I am asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) to the
profit and glory of my _Alma Mater_; and the fact is I seem to be in very
nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I am willing
enough to write something, I know not what to write. Only one point I
see, that if I am to write at all, it should be of the University itself
and my own days under its shadow; of the things that are still the same
and of those that are already changed: such talk, in short, as would pass
naturally between a student of to-day and one of yesterday, supposing
them to meet and grow confidential.
The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life; more
swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so
that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time
and the succession of men. I looked for my name the other day in last
year’s case-book of the Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it
near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I
began to think it had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it,
mounted on the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that
posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the
dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is likely,
with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less welcome; but
I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am the more
emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of a parent and a
praiser of things past.
For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it has
doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline by gradual
stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it does; and
what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased to be a
student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very last of the very best of
_Alma Mater_; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the more strange),
had previously happened to my father; and if they are good and do not
die, something not at all unsimilar will be found in time to have
befallen my successors of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of
advantage in the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on
a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the
most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,
unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the
whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes of good,
flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, morning
journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during lecture and unquenchable
gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sunshine and shadow of my
college life. You cannot fancy what you missed in missing him; his
virtues, I make sure, are inconceivable to his successors, just as they
were apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically
alone in the pleasure I had in his society. Poor soul, I remember how
much he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun)
seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune and
dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went. And it may
be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in their season, and
that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth in
particular are things but of a moment. So this student, whom I have in
my eye, took his full share of these concerns, and that very largely by
his own fault; but he still clung to his fortune, and in the midst of
much misconduct, kept on in his own way learning how to work; and at
last, to his wonder, escaped out of the stage of studentship not openly
shamed; leaving behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good
deal of its interest for myself.
But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is by no
means the only one whom I regret, or whom the students of to-day, if they
knew what they had lost, would regret also. They have still Tait, to be
sure—long may they have him!—and they have still Tait’s class-room,
cupola and all; but think of what a different place it was when this
youth of mine (at least on roll days) would be present on the benches,
and, at the near end of the platform, Lindsay senior {17} was airing his
robust old age. It is possible my successors may have never even heard
of Old Lindsay; but when he went, a link snapped with the last century.
He had something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and plain; he spoke
with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire; his
reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with
post-chaises—a Scotland before steam; he had seen the coal fire on the
Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own grandfather. Thus he
was for me a mirror of things perished; it was only in his memory that I
could see the huge shock of flames of the May beacon stream to leeward,
and the watchers, as they fed the fire, lay hold unscorched of the
windward bars of the furnace; it was only thus that I could see my
grandfather driving swiftly in a gig along the seaboard road from
Pittenweem to Crail, and for all his business hurry, drawing up to speak
good-humouredly with those he met. And now, in his turn, Lindsay is gone
also; inhabits only the memories of other men, till these shall follow
him; and figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather figured in his.
To-day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a
prodigious deal of Greek; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man
filled with the mathematics. And doubtless these are set-offs. But they
cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired, and that
Professor Kelland is dead. No man’s education is complete or truly
liberal who knew not Kelland. There were unutterable lessons in the mere
sight of that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a
fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of
that very kindness. I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class
time, though not for long, and give us glimpses of old-world life in
out-of-the-way English parishes when he was young; thus playing the same
part as Lindsay—the part of the surviving memory, signalling out of the
dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished things. But it
was a part that scarce became him; he somehow lacked the means: for all
his silver hair and worn face, he was not truly old; and he had too much
of the unrest and petulant fire of youth, and too much invincible
innocence of mind, to play the veteran well. The time to measure him
best, to taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, was when he
received his class at home. What a pretty simplicity would he then show,
trying to amuse us like children with toys; and what an engaging
nervousness of manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed!
Truly he made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed,
but at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious, troubled
elder-boy who was working so hard to entertain us. A theorist has held
the view that there is no feature in man so tell-tale as his spectacles;
that the mouth may be compressed and the brow smoothed artificially, but
the sheen of the barnacles is diagnostic. And truly it must have been
thus with Kelland; for as I still fancy I behold him frisking actively
about the platform, pointer in hand, that which I seem to see most
clearly is the way his glasses glittered with affection. I never knew
but one other man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so kind a
spectacle; and that was Dr. Appleton. But the light in his case was
tempered and passive; in Kelland’s it danced, and changed, and flashed
vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual challenge to goodwill.
I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason.
Kelland’s class I attended, once even gained there a certificate of
merit, the only distinction of my University career. But although I am
the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor’s own hand, I
cannot remember to have been present in the Greek class above a dozen
times. Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once)
while in the very act of writing the document above referred to, that he
did not know my face. Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities; acting
upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me a
great deal of trouble to put in exercise—perhaps as much as would have
taught me Greek—and sent me forth into the world and the profession of
letters with the merest shadow of an education. But they say it is
always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is its own
reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps, even upon this I should
plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with more deliberate
care, and none ever had more certificates for less education. One
consequence, however, of my system is that I have much less to say of
Professor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland; and as he is still
alive, and will long, I hope, continue to be so, it will not surprise you
very much that I have no intention of saying it.
Meanwhile, how many others have gone—Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not who
besides; and of that tide of students that used to throng the arch and
blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into the remotest parts of
the earth, and how many more have lain down beside their fathers in their
“resting-graves”! And again, how many of these last have not found their
way there, all too early, through the stress of education! That was one
thing, at least, from which my truantry protected me. I am sorry indeed
that I have no Greek, but I should be sorrier still if I were dead; nor
do I know the name of that branch of knowledge which is worth acquiring
at the price of a brain fever. There are many sordid tragedies in the
life of the student, above all if he be poor, or drunken, or both; but
nothing more moves a wise man’s pity than the case of the lad who is in
too much hurry to be learned. And so, for the sake of a moral at the
end, I will call up one more figure, and have done. A student, ambitious
of success by that hot, intemperate manner of study that now grows so
common, read night and day for an examination. As he went on, the task
became more easy to him, sleep was more easily banished, his brain grew
hot and clear and more capacious, the necessary knowledge daily fuller
and more orderly. It came to the eve of the trial and he watched all
night in his high chamber, reviewing what he knew, and already secure of
success. His window looked eastward, and being (as I said) high up, and
the house itself standing on a hill, commanded a view over dwindling
suburbs to a country horizon. At last my student drew up his blind, and
still in quite a jocund humour, looked abroad. Day was breaking, the
east was tinging with strange fires, the clouds breaking up for the
coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless terror seized upon his
mind. He was sane, his senses were undisturbed; he saw clearly, and knew
what he was seeing, and knew that it was normal; but he could neither
bear to see it nor find the strength to look away, and fled in panic from
his chamber into the enclosure of the street. In the cool air and
silence, and among the sleeping houses, his strength was renewed.
Nothing troubled him but the memory of what had passed, and an abject
fear of its return.
“Gallo canente, spes redit,
Aegris salus refunditur,
Lapsis fides revertitur,”
as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning Office. But to him that
good hour of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, had brought panic,
and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook to think of. He
dared not return to his lodging; he could not eat; he sat down, he rose
up, he wandered; the city woke about him with its cheerful bustle, the
sun climbed overhead; and still he grew but the more absorbed in the
distress of his recollection and the fear of his past fear. At the
appointed hour, he came to the door of the place of examination; but when
he was asked, he had forgotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, they
had not the heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted
him, still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness, vain efforts. He could
only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of all, his
mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day and his own
intolerable fear. And that same night he was tossing in a brain fever.
People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with excellent
reason; but these are not to be compared with such chaotic terrors of the
mind as fell on this young man, and made him cover his eyes from the
innocent morning. We all have by our bedsides the box of the Merchant
Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut; but when a young man sacrifices
sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is playing with the lock.