HENRY DRUMMOND
We were smoking churchwarden pipes and telling how Jock This and Sandy
That had made their money. I hope the Free Kirk folk will not be
scandalised by the revelation, especially by that of the churchwardens.
While Drummond lived I concealed this grievous sin, but now that he has
been dead nigh upon a quarter of a century, I think he will fare no
worse for it in heaven, whatever might have been the case in Glasgow in
the early nineties. He wore a velvet smoking jacket, too, and we
toasted our toes before his study fire on one of the worst nights it
has ever been my fortune to see in Scotland or elsewhere. The wind was
lifting roofs and toppling chimneys to the ground, and the rain was
like streams from a thousand fire engines. There was never a better
night for a fireside.
Jock This and Sandy That got into the conversation (not bodily but in
essence) because their experiences illustrated what Professor Drummond
was saying about "getting on in the world." And he was saying these
things because he liked talking other men's shop, not his own. The
point he made was this: it is n't necessary to emigrate in order to
{171} prosper. He had been talking to a group of young men about this
that very day. He had a way with him when talking to young men.
"How do men get bored?" he asked. "I never get bored. I can be
interested in something always. Time never drags on my hands. But
Jock and Sandy can't get interested unless they are making more money,
so they keep at it all the time. They are lost without their
occupation. Money is a fine thing--to use. If you have n't it, the
man who has it uses you as well as his money. Can we find the way to
make money without becoming its slaves, as almost all men are who make
it?"
In the early nineties Henry Drummond was what they call "one of the
best sellers." Who reads him now? I ask for information. If his
books had been fiction, we could understand that the fashion had
changed in twenty years. But has the fashion changed in God?
Youth used to follow Drummond in troops. When he died more than the
youth of Scotland mourned. But youth does not mourn long. It has in
that respect the advantage of age, which usually makes new friends only
with difficulty; youth has but to summon them, and they come. Drummond
had an immense capacity for friendship. I have said he had a way with
youth; yes, of both sexes and all ages. But his greatest friends were
young men; and his greatest friend of all was D. L. Moody, the
revivalist.
Drummond was saying, as we sat before the fire, drawing clouds from
churchwardens:
{172}
"I don't believe in old saws, do you? Now there 's:
"'Early to bed, and early to rise,
Make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.'
"What nonsense! Healthy, if you like, but how wealthy and how wise is
the manual labourer?
"'Bed at dark,
Up with the lark.'
"Suppose you work with a night shift? Try bringing up a generation on
these old wives' tales. But they 're merely an example of our British
habit of trying to rule by phrases instead of by ideas."
In the hall around the corner, I thought, they might suspect this sort
of thing as inclining toward heresy. But you never can tell. "One
man," as a proverb-muddled acquaintance of mine used to say, "one man
may lead a horse to water, but another may not look over the fence."
They were still buying Drummond's books in large quantities,--"Natural
Law in the Spiritual World" and "The Greatest Thing in the World." I
liked to think that the slender gentleman with longish hair, who was
sartorially British to the _nth_ power, could write things like that in
the morning and in the evening keep me company with a churchwarden, and
these were very long churchwardens, old style, and we smoked "Glasgow
Mild." Drummond, being a sensible man, wanted, as I say, to talk some
other man's shop. He wanted to talk mine but could not pin me down.
It was his shop I wanted. One of his young men with a literary {173}
turn wished to go to America and become a journalist. Would I advise?
"Why America?" I enquired mildly. "You have admirable newspapers in
Scotland. Besides, you were saying that 'it is n't necessary to
emigrate in order to prosper.'"
"It's unkind to remind a man of his inconsistencies," said he.
"I would like to save a good Scot, especially if young, from the
mutilations of American journalism. More especially if literary. Tell
him to learn the trade at home first. He 'll be trained more
thoroughly here. There they 'll put him 'on space' to the uttermost
ruin of any literary gift he may have. Space-writing means
word-spinning--the more words the more money, if you have the knack of
escaping the blue pencil. Space-work will knock seven-ways-for-Sunday
any literary turn he may have. American journalism will do that,
anyhow."
"Perhaps I 'd better kill him."
"My dear sir, your American experiences have done you good."
"They put me under gas and injected the spirit."
And with that we heard the clock strike the hour when we should start
for the place where he was to lecture that evening on "The Greater
Gratitude."
Professor Drummond, in "Natural Law in the Spiritual World", had
attempted, as a clerical and friendly critic said, "to treat religion
as a fact of nature, no less solid and capable of scientific analysis
than any other fact which science claims for its {174} own." Everybody
read the book, for it was translated into all the European languages.
And everybody read its successor, "The Greatest Thing in the World."
The volumes, which were small, carried the name of their author around
the globe in a large way, for they came from the press in tens of
thousands. I suppose he had a million readers, and the most these knew
about him was that he held the professorship of natural science in the
Free Church College at Glasgow, that he was but little over thirty when
he wrote the little books, and that, for a year, he had disappeared in
the wilds of Africa. He returned to find himself famous, or as some
thought and said, notorious.
He had fluttered the theologians, not flattered them. He was a
theologian himself. His object was to stretch theology to man's size.
The champions of a hundred orthodoxies and heterodoxies chattered
fiercely behind their bulwarks of texts. It seems a very small matter
now, but, after all, it helped us all, for Drummond was a helpful man.
He was a young man's man, and there you have one of the keys to him.
To be a professor of anything in the Free Kirk College might imply that
a man was hampered as to words and views. It was not so in Drummond's
case, at any rate. I have said that he was a theologian; I will add
that he was a geologist. When I knew him, he was famous and forty-two,
and he had recently discovered in Glasgow the remains of a fossil
forest. He had just returned from America, where he had been lecturing
at the Lowell {175} Institute, in Boston, on "The Evolution of Man."
How he laughed over his Boston surprise! Of course he knew the Lowell
Institute by name, but he had n't an idea of what it really was. He
had supposed that he would have an audience of two or three dozen old
fogies and a number of short-haired blue-stockings. He found the place
crammed with alert human beings, mostly young, and all enthusiastic.
There was a greater crowd outside, hoping vainly to get in. His
thought was, as he mounted the platform: "My lecture won't do. I must
popularise it. There are no Dryasdusts here." He altered the lecture
as he went along, and when he had finished, he returned to his hotel
and undertook to rewrite all the lectures he had brought from Scotland.
There were no fogies in the throngs that heard him. He had already
been two or three times to America; now he began to understand what it
really was,--the country of the young.
Drummond lived at Number 3 Park Circus, Glasgow. He kept bachelor's
hall there, and kept it very well, indeed. The house was spacious,
"rich not gaudy", the rooms set in carved woods and trophies of ivory,
and everything about them suggesting comfort and agreeable taste. It
did not in the least suggest the abiding place of a theologian,
Scottish or otherwise, and it did not hint at the granite-like hardness
of the houses of some geologists I have known. If I say that we had
jolly evenings there, smoking churchwardens and talking of travel, the
life of cities, and Scottish tales, and New England and Old England,
and the Academy, and books, {176} and Gladstone, and Hyde Park, and the
Rocky Mountains, it is only to show that theological-geologists can be
human. Drummond was more than human; he was companionable. He had
always the appearance of ease, but he was a persistent worker. Work
never drove him, though; he held the reins over it and mastered it. If
you had an appointment with him, the time was yours; he had set it
apart; you were not made to feel that there was any pressure. This may
seem a simple thing to do; but, as most men live, it is not.
Drummond's person was tall and slender; he had brown hair; his eyes
were--shall I call them brownish-grey?--his moustache and short side
whiskers inclined to a sandy tint; his voice was pleasing, and he shook
hands with a hearty grip. He attracted you not so much by cordiality
as by sincerity. He went to the point at once.
I was making a study of British municipal policy and administration,
with a view to certain movements in America. Drummond was helpful
daily. He knew the things that had been done and the men who did them;
he knew the practical fellows and the extremists; the men who worked at
reforms and the men who merely talked about them; the originators and
the copyists; the men who were out for politics and party, and the men
who were out for the good they could do. And so I got at results and
saved time and weariness, though not without much weariness and time.
Down narrow, grimy streets, piloted by Bailie This, or Bailie That, or
Superintendent Thus and So, or Overseer of T'other, {177} I went by day
and night through the densest, soul-rending parts of Glasgow; up
twisting flights of stairs, through murky alleys and through atrocious
smells; people were shovelled there to live as they could. At every
little distance we would come to spaces where old masonry was being
levelled, and new bright buildings going up; lodging houses, tenements,
model dwellings, bathhouses, feeding places, washing places, drying
places, places where the sunlight and air could enter, could sweep
about,--the municipality was overhauling things.
I would return to Drummond's, rid myself of the everlasting Scotch
mist, have a bath, a nap, a change of clothing, and then tuck my knees
under his mahogany, tell about what I 'd seen, and the drenching,
fatiguing day, and, "as sure as eggs is eggs", his explanations would
bring in Moody.
"That was Moody's doing," he would say; or "Moody started us," or
"Moody collected the money to begin this work, or that," or "Moody
showed us the way."
Moody was "the biggest man I ever knew," he said.
"Then why not talk of him?"
"I 'd like nothing better. Unless you knew him, and knew him at work,
you could n't half appreciate him." I feared I never did. "Well,
then, take him as a manager of men--" and there would begin a run of
anecdote showing that the renowned evangelist was a great organiser,
and would have been as great in the business world, or the political
world, or the military world, had he chosen to enter, as {178} he had
been in the hearts of Scotsmen, Englishmen, and Americans.
Moody had discovered Edinburgh, or Edinburgh had discovered Moody; I
was never quite sure which. Anyhow, Moody made Drummond discover
himself and his work in life, and that is the most important discovery
a man can make. Drummond was a Scotsman of the Scots. He was born
near the field of Bannockburn. He came of God-fearing folk, or as he
preferred to say, God-loving. His father was a wealthy merchant, and
meant that his boy should become a minister. But the boy took his
theology without going in for orders. He made science his profession,
and taught theology to scientists and science to theologians.
"I would never be wholly off with the one, nor wholly on with the
other," said he. "I am fond of both. And I believed that I was better
as a geologist and botanist than I could possibly be as a preacher."
When Moody and Sankey came to Scotland, the latter, with his keen
capacity for selecting staff officers, selected Drummond as one of his.
Drummond shared two years of labour with the American revivalists.
They went through England, Scotland, Ireland. Then Moody and Sankey
returned to America, and Drummond returned to his studies, religious
and scientific, gained his professorship, taught his classes, wrote his
books, carried on evangelical work among young men, geologised in
Malta, Africa, and the Rocky Mountains, and found this a good world to
live in if you knew how to work.
We were reviewing his experiences one day. I said:
{179}
"You have omitted to mention a great advantage that you started with
and have kept."
"What's that?" he asked.
"Money. You never had to work for your living. You were free to
indulge your bent, your theological-evangelical-scientific bent, free
to help your soul and work for the souls of others, without having to
think about bills, or grind your powers for the taskmaster, Debt!"
"Moody had n't a dollar when he began his work in Chicago," said
Drummond. "See what he did!"
"Moody was a genius. He made a business success before he gave himself
to religious work. He had proved his greatest power--the management of
men. You or I would have had to grapple with theology, or geology, or
to swim in ink, once we had started and had been left to ourselves."
"Perhaps."
"No doubt about it. A poor man can be a theologian, or a follower of
science, but he can't be both, and explore the Rocky Mountains and
Darkest Africa, and conduct soup kitchens in Glasgow, and do a
two-years tour with Moody and Sankey."
"That aspect had n't occurred to me. I am glad I was not compelled to
have it occur to me," said Drummond.
"A man needing money and unable to get it is like a machine without
lubricating oil. Almost any man who has done much without money could
have done more with it," I said.
{180}
"You think so?"
"Are we to think that friction is the best result?"
"No," Drummond answered.
"Some men can't make money because their work does n't run to it, or
they may have the ability, but not the desire, or they may not be able
to afford to make money; you remember Agassiz's case. Perhaps he did
n't need it."
"Money-making is a special faculty," said Drummond. "A man has it or
does n't have it, as he may or may not have a musical ear, an eye for
colour, a delicate sense of smell, and so on. I know moneyed men, and
I daresay you know others, who are duffers outside their special lines.
Most men are duffers outside their special lines."
"The defect of specialised training, eh?"
"Possibly: like over-specialisation in the trades."
"Cutting threads on screws for thirty years," said I.
"Shall we say the same thing of theology? Most men may overtrain in
that."
"They do. Therefore try mixing science with it."
"That must dilute theology. A little too much science, and the
theology becomes watery. But in the Roman Church they dilute the
science."
"Don't you think it depressing to listen to Carnegie's cant about his
intention to die poor?" I asked. "What else could he do? He says
nothing about _living_ as a poor man. Poverty is a 'blessing' that we
all recognise in essays, sermons, and speeches, but we use all the
strength we can to avoid the blessing, and we don't delude the poor
with our {181} pretences. All of us like to use money as a force.
Perhaps you would call it a mode of motion."
"That sounds like Moody," said Drummond. "There 's the other side," he
went on, "the deadly monotony of the lives of the average rich folk,
deadly monotony, a weary existence dragged along without any interest
in useful things. Take an interest in things; that is the way to live;
not merely think about them. No man has a right to postpone his life
for the sake of his thoughts. This is a real world, not a think world.
Treat it as a real world--act!"
"That is from your 'Programme of Christianity'," said I.
"Yes. The might of those who build is greater than the might of those
who retard."
We got to talking about socialism. "Its basis," he said, "is
materialism, not man. Herbert Spencer said: 'By no political alchemy
can you get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.' And that's a good
standard for testing politicians. None better."
Drummond was always looking at the bright side of life, illuminating it
with common sense. And he loved a joke as well as anybody. He told
with gusto of the fun he had at the Chicago Exhibition when, one
evening, a dozen Arabs and Turks strode through the grounds, gazing
gravely at the marvels of that western civilisation.
"Marvellous," he repeated. "We shall never see anything like it again.
Nor like those Arabs. If you could have seen them, as they passed from
light to darkness at an exit gate, while, choking {182} with laughter,
they removed the sheets and pillow cases, and silk handkerchiefs, and
colored tablecloths which had served them as robes and turbans and
sashes, you would have said they were as marvellous as anything in the
show. And when they wiped the colour from their faces, you would have
recognised several of the most learned professors in America and one
Scotsman with a smudge on his cheek." He roared at the recollection.
He was a professor at twenty-five. And his pupils were university
graduates studying for the ministry. It was part of their duty to
study natural science, to know something about the world they would
preach in and the stupidity of trying to dig science out of Scripture.
Well, Drummond was the man for his work. And besides natural science,
his work was for philanthropy and a rousing, liberalising evangelicism.
At the end of his week in the classroom he would run over to Edinburgh
and hold a religious service with a thousand young men attending
earnestly.
"How do you get into personal touch with your college students?" I
asked him.
"There you touch a tender point," he said. "There is n't enough
personal touch in the colleges of Scotland! We put too much faith in
lectures. Young men come but rarely into personal touch with their
professors. I knew very little of mine. And that's the rule. A man
must break through the routine; the professor must, the student must.
Personal touch would open both of them. Take So-and-So at the
University. He lectures in the {183} morning to one hundred and fifty
or two hundred students. In the afternoon to two hundred more. No
personal touch in that; no opportunity for it. Youth can't be taught
in droves, or saved in masses. And yet, if you go in for individual
development, or by small groups, you multiply the work beyond all
possibility. Our system is wrong. It neglects character for the sake
of competition. But what can be done? Effort, individual effort, is
the only thing worth a bawbee. All the rest is formulae."
He said that, as far as his own efforts went, he did what he could, in
every way that he could. The development of personal responsibility
was what he drove at. "That's the aim and end of life. If you don't
base education on it, what is the use of education? Come. We are
responsible for our physical condition. Let's go for a walk!"
Even in Scotland there are moments without rain. Pallid things that
might have been stars peeped through the scudding clouds. We walked
on, with good, easy strides, and talked,--talked of patriotism for one
thing. "We don't have to teach that in Scotland," he said. "We take
it for granted. Every Scot is born with it. And there 's no
immigration in Scotland. We 're luckier than you, in America, where
you have--what is it? A million a year pouring through the steerages?
I asked about that in my visits, but could n't find that you were
teaching patriotism, except by fits and starts, in widely separated
places. They were talking of teaching it there in the schools. What a
funny idea! School is n't the place to acquire {184} patriotism. Home
is! But where you have immigration on a huge scale the conditions
differ, I confess."
The talk swung over to Gladstone. Drummond was very friendly with him.
I had said that I thought the G.O.M. a vindictive old gentleman.
Drummond laughed: "Oh, but we worship him. We take him very seriously."
"Yes, and he illustrates your favourite theory about taking an interest
in things."
"Right! He is interested in things--movements, tendencies of thought,
theology, religion, literature. I can't, though, quote him as an
authority on science. But his interest, his active interest in things,
keeps him fresh and young, and out of grooves. He is interested in
things, in masses, nations, races, mountain ranges, literature, not
art--literature above all, theological literature most of all."
"In Home Rule but not in Home Rulers," I interrupted.
"Does not the greater include the less?"
"Sometimes," said I, "but in politics it does not include even what is
set down in black and white. Where would you put Gladstone as compared
with your other hero, Moody? Moody, you say, was the biggest human
being you ever knew."
"I won't retract that. Gladstone throws a greater spell over his
hearers, and, when one meets him, an incomparable fascination. Moody's
influence will last the longer, and so will his work."
This was interesting, to say the least of it. Then we turned home.
Four years later, Drummond died. Only forty-five!
{185}