Memories and Portraits - Robert Louis Stevenson.  1912 Chatto and 
Windus edition.  Scanned and proofed by David Price, email 
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS




NOTE


THIS volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better 
to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random.  
A certain thread of meaning binds them.  Memories of childhood and 
youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle - 
taken together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since 
and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself.  This has come 
by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was 
but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the 
irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of 
the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I 
was the first to be surprised at the occurrence.

My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager 
sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed.  Of their 
descendant, the person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not 
because I love him better, but because, with him, I am still in a 
business partnership, and cannot divide interests.

Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already 
in THE CORNHILL, LONGMAN'S, SCRIBNER, THE ENGLISH ILLUSTRATED, THE 
MAGAZINE OF ART, THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW; three are here in print 
for the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he 
regarded as a private circulation.

R. L S.



CONTENTS


I.    THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
II.   SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
III.  OLD MORALITY
IV.   A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
V.    AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER
VI.   PASTORAL
VII.  THE MANSE
VIII. MEMORIES OF AN ISLET
IX.   THOMAS STEVENSON
X.    TALK AND TALKERS: FIRST PAPER
XI.   TALK AND TALKERS: SECOND PAPER
XII.  THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
XIII. "A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED"
XIV.  A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
XV.   A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
XVI.  A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE




CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME


"This is no my ain house;
I ken by the biggin' o't."

Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on 
France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set 
people thinking on the divisions of races and nations.  Such 
thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to 
inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different 
stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its 
extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to 
the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of 
Rannoch.  It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; 
there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered 
so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands 
whence she sprang.  Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains 
still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech.  It was but the 
other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show 
in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-
speaking woman.  English itself, which will now frank the traveller 
through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea 
Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the 
ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home 
country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition.  You may 
go all over the States, and - setting aside the actual intrusion 
and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese - you shall 
scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty 
miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the 
hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.  Book English has 
gone round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms 
of our fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its 
own quality of speech, vocal or verbal.  In like manner, local 
custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on 
into the latter end of the nineteenth century - IMPERIA IN IMPERIO, 
foreign things at home.

In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his 
neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull.  His is a 
domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but 
neither curious nor quick about the life of others.  In French 
colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an 
immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated 
race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a 
transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both.  But the 
Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance.  He 
figures among his vassal in the hour of peace with the same 
disdainful air that led him on to victory.  A passing enthusiasm 
for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot 
impose upon his intimates.  He may be amused by a foreigner as by a 
monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any 
patience.  Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in 
love, declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable - a 
staggering pretension.  So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was 
celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed 
to give them solid English fare - roast beef and plum pudding, and 
no tomfoolery.  Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly.  
We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the 
chance, will we eager him to eat of it himself.  The same spirit 
inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands 
of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their 
ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant.

I quote an American in this connection without scruple.  Uncle Sam 
is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick.  
For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and 
nothing more.  He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let 
him try San Francisco.  He wittily reproves English ignorance as to 
the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten 
Wyoming?  The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used 
over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach.  The Yankee 
States, of which he is so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the 
bucket.  And we find in his book a vast virgin ignorance of the 
life and prospects of America; every view partial, parochial, not 
raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper, at the largest, to 
a clique of states; and the whole scope and atmosphere not 
American, but merely Yankee.  I will go far beyond him in 
reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to 
their cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the 
silly rudeness of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where 
to look when I find myself in company with an American and see my 
countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog.  But in the 
case of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept.  Wyoming 
is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to 
the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no better 
justified than the Britannic.

It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most 
ignorant of the foreigners at home.  John Bull is ignorant of the 
States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his 
opportunities, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own 
door.  There is one country, for instance - its frontier not so far 
from London, its people closely akin, its language the same in all 
essentials with the English - of which I will go bail he knows 
nothing.  His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described; 
it can only be illustrated by anecdote.  I once travelled with a 
man of plausible manners and good intelligence - a University man, 
as the phrase goes - a man, besides, who had taken his degree in 
life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in.  We were 
deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; among other 
things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had 
recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things 
were not so in Scotland.  "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a 
matter of law."  He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he 
choose to be informed.  The law was the same for the whole country, 
he told me roundly; every child knew that.  At last, to settle 
matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal 
body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in 
question.  Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in the face and 
dropped the conversation.  This is a monstrous instance, if you 
like, but it does not stand alone in the experience of Scots.

England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in 
religion, in education, and in the very look of nature and men's 
faces, not always widely, but always trenchantly.  Many particulars 
that struck Mr. Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less 
forcibly; he and I felt ourselves foreigners on many common 
provocations.  A Scotchman may tramp the better part of Europe and 
the United States, and never again receive so vivid an impression 
of foreign travel and strange lands and manners as on his first 
excursion into England.  The change from a hilly to a level country 
strikes him with delighted wonder.  Along the flat horizon there 
arise the frequent venerable towers of churches.  He sees at the 
end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails.  He may go 
where he pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and 
lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment.  
There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many 
windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody 
country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant 
business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their 
air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit 
of romance into the tamest landscape.  When the Scotch child sees 
them first he falls immediately in love; and from that time forward 
windmills keep turning in his dreams.  And so, in their degree, 
with every feature of the life and landscape.  The warm, habitable 
age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of the 
country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy path-ways in the 
fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frocks; 
chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech - 
they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to English airs 
in the child's story that he tells himself at night.  The sharp 
edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt 
whether it is ever killed.  Rather it keeps returning, ever the 
more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have 
been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to 
enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye - 
the domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the 
quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm 
colouring of all.  We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient 
buildings, above all in country places; and those that we have are 
all of hewn or harled masonry.  Wood has been sparingly used in 
their construction; the window-frames are sunken in the wall, not 
flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeper-pitched; 
even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and permanent 
appearance.  English houses, in comparison, have the look of 
cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter.  And to this the 
Scotchman never becomes used.  His eye can never rest consciously 
on one of these brick houses - rickles of brick, as he might call 
them - or on one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly 
reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his 
home.  "This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't."  And 
yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money, the key of it 
long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, and never will be, 
thoroughly adopted by his imagination; nor does he cease to 
remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native 
country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count 
England foreign.  The constitution of society, the very pillars of 
the empire, surprise and even pain us.  The dull, neglected 
peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a 
startling contrast with our own long-legged, long-headed, 
thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman.  A week or two in such a place 
as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping.  It seems incredible that 
within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been 
thus forgotten.  Even the educated and intelligent, who hold our 
own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with 
a difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things 
with less interest and conviction.  The first shock of English 
society is like a cold plunge.  It is possible that the Scot comes 
looking for too much, and to be sure his first experiment will be 
in the wrong direction.  Yet surely his complaint is grounded; 
surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous 
ardour, the better part of the man too often withheld from the 
social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with 
terror.  A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own 
experience.  He will not put you by with conversational counters 
and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one 
interested in life and man's chief end.  A Scotchman is vain, 
interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth 
his thoughts and experience in the best light.  The egoism of the 
Englishman is self-contained.  He does not seek to proselytise.  He 
takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the 
unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference.  
Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all 
he asks; and in the meantime, while you continue to associate, he 
would rather not be reminded of your baser origin.  Compared with 
the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity 
and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest.  That 
you should continually try to establish human and serious 
relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, 
and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue 
something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you 
in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation.  Thus even the 
lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the 
head and shoulders.

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English 
youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and 
gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of 
future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct.  
I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys 
of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once 
more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance 
chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider 
extremes of temperament and sensibility.  The boy of the South 
seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to 
games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily 
transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in 
mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser 
and a less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more 
immersed in present circumstances.  And certainly, for one thing, 
English boys are younger for their age.  Sabbath observance makes a 
series of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of 
Scotch boyhood - days of great stillness and solitude for the 
rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the 
intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and 
senses prey upon and test each other.  The typical English Sunday, 
with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, leads 
perhaps to different results.  About the very cradle of the Scot 
there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two 
divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two 
first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely 
inquiring, "What is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very 
roots of life with, "What is the chief end of man?" and answering 
nobly, if obscurely, "To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever."  I 
do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact 
of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch a great field of 
speculation; and the fact that it is asked of all of us, from the 
peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together.  No 
Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would have had 
patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for 
Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days 
kept their influence to the end.  We have spoken of the material 
conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying 
everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of 
the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone 
cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level 
streets, the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness 
of the architecture, among which English children begin to grow up 
and come to themselves in life.  As the stage of the University 
approaches, the contrast becomes more express.  The English lad 
goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, 
to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by 
proctors.  Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of 
education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that 
separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots.  At an 
earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different 
experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell 
hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the 
public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he 
has been wandering fancy-free.  His college life has little of 
restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility.  He will find no 
quiet clique of the exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten 
borough of the arts.  All classes rub shoulders on the greasy 
benches.  The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his 
scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie from the parish school.  
They separate, at the session's end, one to smoke cigars about a 
watering-place, the other to resume the labours of the field beside 
his peasant family.  The first muster of a college class in 
Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, 
fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish 
embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, 
and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices.  It was in 
these early days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection 
of his pupils, putting these uncouth, umbrageous students at their 
ease with ready human geniality.  Thus, at least, we have a healthy 
democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work; even when there 
is no cordiality there is always a juxtaposition of the different 
classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of 
each is plainly demonstrated to the other.  Our tasks ended, we of 
the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city.  At 
five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college 
gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of 
the winter sunset.  The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies 
in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the 
masters of the world; and some portion of our lives is always 
Saturday, LA TREVE DE DIEU.

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his 
country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story 
and from observation.  A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, 
outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; 
much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters.  
Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of 
foraying hoofs.  He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the 
iron girdle and the handful of oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and 
lived so sparely on their raids.  Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, 
and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of his 
country's history.  The heroes and kings of Scotland have been 
tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history - 
Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five were still either failures or 
defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the 
Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach 
rather a moral than a material criterion for life.  Britain is 
altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire: 
Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his 
imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold, 
sterile and unpopulous.  It is not so for nothing.  I once seemed 
to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of 
sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his 
own.  It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish 
romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine.  But the error 
serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that 
the heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by 
paucity of number and Spartan poverty of life.

So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained.  That 
Shorter Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was 
yet composed in the city of Westminster.  The division of races is 
more sharply marked within the borders of Scotland itself than 
between the countries.  Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, 
are like foreign parts; yet you may choose a man from any of them, 
and, ten to one, he shall prove to have the headmark of a Scot.  A 
century and a half ago the Highlander wore a different costume, 
spoke a different language, worshipped in another church, held 
different morals, and obeyed a different social constitution from 
his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.  Even the 
English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the 
Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the 
Scotch.  Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot.  He would 
willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him 
at the border, and he regarded England as a perilous, unhomely 
land.  When the Black Watch, after years of foreign service, 
returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at 
Port Patrick.  They had been in Ireland, stationed among men of 
their own race and language, where they were well liked and treated 
with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed at 
the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people who did not 
understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and hanged 
them since the dawn of history.  Last, and perhaps most curious, 
the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of 
Europe.  They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, 
not English, but the broad dialect of Scotland.  Now, what idea had 
they in their minds when they thus, in thought, identified 
themselves with their ancestral enemies?  What was the sense in 
which they were Scotch and not English, or Scotch and not Irish?  
Can a bare name be thus influential on the minds and affections of 
men, and a political aggregation blind them to the nature of facts?  
The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to answer, NO; the far 
more galling business of Ireland clenches the negative from nearer 
home.  Is it common education, common morals, a common language or 
a common faith, that join men into nations?  There were practically 
none of these in the case we are considering.

The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, 
the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the 
Highlander.  When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's 
necks in spirit; even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy 
in their talk.  But from his compatriot in the south the Lowlander 
stands consciously apart.  He has had a different training; he 
obeys different laws; he makes his will in other terms, is 
otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home in an 
English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to 
remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the 
Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the 
mind.




CHAPTER II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES (2)


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 (3) 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 cast 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.




CHAPTER III. OLD MORTALITY


I


THERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a 
prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under 
a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and 
the scream of the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to 
it all day long.  The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres 
of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the 
morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of many tall 
memorials, fall upon the graves.  There, in the hot fits of youth, 
I came to be unhappy.  Pleasant incidents are woven with my memory 
of the place.  I here made friends with a plain old gentleman, a 
visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon 
the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter 
sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days 
together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild 
heart flying; and once - she possibly remembers - the wise Eugenia 
followed me to that austere inclosure.  Her hair came down, and in 
the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair 
the braid.  But for the most part I went there solitary and, with 
irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten.  Name 
after name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle 
dates: a regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, 
and had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the 
dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old mortality.  In that 
whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had 
received a picture; and he, with his comely, florid countenance, 
bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining fame and 
popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of 
phantom appellations.  It was then possible to leave behind us 
something more explicit than these severe, monotonous and lying 
epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a painted picture and 
what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable 
than mere oblivion.  Even David Hume, as he lay composed beneath 
that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the 
housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, 
the fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the 
sea.

And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for 
David Hume.  The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, 
like Noah's dove, come home to roost.  The fire, sensibility, and 
volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to 
recognise.  The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of 
routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with 
contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk among the tombs 
of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and after much 
rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see 
himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own 
for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city 
street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope.  
In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, 
the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform - for there, on the most 
thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will 
continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the 
forgotten graveyard.  The length of man's life, which is endless to 
the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought.  He cannot 
bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly.  He 
cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and 
by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.  The parable 
of the talent is the brief epitome of youth.  To believe in 
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in 
life.  Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be 
taken gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of 
time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the 
inadequate gift.  Yet here is a true peril; this it is that sets 
them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with strange 
extremes of pity and derision, the memorials of the dead.

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing 
upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and 
immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or 
heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, 
shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we 
all sit down, the hanger-back not least.  But the average sermon 
flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we 
know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, 
and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us.  Upon the 
average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-
hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he 
should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann.  
Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a 
grudge.  The day is perhaps not far oft when people will begin to 
count MOLL FLANDERS, ay, or THE COUNTRY WIFE, more wholesome and 
more pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism.

But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of 
Obermann.  And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the 
graveyard, I began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-
diggers, and was weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of 
visitors.  This was dayspring, indeed, to a lad in such great 
darkness.  Not that I began to see men, or to try to see them, from 
within, nor to learn charity and modesty and justice from the 
sight; but still stared at them externally from the prison windows 
of my affectation.  Once I remember to have observed two working-
women with a baby halting by a grave; there was something 
monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the 
other with bowed face crouching by her side.  A wreath of 
immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, 
drawing near, I overheard their judgment on that wonder.  "Eh! what 
extravagance!"

To a youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint 
and pregnant saying appeared merely base.

My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was 
unremarkable.  One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the 
red evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane 
Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still 
attended on his labours; how some would even perch about him, 
waiting for their prey; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the 
species varied with the season of the year.  But this was the very 
poetry of the profession.  The others whom I knew were somewhat 
dry.  A faint flavour of the gardener hung about them, but 
sophisticated and dis-bloomed.  They had engagements to keep, not 
alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with man-
kind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time.  And thus there 
was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, 
foot on spade.  They were men wrapped up in their grim business; 
they liked well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the 
key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds 
a calendar of names and dates.  It would be "in fifty-twa" that 
such a tomb was last opened for "Miss Jemimy."  It was thus they 
spoke of their past patients -familiarly but not without respect, 
like old family servants.  Here is indeed a servant, whom we forget 
that we possess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at 
the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the 
mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of 
our race.  To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial 
touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he 
attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave.  But perhaps 
it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English 
sexton differs from the Scotch.  The "goodman delver," reckoning up 
his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts.  
It is a pride common among sextons.  A cabinet-maker does not count 
his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare 
upon him from the shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves.  
He would indeed be something different from human if his solitary 
open-air and tragic labours left not a broad mark upon his mind.  
There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, among the 
cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, 
he waits the continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like 
minute drops into eternity.  As they fall, he counts them; and this 
enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul, in 
the process of years and by the kindly influence of habit grows to 
be his pride and pleasure.  There are many common stories telling 
how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries.  But I will rather 
tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffering 
bedside the minister was summoned.  He dwelt in a cottage built 
into the wall of the church-yard; and through a bull's-eye pane 
above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and 
the upright and recumbent stones.  Dr. Laurie was, I think, a 
Moderate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of 
deathbed dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived 
beyond man's natural years, that his life had been easy and 
reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to 
his care, and that it now behoved him unregretfully to gird his 
loins and follow the majority.  The grave-digger heard him out; 
then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand 
pointed through the window to the scene of his life-long labours.  
"Doctor," he said, "I ha'e laid three hunner and fower-score in 
that kirkyaird; an it had been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I 
would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made out the fower hunner."  But it 
was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part 
to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry 
him.


II


I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the 
ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting 
of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness.  It 
is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are 
forgotten; his is the vague epitaph.  Pity him but the more, if 
pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and 
personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded.  In every 
part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to 
forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable and tragic 
fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, 
is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.  But by-and-by his truant 
interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather 
flowers.  Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; 
no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning 
injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value 
him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not 
without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet 
storing up.

The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble 
fallibility.  When we have fallen through storey after storey of 
our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it 
is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they 
stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, 
linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential 
circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary 
life; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices 
that appeared gigantic in our youth.  So that at the last, when 
such a pin falls out - when there vanishes in the least breath of 
time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our 
supply - when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the 
faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard 
with those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a 
breath to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole 
wing of the palace of our life.