Robert F. Murray (Author of the Scarlet Gown): His Poems; with a Memoir

It was a pleasant existence, and the perfume of buds and flowers in the old gardens, hard by those where John Knox sat and talked with James Melville and our other predecessors at St. Leonard’s, is fragrant in our memories. It was pleasant, but St. Leonard’s Hall has ceased to be, and the life there was not the life of the free and hardy bunk-dwellers. Whoso pined for such dissipated pleasures as the chill and dark streets of St. Andrews offer to the gay and rousing blade, was not encouraged. We were very strictly ‘gated,’ though the whole society once got out of window, and, by way of protest, made a moonlight march into the country. We attended ‘gaudeamuses’ and

solatia

 – University suppers – but little; indeed, he who writes does not remember any such diversions of boys who beat the floor, and break the glass. To plant the standard of cricket in the remoter gardens of our country, in a region devastated by golf, was our ambition, and here we had no assistance at all from the University. It was chiefly at lecture, at football on the links, and in the debating societies that we met our fellow-students; like the celebrated starling, ‘we could not get out,’ except to permitted dinners and evening parties. Consequently one could only sketch student life with a hand faltering and untrained. It was very different with Murray and his friends. They were their own masters, could sit up to all hours, smoking, talking, and, I dare say, drinking. As I gather from his letters, Murray drank nothing stronger than water. There was a certain kind of humour in drink, he said, but he thought it was chiefly obvious to the sober spectator. As the sober spectator, he sang of violent delights which have violent ends. He may best be left to illustrate student life for himself. The ‘waster’ of whom he chants is the slang name borne by the local fast man.

THE WASTER SINGING AT MIDNIGHT.

AFTER LONGFELLOW

Loud he sang the song Ta Phershon

For his personal diversion,

Sang the chorus U-pi-dee,

Sang about the Barley Bree.

In that hour when all is quiet

Sang he songs of noise and riot,

In a voice so loud and queer

That I wakened up to hear.

Songs that distantly resembled

Those one hears from men assembled

In the old Cross Keys Hotel,

Only sung not half so well.

For the time of this ecstatic

Amateur was most erratic,

And he only hit the key

Once in every melody.

If “he wot prigs wot isn’t his’n

Ven he’s cotched is sent to prison,”

He who murders sleep might well

Adorn a solitary cell.

But, if no obliging peeler

Will arrest this midnight squealer,

My own peculiar arm of might

Must undertake the job to-night.

The following fragment is but doubtfully autobiographical. ‘The swift four-wheeler’ seldom devastates the streets where, of old, the Archbishop’s jackmen sliced Presbyterian professors with the claymore, as James Melville tells us: —

TO NUMBER 27x

Beloved Peeler! friend and guide

   And guard of many a midnight reeler,

None worthier, though the world is wide,

      Beloved Peeler.

Thou from before the swift four-wheeler

   Didst pluck me, and didst thrust aside

A strongly built provision-dealer

Who menaced me with blows, and cried

   ‘Come on! come on!’  O Paian, Healer,

Then but for thee I must have died,

      Beloved Peeler!

The following presentiment, though he was no ‘waster,’ may very well have been his own. He was only half Scotch, and not at all metaphysical: —

THE WASTER’S PRESENTIMENT

I shall be spun.  There is a voice within

   Which tells me plainly I am all undone;

For though I toil not, neither do I spin,

      I shall be spun.

April approaches.  I have not begun

   Schwegler or Mackintosh, nor will begin

Those lucid works till April 21.

So my degree I do not hope to win,

   For not by ways like mine degrees are won;

And though, to please my uncle, I go in,

      I shall be spun.

Here we must quote, from

The Scarlet Gown

, one of his most tender pieces of affectionate praise bestowed on his favourite city: —

A DECEMBER DAY

Blue, blue is the sea to-day,

   Warmly the light

Sleeps on St. Andrews Bay —

   Blue, fringed with white.

That’s no December sky!

   Surely ’tis June

Holds now her state on high,

   Queen of the noon.

Only the tree-tops bare

   Crowning the hill,

Clear-cut in perfect air,

   Warn us that still

Winter, the aged chief,

   Mighty in power,

Exiles the tender leaf,

   Exiles the flower.

Is there a heart to-day,

   A heart that grieves

For flowers that fade away,

   For fallen leaves?

Oh, not in leaves or flowers

   Endures the charm

That clothes those naked towers

   With love-light warm.

O dear St. Andrews Bay,

   Winter or Spring

Gives not nor takes away

   Memories that cling

All round thy girdling reefs,

   That walk thy shore,

Memories of joys and griefs

   Ours evermore.

‘I have

not

 worked for my classes this session,’ he writes (1884), ‘and shall not take any places.’ The five or six most distinguished pupils used, at least in my time, to receive prize-books decorated with the University’s arms. These prize-men, no doubt, held the ‘places’ alluded to by Murray. If

he

 was idle, ‘I speak of him but brotherly,’ having never held any ‘place’ but that of second to Mr. Wallace, now Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, in the Greek Class (Mr. Sellar’s). Why was one so idle, in Latin (Mr. Shairp), in Morals (Mr. Ferrier), in Logic (Mr. Veitch)? but Logic was unintelligible.

‘I must confess,’ remarks Murray, in a similar spirit of pensive regret, ‘that I have not had any ambition to distinguish myself either in Knight’s (Moral Philosophy) or in Butler’s.’

1

1

  Mr. Butler lectures on Physics, or, as it is called in Scotland, Natural Philosophy.

Murray then speaks with some acrimony about earnest students, whose motive, he thinks, is a small ambition. But surely a man may be fond of metaphysics for the sweet sake of Queen Entelechy, and, moreover, these students looked forward to days in which real work would bear fruit.

‘You must grind up the opinions of Plato, Aristotle, and a lot of other men, concerning things about which they knew nothing, and we know nothing, taking these opinions at second or third hand, and never looking into the works of these men; for to a man who wants to take a place, there is no time for anything of that sort.’

Why not? The philosophers ought to be read in their own language, as they are now read. The remarks on the most fairy of philosophers – Plato; on the greatest of all minds, that of Aristotle, are boyish. Again ‘I speak but brotherly,’ remembering an old St. Leonard’s essay in which Virgil was called ‘the furtive Mantuan,’ and another, devoted to ridicule of Euripides. But Plato and Aristotle we never blasphemed.

Murray adds that he thinks, next year, of taking the highest Greek Class, and English Literature. In the latter, under Mr. Baynes, he took the first place, which he mentions casually to Mrs. Murray about a year after date: —

‘A sweet life and an idle

   He lives from year to year,

Unknowing bit or bridle,

   There are no Proctors here.’

In Greek, despite his enthusiastic admiration of the professor, Mr. Campbell, he did not much enjoy himself: —

   ‘Thrice happy are those

   Who ne’er heard of Greek Prose —

Or Greek Poetry either, as far as that goes;

   For Liddell and Scott

   Shall cumber them not,

Nor Sargent nor Sidgwick shall break their repose.

   But I, late at night,

   By the very bad light

Of very bad gas, must painfully write

   Some stuff that a Greek

   With his delicate cheek

Would smile at as ‘barbarous’ – faith, he well might.

* * * * *

   So away with Greek Prose,

   The source of my woes!

(This metre’s too tough, I must draw to a close.)

   May Sargent be drowned

   In the ocean profound,

And Sidgwick be food for the carrion crows!’

Greek prose is a stubborn thing, and the biographer remembers being told that his was ‘the best, with the worst mistakes’; also frequently by Mr. Sellar, that it was ‘bald.’ But Greek prose is splendid practice, and no less good practice is Greek and Latin verse. These exercises, so much sneered at, are the Dwellers on the Threshold of the life of letters. They are haunting forms of fear, but they have to be wrestled with, like the Angel (to change the figure), till they bless you, and make words become, in your hands, like the clay of the modeller. Could we write Greek like Mr. Jebb, we would never write anything else.

Murray had naturally, it seems, certainly not by dint of wrestling with Greek prose, the mastery of language. His light verse is wonderfully handled, quaint, fluent, right. Modest as he was, he was ambitious, as we said, but not ambitious of any gain; merely eager, in his own way, to excel. His ideal is plainly stated in the following verses: —

ΑΙΕΝ ΑΡΙΣΤΕΥΕΙΝ

Ever to be the best.  To lead

   In whatsoever things are true;

   Not stand among the halting crew,

The faint of heart, the feeble-kneed,

Who tarry for a certain sign

   To make them follow with the rest —

Oh, let not their reproach be thine!

   But ever be the best.

For want of this aspiring soul,

   Great deeds on earth remain undone,

   But, sharpened by the sight of one,

Many shall press toward the goal.

Thou running foremost of the throng,

   The fire of striving in thy breast,

Shalt win, although the race be long,

   And ever be the best.

And wilt thou question of the prize?

   ’Tis not of silver or of gold,

   Nor in applauses manifold,

But hidden in the heart it lies:

To know that but for thee not one

   Had run the race or sought the quest,

To know that thou hast ever done

   And ever been the best.

Murray was never a great athlete: his ambition did not lead him to desire a place in the Scottish Fifteen at Football. Probably he was more likely to be found matched against ‘The Man from Inversnaid.’

IMITATED FROM WORDSWORTH

He brought a team from Inversnaid

   To play our Third Fifteen,

A man whom none of us had played

   And very few had seen.

He weighed not less than eighteen stone,

   And to a practised eye

He seemed as little fit to run

   As he was fit to fly.

He looked so clumsy and so slow,

   And made so little fuss;

But he got in behind – and oh,

   The difference to us!

He was never a golfer; one of his best light pieces, published later in the

Saturday Review

, dealt in kindly ridicule of

The City of Golf

.

‘Would you like to see a city given over,

   Soul and body, to a tyrannising game?

If you would, there’s little need to be a rover,

   For St. Andrews is the abject city’s name.’

He was fond, too fond, of long midnight walks, for in these he overtasked his strength, and he had all a young man’s contempt for maxims about not sitting in wet clothes and wet boots. Early in his letters he speaks of bad colds, and it is matter of tradition that he despised flannel. Most of us have been like him, and have found pleasure in wading Tweed, for example, when chill with snaw-bree. In brief, while reading about Murray’s youth most men must feel that they are reading, with slight differences, about their own. He writes thus of his long darkling tramps, in a rhymed epistle to his friend C. C. C.

‘And I fear we never again shall go,

   The cold and weariness scorning,

For a ten mile walk through the frozen snow

   At one o’clock in the morning:

Out by Cameron, in by the Grange,

   And to bed as the moon descended.

To you and to me there has come a change,

   And the days of our youth are ended.’

One fancies him roaming solitary, after midnight, in the dark deserted streets. He passes the deep porch of the College Church, and the spot where Patrick Hamilton was burned. He goes down to the Castle by the sea, where, some say, the murdered Cardinal may now and again be seen, in his red hat. In South Street he hears the roll and rattle of the viewless carriage which sounds in that thoroughfare. He loiters under the haunted tower on Hepburn’s precinct wall, the tower where the lady of the bright locks lies, with white gloves on her hands. Might he not share, in the desolate Cathedral,

La Messe des Morts

, when all the lost souls of true lovers are allowed to meet once a year. Here be they who were too fond when Culdees ruled, or who loved young monks of the Priory; here be ladies of Queen Mary’s Court, and the fair inscrutable Queen herself, with Chastelard, that died at St. Andrews for desire of her; and poor lassies and lads who were over gay for Andrew Melville and Mr. Blair; and Miss Pett, who tended young Montrose, and may have had a tenderness for his love-locks. They are

a triste

 good company, tender and true, as the lovers of whom M. Anatole France has written (

La Messe des Morts

). Above the witches’ lake come shadows of the women who suffered under Knox and the Bastard of Scotland, poor creatures burned to ashes with none to help or pity. The shades of Dominicans flit by the Black Friars wall – verily the place is haunted, and among Murray’s pleasures was this of pacing alone, by night, in that airy press and throng of those who lived and loved and suffered so long ago —

‘The mist hangs round the College tower,

   The ghostly street

Is silent at this midnight hour,

   Save for my feet.

With none to see, with none to hear,

   Downward I go

To where, beside the rugged pier,

   The sea sings low.

It sings a tune well loved and known

   In days gone by,

When often here, and not alone,

   I watched the sky.’

But he was not always, nor often, lonely. He was fond of making his speech at the Debating Societies, and his speeches are remembered as good. If he declined the whisky and water, he did not flee the weed. I borrow from

College Echoes

 —

A TENNYSONIAN FRAGMENT

So in the village inn the poet dwelt.

His honey-dew was gone; only the pouch,

His cousin’s work, her empty labour, left.

But still he sniffed it, still a fragrance clung

And lingered all about the broidered flowers.

Then came his landlord, saying in broad Scotch,

‘Smoke plug, mon,’ whom he looked at doubtfully.

Then came the grocer saying, ‘Hae some twist

At tippence,’ whom he answered with a qualm.

But when they left him to himself again,

Twist, like a fiend’s breath from a distant room

Diffusing through the passage, crept; the smell

Deepening had power upon him, and he mixt

His fancies with the billow-lifted bay

Of Biscay, and the rollings of a ship.

And on that night he made a little song,

And called his song ‘The Song of Twist and Plug,’

And sang it; scarcely could he make or sing.

‘Rank is black plug, though smoked in wind and rain;

And rank is twist, which gives no end of pain;

I know not which is ranker, no, not I.

‘Plug, art thou rank? then milder twist must be;

Plug, thou art milder: rank is twist to me.

O twist, if plug be milder, let me buy.

‘Rank twist, that seems to make me fade away,

Rank plug, that navvies smoke in loveless clay,

I know not which is ranker, no, not I.

‘I fain would purchase flake, if that could be;

I needs must purchase plug, ah, woe is me!

Plug and a cutty, a cutty, let me buy.

His was the best good thing of the night’s talk, and the thing that was remembered. He excited himself a good deal over Rectorial Elections. The duties of the Lord Rector and the mode of his election have varied frequently in near five hundred years. In Murray’s day, as in my own, the students elected their own Rector, and before Lord Bute’s energetic reign, the Rector had little to do, but to make a speech, and give a prize. I vaguely remember proposing the author of

Tom Brown

 long ago: he was not, however, in the running.

Politics often inspire the electors; occasionally (I have heard) grave seniors use their influence, mainly for reasons of academic policy.

In December 1887 Murray writes about an election in which Mr. Lowell was a candidate. ‘A pitiful protest was entered by an’ (epithets followed by a proper name) ‘against Lowell, on the score of his being an alien. Mallock, as you learn, was withdrawn, for which I am truly thankful.’ Unlucky Mr. Mallock! ‘Lowell polled 100 and Gibson 92.. The intrigues and corruption appear to be almost worthy of an American Presidential election.’ Mr. Lowell could not accept a compliment which pleased him, because of his official position, and the misfortune of his birth!

Murray was already doing a very little ‘miniature journalism,’ in the form of University Notes for a local paper. He complains of the ultra Caledonian frankness with which men told him that they were very bad. A needless, if friendly, outspokenness was a feature in Scottish character which he did not easily endure. He wrote a good deal of verse in the little University paper, now called

College Echoes

.

If Murray ever had any definite idea of being ordained for the ministry in any ‘denomination,’ he abandoned it. His ‘bursaries’ (scholarships or exhibitions), on which he had been passing rich, expired, and he had to earn a livelihood. It seems plain to myself that he might easily have done so with his pen. A young friend of my own (who will excuse me for thinking that his bright verses are not

better

 than Murray’s) promptly made, by these alone, an income which to Murray would have been affluence. But this could not be done at St. Andrews. Again, Murray was not in contact with people in the centre of newspapers and magazines. He went very little into general society, even at St. Andrews, and thus failed, perhaps, to make acquaintances who might have been ‘useful.’ He would have scorned the idea of making useful acquaintances. But without seeking them, why should we reject any friendliness when it offers itself? We are all members one of another. Murray speaks of his experience of human beings, as rich in examples of kindness and good-will. His shyness, his reserve, his extreme unselfishness, – carried to the point of diffidence, – made him rather shun than seek older people who were dangerously likely to be serviceable. His manner, when once he could be induced to meet strangers, was extremely frank and pleasant, but from meeting strangers he shrunk, in his inveterate modesty.

In 1886 Murray had the misfortune to lose is father, and it became, perhaps, more prominently needful that he should find a profession. He now assisted Professor Meiklejohn of St. Andrews in various kinds of literary and academic work, and in him found a friend, with whom he remained in close intercourse to the last. He began the weary path, which all literary beginners must tread, of sending contributions to magazines. He seldom read magazine articles. ‘I do not greatly care for “Problems” and “vexed questions.” I am so much of a problem and a vexed question that I have quite enough to do in searching for a solution of my own personality.’ He tried a story, based on ‘a midnight experience’ of his own; unluckily he does not tell us what that experience was. Had he encountered one of the local ghosts?

‘My blood-curdling romance I offered to the editor of

Longman’s Magazine

, but that misguided person was so ill-advised as to return it, accompanied with one of these abominable lithographed forms conveying his hypocritical regrets.’ Murray sent a directed envelope with a twopenny-halfpenny stamp. The paper came back for three-halfpence by book-post. ‘I have serious thoughts of sueing him for the odd penny!’ ‘Why should people be fools enough to read my rot when they have twenty volumes of Scott at their command?’ He confesses to ‘a Scott-mania almost as intense as if he were the last new sensation.’ ‘I was always fond of him, but I am fonder than ever now.’ This plunge into the immortal romances seems really to have discouraged Murray; at all events he says very little more about attempts in fiction of his own. ‘I am a barren rascal,’ he writes, quoting Johnson on Fielding. Like other men, Murray felt extreme difficulty in writing articles or tales which have an infinitesimal chance of being accepted. It needs a stout heart to face this almost fixed certainty of rejection: a man is weakened by his apprehensions of a lithographed form, and of his old manuscript coming home to roost, like the Graces of Theocritus, to pine in the dusty chest where is their chill abode. If the Alexandrian poets knew this ill-fortune, so do all beginners in letters. There is nothing for it but ‘putting a stout heart to a stey brae,’ as the Scotch proverb says. Editors want good work, and on finding a new man who is good, they greatly rejoice. But it is so difficult to do vigorous and spontaneous work, as it were, in the dark. Murray had not, it is probable, the qualities of the novelist, the narrator. An excellent critic he might have been if he had ‘descended to criticism,’ but he had, at this time, no introductions, and probably did not address reviews at random to editors. As to poetry, these much-vexed men receive such enormous quantities of poetry that they usually reject it at a venture, and obtain the small necessary supplies from agreeable young ladies. Had Murray been in London, with a few literary friends, he might soon have been a thriving writer of light prose and light verse. But the enchantress held him; he hated London, he had no literary friends, he could write gaily for pleasure, not for gain. So, like the Scholar Gypsy, he remained contemplative,

‘Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.’

About this time the present writer was in St. Andrews as Gifford Lecturer in Natural Theology. To say that an enthusiasm for totems and taboos, ghosts and gods of savage men, was aroused by these lectures, would be to exaggerate unpardonably. Efforts to make the students write essays or ask questions were so entire a failure that only one question was received – as to the proper pronunciation of ‘Myth.’ Had one been fortunate enough to interest Murray, it must have led to some discussion of his literary attempts. He mentions having attended a lecture given by myself to the Literary Society on ‘Literature as a Profession,’ and he found the lecturer ‘far more at home in such a subject than in the Gifford Lectures.’ Possibly the hearer was ‘more at home’ in literature than in discussions as to the origin of Huitzilopochtli. ‘Literature,’ he says, ‘never was, is not, and never will be, in the ordinary sense of the term, a profession. You can’t teach it as you can the professions, you can’t succeed in it as you can in the professions, by dint of mere diligence and without special aptitude.. I think all this chatter about the technical and pecuniary sides of literature is extremely foolish and worse than useless. It only serves to glut the idle curiosity of the general public about matters with which they have no concern, a curiosity which (thanks partly to American methods of journalism) has become simply outrageous.’

Into chatter about the pecuniary aspect of literature the Lecturer need hardly say that he did not meander. It is absolutely true that literature cannot be taught. Maupassant could have dispensed with the instructions of Flaubert. But an ‘aptitude’ is needed in all professions, and in such arts as music, and painting, and sculpture, teaching is necessary. In literature, teaching can only come from general education in letters, from experience, from friendly private criticism. But if you cannot succeed in literature ‘by dint of mere diligence,’ mere diligence is absolutely essential. Men must read, must observe, must practise. Diligence is as necessary to the author as to the grocer, the solicitor, the dentist, the barrister, the soldier. Nothing but nature can give the aptitude; diligence must improve it, and experience may direct it. It is not enough to wait for the spark from heaven to fall; the spark must be caught, and tended, and cherished. A man must labour till he finds his vein, and himself. Again, if literature is an art, it is also a profession. A man’s very first duty is to support himself and those, if any, who are dependent on him. If he cannot do it by epics, tragedies, lyrics, he must do it by articles, essays, tales, or how he honestly can. He must win his leisure by his labour, and give his leisure to his art. Murray, at this time, was diligent in helping to compile and correct educational works. He might, but for the various conditions of reserve, hatred of towns, and the rest, have been earning his leisure by work more brilliant and more congenial to most men. But his theory of literature was so lofty that he probably found the other, the harder, the less remunerative, the less attractive work, more congenial to his tastes.

He describes, to Mrs. Murray, various notable visitors to St. Andrews: Professor Butcher, who lectured on Lucian, and is ‘very handsome,’ Mr. Arthur Balfour, the Lord Rector, who is ‘rather handsome,’ and delights the listener by his eloquence; Mr. Chamberlain, who pleases him too, though he fin