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 be 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
earwigging 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 Machean, 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 leave no
more behind one than Machean. 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 in the Livingstones' 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.