MY DEAR FRIEND,--When, at the urgent request of his trustees and family,
and in accordance with what I believe was his own wish, you undertook my
father's Memoir, it was in a measure on the understanding that I would
furnish you with some domestic and personal details. This I hoped to
have done but was unable.
Though convinced more than ever how little my hand is needed, I will now
endeavor to fulfil my promise. Before doing so, however, you must permit
me to express our deep gratitude to you for this crowning proof of your
regard for him
"Without whose life we had not been;"
to whom for many years you habitually wrote as "My father," and one of
whose best blessings, when he was "such an one as Paul the aged," was to
know that you were to him "mine own son in the gospel."
With regard to the manner in which you have done this last kindness to
the dead, I can say nothing more expressive of our feelings, and, I am
sure, nothing more gratifying to you, than that the record you have
given of my father's life, and of the series of great public questions
in which he took part, is done in the way which would have been most
pleasing to himself--that which, with his passionate love of truth and
liberty, his relish for concentrated, just thought and expression, and
his love of being loved, he would have most desired, in any one speaking
of him after he was gone. He would, I doubt not, say, as one said to a
great painter, on looking at his portrait, "It is certainly like, but it
is much better looking;" and you might well reply as did the painter,
"It is the truth, told lovingly"--and all the more true that it is so
told. You have, indeed, been enabled to speak the truth, or as the Greek
has it, {aletheuein en agape}--to truth it in love.
I have over and over again sat down to try and do what I promised and
wished--to give some faint expression of my father's life; not of what
he did or said or wrote--not even of what he was as a man of God and a
public teacher; but what he was in his essential nature--what he would
have been had he been anything else than what he was, or had lived a
thousand years ago.
Sometimes I have this so vividly in my mind that I think I have only to
sit down and write it off, and do it to the quick. "The idea of his
life," what he was as a whole, what was his self, all his days,
would,--to go on with words which not time or custom can ever wither or
make stale,--
"Sweetly creep
Into my study of imagination;
And every lovely organ of his life
Would come apparelled in more precious habit--
More moving delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of my soul,
Than when he lived indeed,"
as if the sacredness of death and the bloom of eternity were on it; or
as you may have seen in an untroubled lake, the heaven reflected with
its clouds, brighter, purer, more exquisite than itself; but when you
try to put this into words, to detain yourself over it, it is by this
very act disturbed, broken and bedimmed, and soon vanishes away, as
would the imaged heavens in the lake, if a pebble were cast into it, or
a breath of wind stirred its face. The very anxiety to transfer it, as
it looked out of the clear darkness of the past, makes the image grow
dim and disappear.
Every one whose thoughts are not seldom with the dead, must have felt
both these conditions; how, in certain passive, tranquil states, there
comes up into the darkened chamber of the mind, its "chamber of
imagery"--uncalled, as if it blossomed out of space, exact, absolute,
consummate, vivid, speaking, not darkly as in a glass, but face to face,
and "moving delicate"--this "idea of his life;" and then how an effort
to prolong and perpetuate and record all this, troubles the vision and
kills it! It is as if one should try to paint in a mirror the reflection
of a dear and unseen face; the coarse, uncertain passionate handling and
color, ineffectual and hopeless, shut out the very thing itself.
I will therefore give this up as in vain, and try by some fragmentary
sketches, scenes, and anecdotes, to let you know in some measure what
manner of man my father was. Anecdotes, if true and alive, are always
valuable; the man in the concrete, the _totus quis_ comes out in them;
and I know you too well to think that you will consider as trivial or
out of place anything in which his real nature displayed itself, and
your own sense of humor as a master and central power of the human soul,
playing about the very essence of the man, will do more than forgive
anything of this kind which may crop out here and there, like the smile
of wild-flowers in grass, or by the wayside.
My first recollection of my father, my first impression, not only of his
character, but of his eyes and face and presence, strange as it may
seem, dates from my fifth year. Doubtless I had looked at him often
enough before that, and had my own childish thoughts about him; but this
was the time when I got my fixed, compact idea of him, and the first
look of him which I felt could never be forgotten. I saw him, as it
were, by a flash of lightning, sudden and complete. A child begins by
seeing bits of everything; it knows in part--here a little, there a
little; it makes up its wholes out of its own littles, and is long of
reaching the fulness of a whole; and in this we are children all our
lives in much. Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at
what is above them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones,
its "red sodgers" and lady-birds, and all its queer things; their world
is about three feet high, and they are more often stooping than gazing
up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceilings of
the rooms in the manse at Biggar.
On the morning of the 28th May, 1816, my eldest sister Janet and I were
sleeping in the kitchen-bed with Tibbie Meek,[9] our only servant. We
were all three awakened by a cry of pain--sharp, insufferable, as if one
were stung. Years after we two confided to each other, sitting by the
burnside, that we thought that "great cry" which arose at midnight in
Egypt must have been like it. We all knew whose voice it was, and, in
our night-clothes, we ran into the passage, and into the little parlor
to the left hand, in which was a closet-bed. We found my father standing
before us, erect, his hands clenched in his black hair, his eyes full of
misery and amazement, his face white as that of the dead. He frightened
us. He saw this, or else his intense will had mastered his agony, for,
taking his hands from his head, he said, slowly and gently, "Let us give
thanks," and turned to a little sofa in the room; there lay our mother,
dead.[10] She had long been ailing. I remember her sitting in a
shawl,--an Indian one with little dark green spots on a light
ground,--and watching her growing pale with what I afterwards knew must
have been strong pain. She had, being feverish, slipped out of bed, and
"grandmother," her mother, seeing her "change come," had called my
father, and they two saw her open her blue, kind, and true eyes,
"comfortable" to us all "as the day"--I remember them better than those
of any one I saw yesterday--and, with one faint look of recognition to
him, close them till the time of the restitution of all things.
"She had another morn than ours."
Then were seen in full action his keen, passionate nature, his sense of
mental pain, and his supreme will, instant and unsparing, making himself
and his terrified household give thanks in the midst of such a
desolation,--and for it. Her warfare was accomplished, her iniquities
were pardoned: she had already received from her Lord's hand double for
all her sins; this was his supreme and over-mastering thought, and he
gave it utterance.
[9] A year ago, I found an elderly countrywoman, a widow, waiting
for me. Rising up, she said, "D'ye mind me?" I looked at
her, but could get nothing from her face; but the voice
remained in my ear, as if coming from "the fields of sleep,"
and I said by a sort of instinct, "Tibbie Meek!" I had not
seen her or heard her voice for more than forty years. She
had come to get some medical advice. Voices are often like
the smells of flowers and leaves, the tastes of wild
fruits--they touch and awaken memory in a strange way.
"Tibbie" is now living at Thankerton.
[10] This sofa, which was henceforward sacred in the house, he
had always beside him. He used to tell us he set her down
upon it when he brought her home to the manse.
No man was happier in his wives. My mother was modest, calm, thrifty,
reasonable, tender, happy-hearted. She was his student-love, and is even
now remembered in that pastoral region, for "her sweet gentleness and
wife-like government." Her death and his sorrow and loss, settled down
deep into the heart of the countryside. He was so young and bright, so
full of fire, so unlike any one else, so devoted to his work, so
chivalrous in his look and manner, so fearless, and yet so sensitive and
self-contained. She was so wise, good and gentle, gracious and frank.
His subtlety of affection, and his almost cruel self-command, were shown
on the day of the funeral. It was to Symington, four miles off,--a quiet
little churchyard, lying in the shadow of Tinto; a place where she
herself had wished to be laid. The funeral was chiefly on horseback. We,
the family, were in coaches. I had been since the death in a sort of
stupid musing and wonder, not making out what it all meant. I knew my
mother was said to be dead. I saw she was still, and laid out, and then
shut up, and didn't move; but I did not know that when she was carried
out in that long black box, and we all went with her, she alone was
never to return.
When we got to the village all the people were at their doors. One
woman, the blacksmith Thomas Spence's wife, had a nursing baby in her
arms, and he leapt up and crowed with joy at the strange sight, the
crowding horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse.
This was my brother William, then nine months old, and Margaret Spence
was his foster-mother. Those with me were overcome at this sight; he of
all the world whose, in some ways, was the greatest loss, the least
conscious, turning it to his own childish glee.
We got to the churchyard and stood round the open grave. My dear old
grandfather was asked by my father to pray; he did. I don't remember his
words; I believe he, through his tears and sobs, repeated the Divine
words, "All flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of
the grass; the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, but
the word of the Lord endureth forever;" adding, in his homely and
pathetic way, that the flower would again bloom, never again to fade;
that what was now sown in dishonor and weakness, would be raised in
glory and power, like unto His own glorious body. Then to my surprise
and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers, was placed over that dark
hole, and I watched with curious eye the unrolling of those neat black
bunches of cords, which I have often enough seen since. My father took
the one at the head, and also another much smaller springing from the
same point as his, which he had caused to be put there, and unrolling
it, put it into my hand. I twisted it firmly round my fingers, and
awaited the result; the burial men with their real ropes lowered the
coffin, and when it rested at the bottom, it was too far down for me to
see it--the grave was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell us,
that it might hold us all--my father first and abruptly let his cord
drop, followed by the rest. This was too much. I now saw what was meant,
and held on and fixed my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some
difficulty in forcing open my small fingers; he let the little black
cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end
disappearing in the gloom.
My mother's death was the second epoch in my father's life; it marked a
change at once and for life; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised
upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made.
He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in
tears, himself outwardly unmoved.[11] But from that time dates an
entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preaching,
because an entire change in his way of dealing with God's Word. Not that
his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even
altered--I doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy
Scriptures, but was "wise unto salvation"--but it strengthened and
clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God
as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing; he got
a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and
with a fresh power--with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the
living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and
his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled; but fuel was
heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that {ti thermon
pragma}, burned with a new ardor; indeed had he not found an outlet for
his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties
have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendor and
combustion, or dwindled into lethargy.[12]
[11] I have been told that _once_ in the course of the sermon his
voice trembled, and many feared he was about to break down.
[12] There is a story illustrative of this altered manner and
matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young,
at Galashiels, and one wife said to her "neebor," "Jean,
what think ye o' the lad?" "_It's maist o't tinsel wark_,"
said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine
sentiments and figures. After my mother's death, he preached
in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the
first word, "_It's a' gowd noo_."
The manse became silent; we lived and slept and played under the shadow
of that death, and we saw, or rather felt, that he was another father
than before. No more happy laughter from the two in the parlor, as he
was reading Larry, the Irish postboy's letter in Miss Edgeworth's tale,
or the last Waverley novel; no more visitings in a cart with her, he
riding beside us on his white thorough-bred pony, to Kilbucho, or Rachan
Mill, or Kirklawhill. He went among his people as usual when they were
ill; he preached better than ever--they were sometimes frightened to
think how wonderfully he preached; but the sunshine was over--the glad
and careless look, the joy of young life and mutual love. He was little
with us, and, as I said, the house was still, except when he was
_mandating_ his sermons for Sabbath. This he always did, not only _viva
voce_, but with as much energy and loudness as in the pulpit; we felt
his voice was sharper, and rang keen through the house.
What we lost, the congregation and the world gained. He gave himself
wholly to his work. As you have yourself said, he changed his entire
system and fashion of preaching; from being elegant, rhetorical, and
ambitious, he became concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself moved),
keen, searching, unswerving, authoritative to fierceness, full of the
terrors of the Lord, if he could but persuade men. The truth of the
words of God had shone out upon him with an immediateness and infinity
of meaning and power, which made them, though the same words he had
looked on from childhood, other and greater and deeper words. He then
left the ordinary commentators, and men who write about meanings and
flutter around the circumference and corners; he was bent on the centre,
on touching with his own fingers, on seeing with his own eyes, the pearl
of great price. Then it was that he began to dig into the depths, into
the primary and auriferous rock of Scripture, and take nothing at
another's hand: then he took up with the word "apprehend;" he had laid
hold of the truth,--there it was, with its evidence, in his hand; and
every one who knew him must remember well how, in speaking with
earnestness of the meaning of a passage, he, in his ardent, hesitating
way, looked into the palm of his hand as if he actually saw there the
truth he was going to utter. This word _apprehend_ played a large part
in his lectures, as the thing itself did in his processes of
investigation, or, if I might make a word, _indigation_. Comprehension,
he said, was for few; apprehension was for every man who had hands and a
head to rule them, and an eye to direct them. Out of this arose one of
his deficiencies. He _could_ go largely into the generalities of a
subject, and relished greatly others doing it, so that they did do it
really and well; but he was averse to abstract and wide reasonings.
Principles he rejoiced in: he worked with them as with his choicest
weapons; they were the polished stones for his sling, against the
Goliaths of presumption, error, and tyranny in thought or in polity,
civil or ecclesiastical; but he somehow divined a principle, or got at
it naked and alone, rather than deduced it and brought it to a point
from an immensity of particulars, and then rendered it back so as to
bind them into one _cosmos_. One of my young friends now dead, who
afterwards went to India, used to come and hear him in Broughton Place
with me, and this word _apprehend_ caught him, and as he had a great
love for my father, in writing home to me, he never forgot to ask how
"grand old Apprehend" was.
From this time dates my father's possession and use of the German
Exegetics. After my mother's death I slept with him; his bed was in his
study, a small room,[13] with a very small grate; and I remember well
his getting those fat, shapeless, spongy German books, as if one would
sink in them, and be bogged in their bibulous, unsized paper; and
watching him as he impatiently cut them up, and dived into them in his
rapid, eclectic way, tasting them, and dropping for my play such a lot
of soft, large, curled bits from the paper-cutter, leaving the edges all
shaggy. He never came to bed when I was awake, which was not to be
wondered at; but I can remember often awaking far on in the night or
morning, and seeing that keen, beautiful, intense face bending over
these Rosenmuellers, and Ernestis, and Storrs, and Kuinoels--the fire
out, and the gray dawn peering through the window; and when he heard me
move, he would speak to me in the foolish words of endearment my mother
was wont to use, and come to bed, and take me, warm as I was, into his
cold bosom.
[13] On a low chest of drawers in this room there lay for many
years my mother's parasol, by his orders--I daresay, for
long, the only one in Biggar.
_Vitringa in Jesaiam_ I especially remember, a noble folio. Even then,
with that eagerness to communicate what he had himself found, of which
you must often have been made the subject, he went and told it. He would
try to make me, small man as I was, "apprehend" what he and Vitringa
between them had made out of the fifty-third chapter of his favorite
prophet, the princely Isaiah.[14] Even then, so far as I can recall, he
never took notes of what he read. He did not need this, his intellectual
force and clearness were so great; he was so _totus in illo_, whatever
it was, that he recorded by a secret of its own, his mind's results and
victories and _memoranda_, as he went on; he did not even mark his
books, at least very seldom; he marked his mind.
[14] His reading aloud of everything from John Gilpin to John
Howe was a fine and high art, or rather gift. Henderson
could not have given
"The dinner waits, and we are tired;"
Says Gilpin, "So am I,"
better; and to hear him sounding the depths and cadences of
the Living Temple, "bearing on its front this doleful
inscription, 'Here God once dwelt,'" was like listening to
the recitative of Handel. But Isaiah was his masterpiece;
and I remember quite well his startling us all when reading
at family worship, "His name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor, the mighty God," by a peremptory, explosive
sharpness, as of thunder overhead, at the words "the mighty
God," similar to the rendering now given to Handel's music,
and doubtless so meant by him; and then closing with "the
Prince of Peace," soft and low. No man who wishes to feel
Isaiah, as well as understand him, should be ignorant of
Handel's "Messiah." His prelude to "Comfort ye"--its simple
theme, cheerful and infinite as the ripple of the
unsearchable sea--gives a deeper meaning to the words. One
of my father's great delights in his dying months was
reading the lives of Handel and of Michael Angelo, then
newly out. He felt that the author of "He was despised," and
"He shall feed his flock," and those other wonderful airs,
was a man of profound religious feeling, of which they were
the utterance; and he rejoiced over the warlike airs and
choruses of "Judas Maccabaeus." You have recorded his
estimate of the religious nature of him of the _terribile
via_; he said it was a relief to his mind to know that such
a mighty genius walked humbly with his God.
He was thus every year preaching with more and more power, because with
more and more knowledge and "pureness;" and, as you say, there were
probably nowhere in Britain such lectures delivered at that time to such
an audience, consisting of country people, sound, devout, well-read in
their Bibles and in the native divinity, but quite unused to persistent,
deep, critical thought.
Much of this--most of it--was entirely his own, self-originated and
self-sustained, and done for its own sake,
"All too happy in the pleasure
Of his own exceeding treasure."
But he often said, with deep feeling, that one thing put him always on
his mettle, the knowledge that "yonder in that corner, under the
gallery, sat, Sabbath after Sabbath, a man who knew his Greek Testament
better than I did."
This was his brother-in-law, and one of his elders, Mr. Robert Johnston,
married to his sister Violet, a merchant and portioner in Biggar, a
remarkable man, of whom it is difficult to say to strangers what is
true, without being accused of exaggeration. A shopkeeper in that remote
little town, he not only intermeddled fearlessly with all knowledge, but
mastered more than many practised and University men do in their own
lines. Mathematics, astronomy, and especially what may be called
_selenology_, or the doctrine of the moon, and the higher geometry and
physics; Hebrew, Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin, to the veriest rigors of
prosody and metre; Spanish and Italian, German, French, and any odd
language that came in his way; all these he knew more or less
thoroughly, and acquired them in the most leisurely, easy, cool sort of
way, as if he grazed and browsed perpetually in the field of letters,
rather than made formal meals, or gathered for any ulterior purpose, his
fruits, his roots, and his nuts--he especially liked mental nuts--much
less bought them from any one.
With all this, his knowledge of human, and especially of Biggar human
nature, the ins and outs of its little secret ongoings, the entire
gossip of the place, was like a woman's; moreover, every personage great
or small, heroic or comic, in Homer--whose poems he made it a matter of
conscience to read once every four years--Plautus, Suetonius, Plutarch,
Tacitus, and Lucian, down through Boccaccio and Don Quixote, which he
knew by heart and from the living Spanish, to Joseph Andrews, the
Spectator, Goldsmith and Swift, Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss
Ferrier, Galt and Sir Walter,--he was as familiar with, as with David
Crockat the nailer, or the parish minister, the town-drummer, the
mole-catcher, or the poaching weaver, who had the night before leistered
a prime kipper at Rachan Mill, by the flare of a tarry wisp, or brought
home his surreptitious gray hen or _maukin_ from the wilds of Dunsyre or
the dreary Lang Whang.[15]
[15] With the practices of this last worthy, when carried on
moderately, and for the sport's sake, he had a special
sympathy.
This singular man came to the manse every Friday evening for many years,
and he and my father discussed everything and everybody;--beginning with
tough, strong head work--a bout at wrestling, be it Caesar's Bridge, the
Epistles of Phalaris, the import of {men} and {de}, the Catholic
question, or the great roots of Christian faith; ending with the latest
joke in the town or the _West Raw_, the last effusion by Affleck, tailor
and poet, the last blunder of AEsop the apothecary, and the last repartee
of the village fool, with the week's Edinburgh and Glasgow news by their
respective carriers; the whole little life, sad and humorous--who had
been born, and who was dying or dead, married or about to be, for the
past eight days.[16]
[16] I believe this was the true though secret source of much of
my father's knowledge of the minute personal history of
every one in his region, which,--to his people, knowing his
reserved manner and his devotion to his studies, and his so
rarely meeting them or speaking to them except from the
pulpit, or at a diet of visitation, was a perpetual wonder,
and of which he made great use in his dealings with his
afflicted or erring "members."
This amused, and, in the true sense, diverted my father, and gratified
his curiosity, which was great, and his love of men, as well as for man.
He was shy, and unwilling to ask what he longed to know, liking better
to have it given him without the asking; and no one could do this better
than "Uncle Johnston."
You may readily understand what a thorough exercise and diversion of an
intellectual and social kind this was, for they were neither of them men
to shirk from close gripes, or trifle and flourish with their weapons;
they laid on and spared not. And then my uncle had generally some
special nut of his own to crack, some thesis to fling down and offer
battle on, some "particle" to energize upon; for though quiet and calm,
he was thoroughly combative, and enjoyed seeing his friend's blood up,
and hearing his emphatic and bright speech, and watching his flashing
eye. Then he never spared him; criticized and sometimes quizzed--for he
had great humor--his style, as well as debated and weighed his
apprehendings and exegeses, shaking them heartily to test their
strength. He was so thoroughly independent of all authority, except that
of reason and truth, and his own humor; so ready to detect what was
weak, extravagant, or unfair; so full of relish for intellectual power
and accuracy, and so attached to and proud of my father, and bent on his
making the best of himself, that this trial was never relaxed. His firm
and close-grained mind was a sort of whetstone on which my father
sharpened his wits at this weekly "setting."
The very difference of their mental tempers and complexions drew them
together--the one impatient, nervous, earnest, instant, swift, vehement,
regardless of exertion, bent on his goal, like a thorough-bred racer,
pressing to the mark; the other leisurely to slowness and provokingness,
with a constitution which could stand a great deal of ease,
unimpassioned, still, clear, untroubled by likings or dislikings,
dwelling and working in thought and speculation and observation as ends
in themselves, and as their own rewards:[17] the one hunting for a
principle or a "divine method;" the other sapping or shelling from a
distance, and for his pleasure, a position, or gaining a point, or
settling a rule, or verifying a problem, or getting axiomatic and
proverbial.
[17] He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show;
like the _cactus_ in the desert, always plump, always taking
in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He
wrote many papers in the _Repository_ and _Monitor_, an
acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy,
entitled _Calm Answers to Angry Questions_, and was the
author of a capital bit of literary banter--a Congratulatory
Letter to the Minister of Liberton, who had come down upon
my father in a pamphlet, for his sermon on "There remaineth
much land to be possessed." It is a mixture of Swift and
Arbuthnot. I remember one of the flowers he culls from him
he is congratulating, in which my father is characterized as
one of those "shallow, sallow souls that would swallow the
bait, without perceiving the cloven foot!" But a man like
this _never_ is best in a book; he is always greater than
his work.
In appearance they were as curiously unlike; my uncle short and round to
rotundity, homely and florid in feature. _I_ used to think Socrates must
have been like him in visage as well as in much of his mind. He was
careless in his dress, his hands in his pockets as a rule, and strenuous
only in smoking or in sleep; with a large, full skull, a humorous
twinkle in his cold, blue eye, a soft, low voice, expressing every kind
of thought in the same, sometimes plaguily _douce_ tone; a great power
of quiet and telling sarcasm, large capacity of listening to and of
enjoying other men's talk, however small.
My father--tall, slim, agile, quick in his movements, graceful, neat to
nicety in his dress, with much in his air of what is called style, with
a face almost too beautiful for a man's, had not his eyes commanded it
and all who looked at it, and his close, firm mouth been ready to say
what the fiery spirit might bid; his eyes, when at rest,
expressing--more than almost any other's I ever saw--sorrow and tender
love, a desire to give and to get sympathy, and a sort of gentle, deep
sadness, as if that was their permanent state, and gladness their
momentary act; but when awakened, full of fire, peremptory, and not to
be trifled with; and his smile, and flash of gayety and fun, something
no one could forget; his hair in early life a dead black; his eyebrows
of exquisite curve, narrow and intense; his voice deep when unmoved and
calm; keen and sharp to piercing fierceness when vehement and roused--in
the pulpit, at times a shout, at times a pathetic wail; his utterance
hesitating, emphatic, explosive, powerful,--each sentence shot straight
and home; his hesitation arising from his crowd of impatient ideas, and
his resolute will that they should come in their order, and some of them
not come at all, only the best, and his settled determination that each
thought should be dressed in the very and only word which he stammered
on till it came,--it was generally worth his pains and ours.
Uncle Johnston, again, flowed on like Caesar's _Arar_, _incredibili
lenitate_, or like linseed out of a poke. You can easily fancy the
spiritual and bodily contrast of these men, and can fancy too, the kind
of engagements they would have with their own proper weapons on these
Friday evenings, in the old manse dining-room, my father showing uncle
out into the darkness of the back-road, and uncle, doubtless, lighting
his black and ruminative pipe.
If my uncle brought up nuts to crack, my father was sure to have some
difficulties to consult about, or some passages to read, something that
made him put his whole energy forth; and when he did so, I never heard
such reading. To hear him read the story of Joseph, or passages in
David's history, and Psalms 6th, 11th, and 15th, or the 52d, 53d, 54th,
55th, 63d, 64th, and 40th chapters of Isaiah, or the Sermon on the
Mount, or the Journey to Emmaus, or our Saviour's prayer in John, or
Paul's speech on Mars' Hill, or the first three chapters of Hebrews and
the latter part of the 11th or Job, or the Apocalypse; or, to pass from
those divine themes--Jeremy Taylor, or George Herbert, Sir Walter
Raleigh, or Milton's prose, such as the passage beginning "Come forth
out of thy royal chambers, O thou Prince of all the kings of the earth!"
and "Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her divine Master," or
Charles Wesley's Hymns, or, most loved of all, Cowper, from the rapt
"Come thou, and, added to thy many crowns," or "O that those lips had
language!" to the Jackdaw, and his incomparable Letters; or Gray's
Poems, Burns's "Tam O'Shanter," or Sir Walter's "Eve of St. John,"[18]
and "The Gray Brother."
[18] Well do I remember when driving him from Melrose to Kelso
long ago, we came near Sandyknowe, that grim tower of
Smailholm standing erect like a warder turned to stone,
defying time and change his bursting into that noble
ballad--
"The Baron of Smaylho'me rose with day,
He spurr'd his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way,
That leads to Brotherstone;"
and pointing out the "Watchfold height," "the eiry Beacon
Hill," and "Brotherstone."
But I beg your pardon: Time has run back with me, and fetched that
blessed past, and awakened its echoes. I hear his voice; I feel his eye;
I see his whole nature given up to what he is reading, and making its
very soul speak.
Such a man then as I have sketched, or washed faintly in, as the painters
say, was that person who sat in the corner under the gallery every
Sabbath-day, and who knew his Greek Testament better than his minister.
He is dead too, a few months ago, dying surrounded with his cherished
hoard of books of all sizes, times, and tongues--tatterdemalion many; all
however drawn up in an order of his own; all thoroughly mastered and
known; among them David Hume's copy of Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_,
with his autograph, which he had picked up at some stall.
I have said that my mother's death was the second epoch in my father's
life. I should perhaps have said the third; the first being his mother's
long illness and death, and the second his going to Elie, and beginning
the battle of life at fifteen. There must have been something very
delicate and close and exquisite in the relation between the ailing,
silent, beautiful, and pensive mother, and that dark-eyed, dark-haired,
bright and silent son; a sort of communion it is not easy to express.
You can think of him at eleven slowly writing out that small book of
promises in a distinct and minute hand, quite as like his mature hand,
as the shy, lustrous-eyed boy was to his after-self in his manly years,
and sitting by the bedside while the rest were out and shouting, playing
at hide-and-seek round the little church, with the winds from Benlomond
or the wild uplands of Ayrshire blowing through their hair. He played
seldom, but when he did run out, he jumped higher and farther, and ran
faster than any of them. His peculiar beauty must have come from his
mother. He used at rare times, and with a sort of shudder, to tell of
her when a lovely girl of fifteen, having been seen by a gentleman of
rank, in Cheapside, hand in hand with an evil woman, who was decoying
her to ruin, on pretence of showing her the way home; and how he stopped
his carriage and taking in the unconscious girl, drove her to her
uncle's door. But you have said all this better than I can.
His time with his mother, and the necessary confinement and bodily
depression caused by it, I doubt not deepened his native thoughtful
turn, and his tendency to meditative melancholy, as a condition under
which he viewed all things, and quickened and intensified his sense of
the suffering of this world, and of the profound seriousness and mystery
in the midst of which we live and die.
The second epoch was that of his leaving home with his guinea, the last
he ever got from any one but himself; and his going among utter
strangers to be master of a school one half of the scholars of which
were bigger and older than himself, and all rough colts--wilful and
unbroken. This was his first fronting of the world. Besides supporting
himself, this knit the sinews of his mind, and made him rely on himself
in action as well as in thought. He sometimes, but not often, spoke of
this, never lightly, though he laughed at some of his predicaments. He
could not forget the rude shock. Generally those familiar revelations
were at supper, on the Sabbath evening, when, his work over, he enjoyed
and lingered over his meal.
From his young and slight, almost girlish look, and his refined, quiet
manners, the boys of the school were inclined to annoy and bully him. He
saw this, and felt it was now or never,--nothing between. So he took his
line. The biggest boy, much older and stronger, was the rudest, and
infected the rest. The "_wee maister_" ordered him, in that peremptory
voice we all remember, to stand up and hold out his hand, being not at
all sure but the big fellow might knock him down on the word. To the
astonishment of the school, and to the big rebel's too, he obeyed and
was punished on the instant, and to the full; out went the hand, down
came the "_taws_" and bit like fire. From that moment he ruled them by
his eye, the _taws_ vanished.
There was an incident at this time of his life which I should perhaps
not tell, and yet I don't know why I shouldn't, it so perfectly
illustrates his character in many ways. He had come home during the
vacation of his school to Langrig, and was about to go back; he had been
renewing his intercourse with his old teacher and friend whom you
mention, from whom he used to say he learned to like Shakspeare, and who
seems to have been a man of genuine literary tastes. He went down to bid
him good-bye, and doubtless they got on their old book loves, and would
be spouting their pet pieces. The old dominie said, "John, my man, if
you are walking into Edinburgh, I'll convoy you a bit." "John" was too
happy, so next morning they set off, keeping up a constant fire of
quotation and eager talk. They got past Mid-Calder to near East, when my
father insisted on his friend returning, and also on going back a bit
with him; on looking at the old man, he thought he was tired, so on
reaching the well-known "Kippen's Inn," he stopped and insisted on
giving him some refreshment. Instead of ordering bread and cheese and a
bottle of ale, he, doubtless full of Shakspeare, and great upon sack and
canary, ordered _a bottle of wine_! Of this, you may be sure, the
dominie, as he most needed it, had the greater share, and doubtless it
warmed the cockles of his old heart. "John" making him finish the
bottle, and drink the health of "Gentle Will," saw him off, and went in
to pay the reckoning. What did he know of the price of wine! It took
exactly every penny he had; I doubt not, most boys, knowing that the
landlord knew them, would have either paid a part, or asked him to score
it up. This was not his way; he was too proud and shy and honest for
such an expedient. By this time, what with discussing Shakspeare, and
witnessing his master's leisurely emptying of that bottle, and releasing
the
"Dear prisoned spirits of the impassioned grape,"
he found he must run for it to Edinburgh, or rather Leith, fourteen
miles; this he did, and was at the pier just in time to jump into the
Elie pinnace, which was already off. He often wondered what he would
have done if he had been that one moment late. You can easily pick out
the qualities this story unfolds.
His nature, capable as it was of great, persistent, and indeed dogged
labor, was, from the predominance of the nervous system in his
organization, excitable, and therefore needed and relished
excitement--the more intense the better. He found this in his keen
political tastes, in imaginative literature, and in fiction. In the
highest kind of poetry he enjoyed the sweet pain of tears; and he all
his life had a steady liking, even a hunger, for a good novel. This
refreshed, lightened, and diverted his mind from the strain of his
incessant exegesis. He used always to say that Sir Walter and Goldsmith,
and even Fielding, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, were
true benefactors to the race, by giving such genuine, such secure and
innocent pleasure; and he often repeated with admiration Lord Jeffrey's
words on Scott, inscribed on his monument. He had no turn for gardening
or for fishing or any field sports or games; his sensitive nature
recoiled from the idea of pain, and above all, needless pain. He used to
say the lower creation had groans enough, and needed no more burdens;
indeed, he was fierce to some measure of unfairness against such of his
brethren--Dr. Wardlaw, for instance[19]--as resembled the apostles in
fishing for other things besides men.
[19] After a tight discussion between these two attached friends,
Dr. Wardlaw said, "Well, I can't answer you, but fish I must
and shall."
But the exercise and the excitement he most of all others delighted in,
was riding; and had he been a country gentleman and not a clergyman, I
don't think he could have resisted fox-hunting. With the exception of
that great genius in more than horsemanship, Andrew Ducrow, I never saw
a man sit a horse as he did. He seemed inspired, gay, erect, full of the
joy of life, fearless and secure. I have heard a farmer friend say if he
had not been a preacher of the gospel he would have been a cavalry
officer, and would have fought as he preached.
He was known all over the Upper Ward and down Tweeddale for his riding.
"There goes the minister," as he rode past at a swift canter. He had
generally well-bred horses, or as I would now call them, ponies; if he
had not, his sufferings from a dull, hardmouthed, heavy-hearted and
footed, plebeian horse were almost comic. On his gray mare, or his
little blood bay horse, to see him setting off and indulging it and
himself in some alarming gambols, and in the midst of his difficulties,
partly of his own making, taking off his hat or kissing his hand to a
lady, made one think of "young Harry with his beaver up." He used to
tell with much relish, how, one fine summer Sabbath evening after
preaching in the open air for a collection, in some village near, and
having put the money, chiefly halfpence, into his handkerchief, and that
into his hat, he was taking a smart gallop home across the moor, happy
and relieved, when three ladies--I think, the Miss Bertrams of
Kersewell--came suddenly upon him; off went the hat, down bent the head,
and over him streamed the cherished collection, the ladies busy among
the wild grass and heather picking it up, and he full of droll confusion
and laughter.
The gray mare he had for many years. I can remember her small head and
large eyes; her neat, compact body, round as a barrel; her finely
flea-bitten skin, and her thorough-bred legs. I have no doubt she had
Arabian blood. My father's pride in her was quite curious. Many a wild
ride to and from the Presbytery at Lanark, and across flooded and
shifting fords, he had on her. She was as sweet-tempered and enduring,
as she was swift and sure; and her powers of running were appreciated
and applied in a way which he was both angry and amused to discover. You
know what riding the _bruse_ means. At a country wedding the young men
have a race to the bridegroom's home, and he who wins, brings out a
bottle and glass and drinks the young wife's health. I wish Burns had
described a _bruse_; all sorts of steeds, wild, unkempt lads as well as
colts, old broken-down thorough-breds that did wonders when _soopled_,
huge, grave cart horses devouring the road with their shaggy hoofs,
wilful ponies, etc. You can imagine the wild hurry-skurry and fun, the
comic situations and upsets over a rough road, up and down places one
would be giddy to look at.
Well, the young farmers were in the habit of coming to my father, and
asking the loan of the mare to go and see a friend, etc., etc., praising
knowingly the fine points and virtues of his darling. Having through
life, with all his firmness of nature, an abhorrence of saying "No" to
any one, the interview generally ended with, "Well, Robert, you may have
her, but take care of her, and don't ride her fast." In an hour or two
Robert was riding the _bruse_, and flying away from the crowd, Gray
first, and the rest nowhere, and might be seen turning the corner of the
farm-house with the victorious bottle in his uplifted hand, the motley
pack panting vainly up the hill. This went on for long, and the gray was
famous, almost notorious, all over the Upper Ward; sometimes if she
appeared, no one would start, and she trotted the course. Partly from
his own personal abstraction from outward country life, and partly from
Uncle Johnston's sense of waggery keeping him from telling his friend of
the gray's last exploit at Hartree Mill, or her leaping over the "best
man" at Thriepland, my father was the last to hear of this equivocal
glory of "the minister's _meer_." Indeed, it was whispered she had once
won a whip at Lanark races. They still tell of his feats on this fine
creature, one of which he himself never alluded to without a feeling of
shame. He had an engagement to preach somewhere beyond the Clyde on a
Sabbath evening, and his excellent and attached friend and elder, Mr.
Kello of Lindsay-lands, accompanied him on his big plough horse. It was
to be in the open air, on the river side. When they got to the Clyde
they found it in full flood, heavy and sudden rains at the head of the
water having brought it down in a wild _spate_. On the opposite side
were the gathered people and the tent. Before Mr. Kello knew where he
was, there was his minister on the mare swimming across, and carried
down in a long diagonal, the people looking on in terror. He landed,
shook himself, and preached with his usual fervor. As I have said, he
never liked to speak of this bit of hardihood, and he never repeated it;
but it was like the man--there were the people, that was what he would
be at, and though timid for anticipated danger as any woman, _in_ it he
was without fear.
One more illustration of his character in connection with his riding. On
coming to Edinburgh he gave up this kind of exercise; he had no occasion
for it, and he had enough, and more than enough of excitement in the
public questions in which he found himself involved, and in the
miscellaneous activities of a popular town minister. I was then a young
doctor--it must have been about 1840--and had a patient, Mrs. James
Robertson, eldest daughter of Mr. Pirie, the predecessor of Dr. Dick in
what was then Shuttle Street congregation, Glasgow. She was one of my
father's earliest and dearest friends,--a mother in the Burgher Israel,
she and her cordial husband "given to hospitality," especially to "the
Prophets." She was hopelessly ill at Juniper Green, near Edinburgh. Mr.
George Stone, then living at Muirhouse, one of my father's congregation
in Broughton Place, a man of equal originality and worth, and devoted to
his minister, knowing my love of riding, offered me his blood-chestnut
to ride out and make my visit. My father said, "John, if you are going,
I would like to ride out with you;" he wished to see his dying friend.
"You ride!" said Mr. Stone, who was a very Yorkshireman in the matter of
horses. "Let him try," said I. The upshot was, that Mr. Stone sent the
chestnut for me, and a sedate pony--called, if I forget not,
Goliath--for his minister, with all sorts of injunctions to me to keep
him off the thorough-bred, and on Goliath.
My father had not been on a horse for nearly twenty years. He mounted
and rode off. He soon got teased with the short, pattering steps of
Goliath, and looked wistfully up at me, and longingly to the tall
chestnut, stepping once for Goliath's twice, like the Don striding
beside Sancho. I saw what he was after, and when past the toll he said
in a mild sort of way, "John, did you promise _absolutely_ I was not to
ride your horse?" "No, father, certainly not. Mr. Stone, I daresay,
wished me to do so, but I didn't." "Well then, I think we'll change;
this beast shakes me." So we changed. I remember how noble he looked;
how at home: his white hair and his dark eyes, his erect, easy,
accustomed seat. He soon let his eager horse slip gently away. It was
first _evasit_, he was off, Goliath and I jogging on behind; then
_erupit_, and in a twinkling--_evanuit_. I saw them last flashing
through the arch under the Canal, his white hair flying. I was uneasy,
though from his riding I knew he was as yet in command, so I put Goliath
to his best, and having passed through Slateford, I asked a stonebreaker
if he saw a gentleman on a chestnut horse. "Has he white hair?" "Yes."
"And een like a gled's?" "Yes." "Weel then, he's fleein' up the road
like the wund; he'll he at Little Vantage" (about nine miles off) "in
nae time if he haud on." I never once sighted him, but on coming into
Juniper Green there was his steaming chestnut at the gate, neighing
cheerily to Goliath. I went in, he was at the bedside of his friend, and
in the midst of prayer; his words as I entered were, "When thou passest
through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they
shall not overflow thee;" and he was not the least instant in prayer
that his blood was up with his ride. He never again saw Mrs. Robertson,
or as she was called when they were young, Sibbie (Sibella) Pirie. On
coming out he said nothing, but took the chestnut, mounted her, and we
came home quietly. His heart was opened; he spoke of old times and old
friends; he stopped at the exquisite view at Hailes into the valley, and
up the Pentlands beyond, the smoke of Kate's Mill rising in the still
and shadowy air, and broke out into Cowper's words: Yes,--
"HE sets the bright procession on its way,
And marshals all the order of the year;
And ere one flowery season fades and dies,
Designs the blooming wonders of the next."
Then as we came slowly in, the moon shone behind Craiglockhart hill
among the old Scotch firs; he pulled up again, and gave me Collins' Ode
to Evening, beginning--
"If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Thy springs, and dying gales;"
repeating over and over some of the lines, as
"Thy modest ear,
Thy springs, and dying gales."
"--And marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil."