by Unknown
He masters a subject by letting it master him; for though his critical reputation is built on honesty, it is his enthusiasm that makes his work warm with life. Sometimes he entered the class-room so full of what he had to say that he began before he reached his desk. If he was in the middle of a peroration when the bell rang, even the back benches forgot to empty. There were the inevitable students to whom literature is a trial, and sometimes they call attention to their sufferings by a scraping of the feet. Then the professor tried to fix his eyeglass on them, and when it worked properly they were transfixed. As a rule, however, it required so many adjustments that by the time his eye took hold of it he had remembered that students were made so, and his indignation went. Then, with the light in his eye that some photographer ought to catch, he would hope that his lecture was not disturbing their conversation. It was characteristic of his passion for being just that, when he had criticised some writer severely he would remember that the back benches could not understand that criticism and admiration might go together, unless they were told so again.
The test of a sensitive man is that he is careful of wounding the feelings of others. Once, I remember, a student was reading a passage aloud, assuming at the same time such an attitude that the professor could not help remarking that he looked like a teapot. It was exactly what he did look like, and the class applauded. But next moment Masson had apologized for being personal. Such reminiscences are what make the old literature class-room to thousands of graduates a delight to think of.
When the news of Carlyle’s death reached the room, Masson could not go on with his lecture. Every one knows what Carlyle has said of him; and no one who has heard it will ever forget what he has said of Carlyle. Here were two men who understood each other. One of the Carlylean pictures one loves to dwell on shows them smoking together, with nothing breaking the pauses but Mrs. Carlyle’s needles. Carlyle told Masson how he gave up smoking and then took to it again. He had walked from Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh to consult a doctor about his health, and was advised to lose his pipe. He smoked no more, but his health did not improve, and then one day he walked in a wood. At the foot of a tree lay a pipe, a tobacco pouch, a matchbox. He saw clearly that this was a case of Providential interference, and from that moment he smoked again. There the professor’s story stops. I have no doubt, though, that he nodded his head when Carlyle explained what the pipe and tobacco were doing there. Masson’s “Milton” is, of course, his great work, but for sympathetic analysis I know nothing to surpass his “Chatterton.” Lecturing on Chatterton one day, he remarked, with a slight hesitation, that had the poet mixed a little more in company and — and smoked, his morbidness would not have poisoned him. That turned my thoughts to smoking, because I meant to be a Chatterton, but greater. Since then the professor has warned me against smoking too much. He was smoking at the time.
This is no place to follow Masson’s career, nor to discuss his work. To reach his position one ought to know his definition of a man of letters. It is curious, and, like most of his departures from the generally accepted, sticks to the memory. By a man of letters he does not mean the poet, for instance, who is all soul, so much as the strong-brained writer whose guardian angel is a fine sanity. He used to mention John Skelton, the Wolsey satirist, and Sir David Lindsay, as typical men of letters from this point of view, and it is as a man of letters of that class that Masson is best considered. In an age of many whippersnappers in criticism, he is something of a Gulliver.
The students in that class liked to see their professor as well as hear him. I let my hair grow long because it only annoyed other people, and one day there was dropped into my hand a note containing sixpence and the words: “The students sitting behind you present their compliments, and beg that you will get your hair cut with the enclosed, as it interferes with their view of the professor.”
Masson, when he edited Macmillan’s, had all the best men round him. His talk of Thackeray is specially interesting, but he always holds that in conversation Douglas Jerrold was unapproachable. Jerrold told him a good story of his seafaring days. His ship was lying off Gibraltar, and for some hours Jerrold, though only a midshipman, was left in charge. Some of the sailors begged to get ashore, and he let them, on the promise that they would bring him back some oranges. One of them disappeared, and the midshipman suffered for it. More than twenty years afterward Jerrold was looking in at a window in the Strand when he seemed to know the face of a weatherbeaten man who was doing the same thing. Suddenly he remembered, and put his hand on the other’s shoulder. “My man,” he said, “you have been a long time with those oranges!” The sailor recognized him, turned white, and took to his heels. There is, too, the story of how Dickens and Jerrold made up their quarrel at the Garrick Club. It was the occasion on which Masson first met the author of “Pickwick.” Dickens and Jerrold had not spoken for a year, and they both happened to have friends at dinner in the strangers’ room, Masson being Jerrold’s guest. The two hosts sat back to back, but did not address each other, though the conversation was general. At last Jerrold could stand it no longer. Turning, he exclaimed, “Charley, my boy, how are you?” Dickens wheeled round and grasped his hand.
Many persons must have noticed that, in appearance, Masson is becoming more and more like Carlyle every year. How would you account for it? It is a thing his old students often discuss when they meet, especially those of them who, when at college, made up their minds to dedicate their first book to him. The reason they seldom do it is because the book does not seem good enough.
PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE.
Lately I was told that Blackie — one does not say Mr. Cromwell — is no longer professor of Greek in Edinburgh University. What nonsense some people talk! As if Blackie were not part of the building! In his class one day he spoke touchingly of the time when he would have to join Socrates in the Elysian fields. A student cheered — no one knows why. “It won’t be for some time yet,” added John Stuart.
Blackie takes his ease at home, in a dressing-gown and straw hat. This shows that his plaid really does come off. “My occupation nowadays,” he said to me recently, “is business, blethers, bothers, beggars, and backgammon.” He has also started a profession of going to public meetings, and hurrying home to write letters to the newspapers about them. When the editor shakes the manuscript, a sonnet falls out. I think I remember the professor’s saying that he had never made five shillings by his verses. To my mind they are worth more than that.
Though he has explained them frequently, there is still confusion about Blackie’s politics. At Manchester they thought he was a Tory, and invited him to address them, on that understanding. “I fancy I astonished them,” the professor said to me. This is quite possible. Then he was mistaken for a Liberal. The fact is that Blackie is a philosopher, who follows the golden mean. He sees this himself. A philosopher who follows the golden mean is thus a man who runs zig-zag between two extremes. You will observe that he who does this is some time before he arrives anywhere.
The professor has said that he has the strongest lungs in Scotland. Of the many compliments that might well be paid him, not the least worthy would be this: that he is as healthy mentally as physically. Mrs. Norton begins a novel with the remark that one of the finest sights conceivable is a well-preserved gentleman of middle age. It will be some time yet before Blackie reaches middle age, but there must be something wrong with you if you can look at him without feeling refreshed. Did you ever watch him marching along Princes Street on a warm day, when every other person was broiling in the sun? His head is well thrown back, the staff, grasped in the middle, jerks back and forward like a weaver’s shuttle, and the plaid flies in the breeze. Other people’s clothes are hanging limp. Blackie carries his breeze with him.
A year or two ago Mr. Gladstone, when at Dalmeny, pointed out that he had the advantage over Blackie in being of both Highland and Lowland extraction. The professor, however, is as Scotch as the thistle or his native hills, and Mr. Gladston
e, quite justifiably, considers him the most outstanding of living Scotsmen. Blackie is not quite sure himself. Not long ago I heard him read a preface to a life of Mr. Gladstone that was being printed at Smyrna in modern Greek. He told his readers to remember that Mr. Gladstone was a great scholar and an upright statesman. They would find it easy to do this if they first remembered that he was Scottish.
The World included Blackie in its list of “Celebrities at Home.” It said that the door was opened by a red-headed lassie. That was probably meant for local color, and it amused every one who knew Mrs. Blackie. The professor is one of the most genial of men, and will show you to your room himself, talking six languages. This tends to make the conversation one-sided, but he does not mind that. He still writes a good deal, spending several hours in his library daily, and his talk is as brilliant as ever. His writing nowadays is less sustained than it was, and he prefers flitting from one subject to another, to evolving a great work. When he dips his pen into an ink-pot, it at once writes a sonnet — so strong is the force of habit. Recently he wrote a page about Carlyle in a little book issued by the Edinburgh students’ bazaar committee. In this he reproved Carlyle for having “bias.” Blackie wonders why people should have bias.
Some readers of this may in their student days have been invited to the Greek professor’s house to breakfast, without knowing why they were selected from among so many. It was not, as they are probably aware, because of their classical attainments, for they were too thoughtful to be in the prize-list; nor was it because of the charm of their manners or the fascination of their conversation. When the professor noticed any physical peculiarity about a student, such as a lisp, or a glass eye, or one leg longer than the other, or a broken nose, he was at once struck by it, and asked him to breakfast. They were very lively breakfasts, the eggs being served in tureens; but sometimes it was a collection of the maimed and crooked, and one person at the table — not the host himself — used to tremble lest, making mirrors of each other, the guests should see why they were invited.
Sometimes, instead of asking a student to breakfast, Blackie would instruct another student to request his company to tea. Then the two students were told to talk about paulo-post futures in the cool of the evening, and to read their Greek Testament and to go to the pantomime. The professor never tired of giving his students advice about the preservation of their bodily health. He strongly recommended a cold bath at six o’clock every morning. In winter, he remarked genially, you can break the ice with a hammer. According to himself, only one enthusiast seems to have followed his advice, and he died.
In Blackie’s class-room there used to be a demonstration every time he mentioned the name of a distinguished politician. Whether the demonstration took the professor by surprise or whether he waited for it, will never perhaps be known. But Blackie at least put out the gleam in his eye, and looked as if he were angry. “I will say Beaconsfield,” he would exclaim (cheers and hisses). “Beaconsfield” (uproar). Then he would stride forward, and, seizing the railing, announce his intention of saying Beaconsfield until every goose in the room was tired of cackling. (“Question.”) “Beaconsfield.” (“No, no.”) “Beaconsfield.” (“Hear, hear,” and shouts of “Gladstone.”) “Beaconsfield.” (“Three cheers for Dizzy.”) Eventually the class would be dismissed as — (1) idiots, (2) a bear garden, (3) a flock of sheep, (4) a pack of numskulls, (5) hissing serpents. The professor would retire, apparently fuming, to his anteroom, and five minutes afterward he would be playing himself down the North Bridge on imaginary bagpipes. This sort of thing added a sauce to all academic sessions. There was a notebook also, which appeared year after year. It contained the professor’s jokes of a former session, carefully classified by an admiring student. It was handed down from one year’s men to the next; and thus, if Blackie began to make a joke about haggis, the possessor of the book had only swiftly to turn to the H’s, find what the joke was, and send it along the class quicker than the professor could speak it.
In the old days the Greek professor recited a poem in honor of the end of the session. He composed it himself, and, as known to me, it took the form of a graduate’s farewell to his alma mater. Sometimes he would knock a map down as if overcome with emotion, and at critical moments a student in the back benches would accompany him on a penny trumpet. Now, I believe, the Hellenic Club takes the place of the class-room. All the eminent persons in Edinburgh attend its meetings, and Blackie, the Athenian, is in the chair. The policeman in Douglas Crescent looks skeered when you ask him what takes place on these occasions. It is generally understood that toward the end of the meeting they agree to read Greek next time.
PROFESSOR CALDERWOOD.
Here is a true story that the general reader may jump, as it is intended for Professor Calderwood himself. Some years ago an English daily paper reviewed a book entitled “A Handbook of Moral Philosophy.” The professor knows the work. The “notice” was done by the junior reporter, to whom philosophical treatises are generally intrusted. He dealt leniently, on the whole, with Professor Calderwood, even giving him a word of encouragement here and there. Still the criticism was severe. The reviewer subsequently went to Edinburgh University, and came out 144th in the class of moral philosophy.
That student is now, I believe, on friendly terms with Professor Calderwood, but has never told him this story. I fancy the professor would like to know his name. It may perhaps be reached in this way: He was the young gentleman who went to his classes the first day in a black coat and silk hat, and was cheered round the quadrangle by a body of admiring fellow-students, who took him for a professor.
Calderwood contrives to get himself more in touch with the mass of his students than some of his fellow-professors, partly because he puts a high ideal before himself, and to some extent because his subject is one that Scottish students revel in. Long before they join his class they know that they are moral philosophers; indeed, they are sometimes surer of it before they enrol than afterward. Their essays begin in some such fashion as this: “In joining issue with Reid, I wish to take no unfair advantage of my antagonist;” or, “Kant is sadly at fault when he says that — —” or, “It is strange that a man of Locke’s attainments should have been blind to the fact — —” When the professor reads out these titbits to the class, his eyes twinkle. Some students, of course, are not such keen philosophers as others. Does Professor Calderwood remember the one who was never struck by anything in moral philosophy until he learned by accident that Descartes lay in bed till about twelve o’clock every morning? Then it dawned on him that he, too, must have been a philosopher all his life without knowing it. One year a father and son were in the class. The father got so excited over volition and the line that divides right from wrong that he wrenched the desk before him from its sockets and hit it triumphantly, meaning that he and the professor were at one. He was generally admired by his fellow-students, because he was the only one in the class who could cry out “Hear, hear,” and even “Question,” without blushing. The son, on the other hand, was blasé, and would have been an agnostic, only he could never remember the name. Once a week Calderwood turns his class into a debating society, and argues things out with his students. This field-day is a joy to them. Some of them spend the six days previous in preparing posers. The worst of the professor is that he never sees that they are posers. What is the use of getting up a question of the most subtle kind, when he answers it right away? It makes you sit down quite suddenly. There is an occasional student who tries to convert liberty of speech on the discussion day into license, and of him the professor makes short work. The student means to turn the laugh on Calderwood, and then Calderwood takes advantage of him, and the other students laugh at the wrong person. It is the older students, as a rule, who are most violently agitated over these philosophical debates. One with a beard cracks his fingers, after the manner of a child in a village school that knows who won the battle of Bannockburn, and feels that he must burst if he does not let it out at once. A bal
d-headed man rises every minute to put a question, and then sits down, looking stupid. He has been trying so hard to remember what it is that he has forgotten. There is a legend of two who quarrelled over the Will and fought it out on Arthur’s Seat.
One year, however, a boy of sixteen or so, with a squeaky voice and a stammer, was Calderwood’s severest critic. He sat on the back bench, and what he wanted to know was something about the infinite. Every discussion day he took advantage of a lull in the debate to squeak out, “With regard to the infinite,” and then could never get any further. No one ever discovered what he wanted enlightenment on about the infinite. He grew despondent as the session wore on, but courageously stuck to his point. Probably he is a soured man now. For purposes of exposition, Calderwood has a blackboard in his lecture-room, on which he chalks circles that represent the feelings and the will, with arrows shooting between them. In my class there was a boy, a very little boy, who had been a dux at school and was a dunce at college. He could not make moral philosophy out at all, but did his best. Here were his complete notes for one day: “Edinburgh University; Class of Moral Philosophy; Professor Calderwood; Lecture 64; Jan. 11. 18 — You rub out the arrow, and there is only the circle left.”
Professor Calderwood is passionately fond of music, as those who visit at his house know. He is of opinion that there is a great deal of moral philosophy in “The Dead March in Saul.” Once he said something to that effect in his class, adding enthusiastically that he could excuse the absence of a student who had been away hearing “The Dead March in Saul.” After that he received a good many letters from students, worded in this way: “Mr. McNaughton (bench 7) presents his compliments to Professor Calderwood, and begs to state that his absence from the class yesterday was owing to his being elsewhere, hearing ‘The Dead March in Saul.’” “Dear Professor Calderwood: I regret my absence from the lecture to-day, but hope you will overlook it, as I was unavoidably detained at home, practising ‘The Dead March in Saul.’ Yours truly, Peter Webster.” “Professor Calderwood: Dear Sir, — As I was coming to the lecture to-day, I heard ‘The Dead March in Saul’ being played in the street. You will, I am sure, make allowance for my non-attendance at the class, as I was too much affected to come. It is indeed a grand march. Yours faithfully, John Robbie.” “The students whose names are subjoined thank the professor of moral philosophy most cordially for his remarks on the elevating power of music. They have been encouraged thereby to start a class for the proper study of the impressive and solemn march to which he called special attention, and hope he will excuse them, should their practisings occasionally prevent their attendance at the Friday lectures.” Professor Calderwood does not lecture on “The Dead March in Saul” now.