"For such is the flaw or the depth of the plan
In the make of that wonderful creature called man,
No two virtues, whatever relation they claim,
Nor even two different shades of the same.
Though like as was ever twin-brother to brother.
Possessing the one shall imply you've the other."--BURNS.
During my period of convalescence, I amused myself in hewing for my
uncles, from an original design, an ornate dial-stone; and the
dial-stone still exists, to show that my skill as a stone-cutter rose
somewhat above the average of the profession in those parts of the
country in which it ranks highest. Gradually as I recovered health and
strength, little jobs came dropping in. I executed sculptured tablets in
a style not common in the north of Scotland; introduced into the
churchyards of the locality a better type of tombstone than had obtained
in them before, save, mayhap, at a very early period; distanced all my
competitors in the art of inscription-cutting; and at length found that,
without exposing my weakened lungs to the rough tear and wear to which
the ordinary stone-cutter must subject himself, I could live. I deemed
it an advantage, too, rather than the reverse, that my new branch of
employment brought me not unfrequently for a few days into country
districts sufficiently distant from home to present me with new fields
of observation, and to open up new tracts of inquiry. Sometimes I spent
half a week in a farm-house in the neighbourhood of some country
churchyard--sometimes I lodged in a village--oftener than once I
sheltered beside some gentleman's seat, where the august shadow of
lairdship lay heavy on society; and in this way I came to see and know
a good deal of the Scottish people, in their many-coloured aspects, of
which otherwise I might have remained ignorant. At times, too, on some
dusty cottage shelf I succeeded in picking up a rare book, or, what was
not less welcome, got a curious tradition from the cottager; or there
lay within the reach of an evening walk some interesting piece of
antiquity, or some rock-section, which I found it profitable to visit. A
solitary burying-ground, too, situated, as country burying-grounds
usually are, in some pleasant spot, and surrounded by its groups of
ancient trees, formed a much more delightful scene of labour than a
dusty work-shed, or some open area in a busy town; and altogether I
found my new mode of life a quiet and happy one. Nor, with all its
tranquillity, was it a sort of life in which the intellect was in any
great danger of falling asleep. There was scarce a locality in which new
game might not be started, that, in running down, kept the faculties in
full play. Let me exemplify by describing the courses of inquiry,
physical and metaphysical, which opened up to me when spending a few
days, first in the burying-ground of Kirkmichael, and next in the
churchyard of Nigg.
I have elsewhere somewhat fancifully described the ruinous chapel and
solitary grave-yard of Kirkmichael as lying on the sweep of a gentle
declivity, within a few yards of a flat sea-beach, so little exposed to
the winds, that it would seem as if "ocean muffled its waves in
approaching this field of the dead." And so the two vegetations--that of
the land and of the sea--undisturbed by the surf, which on opener coasts
prevents the growth of either along the upper littoral line, where the
waves beat heaviest, here meet and mingle, each encroaching for a little
way on the province of the other. And at meal-times, and when returning
homewards in the evening along the shore, it furnished me with amusement
enough to mark the character of the several plants of both floras that
thus meet and cross each other, and the appearances which they assume
when inhabiting each the other's province. On the side of the land,
beds of thrift, with its gay flowers the sea-pinks, occupied great
prominent cushions, that stood up like little islets amid the flowing
sea, and were covered over by salt water during stream-tides to the
depth of from eighteen inches to two feet. With these there occasionally
mingled spikes of the sea-lavender; and now and then, though more
rarely, a _sea-aster_, that might be seen raising above the calm surface
its composite flowers, with their bright yellow staminal pods, and their
pale purple petals. Far beyond, however, even the cushions of thrift, I
could trace the fleshy, jointed stems of the glass-wort, rising out of
the mud, but becoming diminutive and branchless as I followed them
downwards, till at depths where they must have been frequently swum over
by the young coal-fish and the flounder, they appeared as mere fleshy
spikes, scarce an inch in height, and then ceased. On the side of the
sea it was the various fucoids that rose highest along the beach: the
serrated focus barely met the salt-wort; but the bladder-bearing fucus
(_fucus nodosus_) mingled its brown fronds not unfrequently with the
crimson flowers of the thrift, and the vesicular fucus (_fucus
vesiculosus_) rose higher still, to enter into strange companionship
with the sea-side plantains and the common scurvy-grass. Green
enteromorpha of two species--_E. compressa_ and _E. intestinalis_--I
also found abundant along the edges of the thrift-beds; and it struck me
as curious at the time, that while most of the land-plants which had
thus descended beyond the sea-level were of the high dicotyledonous
division, the sea-weeds with which they mingled their leaves and
seed-vessels were low in their standing--fuci and enteromorpha--plants
at least not higher than their kindred cryptogamia, the lichens and
mosses of the land. Far beyond, in the outer reaches of the bay, where
land-plants never approached, there were meadows of a submarine
vegetation, of (for the sea) a comparatively high character. Their
numerous plants (_zostera marina_) had true roots, and true leaves, and
true flowers; and their spikes ripened amid the salt waters towards the
close of autumn, round white seeds, that, like many of the seeds of the
land, had their sugar and starch. But these plants kept far aloof, in
their green depths, from their cogeners the monocotyledons of the
terrestrial flora. It was merely the low _Fucaceae_ and _Conferveae_ of
the sea that I found meeting and mixing with the descending dicotyledons
of the land. I felt a good deal of interest in marking, about this time,
how certain belts of marine vegetation occurred on a vast boulder
situated in the neighbourhood of Cromarty, on the extreme line of the
ebb of spring-tides. I detected the various species ranged in zones,
just as on lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland,
and alpine zones rising in succession the one over the other. At the
base of the huge mass, at a level to which the tide rarely falls, the
characteristic vegetable is the rough-stemmed tangle--_Laminaria
digitata_. In the zone immediately above the lowest, the prevailing
vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle--_Laminaria saccharina_. Higher
still there occurs a zone of the serrated fucus--_F. serratus_--blent
with another familiar fucus--_F. nodosus_. Then comes a yet higher zone
of _Fucus vesiculosus_; and higher still, a few scattered tufts of
_Fucus canaliculatus_; and then, as on lofty mountains that rise above
the line of perpetual snow, vegetation ceases, and the boulder presents
a round bald head, that rises over the surface after the first few hours
of ebb have passed. But far beyond its base, where the sea never falls,
green meadows of _zostera_ flourish in the depths of the water, where
they unfold their colourless flowers, unfurnished with petals, and ripen
their farinaceous seeds, that, wherever they rise to the surface, seem
very susceptible of frost. I have seen the shores strewed with a line of
green _zostera_, with its spikes charged with seed, after a smart
October frost, that had been coincident with the ebb of a low
spring-tide, had nipt its rectilinear fronds and flexible stems.
But what, it may be asked, was the bearing of all this observation? I
by no means saw its entire bearing at the time: I simply observed and
recorded, because I found it pleasant to observe and record. And yet one
of the wild dreams of Maillet in his _Telliamed_ had given a certain
degree of unity, and a certain definite direction, to my gleanings of
fact on the subject, which they would not have otherwise possessed. It
was held by this fanciful writer, that the vegetation of the land had
been derived originally from that of the ocean. "In a word," we find him
saying, "do not herbs, plants, roots, grains, and all of this kind that
the earth produces and nourishes, come from the sea? Is it not at least
natural to think so, since we are certain that all our habitable lands
came originally from the sea? Besides, in small islands far from the
Continent, which have appeared a few ages ago at most, and where it is
manifest that never any men had been, we find shrubs, herbs, and roots.
Now, you must be forced to own that either those productions owed their
origin to the sea, _or to a new creation, which is absurd_." And then
Maillet goes on to show, after a manner which--now that algaeology has
become a science--must be regarded as at least curious, that the plants
of the sea, though not so well developed as those of the land, are
really very much of the same nature. "The fishermen of Marseilles find
daily," he says, "in their nets, and among their fish, plants of a
hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them; and though these
fruits are not so large nor so well nourished as those of our earth, yet
their species is in no other respects dubious. There they find clusters
of white and black grapes, peach-trees, pear-trees, prune-trees,
apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers." Such was the sort of wild fable
invented in a tract of natural science in which I found it of interest
to acquaint myself with the truth. I have since seen the extraordinary
vision of Maillet revived, first by Oken, and then by the author of the
"Vestiges of Creation;" and when, in grappling with some of the views
and statements of the latter writer, I set myself to write the chapter
of my little work which deals with this special hypothesis, I found that
I had in some sort studied in the school in which the education
necessary to its production was most thoroughly to be acquired. Had the
ingenious author of the "Vestiges" taken lessons for but a short time at
the same form, he would scarce have thought of reviving in those latter
ages the dream of Oken and Maillet. A knowledge of the facts would to a
certainty have protected him against the reproduction of the hypothesis.
The lesson at Nigg was of a more curious kind, though, mayhap, less
certainly conclusive in its bearings. The house of the proprietor of
Nigg bordered on the burying-ground. I was engaged in cutting an
inscription on the tombstone of his wife, recently dead; and a poor
idiot, who found his living in the kitchen, and to whom the deceased had
shown kindness; used to come every day to the churchyard, to sit beside
me, and jabber in broken expressions his grief. I was struck with the
extremeness of his idiocy: he manifested even more than the ordinary
inability of his class to deal with figures, for he could scarce tell
whether nature had furnished him with one head or with two; and no power
of education could have taught him to count his fingers. He was equally
defective, too, in the mechanical. Angus could not be got into trousers;
and the contrivance of the button remained a mystery which he was never
able to comprehend. And so he wore a large blue gown, like that of a
beadsman, which slipped over his head, and was bound by a belt round his
middle, with a stout woollen shirt underneath. But, though unacquainted
with the mystery of the button, there were mysteries of another kind
with which he seemed to have a most perfect acquaintance: Angus--always
a faithful attendant at church--was a great critic in sermons; nor was
it every preacher that satisfied him; and such was his imitative turn,
that he himself could preach by the hour, in the manner--so far at
least as voice and gesture went--of all the popular ministers of the
district. There was, however, rather a paucity of idea in his
discourses: in his more energetic passages, when he struck the book and
stamped with his foot, he usually iterated, in sonorous Gaelic--"The
wicked, the wicked, O wretches the wicked!" while a passage of a less
depreciatory character served him for setting off his middle tones and
his pathos. But that for which his character was chiefly remarkable was
an instinctive, foxlike cunning, that seemed to lie at its very basis--a
cunning which co-existed, however, with perfect honesty, and a devoted
attachment to his patron the proprietor.
The town of Cromarty had its poor imbecile man of quite a different
stamp. Jock Gordon had been, it was said, "like other people" till his
fourteenth year, when a severe attack of illness left him bankrupt in
both mind and body. He rose from his bed lame of a foot and hand, his
one side shrunken and nerveless, the one lobe of his brain apparently
inoperative, and with less than half his former energy and intellect;
not at all an idiot, however, though somewhat more helpless--the poor
mutilated fragment of a reasoning man. Among his other failings, he
stuttered lamentably. He became an inmate of the kitchen of Cromarty
House; and learned to run, or, I should rather say, to _limp_,
errands--for he had risen from the fever that ruined him to run no
more--with great fidelity and success. He was fond of church-going, of
reading good little books, and, notwithstanding his sad stutter, of
singing. During the day, he might be heard, as he hobbled along the
streets on business, "_singing in into himself_," as the children used
to say, in a low unvaried under-tone, somewhat resembling the humming of
a bee; but when night fell, the whole town heard him. He was no
patronizer of modern poets or composers. "There was a ship, and a ship
of fame," and "Death and the fair Lady," were his especial favourites;
and he could repeat the "Gosport Tragedy," and the "Babes in the Wood,"
from beginning to end. Sometimes he stuttered in the notes, and then
they lengthened on and on into a never-ending quaver that our first-rate
singers might have envied. Sometimes there was a sudden break--Jock had
been consulting the pocket in which he stored his bread; but no sooner
was his mouth half-cleared than he began again. In middle-life, however,
a great calamity overtook Jock. His patron, the occupant of Cromarty
House, quitted the country for France: Jock was left without occupation
or aliment; and the streets heard no more of his songs. He grew lank and
thin, and stuttered and limped more painfully than before, and was in
the last stage of privation and distress; when the benevolent proprietor
of Nigg, who resided half the year in a town-house in Cromarty, took
pity upon him, and introduced him to his kitchen. And in a few days Jock
was singing and limping errands with as much energy as ever. But the
time at length came when his new benefactor had to quit his house in
town for his seat in the country; and it behoved Jock to take temporary
leave of Cromarty, and follow him. And then the poor imbecile man of the
town-kitchen had, of course, to measure himself against his formidable
rival, the vigorous idiot of the country one.
On Jock's advent at Nigg--which had taken place a few weeks previous to
my engagement in the burying-ground of the parish--the character of
Angus seemed to dilate in energy and power. He repaired to the
churchyard with spade and pickaxe, and began digging a grave. It was a
grave, he said, for wicked Jock Gordon; and Jock, whether he thought it
or no, had come to Nigg, he added, only to be buried. Jock, however, was
not to be dislodged so; and Angus, professing sudden friendship for him,
gave expression to the magnanimous resolution, that he would not only
tolerate Jock, but also be very kind to him, and show him the place
where he kept all his money. He had lots of money, he said, which he had
hidden in a dike; but he would show the place to Jock Gordon--to poor
cripple Jock Gordon: he would show him the very hole, and Jock would get
it all. And so he brought Jock to the hole--a cavity in a turf-wall in
the neighbouring wood--and, taking care that his own way of retreat was
clear, he bade him insinuate his hand. No sooner had he done so,
however, than there issued forth from between his fingers a cloud of
wasps, of the variety so abundant in the north country, that build their
nests in earthy banks and old mole-hills; and poor Jock, ill fitted for
retreat in any sudden emergency, was stung within an inch of his life.
Angus returned in high glee, preaching about "wicked Jock Gordon, whom
the very wasps wouldn't let alone;" but though he pretended no further
friendship for a few days after, he again drew to him in apparent
kindness; and on the following Saturday, on Jock being despatched to a
neighbouring smithy with a sheep's head to singe, Angus volunteered his
services to show him the way.
Angus went trotting before; Jock came limping behind: the fields were
open and bare; the dwellings few and far between; and after having
passed, in about an hour's walking, half-a-dozen little hamlets, Jock
began to marvel exceedingly that there should be no sign of the smith's
shop. "Poor foolish Jock Gordon!" ejaculated Angus, quickening his trot
into a canter; "what does he know about carrying sheep's heads to the
smithy?" Jock laboured hard to keep up with his guide; quavering and
semi-quavering, as his breath served--for Jock always began to sing,
when in solitary places, after nightfall, as a protection against
ghosts. At length the daylight died entirely away, and he could only
learn from Angus that the smithy was further off than ever; and, to add
to his trouble and perplexity, the roughness of the ground showed him
that they were wandering from the road. First they went toiling athwart
what seemed an endless range of fields, separated from one another by
deep ditches and fences of stone; then they crossed over a dreary moor,
bristling with furze and sloe-thorn; then over a waste of bogs and
quagmires; then across a track of newly-ploughed land; and then they
entered a second wood. At length, after a miserable night's wandering,
day broke upon the two forlorn satyrs; and Jock found himself in a
strange country, with a long narrow lake in front and a wood behind. He
had wandered after his guide into the remote parish of Tarbet.
Tarbet abounded at that time in little muddy lakes, edged with
water-flags and reeds, and swarming with frogs and eels; and it was one
of the largest and deepest of these that now lay before Jock and his
guide. Angus tucked up his blue gown, as if to wade across. Jock would
have as soon thought of fording the German Ocean. "Oh, wicked Jock
Gordon!" exclaimed the fool, when he saw him hesitate; "the colonel's
waiting, poor man, for his head, and Jock will no' take it to the
smithy." He stepped into the water. Jock followed in sheer desperation;
and, after clearing the belt of reeds, both sank to the middle in the
mingled water and mud. Angus had at length accomplished the object of
his journey. Extricating himself in a moment--for he was lithe and
active--he snatched the sheep's head and trotters from Jock, and,
leaping ashore, left the poor man sticking fast. It was church-time ere
he reached, on his way back, the old Abbey of Fearn, still employed as a
Protestant place of worship; and as the sight of the gathering people
awakened his church-going propensity, he went in. He was in high
spirits--seemed, by the mouths he made, very much to admire the sermon,
and paraded the sheep's head and trotters through the passages and
gallery a score of times at least, like a monk of the order of St.
Francis exhibiting the relics of some favourite saint. In the evening he
found his way home, but learned, to his grief and astonishment, that
"wicked Jock Gordon" had got there shortly before him in a cart. The
poor man had remained sticking in the mud for three long hours after
Angus had left him, until at length the very frogs began to cultivate
his acquaintance, as they had done that of King Log of old; and in the
mud he would have been sticking still, had he not been extricated by a
farmer of Fearn, who, in coming to church, had taken the lake in his
way. He left Nigg, however, for Cromarty on the following day, convinced
that he was no match for his rival, and dubious how the next adventure
might terminate.
Such was the story which I found current in Nigg, when working in its
churchyard, with the hero of the adventure often beside me. It led me to
take special note of his class, and to collect facts respecting them, on
which I erected a sort of semi-metaphysical theory of human character,
which, though it would not now be regarded as by any means a novel one,
I had thought out for myself, and which possessed for me, in
consequence, the charm of originality. In these poor creatures, I thus
argued, we find, amid much general dilapidation and brokenness of mind,
certain instincts and peculiarities remaining entire. Here, in Angus,
for instance, there is that instinctive cunning which some of the lower
animals, such as the fox, possess, existing in a wonderful degree of
perfection. Pope himself, who "could not drink tea without a stratagem,"
could scarce have possessed a larger share of it. And yet how distinct
must not this sort of ingenuity be from the mechanical ingenuity! Angus
cannot fix a button in its hole. I even see him baffled by a tall
snuff-box, with a small quantity of snuff at its bottom, that lies
beyond the reach of his finger. He has not ingenuity enough to lay it on
its side, or to empty its snuff on his palm; but stretches and ever
stretches towards it the unavailing digit, and then gets angry to find
it elude his touch. There are other idiots, however, who have none of
Angus's cunning, in whom this mechanical ability is decidedly developed.
Many of the _cretins_ of the Alps are said to be remarkable for their
skill as artisans; and it is told of a Scotch idiot, who lived in a
cottage on the Maolbuie Common in the upper part of the Black Isle, and
in whom a similar mechanical ability existed, abstracted from ability of
almost every other kind, that, among other things, he fabricated, out of
a piece of rude metal, a large sacking needle. Angus is attached to his
patron, and mourns for the deceased lady; but he seems to have little
general regard for the species--simply courting for the time those from
whom he expects snuff. The Cromarty idiot, on the contrary, is obliging
and kindly to all, and bears a peculiar love to children; and, though
more an imbecile in some respects than even Angus, he has a turn for
dress, and can attire himself very neatly. In this last respect,
however, the Cromarty fool was excelled by an idiot of the last age,
known to the children of many a village and hamlet as Fool Charloch, who
used to go wandering about the country, adorned, somewhat in the style
of an Indian chief, with half a peacock's tail stuck in his cap. Yet
another idiot, a fierce and dangerous creature, seemed as invariably
malignant in his dispositions as the Cromarty one is benevolent, and
died in a prison, to which he was committed for killing a poor
half-witted associate. Yet another idiot of the north of Scotland had a
strange turn for the supernatural. He was a mutterer of charms, and a
watcher of omens, and possessed, it was said, the second sight. I
collected not a few other facts of a similar kind, and thus reasoned
regarding them:--
These idiots are imperfect men, from whose minds certain faculties have
been effaced, and other faculties left to exhibit themselves, all the
more prominently from the circumstances of their standing so much alone.
They resemble men who have lost their hands, but retain their feet, or
who have lost their sight or smell, but retain their taste and hearing.
But as the limbs and the senses, if they did not exist as separate parts
of the frame, could not be separately lost, so in the mind itself, or in
at least the organization through which the mind manifests itself,
there must also be separate parts, or they would not be thus found
isolated by Nature in her mutilated and abortive specimens. Those
metaphysicians who deal by the mind as if it were simply a general power
existing in _states_, must be scarce less in error than if they were to
regard the _senses_ as merely a general power existing in states,
instead of recognising them as distinct, independent powers, so various
often in their degree of development, that, from the full perfection of
any one of them, the perfection, or even the existence, of any of the
others cannot be predicated. If, for instance, it were--as some
physicians hold--the same general warmth of emotive power that glows in
benevolence and burns in resentment, the fierce, dangerous idiot that
killed his companion, and the kindly-dispositioned Cromarty one who
takes home pailfuls of water to the poor old women of the place, and
parts with his own toys to its children, would, instead of thus
exhibiting the opposite poles of character, at least so far resemble one
another, that the vindictive fool would at times be kindly and obliging,
and the benevolent one at times violent and resentful. But such is not
the case: the one is never madly savage--the other never genial and
kind; and so it seems legitimate to infer, that it is not a general
power or energy that acts through them in different states, but two
particular powers or energies, as unlike in their natures, and as
capable of acting apart, as seeing and hearing. Even powers which seem
to have so much in common, that the same words are sometimes made use of
in reference to both, may be as distinct as smelling and tasting. We
speak of the _cunning_ workman, and we speak of the _cunning_ man; and
refer to a certain faculty of contrivance manifested in dealing with
characters and affairs on the part of the one, and in dealing with
certain modifications of matter on the part of the other; but so
entirely different are the two faculties, and, further, so little
dependent are they, in at least their first elements, on intellect, that
we may find the cunning which manifests itself in affairs, existing, as
in Angus, totally dissociated from mechanical skill; and, on the other
hand, the cunning of the artisan, existing, as in the idiot of the
Maolbuie, totally dissociated from that of the diplomatist. In short,
regarding idiots as persons of fragmentary mind, in whom certain primary
mental elements may be found standing out in a state of great
entireness, and all the more striking in their relief from the
isolation, I came to view them as _bits of analysis_, if I may so
express myself, made to my hand by Nature, and from the study of which I
could conceive of the structure of minds of a more complete, and
therefore more complex character. As children learn the alphabet from
cards, each of which contains only a letter or two a-piece, printed
large, I held at this time, and, with a few modifications, hold still,
that those primary sentiments and propensities which form the basis of
character, may be found separately stamped in the same way on the
comparatively blank minds of the imbecile; and that the student of
mental philosophy might learn from them what may be regarded as the
alphabet of his science, much more truthfully than from those
metaphysicians who represent mind as a power not manifested in
contemporaneous and separable faculties, but as existing in consecutive
states.
Cromarty had been fortunate in its parish ministers. From the death of
its last curate, shortly after the Revolution, and, the consequent
return of its old "outed minister," who had resigned his living for
conscience' sake, twenty-eight years before, and now came to spend his
evening of life with his people, it had enjoyed the services of a series
of devout and popular men; and so the cause of the Establishment was
particularly strong in both town and parish. At the beginning of the
present century Cromarty had not its single Dissenter; and though a few
of what were known as "Haldane's people" might be found in it, some
eight or ten years later they failed in effecting a lodgment, and
ultimately quitted it for a neighbouring town. Almost all the Dissent
that has arisen in Scotland since the Revolution has been an effect of
Moderatism and forced settlements; and as the place had known neither,
its people continued to harbour within the Church of their fathers, nor
wished to change. A vacancy had occurred in the incumbency, during my
sojourn in the south, through the death of the incumbent, the respected
minister of my childhood and youth; and I found, on my return, a new
face in the pulpit. It was that of a remarkable man--the late Mr.
Stewart of Cromarty--one of at once the most original thinkers and
profound theologians I ever knew; though he has, alas! left as little
mark of his exquisite talent behind him, as those sweet singers of
former ages, the memory of whose enchanting notes has died, save as a
doubtful echo, with the generation that heard them. I sat, with few
interruptions, for sixteen years under his ministry; and for nearly
twelve of these enjoyed his confidence and friendship.
I never could press myself on the notice of superior men, however
desirous of forming their acquaintance; and have, in consequence, missed
opportunities innumerable of coming in friendly contact with persons
whom it would be at once a pleasure and an honour to know. And so, for
the first two years, or rather more, I was content to listen with
profound attention to the pulpit addresses of my new minister, and to
appear as a catechumen, when my turn came, at his diets of catechising.
He had been struck, however, as he afterwards told me, by my sustained
attention when at church; and, on making inquiry regarding me among his
friends, he was informed that I was a great reader, and, it was
believed, a writer of verse. And coming unwittingly out upon him one day
as he was passing, when quitting my work-place for the street, he
addressed me "Well, lad," he said, "it is your dinner hour: I hear I
have a poet among my people?" "I doubt it much," I replied. "Well," he
rejoined, "one may fall short of being a poet, and yet gain by
exercising one's tastes and talents in the poetic walk. The
accomplishment of verse is at least not a vulgar one." The conversation
went on as we passed together along the street; and he stood for a time
opposite the manse door. "I am forming," he said, "a small library for
our Sabbath-school scholars and teachers: most of the books are simple
enough little things; but it contains a few works of the intellectual
class. Call upon me this evening that we may look over them, and you may
perhaps find among them some volumes you would wish to read." I
accordingly waited upon him in the evening; and we had a long
conversation together. He was, I saw, curiously sounding me, and taking
my measure in all directions; or, as he himself afterwards used to
express it in his characteristic way, he was like a traveller who,
having come unexpectedly on a dark pool in a ford, dips down his staff,
to ascertain the depth of the water and the nature of the bottom. He
inquired regarding my reading, and found that in the belles-lettres,
especially in English literature, it was about as extensive as his own.
He next inquired respecting my acquaintance with the metaphysicians.
"Had I read Reid?" "Yes." "Brown?" "Yes." "_Hume?_" "Yes." "Ah! ha!
Hume!! By the way, has he not something very ingenious about miracles?
Do you remember his argument?" I stated the argument. "Ah, very
ingenious--most ingenious. And how would you answer that?" I said, "I
thought I could give an abstract of the reply of Campbell," and sketched
in outline the reverend Doctor's argument. "And do you deem that
satisfactory?" said the minister. "No, not at all," I replied. "No! no!
_that's_ not satisfactory." "But perfectly satisfactory," I rejoined,
"that such is the general partiality for the better side, that the worse
argument has been received as perfectly adequate for the last sixty
years." The minister's face gleamed with the broad fun that entered so
largely into his composition, and the conversation shifted into other
channels.
From that night forward I enjoyed perhaps more of his confidence and
conversation than any other man in his parish. Many an hour did he spend
beside me in the churchyard, and many a quiet tea did I enjoy in the
manse; and I learned to know how much solid worth and true wisdom lay
under the somewhat eccentric exterior of a man who sacrificed scarce
anything to the conventionalities. This, with the exception of Chalmers,
sublimest of Scottish preachers--for, little as he was known, I will
challenge for him that place--was a genial man, who, for the sake of a
joke, would sacrifice anything save principle; but, though marvellously
careless of maintaining intact the "gloss of the clerical enamel," never
was there sincerity more genuine than his, or a more thorough honesty.
Content to be in the right, he never thought of simulating it, and
sacrificed even less than he ought to appearances. I may mention, that
on coming to Edinburgh, I found the peculiar taste formed under the
ministrations of Mr. Stewart most thoroughly gratified under those of
Dr. Guthrie; and that in looking round the congregation, I saw, with
pleasure rather than surprise, that all Mr. Stewart's people resident in
Edinburgh had come to the same conclusion; for there--sitting in the
Doctor's pews--they all were. Certainly in fertility of illustration, in
soul-stirring, evangelistic doctrine, and in a general basis of rich
humour, the resemblance between the deceased and the living minister
seems complete; but genius is always unique; and while in breadth of
popular power Dr. Guthrie stands alone among living preachers, I have
never either heard or read argument in the analogical field that in
ingenuity or originality equalled that of Mr. Stewart.
That in which he specially excelled all the men I ever knew was the
power of detecting and establishing occult resemblances. He seemed able
to read off, as if by intuition--not by snatches and fragments, but as a
consecutive whole--that old revelation of type and symbol which God
first gave to man; and when privileged to listen to him, I have been
constrained to recognise, in the evident integrity of the reading, and
the profound and consistent theological system which the pictorial
record conveyed, a demonstration of the divinity of its origin, not less
powerful and convincing than the demonstrations of the other and more
familiar departments of the Christian evidences. Compared with other
theologians in this province, I have felt under his ministry as if, when
admitted to the company of some party of modern _savans_ employed in
deciphering a hieroglyphic covered obelisk of the desert, and here
successful in discovering the meaning of an insulated sign, and there of
a detached symbol, we had been suddenly joined by some sage of the olden
time, to whom the mysterious inscription was but a piece of common
language written in a familiar alphabet, and who could read off
fluently, and as a whole, what the others could but darkly guess at in
detached and broken parts. To this singular power of tracing analogies
there was added in Mr. Stewart an ability of originating the most vivid
illustrations. In some instances a sudden stroke produced a figure that
at once illuminated the subject-matter of his discourse, like the light
of a lanthorn flashed hastily upon a painted wall; in others he dwelt
upon an illustrative picture, finishing it with stroke after stroke,
until it filled the whole imagination, and sank deep into the memory. I
remember hearing him preach, on one occasion, on the return of the Jews
as a people to HIM whom they had rejected, and the effect which their
sudden conversion could not fail to have on the unbelieving and Gentile
world. Suddenly his language, from its high level of eloquent
simplicity, became that of metaphor, "When JOSEPH," he said, "shall
reveal himself to his _brethren_, the _whole house of Pharaoh shall hear
the weeping_." On another occasion I heard him dwell on that vast
profundity, characteristic of the scriptural revelation of God, which
ever deepens and broadens the longer and more thoroughly it is explored,
until at length the student--struck at first by its expansiveness, but
conceiving of it as if it were a mere _measured_ expansiveness--finds
that it partakes of the unlimited infinity of the Divine nature itself.
Naturally and simply, as if growing out of the subject, like a
berry-covered mistletoe out of the massy trunk of an oak, there sprung
up one of his more lengthened illustrations. A child bred up in the
interior of the country has been brought for the first time to the
sea-shore, and carried out into the middle of one of the noble firths
that indent so deeply our line of coast. And, on his return, he
describes to his father, with all a child's eagerness, the wonderful
expansiveness of the _ocean_ which he had seen. He went out, he tells
him, far amid the great waves and the rushing tides, until at length the
hills seemed diminished into mere hummocks, and the wide land itself
appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then, when in
mid-sea, the sailors heaved the lead; and it went down, and down, and
down, and the long line slipped swiftly away, coil after coil, till, ere
the plummet rested on the ooze below, all was well-nigh expended. And
was it not the great sea, asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so
profoundly deep? Ah! my child, exclaims the father, you have not seen
aught of its greatness: you have sailed over merely one of its little
arms. Had it been out into the wide ocean that the seamen had carried
you, "you would have _seen_ no shore, and you would have _found_ no
bottom." In one rare quality of the orator Mr. Stewart stood alone among
his contemporaries. Pope refers to a strange power of creating love and
admiration by "just touching the brink of all we hate." And Burke, in
some of his nobler passages, happily exemplifies the thing. He
intensified the effect of his burning eloquence by the employment of
figures so homely--nay, almost so repulsive--that the man of lower
powers who ventured on their use would find them effective in but
lowering his subject, and ruining his cause. I need but refer, in
illustration, to the well-known figure of the disembowelled bird, which
occurs in the indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary
French in aught resembled that of the English. "We have not," says the
orator, "been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like
stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff, and rags, and paltry blurred
shreds of paper about the rights of man." Into this perilous but
singularly effective department, closed against even superior men, Mr.
Stewart could enter safely and at will. One of the last sermons I heard
him preach--a discourse of singular power--was on the "Sin-offering" of
the Jewish economy, as minutely described in Leviticus. He drew a
picture of the slaughtered animal, foul with dust and blood, and
streaming, in its impurity, to the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire
amid the uncleanness of ashes outside the camp--its throat gashed
across--its entrails laid open; a vile and horrid thing, which no one
could see without experiencing emotions of disgust, nor touch without
contracting defilement. The description appeared too painfully
vivid--its introduction too little in accordance with the rules of a
just taste. But the master in this difficult walk knew what he was
doing. And that, he said, pointing to the strongly-coloured picture he
had just completed--"And THAT IS SIN." By one stroke the intended effect
was produced, and the rising disgust and horror transferred from the
revolting material image to the great moral evil.
How could such a man pass from earth, and leave no trace behind him?
Mainly, I believe, from two several causes. As the minister of an
attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty, and the promptings of
a highly intellectual nature, to which exertion was enjoyment, led him
to study much and deeply; and he poured forth _viva voce_ his
full-volumed and ever-sparkling tide of eloquent idea, as freely and
richly as the nightingale, unconscious of a listener, pours forth her
melody in the shade. But, strangely diffident of his own powers, he
could not be made to believe that what so much impressed and delighted
the privileged few who surrounded him, was equally suited to impress
and delight the intellectual many outside; or that he was fitted to
speak through the press in tones which would compel the attention, not
merely of the religious, but also of the literary world. Further,
practising but little the art of elaborate composition, and master of a
spoken style more effective for the purposes of the pulpit than almost
any written one, save that of Chalmers, he failed, in all his attempts
in writing, to satisfy a fastidious taste, which he had suffered greatly
to outgrow his ability of production. And so he failed to leave any
adequate mark behind him. I find that for my stock of theological idea,
not directly derived from Scripture, I stand more indebted to two Scotch
theologians than to all other men of their profession and class. The one
of these was Thomas Chalmers--the other, Alexander Stewart: the one a
name known wherever the English language is spoken; while of the other
it is only remembered, and by comparatively a few, that the impression
did exist at the time of his death, that
"A mighty spirit was eclipsed--a power
Had passed from day to darkness, to whose hour
Of light no likeness was bequeathed--no name."