I
All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the
pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end,
which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one
to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I
saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either
read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note
down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus
I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it
was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished
to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I
would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I
practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself.
Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with
senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country
are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often
accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many
parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from
memory.
This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried
to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of
posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most
efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so
far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual
elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word:
things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And
regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard
of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was
certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a
book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said
or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some
conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down
at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I
knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always
unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in
rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I
have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to
Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire
and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called
_The Vanity of Morals_: it was to have had a second part, _The Vanity of
Knowledge_; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were
apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first part was
written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghost-like, from its ashes)
no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the
manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a
laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my other works:
_Cain_, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of _Sordello_: _Robin
Hood_, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields
of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in _Monmouth_, a tragedy, I reclined on the
bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed
many masters; in the first draft of _The King’s Pardon_, a tragedy, I was
on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of
the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance
to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein—for
it was not Congreve’s verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired
and sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do
justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of
the _Book of Snobs_. So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive
novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for
they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old
Dumas, but have met with resurrection: one, strangely bettered by another
hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the
other, originally known as _Semiramis_: _a Tragedy_, I have observed on
bookstalls under the _alias_ of _Prince Otto_. But enough has been said
to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial
efforts I first saw my words on paper.
That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have
profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was
never a finer temperament for literature than Keats’s; it was so, if we
could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival
of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier
and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But this is not the
way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so.
Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training
that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more
original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no
craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to
imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters:
he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial,
proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can
expect to have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that
great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything
here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what
cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are
possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he
should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after
years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words
swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding
for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within
the narrow limit of a man’s ability) able to do it.
And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines
beyond the student’s reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he
please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very true
saying that failure is the only highroad to success. I must have had
some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own
performances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I
could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them
even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I
must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain
with me, “Padding,” said one. Another wrote: “I cannot understand why
you do lyrics so badly.” No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the
way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine.
These were returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained. If they
had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case,
there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked
at—well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning
and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is the occasion
of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in print, and
to measure experimentally how far I stood from the favour of the public.
II
The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted
among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant,
Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an
accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of
the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures,
looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like some goodly
dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with books in their wire
cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of
famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary.
Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance of
Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks askance at these
privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the whole
society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for the
world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt of dead lions
than all the living dogs of the professorate.
I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very
humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for;
yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the pipe I
was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in particular, proud of
being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were
then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name
on the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in
the law courts. Of the death of the second, you have just been reading
what I had to say. And the third also has escaped out of that battle of
life in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They were all
three, as I have said, notable students; but this was the most
conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a
reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to one
of Balzac’s characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill
fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the _Comédie Humaine_.
He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the time of which I
write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to
heaven next day in the _Courant_, and the day after was dashed lower than
earth with a charge of plagiarism in the _Scotsman_. Report would have
it (I daresay, very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he
particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its
truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a
pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a
boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely
tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took
flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk of his
considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years thereafter
he lived I know not how; always well dressed, always in good hotels and
good society, always with empty pockets. The charm of his manner may
have stood him in good stead; but though my own manners are very
agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood; and to
explain the miracle of his continued existence, I must fall back upon the
theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind,
“there was a suffering relative in the background.” From this genteel
eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out in the
character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I best remember
him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking quite like a
refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer; smiling with an
engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow with a great
appearance of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick, with a touch of
burr; telling strange tales with singular deliberation and, to a patient
listener, excellent effect. After all these ups and downs, he seemed
still, like the rich student that he was of yore, to breathe of money;
seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end. Yet he
was then upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself to
found the strangest thing in our society: one of those periodical sheets
from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which young
gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line, to
garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private individuals;
and which are now the source of glory, so that if a man’s name be often
enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod; and people will
pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone;
and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the other
day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works, as I hope you have
just done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon some great
enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite
slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his own life
that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper
single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up early
and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear-wigging
influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In that slender
and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of courage, that he
should thus have died at his employment; and doubtless ambition spoke
loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems there was a
marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he died, and his paper died
after him; and of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to
our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing.
These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the
mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former secretary.
We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and thought it a poor
thing to come into the world at all and have no more behind one than
Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone and have left less; and
this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in
a corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling at the old,
graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of _Alma Mater_
(which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, not without
haggling, for some pence—this book may alone preserve a memory of James
Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown.
Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they were
all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to them, and
made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and
hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active
brothers—Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers
of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University
building—had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were
to be conjunct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to
print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic—that flatterer of
credulity—the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well:
it was a bright vision. I went home that morning walking upon air. To
have been chosen by these three distinguished students was to me the most
unspeakable advance; it was my first draught of consideration; it
reconciled me to myself and to my fellow-men; and as I steered round the
railings at the Tron, I could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly.
Yet, in the bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim
fiasco; I knew it would not be worth reading; I knew, even if it were,
that nobody would read it; and I kept wondering how I should be able,
upon my compact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly, to
meet my share in the expense. It was a comfortable thought to me that I
had a father.
The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part of it,
for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed
obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all
four of us with prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the
hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone; and it has long been a
solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be
still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked
so hopefully Livingtones’ window! Poor, harmless paper, that might have
gone to print a _Shakespeare_ on, and was instead so clumsily defaced
with nonsense; And, shall I say, Poor Editors? I cannot pity myself, to
whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome
confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth,
and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a copy to the
lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did
all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some tact, passed over the
gift and my cherished contributions in silence. I will not say that I
was pleased at this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes
up the work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her
taste. I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary
interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my share
of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed their hands
as much, but methought skipped rather less than formerly, having perhaps,
these two also, embarked upon the enterprise with some graceful
illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told myself that the
time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to work I went again with
my penny version-books, having fallen back in one day from the printed
author to the manuscript student.
III
From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers.
The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to
straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains
invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would print the
thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of its
own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent and
some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this volume of Memories
and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, may stand alongside
of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John and Robert drew very
close together in their lives; for John was rough, he smelt of the windy
brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the hollow.
Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the two; he had
grit and dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases men with any
savage inheritance of blood; and he was a way-farer besides, and took my
gipsy fancy. But however that may be, and however Robert’s profile may
be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man of a most
quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to recast a piece
of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a maturer touch.
And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other country two
such men would be found dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty
cottages, in the woody fold of a green hill.