wore an air of certainty, for they knew that if they stuck to
Calderwood he would pull them through. You cannot lose yourself in the
back garden. But the metaphysicians had their doubts. Fraser led them
into strange places, and said he would meet them there again next day.
They wandered to their lodgings, and got into difficulties with their
landlady for saying that she was only an aggregate of sense phenomena.
Fraser was rather a hazardous cure for weak intellects. Young men whose
anchor had been certainty of themselves went into that class floating
buoyantly on the sea of facts, and came out all adrift--on the sea of
theory--in an open boat--rudderless--one oar--the boat scuttled. How
could they think there was any chance for them, when the professor was
not even sure of himself? I see him rising in a daze from his chair and
putting his hands through his hair. "Do I exist," he said,
thoughtfully, "strictly so called?" The students (if it was the
beginning of the session) looked a little startled. This was a matter
that had not previously disturbed them. Still, if the professor was in
doubt, there must be something in it. He began to argue it out, and an
uncomfortable silence held the room in awe. If he did not exist, the
chances were that they did not exist either. It was thus a personal
question. The professor glanced round slowly for an illustration. "Am
I a table?" A pained look travelled over the class. Was it just
possible that they were all tables? It is no wonder that the students
who do not go to the bottom during their first month of metaphysics
begin to give themselves airs strictly so called. In the privacy of
their room at the top of the house, they pinch themselves to see if
they are still there.
He would, I think, be a sorry creature who did not find something to
admire in Campbell Fraser. Metaphysics may not trouble you, as it
troubles him, but you do not sit under the man without seeing his
transparent honesty and feeling that he is genuine. In appearance and
in habit of thought he is an ideal philosopher, and his communings with
himself have lifted him to a level of serenity that is worth struggling
for. Of all the arts professors in Edinburgh, he is probably the most
difficult to understand, and students in a hurry have called his
lectures childish. If so, it may be all the better for them. For the
first half of the hour, they say, he tells you what he is going to do,
and for the second half he revises. Certainly he is vastly explanatory,
but then he is not so young as they are, and so he has his doubts. They
are so cock-sure that they wonder to see him hesitate. Often there is a
mist on the mountain when it is all clear in the valley.
Fraser's great work is his edition of Berkeley, a labor of love that
should live after him. He has two Berkeleys, the large one and the
little one, and, to do him justice, it was the little one he advised us
to consult. I never read the large one myself, which is in a number of
monster tomes, but I often had a look at it in the library, and I was
proud to think that an Edinburgh professor was the editor. When Glasgow
men came through to talk of their professors, we showed them the big
Berkeley, and after that they were reasonable. There was one man in my
year who really began the large Berkeley, but after a time he was
missing, and it is believed that some day he will be found flattened
between the pages of the first volume.
The "Selections" was the text-book we used in the class. It is
sufficient to prove that Berkeley wrote beautiful English. I am not
sure that any one has written such English since. We have our own
"stylists," but how self-conscious they are after Berkeley! It is seven
years since I opened my "Selections," but I see that I was once more of
a metaphysician than I have been giving myself credit for. The book is
scribbled over with posers in my handwriting about dualism and primary
realities. Some of the comments are in short-hand, which I must at one
time have been able to read, but all are equally unintelligible now.
Here is one of my puzzlers: "Does B here mean impercipient and
unperceived subject or conscious and percipient subject?" Observe the
friendly B. I dare say further on I shall find myself referring to the
professor as F. I wonder if I ever discovered what B meant. I could not
now tell what I meant, myself.
As many persons are aware, the "Selections" consist of Berkeley's text
with the professor's notes thereon. The notes are explanatory of the
text, and the student must find them an immense help. Here, for
instance, is a note: "Phenomenal or sense dependent existence can be
substantiated and caused only by a self-conscious spirit, for otherwise
there could be no propositions about it expressive of what is
conceivable; on the other hand, to affirm that phenomenal or sense
dependent existence, which alone we know, and which alone is
conceivable, is, or even represents, an inconceivable non-phenomenal or
abstract existence, would be to affirm a contradiction in terms." There
we have it.
As a metaphysician I was something of a disappointment. I began well,
standing, if I recollect aright, in the three examinations, first,
seventeenth, and seventy-seventh. A man who sat beside me--man was the
word we used--gazed at me reverently when I came out first, and I could
see by his eye that he was not sure whether I existed properly so
called. By the second exam. his doubts had gone, and by the third he
was surer of me than of himself. He came out fifty-seventh, this being
the grand triumph of his college course. He was the same whose key
translated _cras donaberis haedo_ "To-morrow you will be presented with
a kid," but who, thinking that a little vulgar, refined it down to
"To-morrow you will be presented with a small child."
In the metaphysics class I was like the fountains in the quadrangle,
which ran dry toward the middle of the session. While things were still
looking hopeful for me, I had an invitation to breakfast with the
professor. If the fates had been so propitious as to forward me that
invitation, it is possible that I might be a metaphysician to this day,
but I had changed my lodgings, and, when I heard of the affair, all was
over. The professor asked me to stay behind one day after the lecture,
and told me that he had got his note back with "Left: no address" on
it. "However," he said, "you may keep this," presenting me with the
invitation for the Saturday previously. I mention this to show that
even professors have hearts. That letter is preserved with the
autographs of three editors, none of which anybody can read.
There was once a medical student who came up to my rooms early in the
session, and I proved to him in half an hour that he did not exist. He
got quite frightened, and I can still see his white face as he sat
staring at me in the gloaming. This shows what metaphysics can do. He
has recovered, however, and is sheep-farming now, his examiners never
having asked him the right questions.
The last time Fraser ever addressed me was when I was capped. He said,
"I congratulate you, Mr. Smith," and one of the other professors said,
"I congratulate you, Mr. Fisher." My name is neither Smith nor Fisher,
but no doubt the thing was kindly meant. It was then, however, that the
professor of metaphysics had his revenge on me. I had once spelt Fraser
with a "z."
PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL.
VII.
PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL.
When Chrystal came to Edinburgh, he rooted up the humors of the
class-room as a dentist draws teeth. Souls were sold for keys that
could be carried in the waistcoat pocket. Ambition fell from heights,
and lay with its eye on a certificate. By night was a rush of ghosts,
shrieking for passes. Horse-play fled before the Differential Calculus
in spectacles.
I had Chrystal's first year, and recall the gloomy student sitting
before me who hacked "All hope abandon, ye who enter here" into a desk
that may have confined Carlyle. It took him a session, and he was
digging his own grave, for he never got through; but it was something
to hold by, something he felt sure of. All else was spiders' webs in
chalk.
Chrystal was a fine hare for the hounds who could keep up with him. He
started off the first day with such a spurt that most of us were left
behind mopping our faces, and saying, "Here's a fellow," which is what
Mr. Stevenson says Shakespeare would have remarked about Mr. George
Meredith. We never saw him again. The men who were on speaking
acquaintance with his symbols revelled in him as students love an
enthusiast who is eager to lead them into a world toward which they
would journey. He was a rare guide for them. The bulk, however, lost
him in labyrinths. They could not but admire their brilliant professor;
but while their friend the medallist and he kept the conversation to
themselves, they felt like eavesdroppers hearkening to a pair of
lovers. It is "beautiful," they cried, "but this is no place for us;
let us away."
A good many went, but their truancy stuck in their throats like Otway's
last roll. The M.A. was before them. They had fancied it in their
hands, but it became shy as a maiden from the day they learned
Chrystal's heresy that Euclid is not mathematics, but only some riders
in it. This snapped the cord that had tied the blind man to his dog,
and the M.A. shot down the horizon. When Rutherford delivered his first
lecture in the chair of institutes of medicine, boisterous students
drowned his voice, and he flung out of the room. At the door he paused
to say, "Gentleman, we shall meet again at Philippi." A dire bomb was
this in the midst of them, warranted to go off, none able to cast it
overboard. We too had our Philippi before us. Chrystal could not be
left to his own devices.
I had never a passion for knowing that when circles or triangles
attempt impossibilities it is absurd; and _x_ was an unknown quantity I
was ever content to walk round about. To admit to Chrystal that we
understood _x_ was only a way he had of leading you on to _y_ and _z_.
I gave him his chance, however, by contributing a paper of answers to
his first weekly set of exercises. When the hour for returning the
slips came round, I was there to accept fame--if so it was to be--with
modesty; and if it was to be humiliation, still to smile. The professor
said there was one paper, with an owner's name on it, which he could
not read, and it was handed along the class to be deciphered. My
presentiment that it was mine became a certainty when it reached my
hand; but I passed it on pleasantly, and it returned to Chrystal, a
Japhet that never found its father. Feeling that the powers were
against me, I then retired from the conflict, sanguine that the
teaching of my mathematical schoolmaster, the best that could be, would
pull me through. The Disowned may be going the round of the class-room
still.
The men who did not know when they were beaten returned to their seats,
and doggedly took notes, their faces lengthening daily. Their
note-books reproduced exactly the hieroglyphics of the blackboard, and,
examined at night, were as suggestive as the photographs of persons one
has never seen. To overtake Chrystal after giving him a start was the
presumption that is an offshoot from despair. There was once an elderly
gentleman who for years read the _Times_ every day from the first page
to the last. For a fortnight he was ill of a fever; but, on recovering,
he began at the copy of the _Times_ where he had left off. He
struggled magnificently to make up on the _Times_, but it was in vain.
This is an allegory for the way these students panted after Chrystal.
Some succumbed and joined the majority--literally; for to mathematics
they were dead. I never hear of the old university now, nor pass under
the shadow of the walls one loves when he is done with them, without
seeing myself as I was the day I matriculated, an awestruck boy,
passing and repassing the gates, frightened to venture inside,
breathing heavily at sight of janitors, Scott and Carlyle in the air.
After that I see nothing fuller of color than the meetings that were
held outside Chrystal's door. Adjoining it is a class-room so little
sought for that legend tells of its door once showing the notice,
"There will be no class to-day, as the student is unwell." The crowd
round Chrystal's could have filled that room. It was composed of
students hearkening at the door to see whether he was to call their
part of the roll to-day. If he did, they slunk in; if not, the crowd
melted into the streets, this refrain in their ears:
"I'm plucked, I do admit;
I'm spun, my mother dear:
Yet do not grieve for that
Which happens every year.
I've waited very patiently,
I may have long to wait;
But you've another son, mother,
And he will graduate."
A professor of mathematics once brought a rowdy student from the back
benches to a seat beside him, because: "First, you'll be near the
board; second, you'll be near me; and, third, you'll be near the door."
Chrystal soon discovered that students could be too near the door, and
he took to calling the roll in the middle of the hour, which insured an
increased attendance. It was a silent class, nothing heard but the
patter of pencils, rats scraping for grain, of which there was
abundance, but not one digestion in a bench. To smuggle in a novel up
one's waistcoat was perilous, Chrystal's spectacles doing their work.
At a corner of the platform sat the assistant, with a constable's
authority, but, not formed for swooping, uneasy because he had legs,
and where to put them he knew not. He got through the hour by shifting
his position every five minutes; and, sitting there waiting, he
reminded one of the boy who, on being told to remain so quietly where
he was that he could hear a pin drop, held his breath a moment, then
shouted, "Let it drop!" An excellent fellow was this assistant, who
told us that one of his predecessors had got three months.
A jest went as far in that class as a plum in the midshipmen's pudding,
and, you remember, when the middies came on a plum they gave three
cheers. In the middle of some brilliant reasoning, Chrystal would stop
to add 4, 7, and 11. Addition of this kind was the only thing he could
not do, and he looked to the class for help--"20," they shouted, "24,"
"17," while he thought it over. These appeals to their intelligence
made them beam. They woke up as a sleepy congregation shakes itself
into life when the minister says, "I remember when I was a little
boy----"
The daring spirits--say, those who were going into their father's
office, and so did not look upon Chrystal as a door locked to their
advancement--sought to bring sunshine into the room. Chrystal soon had
the blind down on that. I hear they have been at it recently, with the
usual result. To relieve the monotony, a student at the end of bench
ten dropped a marble, which toppled slowly downward toward the
professor. At every step it took, there was a smothered guffaw; but
Chrystal, who was working at the board, did not turn his head. When the
marble reached the floor, he said, still with his back to the class,
"Will the student at the end of bench ten, who dropped that marble,
stand up?" All eyes dilated. He had counted the falls of the marble
from step to step. Mathematics do not obscure the intellect.
Twenty per cent was a good percentage in Chrystal's examinations;
thirty sent you away whistling. As the M.A. drew nigh, students on
their prospects might have been farmers discussing the weather. Some
put their faith in the professor's goodness of heart, of which
symptoms had been showing. He would not, all at once, "raise the
standard"--hated phrase until you are through, when you write to the
papers advocating it. Courage! was it not told of the Glasgow Snell
competition that one of the competitors, as soon as he saw the first
paper, looked for his hat and the door; that he was forbidden to
withdraw until an hour had elapsed, and that he then tackled the paper
and ultimately carried off the Snell? Of more immediate interest,
perhaps, was the story of the quaking student, whose neighbor handed
him in pencil, beneath the desk, the answer to several questions. It
was in an M.A. exam., and the affrighted student found that he could
not read his neighbor's notes. Trusting to fortune, he inclosed them
with his own answers, writing at the top, "No time to write these out
in ink, so inclose them in pencil." He got through: no moral.
A condemned criminal wondering if he is to get a reprieve will not feel
the position novel if he has loitered in a university quadrangle
waiting for the janitor to nail up the results of a degree exam. A
queer gathering we were, awaiting the verdict of Chrystal. Some
compressed their lips, others were lively as fireworks dipped in water;
there were those who rushed round and round the quadrangle; only one
went the length of saying that he did not want to pass. H. I shall call
him. I met him the other day in Fleet Street, and he annoyed me by
asking at once if I remembered the landlady I quarrelled with because
she wore my socks to church of a Sunday: we found her out one wet
forenoon. H. waited the issue with a cigar in his mouth. He had
purposely, he explained, given in a bad paper. He could not understand
why men were so anxious to get through. He had ten reasons for wishing
to be plucked. We let him talk. The janitor appeared with the fateful
paper, and we lashed about him like waves round a lighthouse, all but
H., who strolled languidly to the board to which the paper was being
fastened. A moment afterward I heard a shriek: "I'm through! I'm
through!" It was H. His cigar was dashed aside, and he sped like an
arrow from the bow to the nearest telegraph office, shouting "I'm
through!" as he ran.
Those of us who had H.'s fortune now consider Chrystal made to order
for his chair, but he has never, perhaps, had a proper appreciation of
the charming fellows who get ten per cent.
PROFESSOR SELLAR.
VIII.
PROFESSOR SELLAR.
When one of the distinguished hunting ladies who chase celebrities
captured Mr. Mark Pattison, he gave anxious consideration to the
quotation which he was asked to write above his name. "Fancy," he said
with a shudder, "going down to posterity arm in arm with _carpe diem_!"
Remembering this, I forbear tying Sellar to _odi profanum vulgus_. Yet
the name opens the door to the quotation. Sellar is a Roman senator. He
stood very high at Oxford, and took a prize for boxing. If you watch
him in the class, you will sometimes see his mind murmuring that
Edinburgh students do not take their play like Oxford men. The
difference is in manner. A courteous fellow-student of Sellar once
showed his relatives over Balliol. "You have now, I think," he said at
last, "seen everything of interest except the master." He flung a
stone at a window, at which the master's head appeared immediately,
menacing, wrathful. "And now," concluded the polite youth, "you have
seen him also."
Mr. James Payn, who never forgave the Scottish people for pulling down
their blinds on Sundays, was annoyed by the halo they have woven around
the name "professor." He knew an Edinburgh lady who was scandalized
because that mere poet, Alexander Smith, coolly addressed professors by
their surnames. Mr. Payn might have known what it is to walk in the
shadow of a Senatus Academicus could he have met such specimens as
Sellar, Fraser, Tait, and Sir Alexander Grant marching down the Bridges
abreast. I have seen them: an inspiriting sight. The pavement only held
three. You could have shaken hands with them from an upper window.
Sellar's treatment of his students was always that of a fine gentleman.
Few got near him; all respected him. At times he was addressed in an
unknown tongue, but he kept his countenance. He was particular about
students keeping to their proper benches, and once thought he had
caught a swarthy north countryman straying. "You are in your wrong
seat, Mr. Orr." "Na, am richt eneuch." "You should be in the seat in
front. That is bench 12, and you are entered on bench 10." "Eh? This is
no bench twal, [counting] twa, fower, sax, aucht, ten." "There is
something wrong." "Oh-h-h, [with sudden enlightenment] ye've been
coontin' the first dask; we dinna coont the first dask." The professor
knew the men he had to deal with too well to scorn this one, who turned
out to be a fine fellow. He was the only man I ever knew who ran his
medical and arts classes together, and so many lectures had he to
attend daily that he mixed them up. He graduated, however, in both
faculties in five years, and the last I heard of him was that, when
applying for a medical assistantship, he sent his father's photograph
because he did not have one of himself. He was a man of brains as well
as sinew, and dined briskly on a shilling a week.
There was a little fellow in the class who was a puzzle to Sellar,
because he was higher sitting than standing: when the professor asked
him to stand up, he stood down. "Is Mr. Blank not present?" Sellar
would ask. "Here, sir," cried Blank. "Then, will you stand up, Mr.
Blank?" (Agony of Blank, and a demonstration of many feet.) "Are you
not prepared, Mr. Blank?" "Yes, sir. _Pastor quum traharet_----" "I
insist on your standing up, Mr. Blank." Several students rise to their
feet to explain, but subside. "Yes, sir. _Pastor quum traharet
per_----" "I shall mark you 'Not prepared,' Mr. Blank." (Further
demonstration, and then an indignant squeak from Blank.) "If you
please, sir, I am standing." "But, in that case, how is it? Ah, oh, ah,
yes; proceed, Mr. Blank." As one man was only called upon for
exhibition five or six times in a year, the professor had always
forgotten the circumstances when he asked Blank to stand up again.
Blank was looked upon by his fellow-students as a practical jest, and
his name was always received with the prolonged applause which greets
the end of an after-dinner speech.
Sellar never showed resentment to the students who addressed him as
Professor Sellars.
One day the professor was giving out some English to be translated into
Latin prose. He read on--"and fiercely lifting the axe with both
hands----" when a cheer from the top bench made him pause. The cheer
spread over the room like an uncorked gas. Sellar frowned, but
proceeded--"lifting the axe----" when again the class became demented.
"What does this mean?" he demanded, looking as if he, too, could lift
the axe. "Axe!" shouted a student in explanation. Still Sellar could
not solve the riddle. Another student rose to his assistance.
"Axe--Gladstone!" he cried. Sellar sat back in his chair. "Really,
gentlemen," he said, "I take the most elaborate precautions against
touching upon politics in this class, but sometimes you are beyond me.
Let us continue--'and fiercely lifting his weapon with both hands----'"
The duxes from the schools suffered a little during their first year,
from a feeling that they and Sellar understood each other. He liked to
undeceive them. We had one, all head, who went about wondering at
himself. He lost his bursary on the way home with it, and still he
strutted. Sellar asked if we saw anything peculiar in a certain line
from Horace. We did not. We were accustomed to trust to Horace's
reputation, all but the dandy. "Eh--ah! professor," he lisped; "it
ought to have been so and so." Sellar looked at this promising plant
from the schools, and watered him without a rose on the pan. "Depend
upon it, Mr.--ah, I did not catch your name, if it ought to have been
so and so, Horace would have made it so and so."
Sellar's face was proof against wit. It did not relax till he gave it
liberty. You could never tell from it what was going on inside. He read
without a twitch a notice on his door: "Found in this class a
gold-headed pencil case; if not claimed within three days will be sold
to defray expenses." He even withstood the battering-ram on the day of
the publication of his "Augustan Poets." The students could not let
this opportunity pass. They assailed him with frantic applause; every
bench was a drum to thump upon. His countenance said nothing. The drums
had it in the end, though, and he dismissed the class with what is
believed to have verged on a smile. Like the lover who has got his
lady's glance, they at once tried for more, but no.