experimenting. Then is the time to join the university library. The
pound, which makes you a member, has never had its poet. You can
withdraw your pound when you please. There are far-seeing men who work
the whole thing out by mathematics. Put simply, this is the notion. In
the beginning of the session you join the library, and soon you forget
about your pound; you reckon without it. As the winter closes in, and
the coal-bunk empties; or you find that five shillings a week for
lodgings is a dream that cannot be kept up; or your coat assumes more
and more the color identified with spring; or you would feast your
friends for once right gloriously; or next Wednesday is your little
sister's birthday; you cower, despairing, over a sulky fire. Suddenly
you are on your feet, all aglow once more. What is this thought that
sends the blood to your head? That library pound! You had forgotten
that you had a bank. Next morning you are at the university in time to
help the library door to open. You ask for your pound; you get it. Your
hand mounts guard over the pocket in which it rustles. So they say. I
took their advice and paid in my money; then waited exultingly to
forget about it. In vain. I always allowed for that pound, in my
thoughts. I saw it as plainly, I knew its every feature as a schoolboy
remembers his first trout. Not to be hasty, I gave my pound two months,
and then brought it home again. I had a fellow-student who lived across
the way from me. We railed at the library-pound theory at open windows
over the life of the street; a beautiful dream, but mad, mad.
He was an enthusiast, and therefore happy, whom I have seen in the
Humanity class-room on an examination day, his pen racing with time,
himself seated in the contents of an ink bottle. Some stories of exams.
have even a blacker ending. I write in tears of him who, estimating his
memory as a leaky vessel, did with care and forethought draw up a crib
that was more condensed than a pocket cyclopaedia, a very Liebig's
essence of the classics, tinned meat for students in the eleventh hour.
Bridegrooms have been known to forget the ring; this student forgot his
crib. In the middle of the examination came a nervous knocking at the
door. A lady wanted to see the professor at once. The student looked
up, to see his mother handing the professor his crib. Her son had
forgotten it; she was sure that it was important, so she had brought it
herself.
Jump the body of this poor victim. There was no M.A. for him that year;
but in our gowns and sashes we could not mourn for a might-have-been.
Soldiers talk of the Victoria cross, statesmen of the Cabinet, ladies
of a pearl set in diamonds. These are pretty baubles, but who has
thrilled as the student that with bumping heart strolls into
Middlemass' to order his graduate's gown? He hires it--five
shillings--but the photograph to follow makes it as good as his for
life. Look at him, young ladies, as he struts to the Synod Hall to have
M.A. tacked to his name. Dogs do not dare bark at him. His gait is
springy; in Princes Street he is as one who walks upstairs. Gone to me
are those student days forever, but I can still put a photograph before
me of a ghost in gown and cape, the hair straggling under the cap as
tobacco may straggle over the side of a tin when there is difficulty in
squeezing down the lid. How well the little black jacket looks, how
vividly the wearer remembers putting it on. He should have worn a
dress-coat, but he had none. The little jacket resembled one with the
tails off, and, as he artfully donned his gown, he backed against the
wall so that no one might know.
To turn up the light on old college days is not always the signal for
the dance. You are back in the dusty little lodging, with its battered
sofa, its slippery tablecloth, the prim array of books, the picture of
the death of Nelson, the peeling walls, the broken clock; you are
again in the quadrangle with him who has been dead this many a year.
There are tragedies in a college course. Dr. Walter Smith has told in a
poem mentioned elsewhere of the brilliant scholar who forgot his
dominie; some, alas! forget their mother. There are men--I know it--who
go mad from loneliness; and medallists ere now have crept home to die.
The capping-day was the end of our springtide, and for some of us the
summer was to be brief. Sir Alexander, gone into the night since then,
flung "I mekemae" at us as we trooped past him, all in bud, some small
flower to blossom in time, let us hope, here and there.
MR. JOSEPH THOMSON.
IX.
MR. JOSEPH THOMSON.
Two years hence Joseph Thomson's reputation will be a decade old,
though he is at present only thirty years of age. When you meet him for
the first time you conclude that he must be the explorer's son. His
identity, however, can always be proved by simply mentioning Africa in
his presence. Then he draws himself up, and his eyes glisten, and he is
thinking how glorious it would be to be in the Masai country again,
living on meat so diseased that it crumbled in the hand like
short-bread.
Gatelaw-bridge Quarry, in Dumfriesshire, is famous for Old Mortality
and Thomson, the latter (when he is at the head of a caravan) being as
hardheaded as if he had been cut out of it. He went to school at
Thornhill, where he spent great part of his time in reading novels, and
then he matriculated at Edinburgh University, where he began to
accumulate medals. Geology and kindred studies were his favorites
there. One day he heard that Keith Johnston, then on the point of
starting for Africa, wanted a lieutenant. Thomson was at that time
equally in need of a Keith Johnston, and everybody who knew him saw
that the opening and he were made for each other. Keith Johnston and
Thomson went out together, and Johnston died in the jungle. This made a
man in an hour of a stripling. Most youths in Thomson's position at
that turning-point of his career would have thought it judicious to
turn back, and in geographical circles it would have been considered
highly creditable had he brought his caravan to the coast intact.
Thomson, however, pushed on, and did everything that his dead leader
had hoped to do. From that time his career has been followed by every
one interested in African exploration, and by his countrymen with some
pride in addition. When an expedition was organized for the relief of
Emin Pacha, there was for a time some probability of Thomson's having
the command.
He and Stanley differed as to the routes that should be taken, and
subsequent events have proved that Thomson's was the proper one.
Thomson came over from Paris at that time to consult with the
authorities, and took up his residence in the most overgrown hotel in
London. His friends here organized an expedition for his relief. They
wandered up and down the endless stairs looking for him, till, had they
not wanted to make themselves a name, they would have beaten a retreat.
He also wandered about looking for them, and at last they met. The
leader of the party, restraining his emotion, lifted his hat, and said,
"Mr. Thomson, I presume?" This is how I found Thomson.
The explorer had been for some months in Paris at that time, and France
did him the honor of translating his "Through Masailand" into French.
In this book there is a picture of a buffalo tossing Thomson in the
air. This was after he had put several bullets into it, and in the
sketch he is represented some ten feet from the ground, with his gun
flying one way and his cap another. "It was just as if I were
distributing largess to the natives," the traveller says now, though
this idea does not seem to have struck him at the time. He showed the
sketch to a Parisian lady, who looked at it long and earnestly. "Ah, M.
Thomson," she said at length, "but how could you pose like that?"
Like a good many other travellers, including Mr. Du Chaillu, who says
he is a dear boy, Thomson does not smoke. Stanley, however, smokes very
strong cigars, as those who have been in his sumptuous chambers in Bond
Street can testify. All the three happen to be bachelors, though;
because, one of them says, after returning from years of lonely travel,
a man has such a delight in female society that to pick and choose
would be invidious. Yet they have had their chance. An African race
once tried to bribe Mr. Du Chaillu with a kingdom and over eight
hundred wives--"the biggest offer," he admits, "I ever had in one day."
Among the lesser annoyances to which Thomson was subjected in Africa
was the presence of rats in the night-time, which he had to brush away
like flies. Until he was asked whether there was not danger in this, it
never seems to have struck him that it was more than annoying. Yet
though he and the two other travellers mentioned (doubtless they are
not alone in this) have put up cheerfully with almost every hardship
known to man, this does not make them indifferent to the comforts of
civilization when they return home. Du Chaillu was looking very
comfortable in a house-boat the other day, where his hosts thought they
were "roughing it"--with a male attendant; and in Stanley's easy-chairs
you sink to dream. The last time I saw Thomson in his rooms in London
he was on his knees, gazing in silent rapture at a china saucer with a
valuable crack in it.
If you ask Thomson what was the most dangerous expedition he ever
embarked on, he will probably reply, "Crossing Piccadilly." The finest
thing that can be said of him is that during these four expeditions he
never once fired a shot at a native. Other explorers have had to do so
to save their lives. There were often occasions when Thomson could have
done it, to save his life to all appearance, too. The result of his
method of progressing is that where he has gone--and he has been in
parts of Africa never before trod by the white man--he really has
"opened up the country" for those who care to follow him. Civilization
by bullet has only closed it elsewhere. Yet though there is an
abundance of Scotch caution about him, he is naturally an impulsive
man, more inclined personally to march straight on than to reach his
destination by a safer if more circuitous route. Where only his own
life is concerned, he gives you the impression of one who might be
rash; but his prudence at the head of a caravan is at the bottom of the
faith that is placed in him. According to a story that got into the
papers years ago, M. de Brazza once quarrelled with Thomson in Africa,
and all but struck him. Thomson was praised for keeping his temper. The
story was a fabrication, but I fear that if M. de Brazza had behaved
like this, Thomson would not have remembered to be diplomatic till
some time afterward. A truer tale might be told of an umbrella,
gorgeous and wonderful to behold, that De Brazza took to Africa to
impress the natives with, and which Thomson subsequently presented to a
dusky monarch.
The explorer has never shot a lion, though he has tracked a good many
of them. Once he thought he had one. It was reclining in a little
grove, and Thomson felt that it was his at last. With a trusty native
he crept forward till he could obtain a good shot, and then fired. In
breathless suspense he waited for its spring, and then when it did not
spring he saw that he had shot it through the heart. However, it turned
out only to be a large stone.
The young Scotchman sometimes thinks of the tremendous effect it would
have had on the natives had he been the possessor of a complete set of
artificial teeth. This is because he has one artificial tooth.
Happening to take it out one day, an awe filled all who saw him, and
from that hour he was esteemed a medicine man. Another excellent way of
impressing Africa with the grandeur of Britain was to take a
photograph. When the natives saw the camera aimed at them, they fell to
the ground vanquished.
When Thomson was recently in this country, he occasionally took a walk
of twenty or thirty miles to give him an appetite for dinner. This he
calls a stroll. One day he strolled from Thornhill to Edinburgh, had
dinner, and then went to the Exhibition. In appearance he is tall and
strongly knit rather than heavily built, and if you see him more than
once in the same week you discover that he has still an interest in
neck-ties. Perhaps his most remarkable feat consisted in taking a
bottle of brandy into the heart of Africa, and bringing it back
intact.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
X.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Some men of letters, not necessarily the greatest, have an
indescribable charm to which we give our hearts. Thackeray is the young
man's first love. Of living authors, none perhaps bewitches the reader
more than Mr. Stevenson, who plays upon words as if they were a musical
instrument. To follow the music is less difficult than to place the
musician. A friend of mine, who, like Mr. Grant Allen, reviews 365
books a year, and 366 in leap years, recently arranged the novelists of
to-day in order of merit. Meredith, of course, he wrote first, and then
there was a fall to Hardy. "Haggard," he explained, "I dropped from the
Eiffel Tower; but what can I do with Stevenson? I can't put him before
'Lorna Doone.'" So Mr. Stevenson puzzles the critics, fascinating them
until they are willing to judge him by the great work he is to write
by and by when the little books are finished. Over "Treasure Island" I
let my fire die in winter without knowing that I was freezing. But the
creator of Alan Breck has now published nearly twenty volumes. It is so
much easier to finish the little works than to begin the great one, for
which we are all taking notes.
Mr. Stevenson is not to be labelled novelist. He wanders the byways of
literature without any fixed address. Too much of a truant to be
classified with the other boys, he is only a writer of fiction in the
sense that he was once an Edinburgh University student because now and
again he looked in at his classes when he happened to be that way. A
literary man without a fixed occupation amazes Mr. Henry James, a
master in the school of fiction which tells, in three volumes, how
Hiram K. Wilding trod on the skirt of Alice M. Sparkins without
anything's coming of it. Mr. James analyzes Mr. Stevenson with immense
cleverness, but without summing up. That "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
should be by the author of "Treasure Island," "Virginibus Puerisque"
by the author of "The New Arabian Nights," "A Child's Garden of Verses"
by the author of "Prince Otto," are to him the three degrees of
comparison of wonder, though for my own part I marvel more that the
author of "Daisy Miller" should be Mr. Stevenson's eulogist. One
conceives Mr. James a boy in velveteens looking fearfully at Stevenson
playing at pirates.
There is nothing in Mr. Stevenson's sometimes writing essays, sometimes
romances, and anon poems to mark him versatile beyond other authors.
One dreads his continuing to do so, with so many books at his back,
lest it means weakness rather than strength. He experiments too long;
he is still a boy wondering what he is going to be. With Cowley's
candor he tells us that he wants to write something by which he may be
forever known. His attempts in this direction have been in the nature
of trying different ways, and he always starts off whistling. Having
gone so far without losing himself, he turns back to try another road.
Does his heart fail him, despite his jaunty bearing, or is it because
there is no hurry? Though all his books are obviously by the same hand,
no living writer has come so near fame from so many different sides.
Where is the man among us who could write another "Virginibus
Puerisque," the most delightful volume for the hammock ever sung in
prose? The poems are as exquisite as they are artificial. "Jekyll and
Hyde" is the greatest triumph extant in Christmas literature of the
morbid kind. The donkey on the Cevennes (how Mr. Stevenson belabored
him!) only stands second to the "Inland Voyage." "Kidnapped" is the
outstanding boy's book of its generation. "The Black Arrow" alone, to
my thinking, is second class. We shall all be doleful if a marksman who
can pepper his target with inners does not reach the bull's-eye. But it
is quite time the great work was begun. The sun sinks while the climber
walks round his mountain, looking for the best way up.
Hard necessity has kept some great writers from doing their best work,
but Mr. Stevenson is at last so firmly established that if he
continues to be versatile it will only be from choice. He has attained
a popularity such as is, as a rule, only accorded to classic authors or
to charlatans. For this he has America to thank rather than Britain,
for the Americans buy his books, the only honor a writer's admirers are
slow to pay him. Mr. Stevenson's reputation in the United States is
creditable to that country, which has given him a position here in
which only a few saw him when he left. Unfortunately, with popularity
has come publicity. All day the reporters sit on his garden wall.
No man has written in a finer spirit of the profession of letters than
Mr. Stevenson, but this gossip vulgarizes it. The adulation of the
American public and of a little band of clever literary dandies in
London, great in criticism, of whom he has become the darling, has made
Mr. Stevenson complacent, and he always tended perhaps to be a thought
too fond of his velvet coat. There is danger in the delight with which
his every scrap is now received. A few years ago, when he was his own
severest and sanest critic, he stopped the publication of a book after
it was in proof--a brave act. He has lost this courage, or he would
have rewritten "The Black Arrow." There is deterioration in the essays
he has been contributing to an American magazine, graceful and
suggestive though they are. The most charming of living stylists, Mr.
Stevenson is self-conscious in all his books now and again, but
hitherto it has been the self-consciousness of an artist with severe
critics at his shoulder. It has become self-satisfaction. The critics
have put a giant's robe on him, and he has not flung it off. He
dismisses "Tom Jones" with a simper. Personally Thackeray "scarce
appeals to us as the ideal gentleman; if there were nothing else [what
else is there?], perpetual nosing after snobbery at least suggests the
snob." From Mr. Stevenson one would not have expected the revival of
this silly charge, which makes a cabbage of every man who writes about
cabbages. I shall say no more of these ill-considered papers, though
the sneers at Fielding call for indignant remonstrance, beyond
expressing a hope that they lie buried between magazine covers. Mr.
Stevenson has reached the critical point in his career, and one would
like to see him back at Bournemouth, writing within high walls. We want
that big book; we think he is capable of it, and so we cannot afford to
let him drift into the seaweed. About the writer with whom his name is
so often absurdly linked we feel differently. It is as foolish to rail
at Mr. Rider Haggard's complacency as it would be to blame Christopher
Sly for so quickly believing that he was born a lord.
The key-note of all Mr. Stevenson's writings is his indifference, so
far as his books are concerned, to the affairs of life and death on
which their minds are chiefly set. Whether man has an immortal soul
interests him as an artist not a whit: what is to come of man troubles
him as little as where man came from. He is a warm, genial writer, yet
this is so strange as to seem inhuman. His philosophy is that we are
but as the light-hearted birds. This is our moment of being; let us
play the intoxicating game of life beautifully, artistically, before we
fall dead from the tree. We all know it is only in his books that Mr.
Stevenson can live this life. The cry is to arms; spears glisten in the
sun; see the brave bark riding joyously on the waves, the black flag,
the dash of red color twisting round a mountain-side. Alas! the drummer
lies on a couch beating his drum. It is a pathetic picture, less true
to fact now, one rejoices to know, than it was recently. A common
theory is that Mr. Stevenson dreams an ideal life to escape from his
own sufferings. This sentimental plea suits very well. The noticeable
thing, however, is that the grotesque, the uncanny, holds his soul; his
brain will only follow a colored clew. The result is that he is chiefly
picturesque, and, to those who want more than art for art's sake, never
satisfying. Fascinating as his verses are, artless in the perfection of
art, they take no reader a step forward. The children of whom he sings
so sweetly are cherubs without souls. It is not in poetry that Mr.
Stevenson will give the great book to the world, nor will it, I think,
be in the form of essays. Of late he has done nothing quite so fine as
"Virginibus Puerisque," though most of his essays are gardens in which
grow few weeds. Quaint in matter as in treatment, they are the best
strictly literary essays of the day, and their mixture of tenderness
with humor suggests Charles Lamb. Some think Mr. Stevenson's essays
equal to Lamb's, or greater. To that I say, no. The name of Lamb will
for many a year bring proud tears to English eyes. Here was a man, weak
like the rest of us, who kept his sorrows to himself. Life to him was
not among the trees. He had loved and lost. Grief laid a heavy hand on
his brave brow. Dark were his nights; horrid shadows in the house;
sudden terrors; the heart stops beating waiting for a footstep. At that
door comes Tragedy, knocking at all hours. Was Lamb dismayed? The
tragedy of his life was not drear to him. It was wound round those who
were dearest to him; it let him know that life has a glory even at its
saddest, that humor and pathos clasp hands, that loved ones are drawn
nearer, and the soul strengthened in the presence of anguish, pain, and
death. When Lamb sat down to write, he did not pull down his blind on
all that is greatest, if most awful, in human life. He was gentle,
kindly; but he did not play at pretending that there is no cemetery
round the corner. In Mr. Stevenson's exquisite essays one looks in vain
for the great heart that palpitates through the pages of Charles Lamb.
The great work, if we are not to be disappointed, will be fiction. Mr.
Stevenson is said to feel this himself, and, as I understand, "Harry
Shovel" will be his biggest bid for fame. It is to be, broadly
speaking, a nineteenth-century "Peregrine Pickle," dashed with
Meredith, and this in the teeth of many admirers who maintain that the
best of the author is Scottish. Mr. Stevenson, however, knows what he
is about. Critics have said enthusiastically--for it is difficult to
write of Mr. Stevenson without enthusiasm--that Alan Breck is as good
as anything in Scott. Alan Breck is certainly a masterpiece, quite
worthy of the greatest of all story-tellers, who, nevertheless, it
should be remembered, created these rich side characters by the score,
another before dinner-time. English critics have taken Alan to their
hearts, and appreciate him thoroughly; the reason, no doubt, being that
he is the character whom England acknowledges as the Scottish type. The
Highlands, which are Scotland to the same extent as Northumberland is
England, present such a character to this day, but no deep knowledge of
Mr. Stevenson's native country was required to reproduce him. An
artistic Englishman or American could have done it. Scottish religion,
I think, Mr. Stevenson has never understood, except as the outsider
misunderstands it. He thinks it hard because there are no colored
windows. "The color of Scotland has entered into him altogether," says
Mr. James, who, we gather, conceives in Edinburgh Castle a place where
tartans glisten in the sun, while rocks re-echo bagpipes. Mr. James is
right in a way. It is the tartan, the claymore, the cry that the
heather is on fire, that are Scotland to Mr. Stevenson. But the
Scotland of our day is not a country rich in color; a sombre gray
prevails. Thus, though Mr. Stevenson's best romance is Scottish, that
is only, I think, because of his extraordinary aptitude for the
picturesque. Give him any period in any country that is romantic, and
he will soon steep himself in the kind of knowledge he can best turn to
account. Adventures suit him best, the ladies being left behind; and so
long as he is in fettle it matters little whether the scene be Scotland
or Spain. The great thing is that he should now give to one ambitious
book the time in which he has hitherto written half a dozen small ones.
He will have to take existence a little more seriously--to weave
broadcloth instead of lace.
REV. WALTER C. SMITH, D.D.
XI.
REV. WALTER C. SMITH, D.D.
During the four winters another and I were in Edinburgh, we never
entered any but Free churches. This seems to have been less on account
of a scorn for other denominations than because we never thought of
them. We felt sorry for the "men" who knew no better than to claim to
be on the side of Dr. Macgregor. Even our Free kirks were limited to
two, St. George's and the Free High. After all, we must have been
liberally minded beyond most of our fellows, for, as a rule, those who
frequented one of these churches shook their heads at the other. It is
said that Dr. Whyte and Dr. Smith have a great appreciation of each
other. They, too, are liberally minded.