Adventures among Books

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Among Dr. Brown's papers on children, that called "Pet Marjorie" holds
the highest place. Perhaps certain passages are "wrote too
sentimentally," as Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the practice
of many authors. But it was difficult to be perfectly composed when
speaking of this wonderful fairy-like little girl, whose affection was as
warm as her humour and genius were precocious. "Infant phenomena" are
seldom agreeable, but Marjorie was so humorous, so quick-tempered, so
kind, that we cease to regard her as an intellectual "phenomenon." Her
memory remains sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of little
Penelope Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, and
who died very soon after she was thus made Immortal.

It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie Fleming; every one
knows about her and her studies: "Isabella is teaching me to make simme
colings, nots of interrigations, peorids, commoes, &c." Here is a
Shakespearian criticism, of which few will deny the correctness:
"'Macbeth' is a pretty composition, but awful one." Again, "I never read
sermons of any kind, but I read novelettes and my Bible." "'Tom Jones'
and Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard' are both excellent, and much
spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men." Her Calvinistic belief
in "_unquestionable_ fire and brimston" is unhesitating, but the young
theologian appears to have substituted "unquestionable" for
"unquenchable." There is something humorous in the alteration, as if
Marjorie refused to be put off with an "excellent family substitute" for
fire and brimstone, and demanded the "unquestionable" article, no other
being genuine, please observe trade mark.

Among Dr. Brown's contributions to the humorous study of dogs, "Rab," of
course, holds the same place as Marjorie among his sketches of children.
But if his "Queen Mary's Child Garden," the description of the little
garden in which Mary Stuart did _not_ play when a child, is second to
"Marjorie," so "Our Dogs" is a good second to "Rab." Perhaps Dr. Brown
never wrote anything more mirthful than his description of the sudden
birth of the virtue of courage in Toby, a comic but cowardly mongrel, a
cur of low degree.

"Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens
before his own and the neighbouring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors
off, a bulky, choleric, red-faced man--_torvo vultu_--was, by law of
contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby
into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his
eye. One day, his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone,
and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been
planting some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick
Toby made very light of, substituted his bone, and was engaged
covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling
nose, when S. spied him through the inner glass door, and was out upon
him, like the Assyrian, with a terrific _gowl_. I watched them.
Instantly Toby made at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than
Scrymgeour's, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there
is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby contented himself with
proclaiming his victory at the door, and, returning, finished his bone-
planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass
door, glared at him. From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck
at first sight was lord of all . . . That very evening he paid a visit
to Leo, next door's dog, a big tyrannical bully and coward . . . To
him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked
about, as much as to say, 'Come on, Macduff'; but Macduff did not come
on."

This story is one of the most amazing examples of instant change of
character on record, and disproves the sceptical remark that "no one was
ever converted, except prize-fighters, and colonels in the army." I am
sorry to say that Dr. Brown was too fond of dogs to be very much attached
to cats. I never heard him say anything against cats, or, indeed,
against anybody; but there are passages in his writings which tend to
show that, when young and thoughtless, he was not far from regarding cats
as "the higher vermin." He tells a story of a Ghazi puss, so to speak, a
victorious cat, which, entrenched in a drain, defeated three dogs with
severe loss, and finally escaped unharmed from her enemies. Dr. Brown's
family gloried in the possession of a Dandy Dinmont named John Pym, whose
cousin (Auld Pepper) belonged to one of my brothers. Dr. Brown was much
interested in Pepper, a dog whose family pride was only matched by that
of the mother of Candide, and, at one time, threatened to result in the
extinction of this branch of the House of Pepper. Dr. Brown had
remarked, and my own observations confirm it, that when a Dandy is not
game, his apparent lack of courage arises "from kindness of heart."

Among Dr. Brown's landscapes, as one may call his descriptions of
scenery, and of the ancient historical associations with Scotch scenery,
"Minchmoor" is the most important. He had always been a great lover of
the Tweed. The walk which he commemorates in "Minchmoor" was taken, if I
am not mistaken, in company with Principal Shairp, Professor of Poetry in
the University of Oxford, and author of one of the most beautiful of
Tweedside songs, a modern "Bush aboon Traquair:"--

"And what saw ye there,
At the bush aboon Traquair;
Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed?
I heard the cushie croon
Thro' the gowden afternoon,
And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale o' Tweed."

There is in the country of Scott no pleasanter walk than that which Dr.
Brown took in the summer afternoon. Within a few miles, many places
famous in history and ballad may be visited: the road by which Montrose's
men fled from Philiphaugh fight; Traquair House, with the bears on its
gates, as on the portals of the Baron of Bradwardine; Williamhope, where
Scott and Mungo Park, the African explorer, parted and went their several
ways. From the crest of the road you see all the Border hills, the
Maiden Paps, the Eildons cloven in three, the Dunion, the Windburg, and
so to the distant Cheviots, and Smailholm Tower, where Scott lay when a
child, and clapped his hands at the flashes of the lightning, _haud sine
Dis animosus infans_, like Horace.

From the crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley of
Yarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the "dowie dens," and so,
"through the pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to the
railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back Tamlane from
the queen of the fairies. All this country was familiar to Dr. Brown,
and on one of the last occasions when I met him, he was living at
Hollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel, Scott's home while he was
happy and prosperous, before he had the unhappy thought of building
Abbotsford. At the time I speak of, Dr. Brown had long ceased to write,
and his health suffered from attacks of melancholy, in which the world
seemed very dark to him. I have been allowed to read some letters which
he wrote in one of these intervals of depression. With his habitual
unselfishness, he kept his melancholy to himself, and, though he did not
care for society at such times, he said nothing of his own condition that
could distress his correspondent. In the last year of his life,
everything around him seemed to brighten: he was unusually well, he even
returned to his literary work, and saw his last volume of collected
essays through the press. They were most favourably received, and the
last letters which I had from him spoke of the pleasure which this
success gave him. Three editions of his book ("John Leech, and Other
Essays") were published in some six weeks. All seemed to go well, and
one might even have hoped that, with renewed strength, he would take up
his pen again. But his strength was less than we had hoped. A cold
settled on his lungs, and, in spite of the most affectionate nursing, he
grew rapidly weaker. He had little suffering at the end, and his mind
remained unclouded. No man of letters could be more widely regretted,
for he was the friend of all who read his books, as, even to people who
only met him once or twice in life, he seemed to become dear and
familiar.

In one of his very latest writings, "On Thackeray's Death," Dr. Brown
told people (what some of them needed, and still need to be told) how
good, kind, and thoughtful for others was our great writer--our greatest
master of fiction, I venture to think, since Scott. Some of the lines
Dr. Brown wrote of Thackerary might be applied to himself: "He looked
always fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost
infantile face"--a face very pale, and yet radiant, in his last years,
and mildly lit up with eyes full of kindness, and softened by sorrow. In
his last year, Mr. Swinburne wrote to Dr. Brown this sonnet, in which
there seems something of the poet's prophetic gift, and a voice sounds as
of a welcome home:--

"Beyond the north wind lay the land of old,
Where men dwelt blithe and blameless, clothed and fed
With joy's bright raiment, and with love's sweet bread,--
The whitest flock of earth's maternal fold,
None there might wear about his brows enrolled
A light of lovelier fame than rings your head,
Whose lovesome love of children and the dead
All men give thanks for; I, far off, behold
A dear dead hand that links us, and a light
The blithest and benignest of the night,--
The night of death's sweet sleep, wherein may be
A star to show your spirit in present sight
Some happier isle in the Elysian sea
Where Rab may lick the hand of Marjorie."




CHAPTER IV: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES


Never but once did I enjoy the privilege of meeting the author of "Elsie
Venner"--Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was at a dinner given by Mr. Lowell,
and of conversation with Dr. Holmes I had very little. He struck me as
being wonderfully erect, active, and vivacious for his great age. He
spoke (perhaps I should not chronicle this impression)--he spoke much,
and freely, but rather as if he were wound up to speak, so to say--wound
up, I mean, by a sense of duty to himself and kindness to strangers, who
were naturally curious about so well-known a man. In his aspect there
was a certain dryness, and, altogether, his vivacity, his ceaselessness,
and a kind of equability of tone in his voice, reminded me of what Homer
says concerning the old men around Priam, above the gate of Troy, how
they "chirped like cicalas on a summer day." About the matter of his
talk I remember nothing, only the manner remains with me, and mine may
have been a false impression, or the manner may have been accidental, and
of the moment: or, again, a manner appropriate for conversation with
strangers, each coming up one after the other, to view respectfully so
great a lion. Among his friends and intimates he was probably a
different man, with a tone other and more reposeful.

He had a long, weary task before him, then, to talk his way, ever
courteous, alert, attentive, through part of a London season. Yet, when
it was all over, he seems to have enjoyed it, being a man who took
pleasure in most sorts of experience. He did not affect me, for that one
time, with such a sense of pleasure as Mr. Lowell did--Mr. Lowell, whom I
knew so much better, and who was so big, strong, humorous, kind, learned,
friendly, and delightfully natural.

Dr. Holmes, too, was a delightful companion, and I have merely tried to
make a sort of photographic "snap-shot" at him, in a single casual
moment, one of myriads of such moments. Turning to Dr. Holmes's popular,
as distinct from his professional writings, one is reminded, as one often
is, of the change which seems to come over some books as the reader grows
older. Many books are to one now what they always were; some, like the
Waverley novels and Shakespeare, grow better on every fresh reading.
There are books which filled me, in boyhood or in youth, with a sort of
admiring rapture, and a delighted wonder at their novelty, their
strangeness, freshness, greatness. Thus Homer, and the best novels of
Thackeray, and of Fielding, the plays of Moliere and Shakespeare, the
poems of--well, of all the real poets, moved this astonishment of
admiration, and being read again, they move it still. On a different
level, one may say as much about books so unlike each other, as those of
Poe and of Sir Thomas Browne, of Swift and of Charles Lamb.

There are, again, other books which caused this happy emotion of wonder,
when first perused, long since, but which do so no longer. I am not much
surprised to find Charles Kingsley's novels among them.

In the case of Dr. Holmes's books, I am very sensible of this
disenchanting effect of time and experience. "The Professor at the
Breakfast Table" and the novels came into my hands when I was very young,
in "green, unknowing youth." They seemed extraordinary, new, fantasies
of wisdom and wit; the reflections were such as surprised me by their
depth, the illustrations dazzled by their novelty and brilliance.
Probably they will still be as fortunate with young readers, and I am to
be pitied, I hope, rather than blamed, if I cannot, like the wise thrush--

"Recapture
The first fine careless rapture."

By this time, of course, one understands many of the constituents of Dr.
Holmes's genius, the social, historical, ancestral, and professional
elements thereof. Now, it is the business of criticism to search out and
illustrate these antecedents, and it seems a very odd and unlucky thing,
that the results of this knowledge when acquired, should sometimes be a
partial disenchantment. But we are not disenchanted at all by this kind
of science, when the author whom we are examining is a great natural
genius, like Shakespeare or Shelley, Keats or Scott. Such natures bring
to the world far more than they receive, as far as our means of knowing
what they receive are concerned. The wind of the spirit that is not of
this earth, nor limited by time and space, breathes through their words,
and thoughts, and deeds. They are not mere combinations, however deft
and subtle, of _known_ atoms. They must continually delight, and
continually surprise; custom cannot stale them; like the heaven-born Laws
in Sophocles, age can never lull them to sleep. Their works, when they
are authors, never lose hold on our fancy and our interest.

As far as my own feelings and admiration can inform me, Dr. Holmes,
though a most interesting and amiable and kindly man and writer, was not
of this class. As an essayist, a delineator of men and morals, an
unassuming philosopher, with a light, friendly wit, he certainly does not
hold one as, for example, Addison does. The old _Spectator_ makes me
smile, pleases, tickles, diverts me now, even more than when I lay on the
grass and read it by Tweedside, as a boy, when the trout were sluggish,
in the early afternoon. It is only a personal fact that Dr. Holmes, read
in the same old seasons, with so much pleasure and admiration and
surprise, no longer affects me in the old way. Carlyle, on the other
hand, in his "Frederick," which used to seem rather long, now entertains
me far more than ever. But I am well aware that this is a mere
subjective estimate; that Dr. Holmes may really be as great a genius as I
was wont to think him, for criticism is only a part of our impressions.
The opinion of mature experience, as a rule, ought to be sounder than
that of youth; in this case I cannot but think that it is sounder.

Dr. Holmes was a New Englander, and born in what he calls "the Brahmin
caste," the class which, in England, before the sailing of the _May
Flower_, and ever since, had always been literary and highly educated. "I
like books; I was born and bred among them," he says, "and have the easy
feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among
horses." He is fond of books, and, above all, of old books--strange, old
medical works, for example--full of portents and prodigies, such as those
of Wierus.

New England, owing to its famous college, Harvard, and its steady
maintenance of the literary and learned tradition among the clergy, was,
naturally, the home of the earliest great American school of writers.
These men--Longfellow, Lowell, Ticknor, Prescott, Hawthorne, and so many
others--had all received the same sort of education as Europeans of
letters used to receive. They had not started as printers' devils, or
newspaper reporters, or playwrights for the stage, but were academic. It
does not matter much how a genius begins--as a rural butcher, or an
apothecary, or a clerk of a Writer to the Signet. Still, the New
Englanders were academic and classical. New England has, by this time,
established a tradition of its literary origin and character. Her
children are sons of the Puritans, with their independence, their
narrowness, their appreciation of comfort, their hardiness in doing
without it, their singular scruples of conscience, their sense of the
awfulness of sin, their accessibility to superstition. We can read of
the later New Englanders in the making, among the works of Cotton Mather,
his father Increase Mather, and the witch-burning, periwig-hating,
doctrinal Judge Sewall, who so manfully confessed and atoned for his
mistake about the Salem witches. These men, or many of them, were deeply-
learned Calvinists, according to the standard of their day, a day lasting
from, say, the Restoration to 1730. Cotton Mather, in particular, is
erudite, literary--nay, full of literary vanity--mystical, visionary,
credulous to an amusing degree.

But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish correspondent and
counterpart, Wodrow. The sons or grandsons of these men gained the War
of Independence. Of this they are naturally proud, and the circumstance
is not infrequently mentioned in Dr. Holmes's works. Their democracy is
not roaring modern democracy, but that of the cultivated middle classes.
Their stern Calvinism slackened into many "isms," but left a kind of
religiosity behind it. One of Dr. Holmes's mouthpieces sums up his whole
creed in the two words _Pater Noster_. All these hereditary influences
are consciously made conspicuous in Dr. Holmes's writings, as in
Hawthorne's. In Hawthorne you see the old horror of sin, the old terror
of conscience, the old dread of witchcraft, the old concern about
conduct, converted into aesthetic sources of literary pleasure, of
literary effects.

As a physician and a man of science, Dr. Holmes added abundant knowledge
of the new sort; and apt, unexpected bits of science made popular,
analogies and illustrations afforded by science are frequent in his
works. Thus, in "Elsie Venner," and in "The Guardian Angel," "heredity"
is his theme. He is always brooding over the thought that each of us is
so much made up of earlier people, our ancestors, who bequeath to us so
many disagreeable things--vice, madness, disease, emotions, tricks of
gesture. No doubt these things are bequeathed, but all in such new
proportions and relations, that each of us is himself and nobody else,
and therefore had better make up his mind to _be_ himself, and for
himself responsible.

All this doctrine of heredity, still so dimly understood, Dr. Holmes
derives from science. But, in passing through his mind, that of a New
Englander conscious of New England's past, science takes a stain of
romance and superstition. Elsie Venner, through an experience of her
mother's, inherits the nature of the serpent, so the novel is as far from
common life as the tale of "Melusine," or any other echidna. The fantasy
has its setting in a commonplace New England environment, and thus
recalls a Hawthorne less subtle and concentrated, but much more humorous.
The heroine of the "Guardian Angel," again, exposes a character in
layers, as it were, each stratum of consciousness being inherited from a
different ancestor--among others, a red Indian. She has many
personalities, like the queer women we read about in French treatises on
hysterics and nervous diseases. These stories are "fairy tales of
science," by a man of science, who is also a humourist, and has a touch
of the poet, and of the old fathers who were afraid of witches. The
"blend" is singular enough, and not without its originality of
fascination.

Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently took an imaginative
pleasure in all shapes of superstition that he could muster. I must
quote a passage from "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," as
peculiarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half accepting the
abnormally romantic--accepting just enough for pleasure, like Sir Walter
Scott. Connected with the extract is a curious anecdote.

"I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was
a boy, that diabolised my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
neighbourhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks
called the 'Devil's footsteps.' These were patches of sand in the
pastures, where no grass grew, where even the low-bush blackberry, the
'dewberry,' as our Southern neighbours call it, in prettier and more
Shakespearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers, where even
the pale, dry, sadly-sweet 'everlasting' could not grow, but all was bare
and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near
my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor. I do
not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,--little
having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very
desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the north-
west corner, and on the level of the third or fourth storey, there are
signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be
mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried
away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair, and I do not
care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the
chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the
building there could be no question; and the zigzag line, where the
mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible.

"The queer burnt spots, called the 'Devil's footsteps,' had never
attracted attention before this time, though there is no evidence that
they had not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a
'Goody,' so called, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange
horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know
something . . . I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of
impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with
untenanted locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret,--with
'Devil's footsteps' in the fields behind the house, and in front of it
the patched dormitory, where the unexplained occurrence had taken place
which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one
of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a
dreadful season of mental conflict, took to religion, and became renowned
for his ascetic sanctity."

It is a pity that Dr. Holmes does not give the whole story, instead of
hinting at it, for a similar tale is told at Brazenose College, and
elsewhere. Now take, along with Dr. Holmes's confession to a grain of
superstition, this remark on, and explanation of, the curious
coincidences which thrust themselves on the notice of most people.

"Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commonstable. Young fellows
being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the
evening meal, it was a trick of some of the boys to impale a slice of
meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork, holding it, beneath
the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that
guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and
kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one, if
it was not in its place. Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so
many years to hear of this College trick, I should hear it mentioned a
_second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a College youth of the
present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and
to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these
twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

"I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as
an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of
subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our
attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts
and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.