Letters to Isabel

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BOSTON! OOLLEQeI

I

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LETTER

1. The Promise

2. ROSYTH

Letter I The Promise

Craigmyle.

My dear Isabel, I can write again !

Sitting in the loggia here, I look over great fair spaces of Scotland. Under an arc of crystal air the scene, serene and splendid, stretches out : horizoned by Mounts Battock and Keen, by Lochnagar, by Morven, and away west by far Ben Avon — seventy miles from point to point !

It outrivals the noble view which spread before the eyes of Marmion and his men when they surveyed, from the Braids, Edinburgh and the gleaming Firth, and north to the bounding line of the Ochils. Then it was that FitzEustace could not forbear and

"Cried, * Where's the coward who would not dare

To fight for such a land ! ' "

But of those great things — daring, fighting, dying — there is no question here. For it is the land of the Gordons. Alas ! to many homes, away out there, has come the Great Bereaving.

And so it is that it is not space nor beauty that most

B I impresses one. It is that all at last is peace. The Great War has closed.

In town, from day to day, one vividly realizes that, although peace — a glorious peace — has been won, yet deep problems have arisen, and suffering and peril remain, for our heroic people. From the highest political to the humblest domestic spheres we have still to reap the aftermath of war.

I received a letter a few days ago from General Smuts, saying good-bye, after his remarkable labours in England and Paris. He was, as you know, the representative of South Africa at the Peace Conference, and was appointed to that high position after his victorious African campaign. He puts the same thought about the after-war thus : —

"It will be a great change to go back to my small world, after having taken part in the greatest doings on earth. But I shall at any rate be very happy to rejoin my little family after an absence of three and a half years. What a time that has been ! What ' crowded hours of glorious life.* But the aftermath is coming, and I fear we shall see grave troubles all over the world. I hope you have liked my few parting words to the British Public, calling them to patience and generosity in the difficult times ahead. Our worn-out nerves and temper are indeed going to be put to the severest test. I pray that God may not leave the poor, erring tribes of men to their own devices.

"Good-bye, my dear Friend. I send my dear love to you and Lady Shaw.

"Ever yours most sincerely,

"T. C. Smuts."

You know what in our home circle we think of Smuts. He is — is he not? — the Christian warrior; a fine combination of courage and faith, of unquenchable valour, and yet of the just, the serene, and the equal mind.

THE PROMISE

Once, in a letter which I had from Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman, and which I shall tell you of some day, he described to me what was higher as a political object than party or national triumph, or the overthrow of others, namely, to make — I think these were his words — to make those love us who now hate us." And this — in the grant of a Constitution to South Africa — Sir Henry did. Both Botha and Smuts have talked to me recently about him with veneration and affection, in this sense.

But South Africa is another story. After a bit we shall come to it. Meantime, we are not doing things decently and in order, for we have not begun at the beginning.

I am rather at your mercy ; you know how importunate you are that I should " tell you things," and then how you gravel me with : " Why don't you write that down ? " And so I have grown submissive just because I am so browbeaten.

Autobiography ? Catch me ! Horrible word : horrible thing ! To stand aloof from oneself, mere impossible acrobatics : to pretend that you are unconcerned as to whether you should appear a pleasing object? — mere useless affectation.

So what to do ? Just this : to let you see places, events and men just as I happen to remember them; and if I stumble across the picture with any of the struggles and the happinesses of my own life, I shall be there because you have dragged me in.

I know that you want something about the early days. Calm yourself, my dear; perhaps you may hear from me to-morrow.

Meantime, as I say, it is the peace of everything here which sinks into the soul. Away south, railway strikes, bread strikes, coal strikes, with a haunting dread of social upheaval. Here, the fields of ripening grain and the everlasting hills.

Your grateful

Father.

Letter II Rosyth

Craigmyle.

My dear,

Of all the changes in the appearance of places that I can think of, you will be surprised to hear me name Rosyth; I think Rosyth shows the greatest. It is tacked on to Dunfermline — with which it has about as much affinity as modern brass-work has to old tapestry : it is born of the spirit of war and the needs of war, and this in a place which was the very backwater of peace.

The clang-clang of industry — at high pressure for the mastery of the seas — resounds on a shore where in the 'Fifties you would see a belt of shingly beach with here and there a broken bottle or an old boot which the shifting of the tide had floated along from Limekilns — their natural emporium. And you might see, stepping westwards to the Castle of Rosyth, a couple of slow-paced, heavily built men, who addressed each other as " Captain,'* and in a floating odour of black twist spoke affectionately of a sloop or a brig which bore a wife's or a daughter's name, and which went out across the North Sea and through the Cattegat to Riga.

Yet their talk, too, was of change ; mostly, however, of decay — the decay of Limekilns and Charlestown, and even Inverkeithing.

Such pictures could not but remain — etched into the memory of even the most restless of boys ; and the scenes of to-day sometimes appear to fade away, and in their place, as on a palimpsest from which the latest writing was thought to have been quite erased, there appears the earlier and the primitive record — imprinted, overlaid, but ineffaceable.

There, for instance, are huge docks and quays, and there float battleships, cruisers, destroyers — the wonder of the age and the terror of the world. But all these pass away, and on the self-same spot I see a little horseshoe of stone, the prongs projected well into the salt water, where children, adventurously wandering from Dunfermline, were wont to bathe, without guardians and without fear.

One grown-up " I remenjber well, a solicitor {Scotice, a " writer named Blair — one of the kindliest humour, and most oracular of speech. Later, I used to hear of his not infrequent reply to the not infrequent question : "Well, Mr. Blair, how's business?" To this came, with a sidelong cock of the head : Business, Sir ! In the language of Thomas de Quincey, business is suffering from syncope, or solemn pause ! " This good man came for his daily bathe to the " Basin of Rosyth." And so the vision of the bustling present, with its majestic panoply of naval power — all this fades out; and in its place I see the tall and sinewy form of Thomas Blair, the writer, poised on a slab of rock, ere he plunged into the greygreen waters of the Firth.

This, dear — would you believe it? — was more than sixty years ago. There was then, as it were, an interlude of peace : the Crimean War was over in 1856; the follow-

ROSYTH ing was the year of the Indian Mutinyl: and so when I was six and seven — your respected father, if you care to know it, was born in 1850 — there came new place-names into even the vocabulary of the child. The one, reverberating through the world, was Sebastopol : the other Lucknow; and these I distinctly remember as the gates which opened on new avenues to wonder; and War, and even Empire, gave an ampler range to the talk of the fireside.

And so far as the old world was concerned, the next nine years — that is, from the Mutiny to Sadowa — from the shock and terror of India to the sudden outbreak of Prussian military ambition, bursting like a new fear upon Europe — those nine years were the years of my conscious school life.

You would like to hear about that fireside talk and that school life, would you? Well, I am not sure. We shall see about it. Good night !

Your very own

True Love.

LETTER III Craigmyle

September i<^, 1920.

Dear Infanta Isabella,

How dim the memory grows about the early years ! And how capricious it is !

No room in this world — no, not in king's palace or nobleman's castle, or anything down to the humblest sheiling on the hillside — can stamp its picture into my mind so deeply as the little reading-parlour with the high glazed bookcase and the great leathern arm-chair in which of an evening she sat.

So brave and practical she was ! You may see her lineaments in the last chapter of Proverbs. Yes, my mother (and yours too, dear, but you must not let her see this letter!) — they both earned that priceless encomium: " In her tongue is the law of kindness." Yet she was austere, and with a high authority. Sometimes she was bemused ; and when asked the reason, would reply, Did I look bethochted ? " and smile.

Dimly I understood that she was seeing again the procession of her sorrows. And what sorrows they were ! My father's death, just as he was making his standing sure; then the eldest of a family of six, a lovely darkringleted girl, in her twentieth year, her mother's beloved counsellor, fading away like a flower, as if

Death itself was afraid to snatch suddenly; then the infant girl, born on the day of my father's death, and named after him, Alexandrina — she, too, torn from her arms. I remember the doctor coming; and after his verdict — ah ! how I remember it ! — never in my life did I hear anything more pitiful than her heart-broken cry.

Yet the dark clouds lifted, scattered by the stirrings of necessity, and by a second cause, on which I dare hardly speak : she kept up her communications with the Unseen. Reverence was deep in her nature; and reverence is the queen of the virtues. Lest reverence should degenerate into superstition, lest sorrow should lapse into fetish-worship, her broad downright sense, and — I say it quite sincerely — her quick sense of humour, were always at hand, and life's balance swung evenly, and by and by merrily, again.

Twenty years after — that is to say, forty years ago and long before you were born — there was a considerable outburst of agnosticism in Britain. I do not mean the shallow agnosticism of the prig — which, of course, is always with us — but real agnosticism, sprung from honest doubts and real intellectual dilemmas.

In the early days of which I speak there were distinct premonitions of it. The fear of it appeared like a spectre to the great and weary brain of Hugh Miller, and he blew out his brains in a house in Leith Walk. My father had studied his writings : among the books on our shelves I distinctly remember " The Testimony of the Rocks " and " My Schools and Schoolmasters," and I recall discussions on his views. But it was mostly the practical answer that appealed to the Scotch mind : and in due time many a Scotch response reverberated in unison with Tennyson's —

** Leave thou thy sister where she prays : Her early faith, her happy views; Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse A life that leads melodious lays.

Her faith through form is pure as thine ; Her hands are quicker unto good."

There was she, in whose veritable presence we saw —

" The flesh and blood To which she links a truth divine."

And so was given in our humble circle, as in so many others, the perennial answer — the answer of life to doubt.

Now then, back to the reading-parlour. " Tom," she used to say, " I like to hear clever men talk." I used to sit on a footstool at her feet; and this she repeated to me when they went away and the little parliaments ended. Weighty problems were handled — but let me first tell you of the books.

Wodrow's History : little or no impression ; the superstition against which Buckle so declaims in his " History of Civilization " was fleeting enough.

" The Scots Worthies " — a different affair. It caught hold, and there were passages in James Guthrie's dying speech and several others which mixed in my mind — not a bad mixture — the principles of civil liberty and religious liberty.

" The Pilgrim's Progress." There was a book for you ! A picture of Apollyon — flames from the mouth, hoofs for feet, and " the scaly horror of his tail " ; oh ! the early rapture of really seeing the devil incarnate ! Then the text : over and over again I read it till all was

II familiar, till great stretches of the noblest poetical passages of Scripture passed into the mind, and a gallery of indelible sketches was made — the Wicket Gate and the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, the Delectable Mountains and the Land of Beulah. And character-sketches: unforgettable: Greatheart; the Man with the Muck Rake, and those immortal psychological thumb-nail studies — the Judge and Jury in " Vanity Fair." What wonder was it that when your and my dear Dick gave up his life at Thiepval, and the Church authorities wanted a scroll for his memorial tablet, there should at once spring into my mind the eloge of Bunyan on the away-going of Mr. Valiant for the Truth, " And so he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.''

Have I lingered too long over what one might call these religious reminiscences? Well, dear, they were a type. In thousands and thousands of Scotch homes, I feel assured that this was so. It largely accounted for some of the traits — quaint, if you will — and some of the forces and currents, quiet and still, but yet strong, and, when opposed, tumultuous — of that Scotch character that has modified many nations and ruled great spaces of the earth. Jolly old Scots we are, to whom Providence in a well-known sense has been good, has it not?

Good night ! Sound sleep !

Father.

P.S. — Very well, my lass : I will. You have given me back the letter and asked me to bring in something about these big theological fellows — Did they have the same kind of upbringing or early impressions ? " Here you are.

Well, I incline to the opinion that they had. The very same kind of early training that I have sketched was theirs. But in their case, of course, the soil was far richer. And they had a far wider and far deeper University culture. Natures such as theirs that were shocked into self-consciousness by Hugh Miller's death, and were bored and stung by the later extremes of Hegelian thought — these natures became a breed of intellectual giants.

They declined to bow the knee to Germany; they remorselessly pursued to its recesses every avenue of German thought, and they became the theological princes of the Free Church of Scotland, to whom by and by every Church and University in Christendom did homage. Some of them, such as Bruce, Marcus Dods and Robertson Smith, I hardly knew. Others I knew well, such as Drs. Davidson, Orr and Lindsay, and Principal Rainy; and one — the last of the band still with us — our friend and my fellow-student. Principal Sir G. Adam Smith. In these — one and all — I found the same traits : a penetrating judgment; a scholarship far beyond my limited reach; a power of what I may call expository and illuminative controversy. And their gifts were rested upon a depth of conviction and were graced with that reverence of which I have spoken and which only simple early training can instil.

Now, lest you grow too solem.n, listen to this : Was I in these very early years " mighty in the Scriptures " ? There seems to have been something of the sort. There was a Mr. George Sampson, a grocer of my acquaintance, for he was a donor of walnuts. It is a far back recollection, but it is very clear. I had to get my Scripture puzzles settled, so I went personally, and on my own, into the affair. I remember yet the tinkling of the front door bell as I pushed into his shop. The customers seemed to make way for me as I advanced. I was not so high as his counter, but I put my hand up to it, interrupting his business with the demand : " Mr. Sampson," said I, " are you the gentleman that carried away the gates of Gaza on his back "

Your own, S. OF D.

*

Letter IV Books From The Bookcase

Craigmyle.

My dear,

Books, good books, and plenty of them : lucky lass - that you are ! This is what you have been brought up among. Glad am I that in your day nearly all kinds of literature, and certainly the good kind and the great kind, are not only accessible, but actually obtainable as a possession, for every well-doing household in the land.

Formerly it was so very different, that it will soon become impossible to realize the striking change in this respect between the end and the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, books were bought with self-denial. Shall it be — with literature — lightly come and lightly go.'^ Preferring quantity to quality, and skimming to study, people are, I dare say, staggering about a bit. But cheer up ! — things will right themselves ; in literature as in life, the only thing that wears is quality — character.

Anyhow, a book then was something individual, a possession, to be weighed up, to be purchased with consideration, to be perused with gravity, to be kept with care. To stock a few shelves, then, cost as much as to furnish a quite excellent library to-day. As for variety

BOOKS FROM THE BOOKCASE 15

of interest — I speak comparatively — there was little of it. Novel reading — even novel reading on the Sabbath Day — slid modestly into the ordinary Scottish homes by the artful wicket-gates of Good Words and the Sunday at Home. Dr. Norman McLeod and Dr. Guthrie had much to answer for ! But in the early days of which I speak the hour and the power of these daring innovators " had hardly, I think, arrived !

No. We worked upon the solid. The literature of knowledge — so much has science advanced — was slender ; but the real literature of power, especially the poets, that did get a grip.

Imagine, for instance, a rather undersized boy sitting in the great leathern chair and resting on one of its arms a large one-volume edition of Shakespeare's Plays, with Samuel Johnson's essay prefixed, and you may hear him draw his breath hard : he is on his first big excursion among the immortals, and he is panting with excitement over the closing scenes of " Othello." I remember it as if it were yesterday.

And there was a Burns — a genteel and very proper edition — but with plenty in it to fire the blood and to move the heart, and to show what human language can rise to in the passionate exaltation of the love-songs. These last, being wedded to familiar national music, became easily — it was the common case — a lifelong possession.

The non-religious prose I cannot well recall, though there were reams of it, and books like Mungo Park's " Travels," in two great volumes, I read from cover to cover. But few made any imprint on the memory. Some did. At one end of that scale there was, say, the homespun i6 humour of " Mamsie Waugh," and at the other end the thrilling episodes of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." Legree was for me the American Apollyon.

When you talk of books, don't forget the effects of books like that last. Owing to it, I make free to say, more than to any other cause, the sympathies of British homes were enthusiastically won for the victory of Lincoln and the North, and for the emancipation of the slave. We had, you know, done our bit in our own dominions; but we had done it in our compromising British way and bought the owners out. But here was a conflict not to be bought off, and, so far as Scotland was concerned, it was founded on principles of independence, of freedom, of brotherhood, which our history and our Burns had made dear to us and worth a fight.

In the talk in which these well-instructed, thoughtful men indulged, and which I was privileged to hear, these last ideas often recurred. But it went wide of my reach when they discussed, apparently with shrewdness, Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations " and George Combe's Constitution of Man."

While that was the kind of atmosphere (the Bible, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Burns) — the atmosphere in which Scotch boys of my time and rank lived, do not, please do not, put us down either for pundits or for prigs. On the contrary, it was a wildish, rollicking, spirited time for little fellows. And there were the materials for what is a great asset in a boy's life, not mystery exactly, but what I call historical wonder. I made friends with the clockmaker and accompanied him or his son up the tortuous stairs of the old Abbey Tower and into the reverberating chamber of that great bell whose deep and resonant curfew

BOOKS FROM THE BOOKCASE 17 booms — wherever one may wander, from childhood to age — booms in the memory for ever. Then climbing higher I reached the frieze of the Bartizan, and peering over the frieze, I saw far down below, the wood and classic glen of Pittencrieff. These enclosed romantic ruins — the tower and tomb of Malcolm Canmore, and that pile, which I knew to have been, long ago, the birthplace and the dwelling-place of Kings.

Only the other day I verified some facts about this, one of which facts, if your ladyship were English, I should swear you didn't know, namely, that it was there that King Charles I of England was born.

The story I give and the picture I send are from the standard history of Dunfermline, by that industrious and capable parish minister, Dr. Peter Chalmers. Puzzle : pick out the window of the room where the Martyr King first saw the light.

The plodding record reads : —

PALACE— k little to the south-east of King

Malcolm Canmore's Tower, and east side of the rivulet

close to the verge of the glen, in a very romantic situation,

are the ruins of a palace, once the residence of the

Sovereigns of Scotland. ... At the western end tradition

still points out a high window, now completely covered

with ivy, and the chimney, nearly entire, of the room in

which that ill-advised and unfortunate monarch, Charles I,

was born, which event occurred on the 19th November,

1600. This, too, was the birthplace of his sister Elizabeth,

on the 19th August, 1596, afterwards Queen of Bohemia,

from whom her present Majesty [Queen Victoria] is

descended." c i8 LETTERS TO ISABEL

In those days no dull definiteness like that weighed me down, but all around there was impressionism and romance. When my guide called to me from the bell tower, I tumbled or clambered down the worn and dusty steps — beyond my power of numbering — and I was away, scampering over graves, to an abutment of the churchyard to climb and to bestride a cannon from Sebastopol, and strain my eyes across the Firth and away to the south-east, to catch a glimpse of Edinburgh Castle.

But the rollicking took far less classic turns than that. Think, for instance, of the snow. How it descended on the cold, grey, slushy, slippery town, and reinspirited us by its supply of ammunition ! From an entry, as from a fortification, a bombardment took place. Dunfermline in those days was a labyrinth of closes, the strategic possibilities of which I had studied with care. The citizen who gave chase came to grief or got lost; but by that time I was sitting at my mother's knee safe in the reading-parlour and " hearing clever men talk."

Her, so long as there was nothing really bad in it, I took for an ally. I once heard her spirited rejoinder to a friend, who offered her sympathy about a boy who got into scrapes and out again so often : " Rather," said my mother, " rather a coal than a clod."

Ever your affectionate

Parent.

Letter V Schools And The Law

Craigmyle.

August IS, 1919.

Isabel dear,

Here is a memory which after sixty-four years remains ineffaceable. It is a school scene; and if you can see its connexion with education, you are the clever one.

Education was a passion with my father and mother. He died, alas ! when I was in my sixth year, and I remember that he was alive when this occurred. I had to be at school at the fixed hour of nine in the morning. I must frankly tell you that, like all the rules of my youth (they were certainly good rules), breach meant punishment. There was an unerring precision about that, which left me no doubts about the reign of law ! To fend off the consequences by either untruth or concealment or evasion : somehow that did not come within one's range ; perhaps the consequences of exposure would have been too awful. So nothing was left for me but to try to drive a bargain.

Armed, accordingly, with an apple, I faced the foe. I remember yet climbing the school stair and entering the upper room.

Mr. Gellet," said I, " Fm ower late; but if you don't give me the tawse, then I'll give you that big, bonny, redcheeked apple ! "

" All right, Tom," said he — as I thought very solemnly — and he accepted the apple and placed it on his desk.

The thing would have faded from my mind but for this — to me — extraordinary circumstance, that he broke his bargain. At the end of the school hours he gave me my apple back ! When the worthy teacher called in the evening, I heard splutterings of laughter in the home circle, which mystified rather than mortified me.

After this Infant School — for I had been sent to school at three, I was so restless — came the High School of Dunfermline.

The time I speak of was, of course, long before the passing of the famous Scotch Education Act of 1872, which set up School Boards in every burgh and parish in the Kingdom. In one sense this was a mere matter of administration, namely, as I have said, the setting up of an elected Board; for in every burgh and parish there had already and for long been a schoolhouse and school teacher, and the ideals of Knox had never failed. This is literally so, and among their results is an outstanding fact : the passion for education was the ideal, and the uses of it for the main chance in life was the practical side of the affair to the Scotch mind.

My mother — shrewdness itself — used to say to me :

" It's but little of this world's gear that you'll get from me, but I would like to give you the best education that that head of yours will hold."

So I went to the High School of the town, which had a headmaster who received a house, £ 100 a year — an old burgh foundation — and our school fees, as his reward. He was of diminutive stature, but of more than average intelligence, and faithful to his task. More by my

SCHOOLS AND THE LAW mother's influence than his, and possibly from a spirit of emulation, I plodded through an elementary course. The schoolbooks were bald and uninteresting; in nothing educational has there been more advance than in this vital matter, the production of good schoolbooks.

There came in time, on top of the three Rs, a sound course of Euclid — taken in the raw — with some Algebra thrown in, and a smattering of Latin (grounding, grounding, grounding, in Ruddiman's Rudiments), less French and no Greek. Thus poorly equipped, I stood my examination, and remember, in a kind of dazed way — I was just over thirteen — getting the Town Council medal — a fat bit of silver with a broad blue ribbon — hung round my neck by the Provost of the day, with a kindly word. Then I rebelled : I declined to go back to school because it would be mean to compete again for the Dux place. What was to be done ?