship's custom to alight and open a
gate. Here the brougham stood for some minutes, awaiting Lord
Rosebery's convenience. At last the coachman became uneasy and
dismounted. His brain reeled when he saw an empty brougham. He could
have sworn to seeing his lordship enter. There were his papers. What
had happened? With a quaking hand the horses were turned, and, driving
back, the coachman looked fearfully along the sides of the road. He met
Lord Rosebery travelling in great good humor by the luggage omnibus.
Whatever is to be Lord Rosebery's future, he has reached that stage in
a statesman's career when his opponents cease to question his capacity.
His speeches showed him long ago a man of brilliant parts. His tenure
of the Foreign Office proved him heavy metal. Were the Gladstonians to
return to power, the other Cabinet posts might go anywhere, but the
Foreign Secretary is arranged for. Where his predecessors had clouded
their meaning in words till it was as wrapped up as a Mussulman's head,
Lord Rosebery's were the straightforward despatches of a man with his
mind made up. German influence was spoken of; Count Herbert Bismarck
had been seen shooting Lord Rosebery's partridges. This was the
evidence: there has never been any other, except that German methods
commended themselves to the minister rather than those of France. His
relations with the French government were cordial. "The talk of
Bismarck's shadow behind Rosebery," a great French politician said
lately, "I put aside with a smile; but how about the Jews?" Probably
few persons realize what a power the Jews are in Europe, and in Lord
Rosebery's position he is a strong man if he holds his own with them.
Any fears on that ground have, I should say, been laid by his record at
the Foreign Office.
Lord Rosebery had once a conversation with Prince Bismarck, to which,
owing to some oversight, the Paris correspondent of the _Times_ was not
invited. M. Blowitz only smiled good-naturedly, and of course his
report of the proceedings appeared all the same. Some time afterward
Lord Rosebery was introduced to this remarkable man, who, as is well
known, carries Cabinet appointments in his pocket, and complimented him
on his report. "Ah, it was all right, was it?" asked Blowitz, beaming.
Lord Rosebery explained that any fault it had was that it was all
wrong. "Then if Bismarck did not say that to you," said Blowitz,
regally, "I know he intended to say it."
The "Uncrowned King of Scotland" is a title that has been made for Lord
Rosebery, whose country has had faith in him from the beginning. Mr.
Gladstone is the only other man who can make so many Scotsmen take
politics as if it were the Highland Fling. Once when Lord Rosebery was
firing an Edinburgh audience to the delirium point, an old man in the
hall shouted out, "I dinna hear a word he says, but it's grand, it's
grand!" During the first Midlothian campaign Mr. Gladstone and Lord
Rosebery were the father and son of the Scottish people. Lord Rosebery
rode into fame on the top of that wave, and he has kept his place in
the hearts of the people, and in oleographs on their walls, ever since.
In all Scottish matters he has the enthusiasm of a Burns dinner, and
his humor enables him to pay compliments. When he says agreeable things
to Scotsmen about their country, there is a twinkle in his eye and in
theirs to which English scribes cannot give a meaning. He has unveiled
so many Burns statues that an American lecturess explains: "Curious
thing, but I feel somehow I am connected with Lord Rosebery. I go to a
place and deliver a lecture on Burns; they collect subscriptions for a
statue, and he unveils it." Such is the delight of the Scottish
students in Lord Rosebery that he may be said to have made the
triumphal tour of the northern universities as their lord-rector; he
lost the post in Glasgow lately through a quibble, but had the honor
with the votes. His address to the Edinburgh undergraduates on
"Patriotism" was the best thing he ever did outside politics, and made
the students his for life. Some of them had smuggled into the hall a
chair with "Gaelic chair" placarded on it, and the lord-rector
unwittingly played into their hands. In a noble peroration he exhorted
his hearers to high aims in life. "Raise your country," he exclaimed
[cheers]; "raise yourselves [renewed cheering]; raise your university
[thunders of applause]." From the back of the hall came a solemn voice,
"Raise the chair!" Up went the Gaelic chair.
Even Lord Rosebery's views on imperial federation can become a
compliment to Scotland. Having been all over the world himself, and
felt how he grew on his travels, Lord Rosebery maintains that every
British statesman should visit India and the colonies. He said that
first at a semi-public dinner in the country--and here I may mention
that on such occasions he has begun his speeches less frequently than
any other prominent politician with a statement that others could be
got to discharge the duty better; in other words, he has several times
omitted this introduction. On his return to London he was told that his
colleagues in the Administration had been seeing how his scheme would
work out. "We found that if your rule were enforced, the Cabinet would
consist of yourself and Childers." "This would be an ideal cabinet,"
Lord Rosebery subsequently remarked in Edinburgh, "for it would be
entirely Scottish," Mr. Childers being member for a Scottish
constituency.
The present unhappy division of the Liberal party has made enemies of
friends for no leading man so little as for Lord Rosebery. There are
forces working against him, no doubt, in comparatively high places, but
the Unionists have kept their respect for him. His views may be wrong,
but he is about the only Liberal leader, with the noble exception of
Lord Hartington, of whom troublous times have not rasped the temper.
Though a great reader, he is not a literary man like Mr. Morley, who
would, however, be making phrases where Lord Rosebery would make laws.
Sir William Harcourt has been spoken of as a possible prime minister,
but surely it will never come to that. If Mr. Gladstone's successor is
chosen from those who have followed him on the home-rule question, he
probably was not rash in himself naming Lord Rosebery.
Lord Rosebery could not now step up without stepping into the
premiership. His humor, which is his most obvious faculty, has been a
prop to him many a time ere now, but, if I was his adviser, I should
tell him that it has served its purpose. There are a great many
excellent people who shake their heads over it in a man who has become
a power in the land. "Let us be grave," said Dr. Johnson once to a
merry companion, "for here comes a fool." In an unknown novel there is
a character who says of himself that "he is not stupid enough ever to
be a great man." I happen to know that this reflection was evolved by
the author out of thinking over Lord Rosebery. It is not easy for a
bright man to be heavy, and Lord Rosebery's humor is so spontaneous
that if a joke is made in their company he has always finished laughing
before Lord Hartington begins. Perhaps when Lord Rosebery is on the
point of letting his humor run off with him in a public speech, he
could recover his solemnity by thinking of the _Examiner_.
PROFESSOR MASSON.
II.
PROFESSOR MASSON.
Though a man might, to my mind, be better employed than in going to
college, it is his own fault if he does not strike on some one there
who sends his life off at a new angle. If, as I take it, the glory of a
professor is to give elastic minds their proper bent, Masson is a name
his country will retain a grip of. There are men who are good to think
of, and as a rule we only know them from their books. Something of our
pride in life would go with their fall. To have one such professor at a
time is the most a university can hope of human nature; so Edinburgh
need not expect another just yet. These, of course, are only to be
taken as the reminiscences of a student. I seem to remember everything
Masson said, and the way he said it.
Having, immediately before taken lodgings in a crow's nest, my first
sight of Masson was specially impressive. It was the opening of the
session, when fees were paid, and a whisper ran round the quadrangle
that Masson had set off home with three hundred one-pound notes stuffed
into his trouser pockets. There was a solemn swell of awestruck
students to the gates, and some of us could not help following him. He
took his pockets coolly. When he stopped it was at a second-hand
bookstall, where he rummaged for a long time. Eventually he pounced
upon a dusty, draggled little volume, and went off proudly with it
beneath his arm. He seemed to look suspiciously at strangers now, but
it was not the money but the book he was keeping guard over. His
pockets, however, were unmistakably bulging out. I resolved to go in
for literature.
Masson, however, always comes to my memory first knocking nails into
his desk or trying to tear the gas-bracket from its socket. He said
that the Danes scattered over England, taking such a hold as a nail
takes when it is driven into wood. For the moment he saw his desk
turned into England; he whirled an invisible hammer in the air, and
down it came on the desk with a crash. No one who has sat under Masson
can forget how the Danes nailed themselves upon England. His desk is
thick with their tombstones. It was when his mind groped for an image
that he clutched the bracket. He seemed to tear his good things out of
it. Silence overcame the class. Some were fascinated by the man; others
trembled for the bracket. It shook, groaned, and yielded. Masson said
another of the things that made his lectures literature; the crisis was
passed; and everybody breathed again.
He masters a subject by letting it master him; for though his critical
reputation is built on honesty, it is his enthusiasm that makes his
work warm with life. Sometimes he entered the class-room so full of
what he had to say that he began before he reached his desk. If he was
in the middle of a peroration when the bell rang, even the back benches
forgot to empty. There were the inevitable students to whom literature
is a trial, and sometimes they call attention to their sufferings by a
scraping of the feet. Then the professor tried to fix his eyeglass on
them, and when it worked properly they were transfixed. As a rule,
however, it required so many adjustments that by the time his eye took
hold of it he had remembered that students were made so, and his
indignation went. Then, with the light in his eye that some
photographer ought to catch, he would hope that his lecture was not
disturbing their conversation. It was characteristic of his passion for
being just that, when he had criticised some writer severely he would
remember that the back benches could not understand that criticism and
admiration might go together, unless they were told so again.
The test of a sensitive man is that he is careful of wounding the
feelings of others. Once, I remember, a student was reading a passage
aloud, assuming at the same time such an attitude that the professor
could not help remarking that he looked like a teapot. It was exactly
what he did look like, and the class applauded. But next moment Masson
had apologized for being personal. Such reminiscences are what make
the old literature class-room to thousands of graduates a delight to
think of.
When the news of Carlyle's death reached the room, Masson could not go
on with his lecture. Every one knows what Carlyle has said of him; and
no one who has heard it will ever forget what he has said of Carlyle.
Here were two men who understood each other. One of the Carlylean
pictures one loves to dwell on shows them smoking together, with
nothing breaking the pauses but Mrs. Carlyle's needles. Carlyle told
Masson how he gave up smoking and then took to it again. He had walked
from Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh to consult a doctor about his health,
and was advised to lose his pipe. He smoked no more, but his health did
not improve, and then one day he walked in a wood. At the foot of a
tree lay a pipe, a tobacco pouch, a match-box. He saw clearly that this
was a case of Providential interference, and from that moment he smoked
again. There the professor's story stops. I have no doubt, though,
that he nodded his head when Carlyle explained what the pipe and
tobacco were doing there. Masson's "Milton" is, of course, his great
work, but for sympathetic analysis I know nothing to surpass his
"Chatterton." Lecturing on Chatterton one day, he remarked, with a
slight hesitation, that had the poet mixed a little more in company
and--and smoked, his morbidness would not have poisoned him. That
turned my thoughts to smoking, because I meant to be a Chatterton, but
greater. Since then the professor has warned me against smoking too
much. He was smoking at the time.
This is no place to follow Masson's career, nor to discuss his work. To
reach his position one ought to know his definition of a man of
letters. It is curious, and, like most of his departures from the
generally accepted, sticks to the memory. By a man of letters he does
not mean the poet, for instance, who is all soul, so much as the
strong-brained writer whose guardian angel is a fine sanity. He used to
mention John Skelton, the Wolsey satirist, and Sir David Lindsay, as
typical men of letters from this point of view, and it is as a man of
letters of that class that Masson is best considered. In an age of many
whipper-snappers in criticism, he is something of a Gulliver.
The students in that class liked to see their professor as well as hear
him. I let my hair grow long because it only annoyed other people, and
one day there was dropped into my hand a note containing sixpence and
the words: "The students sitting behind you present their compliments,
and beg that you will get your hair cut with the enclosed, as it
interferes with their view of the professor."
Masson, when he edited _Macmillan's_, had all the best men round him.
His talk of Thackeray is specially interesting, but he always holds
that in conversation Douglas Jerrold was unapproachable. Jerrold told
him a good story of his seafaring days. His ship was lying off
Gibraltar, and for some hours Jerrold, though only a midshipman, was
left in charge. Some of the sailors begged to get ashore, and he let
them, on the promise that they would bring him back some oranges. One
of them disappeared, and the midshipman suffered for it. More than
twenty years afterward Jerrold was looking in at a window in the Strand
when he seemed to know the face of a weatherbeaten man who was doing
the same thing. Suddenly he remembered, and put his hand on the other's
shoulder. "My man," he said, "you have been a long time with those
oranges!" The sailor recognized him, turned white, and took to his
heels. There is, too, the story of how Dickens and Jerrold made up
their quarrel at the Garrick Club. It was the occasion on which Masson
first met the author of "Pickwick." Dickens and Jerrold had not spoken
for a year, and they both happened to have friends at dinner in the
strangers' room, Masson being Jerrold's guest. The two hosts sat back
to back, but did not address each other, though the conversation was
general. At last Jerrold could stand it no longer. Turning, he
exclaimed, "Charley, my boy, how are you?" Dickens wheeled round and
grasped his hand.
Many persons must have noticed that, in appearance, Masson is becoming
more and more like Carlyle every year. How would you account for it? It
is a thing his old students often discuss when they meet, especially
those of them who, when at college, made up their minds to dedicate
their first book to him. The reason they seldom do it is because the
book does not seem good enough.
PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE.
III.
PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE.
Lately I was told that Blackie--one does not say Mr. Cromwell--is no
longer professor of Greek in Edinburgh University. What nonsense some
people talk! As if Blackie were not part of the building! In his class
one day he spoke touchingly of the time when he would have to join
Socrates in the Elysian fields. A student cheered--no one knows why.
"It won't be for some time yet," added John Stuart.
Blackie takes his ease at home, in a dressing-gown and straw hat. This
shows that his plaid really does come off. "My occupation nowadays," he
said to me recently, "is business, blethers, bothers, beggars, and
backgammon." He has also started a profession of going to public
meetings, and hurrying home to write letters to the newspapers about
them. When the editor shakes the manuscript, a sonnet falls out. I
think I remember the professor's saying that he had never made five
shillings by his verses. To my mind they are worth more than that.
Though he has explained them frequently, there is still confusion about
Blackie's politics. At Manchester they thought he was a Tory, and
invited him to address them, on that understanding. "I fancy I
astonished them," the professor said to me. This is quite possible.
Then he was mistaken for a Liberal. The fact is that Blackie is a
philosopher, who follows the golden mean. He sees this himself. A
philosopher who follows the golden mean is thus a man who runs zig-zag
between two extremes. You will observe that he who does this is some
time before he arrives anywhere.
The professor has said that he has the strongest lungs in Scotland. Of
the many compliments that might well be paid him, not the least worthy
would be this: that he is as healthy mentally as physically. Mrs.
Norton begins a novel with the remark that one of the finest sights
conceivable is a well-preserved gentleman of middle age. It will be
some time yet before Blackie reaches middle age, but there must be
something wrong with you if you can look at him without feeling
refreshed. Did you ever watch him marching along Princes Street on a
warm day, when every other person was broiling in the sun? His head is
well thrown back, the staff, grasped in the middle, jerks back and
forward like a weaver's shuttle, and the plaid flies in the breeze.
Other people's clothes are hanging limp. Blackie carries his breeze
with him.
A year or two ago Mr. Gladstone, when at Dalmeny, pointed out that he
had the advantage over Blackie in being of both Highland and Lowland
extraction. The professor, however, is as Scotch as the thistle or his
native hills, and Mr. Gladstone, quite justifiably, considers him the
most outstanding of living Scotsmen. Blackie is not quite sure himself.
Not long ago I heard him read a preface to a life of Mr. Gladstone that
was being printed at Smyrna in modern Greek. He told his readers to
remember that Mr. Gladstone was a great scholar and an upright
statesman. They would find it easy to do this if they first remembered
that he was Scottish.
The _World_ included Blackie in its list of "Celebrities at Home." It
said that the door was opened by a red-headed lassie. That was probably
meant for local color, and it amused every one who knew Mrs. Blackie.
The professor is one of the most genial of men, and will show you to
your room himself, talking six languages. This tends to make the
conversation one-sided, but he does not mind that. He still writes a
good deal, spending several hours in his library daily, and his talk is
as brilliant as ever. His writing nowadays is less sustained than it
was, and he prefers flitting from one subject to another, to evolving a
great work. When he dips his pen into an ink-pot, it at once writes a
sonnet--so strong is the force of habit. Recently he wrote a page about
Carlyle in a little book issued by the Edinburgh students' bazaar
committee. In this he reproved Carlyle for having "bias." Blackie
wonders why people should have bias.
Some readers of this may in their student days have been invited to the
Greek professor's house to breakfast, without knowing why they were
selected from among so many. It was not, as they are probably aware,
because of their classical attainments, for they were too thoughtful to
be in the prize-list; nor was it because of the charm of their manners
or the fascination of their conversation. When the professor noticed
any physical peculiarity about a student, such as a lisp, or a glass
eye, or one leg longer than the other, or a broken nose, he was at once
struck by it, and asked him to breakfast. They were very lively
breakfasts, the eggs being served in tureens; but sometimes it was a
collection of the maimed and crooked, and one person at the table--not
the host himself--used to tremble lest, making mirrors of each other,
the guests should see why they were invited.
Sometimes, instead of asking a student to breakfast, Blackie would
instruct another student to request his company to tea. Then the two
students were told to talk about paulo-post futures in the cool of the
evening, and to read their Greek Testament and to go to the pantomime.
The professor never tired of giving his students advice about the
preservation of their bodily health. He strongly recommended a cold
bath at six o'clock every morning. In winter, he remarked genially, you
can break the ice with a hammer. According to himself, only one
enthusiast seems to have followed his advice, and he died.
In Blackie's class-room there used to be a demonstration every time he
mentioned the name of a distinguished politician. Whether the
demonstration took the professor by surprise or whether he waited for
it, will never perhaps be known. But Blackie at least put out the gleam
in his eye, and looked as if he were angry. "I will say Beaconsfield,"
he would exclaim (cheers and hisses). "Beaconsfield" (uproar). Then he
would stride forward, and, seizing the railing, announce his intention
of saying Beaconsfield until every goose in the room was tired of
cackling. ("Question.") "Beaconsfield." ("No, no.") "Beaconsfield."
("Hear, hear," and shouts of "Gladstone.") "Beaconsfield." ("Three
cheers for Dizzy.") Eventually the class would be dismissed as--(1)
idiots, (2) a bear garden, (3) a flock of sheep, (4) a pack of
numskulls, (5) hissing serpents. The professor would retire, apparently
fuming, to his anteroom, and five minutes afterward he would be playing
himself down the North Bridge on imaginary bagpipes. This sort of thing
added a sauce to all academic sessions. There was a notebook also,
which appeared year after year. It contained the professor's jokes of a
former session, carefully classified by an admiring student. It was
handed down from one year's men to the next; and thus, if Blackie began
to make a joke about haggis, the possessor of the book had only swiftly
to turn to the H's, find what the joke was, and send it along the class
quicker than the professor could speak it.
In the old days the Greek professor recited a poem in honor of the end
of the session. He composed it himself, and, as known to me, it took
the form of a graduate's farewell to his alma mater. Sometimes he
would knock a map down as if overcome with emotion, and at critical
moments a student in the back benches would accompany him on a penny
trumpet. Now, I believe, the Hellenic Club takes the place of the
class-room. All the eminent persons in Edinburgh attend its meetings,
and Blackie, the Athenian, is in the chair. The policeman in Douglas
Crescent looks skeered when you ask him what takes place on these
occasions. It is generally understood that toward the end of the
meeting they agree to read Greek next time.
PROFESSOR CALDERWOOD.
IV.
PROFESSOR CALDERWOOD.
Here is a true story that the general reader may jump, as it is
intended for Professor Calderwood himself. Some years ago an English
daily paper reviewed a book entitled "A Handbook of Moral Philosophy."
The professor knows the work. The "notice" was done by the junior
reporter, to whom philosophical treatises are generally intrusted. He
dealt leniently, on the whole, with Professor Calderwood, even giving
him a word of encouragement here and there. Still the criticism was
severe. The reviewer subsequently went to Edinburgh University, and
came out 144th in the class of moral philosophy.
That student is now, I believe, on friendly terms with Professor
Calderwood, but has never told him this story. I fancy the professor
would like to know his name. It may perhaps be reached in this way: He
was the young gentleman who went to his classes the first day in a
black coat and silk hat, and was cheered round the quadrangle by a body
of admiring fellow-students, who took him for a professor.
Calderwood contrives to get himself more in touch with the mass of his
students than some of his fellow-professors, partly because he puts a
high ideal before himself, and to some extent because his subject is
one that Scottish students revel in. Long before they join his class
they know that they are moral philosophers; indeed, they are sometimes
surer of it before they enrol than afterward. Their essays begin in
some such fashion as this: "In joining issue with Reid, I wish to take
no unfair advantage of my antagonist;" or, "Kant is sadly at fault when
he says that----" or, "It is strange that a man of Locke's attainments
should have been blind to the fact----" When the professor reads out
these tit-bits to the class, his eyes twinkle. Some students, of
course, are not such keen philosophers as others. Does Professor
Calderwood remember the one who was never struck by anything in moral
philosophy until he learned by accident that Descartes lay in bed till
about twelve o'clock every morning? Then it dawned on him that he, too,
must have been a philosopher all his life without knowing it. One year
a father and son were in the class. The father got so excited over
volition and the line that divides right from wrong that he wrenched
the desk before him from its sockets and hit it triumphantly, meaning
that he and the professor were at one. He was generally admired by his
fellow-students, because he was the only one in the class who could cry
out "Hear, hear," and even "Question," without blushing. The son, on
the other hand, was _blase_, and would have been an agnostic, only he
could never remember the name. Once a week Calderwood turns his class
into a debating society, and argues things out with his students. This
field-day is a joy to them. Some of them spend the six days previous in
preparing posers. The worst of the professor is that he never sees that
they are posers. What is the use of getting up a question of the most
subtle kind, when he answers it right away? It makes you sit down quite
suddenly. There is an occasional student who tries to convert liberty
of speech on the discussion day into license, and of him the professor
makes short work. The student means to turn the laugh on Calderwood,
and then Calderwood takes advantage of him, and the other students
laugh at the wrong person. It is the older students, as a rule, who are
most violently agitated over these philosophical debates. One with a
beard cracks his fingers, after the manner of a child in a village
school that knows who won the battle of Bannockburn, and feels that he
must burst if he does not let it out at once. A bald-headed man rises
every minute to put a question, and then sits down, looking stupid. He
has been trying so hard to remember what it is that he has forgotten.
There is a legend of two who quarrelled over the Will and fought it out
on Arthur's Seat.
One year, however, a boy of sixteen or so, with a squeaky voice and a
stammer, was Calderwood's severest critic. He sat on the back bench,
and what he wanted to know was something about the infinite. Every
discussion day he took advantage of a lull in the debate to squeak out,
"With regard to the infinite," and then could never get any further. No
one ever discovered what he wanted enlightenment on about the infinite.
He grew despondent as the session wore on, but courageously stuck to
his point. Probably he is a soured man now. For purposes of exposition,
Calderwood has a blackboard in his lecture-room, on which he chalks
circles that represent the feelings and the will, with arrows shooting
between them. In my class there was a boy, a very little boy, who had
been a dux at school and was a dunce at college. He could not make
moral philosophy out at all, but did his best. Here were his complete
notes for one day: "Edinburgh University; Class of Moral Philosophy;
Professor Calderwood; Lecture 64; Jan. 11. 18--You rub out the arrow,
and there is only the circle left."
Professor Calderwood is passionately fond of music, as those who visit
at his house know. He is of opinion that there is a great deal of
moral philosophy in "The Dead March in Saul." Once he said something to
that effect in his class, adding enthusiastically that he could excuse
the absence of a student who had been away hearing "The Dead March in
Saul." After that he received a good many letters from students, worded
in this way: "Mr. McNaughton (bench 7) presents his compliments to
Professor Calderwood, and begs to state that his absence from the class
yesterday was owing to his being elsewhere, hearing 'The Dead March in
Saul.'" "Dear Professor Calderwood: I regret my absence from the
lecture to-day, but hope you will overlook it, as I was unavoidably
detained at home, practising 'The Dead March in Saul.' Yours truly,
Peter Webster." "Professor Calderwood: Dear Sir,--As I was coming to
the lecture to-day, I heard 'The Dead March in Saul' being played in
the street. You will, I am sure, make allowance for my non-attendance
at the class, as I was too much affected to come. It is indeed a grand
march. Yours faithfully, John Robbie." "The students whose names are
subjoined thank the professor of moral philosophy most cordially for
his remarks on the elevating power of music. They have been encouraged
thereby to start a class for the proper study of the impressive and
solemn march to which he called special attention, and hope he will
excuse them, should their practisings occasionally prevent their
attendance at the Friday lectures." Professor Calderwood does not
lecture on "The Dead March in Saul" now.
The class of moral philosophy is not for the few, but the many. Some
professors do not mind what becomes of the nine students, so long as
they can force on every tenth. Calderwood, however, considers it his
duty to carry the whole class along with him; and it is, as a
consequence, almost impossible to fall behind. The lectures are not
delivered, in the ordinary sense, but dictated. Having explained the
subject of the day with the lucidity that is this professor's peculiar
gift, he condenses his remarks into a proposition. It is as if a
minister ended his sermon with the text. Thus: "Proposition 34: Man is
born into the world--(You have got that? See that you have all got
it.) Man is born into the world with a capacity--with a capacity----"
(Anxious student: "If you please, professor, where did you say man was
born into?") "Into the world, with a capacity to distinguish----"
("With a what, sir?")--"with a capacity to distinguish----" (Student:
"Who is born into the world?") "Perhaps I have been reading too
quickly. Man is born into the world, with a capacity to distinguish
between--distinguish between----" (student shuts his book, thinking
that completes the proposition)--"distinguish between right and
wrong--right--and wrong. You have all got Proposition 34, gentlemen?"
Once Calderwood was questioning a student about a proposition, to see
that he thoroughly understood it. "Give an illustration," suggested the
professor. The student took the case of a murderer. "Very good," said
the professor. "Now give me another illustration." The student pondered
for a little. "Well," he said at length, "take the case of another
murderer."
Professor Calderwood has such an exceptional interest in his students
that he asks every one of them to his house. This is but one of many
things that makes him generally popular; he also invites his ladies'
class to meet them. The lady whom you take down to supper suggests
Proposition 41 as a nice thing to talk about, and asks what you think
of the metaphysics of ethics. Professor Calderwood sees the ladies into
the cabs himself. It is the only thing I ever heard against him.
PROFESSOR TAIT.
V.
PROFESSOR TAIT.
Just as I opened my desk to write enthusiastically of Tait, I
remembered having recently deciphered a pencil note about him, in my
own handwriting, on the cover of Masson's "Chronological List," which I
still keep by me. I turned to the note to see if there was life in it
yet. "Walls," it says, "got 2s. for T. and T. at Brown's, 16 Walker
Street." I don't recall Walls, but T. and T. was short for "Thomson and
Tait's Elements of Natural Philosophy" (elements!), better known in my
year as the "Student's First Glimpse of Hades." Evidently Walls sold
his copy, but why did I take such note of the address? I fear T. and T.
is one of the "Books Which Have Helped Me." This somewhat damps my
ardor.
When Tait was at Cambridge, it was flung in the face of the
mathematicians that they never stood high in Scriptural knowledge.
Tait and another were the two of whom one must be first wrangler, and
they agreed privately to wipe this stigma from mathematics. They did it
by taking year about the prize which was said to hang out of their
reach. It is always interesting to know of professors who have done
well in Biblical knowledge. All Scottish students at the English
universities are not so successful. I knew a Snell man who was sent
back from the Oxford entrance exam., and he always held himself that
the Biblical questions had done it.
Turner is said by medicals to be the finest lecturer in the university.
He will never be that so long as Tait is in the natural philosophy
chair. Never, I think, can there have been a more superb demonstrator.
I have his burly figure before me. The small twinkling eyes had a
fascinating gleam in them; he could concentrate them until they held
the object looked at; when they flashed round the room he seemed to
have drawn a rapier. I have seen a man fall back in alarm under Tait's
eyes, though there were a dozen benches between them. These eyes could
be merry as a boy's, though, as when he turned a tube of water on
students who would insist on crowding too near an experiment, for
Tait's was the humor of high spirits. I could conceive him at marbles
still, and feeling annoyed at defeat. He could not fancy anything much
funnier than a man missing his chair. Outside his own subject he is
not, one feels, a six-footer. When Mr. R. L. Stevenson's memoir of the
late Mr. Fleeming Jenkin was published, Tait said at great length that
he did not like it; he would have had the sketch by a scientific man.
But though scientists may be the only men nowadays who have anything to
say, they are also the only men who can't say it. Scientific men out of
their sphere know for a fact that novels are not true. So they draw
back from novelists who write biography. Professor Tait and Mr.
Stevenson are both men of note, who walk different ways, and when they
meet neither likes to take the curbstone. If they were tied together
for life in a three-legged race, which would suffer the more?
But if Tait's science weighs him to the earth, he has a genius for
sticking to his subject, and I am lost in admiration every time I bring
back his lectures. It comes as natural to his old students to say when
they meet, "What a lecturer Tait was!" as to Englishmen to joke about
the bagpipes. It is not possible to draw a perfect circle, Chrystal
used to say, after drawing a very fine one. To the same extent it was
not possible for Tait never to fail in his experiments. The atmosphere
would be too much for him once in a session, or there were other
hostile influences at work. Tait warned us of these before proceeding
to experiment, but we merely smiled. We believed in him as though he
were a Bradshaw announcing that he would not be held responsible for
possible errors.
I had forgotten Lindsay--"the mother may forget her child." As I write,
he has slipped back into his chair on the professor's right, and I
could photograph him now in his brown suit. Lindsay was the
imperturbable man who assisted Tait in his experiments, and his father
held the post before him. When there were many of us together, we could
applaud Lindsay with burlesque exaggeration, and he treated us
good-humoredly, as making something considerable between us. But I once
had to face Lindsay alone, in quest of my certificate; and suddenly he
towered above me, as a waiter may grow tall when you find that you have
not money enough to pay the bill. He treated me most kindly; did not
reply, of course, but got the certificate, and handed it to me as a
cashier contemptuously shovels you your pile of gold. Long ago I pasted
up a crack in my window with the certificate, but it said, I remember,
that I had behaved respectably--so far as I had come under the eyes of
the professor. Tait was always an enthusiast.
We have been keeping Lindsay waiting. When he had nothing special to
do, he sat indifferently in his chair, with the face of a precentor
after the sermon has begun. But though it was not very likely that
Lindsay would pay much attention to talk about such playthings as the
laws of nature, his fingers went out in the direction of the professor
when the experiments began. Then he was not the precentor; he was a
minister in one of the pews. Lindsay was an inscrutable man, and I
shall not dare to say that he even half-wished to see Tait fail. He
only looked on, ready for any emergency; but if the experiment would
not come off, he was as quick to go to the professor's assistance as a
member of Parliament is to begin when he has caught the Speaker's eye.
Perhaps Tait would have none of his aid, or pushed the mechanism for
the experiment from him--an intimation to Lindsay to carry it quickly
to the ante-room. Do you think Lindsay read the instructions so? Let me
tell you that your mind fails to seize hold of Lindsay. He marched the
machine out of Tait's vicinity as a mother may push her erring boy away
from his father's arms, to take him to her heart as soon as the door is
closed. Lindsay took the machine to his seat, and laid it before him on
the desk, with well-concealed apathy. Tait would flash his eye to the
right to see what Lindsay was after, and there was Lindsay sitting with
his arms folded. The professor's lecture resumed its way, and then out
went Lindsay's hands to the machine. Here he tried a wheel; again he
turned a screw; in time he had the machine ready for another trial. No
one was looking his way, when suddenly there was a whizz--bang, bang.
All eyes were turned upon Lindsay, the professor's among them. A cheer
broke out as we realized that Lindsay had done the experiment. Was he
flushed with triumph? Not a bit of it; he was again sitting with his
arms folded. A Glasgow merchant of modest manners, when cross-examined
in a law court, stated that he had a considerable monetary interest in
a certain concern. "How much do you mean by a 'considerable monetary
interest'?" demanded the contemptuous barrister who was cross-examining
him. "Oh," said the witness, humbly, "a maiter o' a million an' a
half--or, say, twa million." That Glasgow man in the witness-box is the
only person I can think of, when looking about me for a parallel to
Lindsay. While the professor eyed him and the students deliriously beat
the floor, Lindsay quietly gathered the mechanism together and carried
it to the ante-room. His head was not flung back nor his chest forward,
like one who walked to music. In his hour of triumph he was still
imperturbable. I lie back in my chair to-day, after the lapse of years,
and ask myself again, How did Lindsay behave after he entered the
ante-room, shutting the door behind him? Did he give way? There is no
one to say. When he returned to the class-room he wore his familiar
face; a man to ponder over.
There is a legend about the natural philosophy class-room, the period
long antecedent to Tait. The professor, annoyed by a habit students had
got into of leaving their hats on his desk, announced that the next hat
placed there would be cut in pieces by him in presence of the class.
The warning had its effect, until one day when the professor was called
for a few minutes from the room. An undergraduate, to whom the natural
sciences, unrelieved, were a monotonous study, slipped into the
ante-room, from which he emerged with the professor's hat. This he
placed on the desk, and then stole in a panic to his seat. An awe fell
upon the class. The professor returned, but when he saw the hat he
stopped. He showed no anger. "Gentlemen," he said, "I told you what
would happen if you again disobeyed my orders." Quite blandly he took a
pen-knife from his pocket, slit the hat into several pieces, and flung
them into the sink. While the hat was under the knife, the students
forgot to demonstrate; but as it splashed into the sink, they gave
forth a true British cheer. The end.
Close to the door of the natural philosophy room is a window that in my
memory will ever be sacred to a janitor. The janitors of the university
were of varied interest, from the merry one who treated us as if we
were his equals, and the soldier who sometimes looked as if he would
like to mow us down, to the Head Man of All, whose name I dare not
write, though I can whisper it. The janitor at the window, however, sat
there through the long evenings while the Debating Society (of which I
was a member) looked after affairs of state in an adjoining room. We
were the smallest society in the university and the longest-winded,
and I was once nearly expelled for not paying my subscription. Our
grand debate was, "Is the policy of the government worthy the
confidence of this society?" and we also read about six essays yearly
on "The Genius of Robert Burns"; but it was on private business that we
came out strongest. The question that agitated us most was whether the
meetings should be opened with prayer, and the men who thought they
should would not so much as look at the men who thought they should
not. When the janitor was told that we had begun our private business,
he returned to his window and slept. His great day was when we could
not form a quorum, which happened now and then.
Gregory was a member of that society--what has become of Gregory? He
was one of those men who professors say have a brilliant future before
them, and who have not since been heard of. Morton, another member, was
of a different stamp. He led in the debate on "Beauty of the Mind v.
Beauty of the Body." His writhing contempt for the beauty that is only
skin-deep is not to be forgotten. How noble were his rhapsodies on the
beauty of the mind! And when he went to Calderwood's to supper, how
quick he was to pick out the prettiest girl, who took ten per cent in
moral philosophy, and to sit beside her all the evening! Morton had a
way of calling on his friends the night before a degree examination to
ask them to put him up to as much as would pull him through.
Tait used to get greatly excited over the rectorial elections, and, if
he could have disguised himself, would have liked, I think, to join in
the fight round the Brewster statue. He would have bled for the
Conservative cause, as his utterances on university reform have shown.
The reformers have some cause for thinking that Tait is a greater man
in his class room than when he addresses the graduates. He has said
that the less his students know of his subject when they join his
class, the less, probably, they will have to unlearn. Such views are
behind the times that feed their children on geographical biscuits in
educational nurseries with astronomical ceilings and historical
wall-papers.
PROFESSOR CAMPBELL FRASER.
VI.
PROFESSOR CAMPBELL FRASER.
Not long ago I was back in the Old University--how well I remember
pointing it out as the jail to a stranger, who had asked me to show him
round. I was in one of the library ante-rooms, when some one knocked,
and I looked up, to see Campbell Fraser framed in the doorway. I had
not looked on that venerable figure for half a dozen years. I had
forgotten all my metaphysics. Yet it all came back with a rush. I was
on my feet, wondering if I existed strictly so called.