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but a fierce strife and commotion, with nothing distinctly visible or
decipherable even yet, but a vague sense of some agony transacting
itself in the dark interior within the loop-holed timbers and rafters,
and of two human arms swung round and round like flails. Then, all
at once, it flashed upon the dreamer what he had been beholding. It
was Judas that was within the hut, and that was the suicide of the
Betrayer.
Every author is to be estimated by specimens of him at his very
best. Dr. John Brown had a favourite phrase for such specimens of
what he thought the very best in the authors he liked. Of a passage,
or of a whole paper, that seemed to him perfect in its kind, perfect in
workmanship as well as in conception, he would say that it was
“done to the quick.” The phrase indicates, in the first place, Dr. John
Brown’s notions of what constitutes true literature of any kind, or at
least true literature of a popular kind, as distinct from miscellaneous
printed matter. It must be something that will reach the feelings.
This being presupposed, then that is best in any author which
reaches the feelings most swiftly and directly,—cuts at once, as it
were, with knife-like acuteness, to the most sensitive depths. That
there are not a few individual passages scattered through Dr. John’s
own writings, and also some entire papers of his, that answer this
description, will have appeared by our review of his writings so far as
they have been yet enumerated. In such papers and passages, as
every reader will observe, even the workmanship is at its best. The
author gathers himself up, as it were; his artistic craft becomes more
decisive and subtle with the heightened glow of his feelings; and his
style, apt to be a little diffuse and slipshod at other times, becomes
nervous and firm.
Of whatever other productions of Dr. John Brown’s pen this may
be asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they
are thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme
praise must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have
reserved to the last,—Rab and his Friends and Our Dogs. Among the
many fine and humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so
happened that love of the lower animals, and especially of the most
faithful and most companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since
Sir Walter Scott limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs
used to fawn upon him, recognising him as the friend of their kind,
there has been no such lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature,
in this city at least, as was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he
should leave this part of himself, one of the ruling affections of his
life, unrepresented in his literary effusions. Hence, while there are
dogs incidentally elsewhere in his writings, these two papers are all
but dedicated to dogs. What need to quote from them? What need to
describe them? They have been read, one of them at least, by perhaps
two millions of the English-reading population of the earth: the very
children of our Board Schools know the story of Rab and his Friends.
How laughingly it opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two
boys in their scamper through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago
after the hullabaloo of the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a
sensation on our first introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South
Bridge, to the great Rab, the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if
with his hands in his pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been
baulked of his victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and
finds the consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we
come, six years afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and
his wife, and the wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and
the carrier and Rab remain there till the operation is over, and the
dead body of poor Ailie is carried home by her husband in his cart
over the miles of snowy country road, and the curtain falls black at
last over the death of the carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself!
Though the story, as the author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly
matter of fact,” who could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little
wonder that it has taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so
commonly spoken of while he was alive as “The author of Rab and
His Friends.” It is by that story, and by those other papers that may
be associated with it as also masterly in their different varieties, as all
equally “done to the quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long
years hence, when all of us are gone, I can imagine that a little
volume will be in circulation, containing Rab and his Friends and
Our Dogs, and also let us say the Letter to Dr. Cairns, and Queen
Mary’s Child-Garden, and Jeems the Doorkeeper, and the paper
called Mystifications, and that called Pet Marjorie or Marjorie
Fleming, and that then readers now unborn, thrilled by that peculiar
touch which only things of heart and genius can give, will confess to
the charm that now fascinates us, and will think with interest of Dr.
John Brown of Edinburgh.
LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH
A GENERAL REVIEW[51]
II.
It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in
the architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir
Walter Scott,—the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised
anywhere on the earth to the memory of a man of letters. The
Edinburgh of the thirty years from 1802 to 1832 was, is, and will ever
be, the Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott. All persons and things else
that were contained in the Edinburgh of those thirty years are
thought of now as having had their being and shelter under the
presidency of that one overarching personality. When these are
counted up, however, the array should be sufficiently impressive,
even were the covering arch removed. The later lives of Henry
Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, and Playfair, and of the Alison of the
Essays on Taste; the lyric genius of the Baroness Nairne, and her
long unavowed songs; the rougher and more prolific muse of James
Hogg; Dr. M’Crie and his historical writings; all the early promise of
the scholarly and poetical Leyden; some of the earlier strains of
Campbell; Dr. Thomas Brown and his metaphysical teachings in
aberration from Dugald Stewart; Mrs. Brunton and her novels; Mrs.
Johnstone and her novels; Miss Ferrier and her novels; the too brief
career of the philologist Dr. Alexander Murray; much of the most
active career, scientific and literary, of Sir David Brewster; the
Scottish Record researches of Thomas Thomson, and the
contributions of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and many of those of David
Laing, to Scottish history and Scottish literary antiquities; the
starting of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817, and the outflashing in
that periodical of Wilson as its “Christopher North,” with his
coadjutor Lockhart; all the rush of fame that attended the “Noctes
Ambrosianæ” in that periodical, with the more quiet popularity of
such particular contributions to its pages as those of David Macbeth
Moir; the first intimations of the extraordinary erudition and the
philosophic power of Sir William Hamilton; the first years of the
Edinburgh section of the life of Dr. Chalmers; the first tentative
residences in Edinburgh, and ultimate settlement there, in
connection with Blackwood and other periodicals, of the strange
English De Quincey, driven thither by stress of livelihood after trial
of London and the Lakes; the somewhat belated outset, in obscure
Edinburgh lodgings, and then in a house in Comely Bank, of what
was to be the great career of Thomas Carlyle; the more precocious
literary assiduity of young Robert Chambers, with results of various
kinds already in print; such are some of the phenomena discernible
in the history of Edinburgh during those thirty years of Scott’s
continuous ascendency through which there ran the equally
continuous shaft of Jeffrey’s critical leadership.
Nor when Scott died was his influence at an end. Edinburgh
moved on, indeed, after his familiar figure had been lost to her, into
another tract of years, full of continued and still interesting literary
activity, in which, of all Scott’s survivors, who so fit to succeed him in
the presidency, who called to it with such acclamation, as the long-
known, long-admired, and still magnificent Christopher North? In
many respects, however, this period of Edinburgh’s continued
literary activity, from 1832 onwards, under the presidency of Wilson,
was really but a prolongation, a kind of afterglow, of the era of the
great Sir Walter.
Not absolutely so. In the Edinburgh from which Sir Walter had
vanished there were various intellectual developments, various
manifestations of literary power and tendency, as well as of social
energy, which Sir Walter could not have foreseen, which were even
alien to his genius, and which owed little or nothing to his example.
There were fifteen years more of the thunders and lightnings of the
great Chalmers; of real importance after a different fashion was the
cool rationality of George Combe, with his physiological and other
teachings; the little English De Quincey, hidden away in no one
knows how many Edinburgh domiciles in succession, and appearing
in the Edinburgh streets and suburbs only furtively and timorously
when he appeared at all, was sending forth more and more of his
wonderful essays and prose-phantasies; less of a recluse, but
somewhat of a recluse too, and a late burner of the lamp, Sir William
Hamilton was still pursuing those studies and speculations which
were to constitute him in the end the most momentous force since
Hume in the profounder philosophy of Great Britain; and, not to
multiply other cases, had there not come into Edinburgh the massive
Hugh Miller from Cromarty, his self-acquired English classicism
superinduced upon native Scandinavian strength, and powdered
with the dust of the Old Red Sandstone?
Not the less, parallel with all this, ran the transmitted influence
of Sir Walter Scott. What we may call the Scotticism of Scott,—that
special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath
and shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in
preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish
Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a
restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of
those Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or
elsewhere. One sees a good deal of this in Christopher North himself,
and also in Hugh Miller. It appears in more pronounced form in the
long-protracted devotion of the good David Laing to those labours of
Scottish antiquarianism which he had begun while Scott was alive
and under Scott’s auspices, and in the accession to the same field of
labour of such later scholars as Cosmo Innes. It appears in the
character of many of those writings which marked the advance of
Robert Chambers, after the days of his youthful attachment to Scott
personally, to his more mature and more independent celebrity. It
appears, moreover, in the nature of much of that publishing
enterprise of the two Chamberses jointly the commencement of
which by the starting of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in the very
year of Scott’s death is itself a memorable thing in the annals of
Edinburgh; and it is discernible in a good deal of the contemporary
publishing activity of other Edinburgh firms. Finally, to keep still to
individuals, do we not see it, though in contrasted guises, in the
literary lives, so closely in contact, of John Hill Burton and William
Edmonstoune Aytoun? If we should seek for a convenient stopping-
point at which to round off our recollections of the whole of that age
of the literary history of Edinburgh which includes both the era of
the living Scott and the described prolongation of that era, then,
unless we stop at the death of Wilson in 1854, may not the death of
Aytoun in 1865 be the point chosen? No more remarkable
representative than Aytoun to the last of what we have called the
afterglow from the spirit of Scott. Various as were his abilities, rich as
was his vein of humour, what was the dominant sentiment of all his
serious verse? What but that to which he has given expression in his
imagined soliloquy of the exiled and aging Prince Charlie?—
“Let me feel the breezes blowing
Fresh along the mountain side!
Let me see the purple heather,
Let me hear the thundering tide,
Be it hoarse as Corrievreckan
Spouting when the storm is high!
Give me back one hour of Scotland;
Let me see it ere I die.”
THE END