The life and letters of Hugh Miller

Chapter IV

Returns to Conon-side — Makes Himself respected in the Barrack — Companions —Attempts Geometry and Architecture — Hardships — Experiment in Necromancy — Dream — The Bothy System — Literary Recreations — Tedium — End of Apprenticeship — The Blessing of Labour — Practical Philosophy

Chapter I

Favourable Opinions from Old David Wright and Uncle James — First Work as Journeyman — Aunt Jenny's Cottage — Sends Poetical Pieces to Ross— Self-Delineation . . . . 97

Chapter II

Gairloch — Letters descriptive of his Journey from Conon-side and of Gairloch Scenery — Love-Poetry — The Carter — Old John Fraser — A Dream — Magnanimous Revenge — Gairloch Landscapes — Back to Cromarty . . . . . . . . . . 105

Chapter III

Comes of Age— Sets sail for Edinburgh — Parting Reflections — Morning on the Moray Frith — First Sight of Edinburgh — Absent from Church for five Sundays and ' a few more ' — Holyrood, Charles II.'s Statue, Effigy of Knox, the College, Ferguson's Grave, Dr McCrie— The Panorama, the Theatre . . . . . . 127

Chapter IV

Niddrie — Blackguard Workmen — Miller prejudiced by them against their Class — His Opinions on Trades' Unions — The ' Boatman's Tale '—Returns to Cromarty . . . . . . . . 144

Chapter V

The Stone-cutter's Disease — Lines to Sister Jeanie — Renews his Friendship with Swanson and Corresponds with Ross — Writes an Ode on Greece and offers it to the Scotsman . . . . 156

Chapter VI

Poems addressed to Ross — Serious Thoughts — Correspondence with Swanson — Freakish Humour — Descends into the Tomb of the Urquharts— Is catechized by Mr Stewart — Writing in the Open Air — A Proselytizing Bore — Correspondence on Religion . . 171

CONTENTS. vii

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Chapter VII

Poverty, Honourable and Dishonourable — First Impressions of the Rev. Mr Stewart— Looks into his Father's Bible— The selfish Theory of Morals — New-year's-Day Musings — Important comment upon and addition to these ten days afterwards — The Change effected in his Spiritual State . . . . . . . . 206

Chapter VIII

Miller at twenty-six — Letter to Ross — The blessing of a True Friend — Romance the Shadow of Religion — Former and present Views of Religion — Free-thinkers who cannot think at all — Christian the highest style of Man — Project of going to Inverness — Schemes of Self-culture 220

Chapter IX

Seeks Work in Inverness unsuccessfully — Resolves to print his Poems — Makes the acquaintance of Mr Carruthers — Is asked to Enlist — Corrects Proof-sheets of his Poetry, and decides that it is poor — Retains inflexibly his first opinion of its merits, and resolves to cultivate Prose — Deaths of Uncle James and of William Ross — Dedication of his Poems to Swanson . . . . . . 235

Chapter X

Resumes work as a Stone-cutter at Croma'rty — Intimacy with Mr Stewart — The Literary Lion of the place — Writes for the Inverness Courier — Letters on the Herring Fishery — Extraordinary Shoal of Herrings — A Night on Guilliam — Emigration of Highlanders to Canada— Science at last . . . . . . TT 242

Chapter XI

Miller and his new Friends — Introduced to Principal Baird — Will not go to Edinburgh for the present — His Poems do not sell — Corresponds with Mr Isaac Forsyth— Will not relinquish Literary Ambition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Chapter XII

Miller's Political Views— The Cromarty Chapel Case— In character of Village Junius . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

Chapter XIII

Miss Fraser— Her Parentage, Residence in Edinburgh, Position in Cromarty— Society of the place— Miller's Manner and Appearance — A fascinating Companion — He and Miss Fraser become Lovers — Glimpses of Romance — Metaphysical Love-making — A new Ambiviii CONTENTS.

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tion awakes in Miller — Fable of Apollo and Daphne reversed — Letter to Miss Eraser — and to Mrs Eraser . . . . . . 273

Chapter I. Birth, Parentage, And First Impressions

AS the voyager passes from the blue expanse of the Moray Frith into the land-locked bay of Cromarty, he sees on the left, crowning a swell of green upland which runs crescent-like along the coast, a pillar of red sandstone, rising fifty feet into the air, and surmounted by a statue. The few white houses, embowered in garden foliage, which form the better part of the village of Cromarty, cluster beneath ; and the sea, faced by a row of thatched fishermen's cottages, comes rippling, at every flow of the tide, to within a bow-shot of its base. The statue represents a grave, strong-built man, of massive head and thoughtful face, who seems to look out steadfastly upon the waves. Statue and pillar constitute the monument reared by his countrymen to Hugh Miller.

Almost at the foot of the pillar stands a humble cottage, and on the sward from which it rises is placed the village churchyard. In that cottage Hugh Miller was born ; and during his boyhood and early youth he was dependent on a widowed mother, who maintained herself and her family by the ' sedulously plied but indifferently remunerated labour ' of her needle. In that churchyard are several headstones chiselled by his hand when he earned his bread as a journeyman mason.

Hugh Miller broke suddenly upon the public of Scotland in the prime of his years. He was already a man of ripe thought and confirmed intellectual habits, betraying none of the extravagance of opinion and spasmodic vehemence of language usually characteristic of self-trained genius. Solidity and sobriety of judgment, sensitive dislike of paradox, contempt for the catchwords of political sciolism and free-thinking conceit, purity, vigour, and elegance of style which reminded critics of Goldsmith and of Addison, were the results of his self-education. Possessed of large stores of literary information, an original explorer in science, with definite and firmly-held opinions on religious, political, and social questions, thoroughly understanding the character of his countrymen and ardently sympathizing with its nobler elements, he no sooner found a medium for the communication of his ideas than he became a most influential guide of opinion, and continued to be so to the hour of his death. Adopting literature and science henceforward as the business of his life, he produced a series of unique and remarkable works, in which were intermingled racy and sagacious observations on men and manners, with delineations, exquisitely fresh and vivid, of nature's facts and beauties. They were at once pronounced by eminent critics to belong to a high and rare order of literary productions ; they became popular, and have retained their popularity, with the best class of readers in Britain and America ; and they have been translated into most European languages. It will be admitted that they bear the impress of an original, determinate, and admirable mind; noble in all its ground-tones, richly endowed in respect both of intellect and of imagination,

' MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS: 5

penetrated with reverence for God and for the revelation which God has made of Himself in nature, providence, and Christ, full of brotherly sympathy, of candour, intelligence, and affection. A reputation thus founded is not likely to prove ephemeral ; and the name of Hugh Miller, we may safely presume, will be his most enduring monument. How the son of a sailor's widow came to address and retain an audience as wide as the world of culture, — how the Cromarty stone-mason qualified himself for achieving a European reputation, — is a question fitted to interest wise curiosity, and deserving an explicit and careful reply.

Hugh Miller, as all the world knows, was the author of an autobiographic work entitled, My Schools and Schoolmasters, and it may have occurred to some that he thus anticipated and superseded biography. But there are no good grounds for this opinion. The book which has been named, recognized by all judges as one of the most captivating and able of the author's performances, has a place in English literature from which it cannot be moved; but it is no substitute for the biography of Hugh Miller. In the first place, it deals with but one portion of its author's career, and that the portion which preceded his emergence into public life. In the second place, a considerable amount of biographic material relating to Hugh Miller, unencroached upon in the Schools and Schoolmasters, is in existence. From early boyhood he was fond of jotting down particulars connected with his personal history, and for many years previously to his being harnessed to steady literary toil, he took great delight in letterwriting. In the third place, it will hardly be disputed by any one who reflects upon the subject, that biography is necessarily a different matter from autobiography, and that the latter is to be regarded simply as one of the sources from which the biographer constructs his narrative. Mr Lewes, whose Life of Goethe has a place of honour not only among biographies but among the select masterpieces of biography, may be held to have settled this point. He had before him Goethe's celebrated autobiography, in three volumes, a work which its author declares to have been composed in a spirit of austere veracity, and yet Mr Lewes finds it characterized by ' abiding inaccuracy of tone! Goethe, looking from the distance of half a century, beheld his own face through a medium which softened, brightened, or obliterated the features. Hugh Miller, when he wrote the Schools and Schoolmasters, was not so old as Goethe when he wrote Poetry and Truth from my Life ; nor am I prepared to say that the former departs from literal accuracy to the same extent as the latter: but in the case of Hugh Miller also, the impression made by an event or spectacle, as set down at the moment by the boy or lad, and the account of that impression given by the man of fifty, prove often to be two different things. ' It is possible/ says Hugh Miller himself, ' for two histories of the same period and individual to be at once true to fact, and unlike each other in the scenes which they describe and the events which they record.'

Hugh Miller was born in the town of Cromarty on the 10th of October, 1802. The occurrence appears to have acted on the imagination of his father, as he had a 'singular dream' respecting his first-born. The midwife remarked that the conformation of the head was unusual, and indicated, in her sage opinion, that the child would turn out an idiot.*

* Letter of Miller to Mr Isaac Forsyth, Feb. 30, 1830.

CROMARTY. 7

Cromarty was a more important place seventy years ago than it is now, but its dimensions never exceeded those of a considerable village. It is one of several miniature towns which stud the shores of the Maolbuie or Black Isle, a peninsular block of land, washed on the north by the frith of Cromarty, on the south by the frith of Beauly, and abutting on the German Ocean in a green headland, fringed with pine, known to mariners as the Southern Sutor of Cromarty. On the landward side of this headland nestles the little town. The Maolbuie, stretching westward, rises from encircling sea, occasionally in abrupt crags, generally in gradual undulation. Here and there, along the watercourses and in the hollows, are glimpses of green field and leafy wood, but the general impression is that of a huge swell of brown moorland, over-blown by sea-winds, traversed by chill fogs, and constituting, on the whole, one of the most bleak and ungenial districts in Scotland. The natives of Cromarty have always been a hardy, long-lived race. The climate, though salubrious, is severe. The town is exposed at all seasons to high gales from the North Sea, laden with mist or sleet, and even at midsummer keen blasts from the Atlantic make their way through the western hill-gorges, send the spray of the frith whistling through the air, and pierce to every nook and cranny of the shivering town. But there are fertile spots in its immediate neighbourhood, and in sheltered nooks the elm and poplar flourish ; the air, except when darkened by sea-fog, is clear and bracing; a chain of hills, running along the frith on the north, leads the eye to the heights of Ben Wyvis sleeping in the pearl-blue of distance ; there are brooks rippling through wooded dells, and caves hollowed in the rock ; and at all times, and from almost every point of view, there is a gleaming of green or purple waters, wreathed with snowy foam. In favourable weather Cromarty is a pleasant place; one who had passed in it a kindly childhood and youth might love it well. Nature, as seen in its vicinity, if not clad in Alpine grandeur, has many aspects of beauty and tenderness, and at least one aspect, that of ocean in calm or in storm, of utmost sublimity.

Like all towns on the eastern coast of Scotland, Cromarty is inhabited principally by an English-speaking race, substantially identical with that found in the lowlands of Scotland. Hugh Miller never spoke the language of the Scottish Highlanders, and was apt in conversation to lay emphasis on the fact of his being a Teuton. But there was a dash of good Celtic bloojd in his veins. Donald Ross, called also DonaldfRoy, or the Red,xthe grandfather of his grandmother, was of the best Gaelic type, with the vivacity, courage, and religious susceptibility of his race. The history and character of Donald, as portrayed in the revering narratives of his descendants, were among the sacred influences of Hugh Miller's childhood. The figure of his grey-haired sire, standing up in the Church of Nigg, and defying the Presbytery, in the Name of God, to join a minister, not called by its people, to its stone-walls ; the ring which Miller's grandmother had received, at the time of her marriage, from Donald, as her spousal ring to her other husband, the Head of the Church ; the mysterious hints which would pass round the fireside circle in the evening, that this patriarch, like the men of God of old, had been privileged with visions of the unseen world, with whisperings out of the abysmal deeps of futurity ; — all this was stamped upon the child's imagination, predisposing him, in the dawn of his sympathies, to look with reverence on the religious character, and preparing him to

HIS FATHER. 9

become, one day, a leader among the evangelical religionists of Scotland.

Strong, however, as the influence of his Celtic ancestry may have been on Hugh Miller, it was not so powerful as that derived from his Lowland fathers. He was descended on that side from a long line of sea-faring men, whose intrepid and adventurous spirit had led them from their native Cromarty, to sail, in the earliest times of Scottish history, with Sir Andrew Wood or the ' bold Bartons,' and at a later period to voyage and fight under Anson, or to engage in buccaneering enterprises on the Spanish main. For more than a hundred years before the birth of Hugh Miller, not one of his paternal ancestors had been laid in the churchyard of Cromarty. To the latest hour of his life, he cherished the profoundest enthusiasm for his father, the hardy and resolute seaman whose name he bore. He was only five years old when Hugh Miller, the elder, perished at sea; but he had already learned to love his father with an affection stronger than is common in childhood, andBjJgng, after every one else had ceased to hope,' he might be seen on the grassy knoll behind his mother's house, looking wistfully out upon the Moray frith for ' the Isloop with the two stripes of white and the two square topsails.'

""Miller has left us, in the Schools and Schoolmasters, a powerful and vivid sketch of his father, and the lineaments are those of a remarkable man. Very gentle, very brave, serenely invincible in every change of fortune, patient to endure individual wrong, but with a flash of keenest fire in him to avenge the cruelty or injustice which he saw practised on others, he was great without knowing it, and what is also perhaps an advantage, without its being known. Miller says finely that there was a ' bit of picture ' in all his recollections of his father, and most picturesquely has he arranged the pieces in the mosaic of his narrative. We see the bold seaman, bronzed by the southern sun, asleep in his open boat on the Ganges, and mark him start on awaking as he meets the glare of a tiger's eye, its paws resting on the gunwale. We behold him afloat for three days in the open sea on the bottom of an upturned boat, sharks glancing around him on the crests of the waves. He bears meekly the oppressions of a cruel captain, until his kind-hearted Irish comrade is being chained down to the deck beneath a tropical sun ; then, the genial warmth in his bosom kindling into electric flame, he faces the tyrant. ' The captain drew a loaded pistol from his belt ; the sailor struck up his hand ; and, as the bullet whistled through the rigging above, he grappled with him and disarmed him in a trice/ At the action off the Dogger Bank he does the work of two men. and, when the action seems over, is utterly prostrate ; but no sooner does the sign of battle fly again along the line, than he springs to his feet, fresh as if he had awakened from morning slumber. Not less characteristic is the steadfastness of his manly ambition to realize a competence. As wave after wave of adversity meets him, he rises through the swell, his brow showing clear and proud in the light of victory.

It was the deliberate conviction of Hugh Miller that his father was an abler man than he. To this opinion few will subscribe ; but the more we study the character of the son, the deeper will be our conviction that it is essentially the character of • the father, developed, on the intellectual side, with more of symmetry and completeness, and seen at last under softer lights. Physiologists would probably have something

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS. 11

to say on this point. Modern science tends to show that there was more in Mr Shandy's philosophy of character than Sterne's humour gives account of, and that, if we can rightly estimate the effect of local circumstance and other influences to modify or to transmute, the ground-plan of a man's character may be found written in his bones. Hugh Miller's father was at the time of his birth a man of forty-four ; mature in every faculty ; of marked individuality and iron wilL His mother was a girl of eighteen, who had been brought up at her husband's knee, and had learned to revere him as a father before she accepted him as a lover. Throughout life she displayed no special force of mind or character. The first child of such a marriage was likely to bear the indelible stamp of his father's manhood.

Fancy delights to construct oracles from the earliest recollections of men who have become famous. We must guard against attaching too much importance to the infantile reminiscences of Miller. Those he mentions are graceful in themselves, and form a singularly appropriate introduction to the life of a man of science. He remembered going into the garden one day before completing his third year, and seeing there ' a minute duckling covered with soft yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red colour/ The ' duckling,' he tells us, belonged to the vegetable kingdom, though he could no longer identify it; the mussel-bearing plant was, he believed, a scarlet-runner. If there is in this incident anything unusual, it is the circumstance that natural phenomena of form and colour, so simple and common, should have powerfully affected the imagination of a child not three years old. The incidents first stored in memory are generally those of change or excitement, — a storm, a removal, a journey, a visit to a puppet show or wax-work. The forms of those natural objects by which a child is surrounded, leaves, trees, flowers, fall faintly on the mental tablets ; probably not one man in a thousand retains a more vivid recollection of them than of the curtains round his cradle. During Hugh Miller's life, the observation of a new fact in nature afforded him a thrill of pleasure which never lost its freshness, and it seems probable that the first consciousness of this pleasure arose in the breast of small, toddling, large-headed Hugh, when he opened wide his eyes to take the bearings of the mysterious duckling and the vegetable mussels.

More definitely important, in a biographic point of view, are those incidents of Miller's childhood which formed what he calls a ' machinery of the supernatural.' About the time when the incomprehensible duckling grew out of the earth before his eyes, he thought that he beheld the apparition of his buccaneering ancestor, John Feddes, ' in the form of a large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue great-coat,' who stood on the landing-place at the top of the stairs and regarded him with apparent complacency. He was much frightened, and for years dreaded a reappearance of the phantom.

Still more circumstantial is his account of what he saw on that night when, far away on the North Sea, his father's ship went down. * There were no forebodings,' he is careful to tell us, in the Cromarty cottage. No storm agitated the air, and though the billows of a deep ground-swell broke heavily under leaden skies, the weather occasioned no alarm. A hopeful letter had been received from his father, written at Peterhead, and his mother sat ' beside the household fire, plying the cheerful needle/ Suddenly the door fell

APPARITIONS. 13

open and little Hugh was sent to shut it. 'Day/ he proceeds, ' had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a grey haze spread a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female : they bore a livid and sodden appearance ; and directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled, and ran shrieking to my mother, telling what I had seen ; and the house-girl, whom she next sent to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned frightened, and said that she too had seen the woman's hand; which, however, did not seem to be the case. And finally my mother, going to the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the extremeness of my terror, and the minuteness of my description. I communicate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it. The supposed apparition may have been merely a momentary affection of the eye, of the nature described by Sir Walter Scott in his Demonologij, and Sir David Brewster in his Natural Magic. But if so, the affection was one of which I experienced no after return ; and its coincidence, in the case, with tKe~probable time of my father's death, seems at least curious/

Men who believe in a ghost-story seldom favour us with unqualified avowals of the fact. Hugh Miller seems to have been persuaded at fifty that the livid hand he saw at five was preternatural. The incident is thus invested with interest in a biographic point of view. It affords us a glimpse into the subtlest workings of Hugh Miller's mind. We must, therefore, consider it carefully.

The appearance, to begin with, is to be classed among the more easily explicable phenomena of optical delusion. The child, from the day his mind began to receive impressions of any kind, had been encompassed with an atmosphere of superstition. In days of steamships and telegraphs, sailors and fishermen continue a superstitious race ; but it is only by the strongest effort of imagination that we can realize the extent to which the natural and the supernatural were confounded in remote fishing towns like Cromarty at the commencement of this century. Teach a child to look for ghosts, and he will be sure to see them. Hugh had learned to associate the idea of his father with a special manifestation of the awful and the supernatural. Often, while the embers were burning low on winter evenings, and every inmate of the cottage listened in awe-struck silence, had he hung upon the lips of ' Jack Grant the mate,' as he told how his father had sailed from Peterhead beneath a gloomy twilight ; how a woman and child who begged a passage were taken on board; how the wind rose and the snow-storm lashed the vessel ; how a dead-light gleamed out on the cross trees ; how a ghostly woman, with a child in her arms, flitted round the master at the helm ; how, when dawn glimmered over the sea, the ship struck and rolled over amid the breakers on ' the terrible bar of Findhorn ; ' and how the corpse of the woman, still clasping the babe in her arms, was floated out through a hole in the side of the wreck.

Turn now to the passage quoted. His father being away at sea, the child is sent, as the dusk thickens, to

THE LIVID HAND. 15

close the cottage door. The night-mist is creeping up from the sea. I have seen that mist, seen it through the eyes of childhood, on the moorland of the Maolbuie, a few miles west of Cromarty ; and no one who has seen it can wonder that a vivid imagination should evoke spectral forms from its twilight imagery. The same power of fantasy which called up the ghost of old John Feddes, to stand upon the top of the stair, revealed to the eye of the boy, as he peered into the mist on that melancholy evening, a dissevered hand and arm. There is one little circumstance which renders it matter of demonstration that his mind was preoccupied by expectation of the marvellous. ' Hand and arm/ he informs us, ' were apparently those of a female.5 How did he know this? A child of five could not distinguish between the * livid and sodden ' hand and arm of a man and the ' livid and sodden ' hand and arm of a woman. His imagination, haunted by the woman of Jack Grant's narrative, created her.

The whole affair, then, resolves itself into a strong mental impression of little Hugh's throwing itself out in bodiless form on the mist of the night. And as was the boy so was the man. J\. sustained intensity of mental vision, a creative power of fantasy, characterized Miller to the last. Not powerful enough to overbear or to pervert the scientific instinct with which it was associated, it had a pervasive influence on his mental operations ; the feeling, belief, impression on his mind, had for him a substantive reality; and there was an antecedent probability that, if the steadiness of his intellectual nerve were shaken by disease, or by excess of mental toil, some fixed idea might obtain the mastery over him and hurl his reason from her throne.

It has been said that his mother was not remarkable for mental power or for strength of character. She had, however, one intellectual faculty in extraordinary vigour, to wit, memory, and she loaded it with knowledge of a peculiarly unprofitable kind. Her belief in fairies, witches, dreams, presentiments, ghosts, was unbounded, and she was restrained by no modern scruples from communicating either her fairy lore, or the faith with which she received it, to her son. Her faith in her legendary personages was inextricably involved with her belief in the angels and spirits of Scripture, and to betray scepticism as to apparitions and fairies was in her view to take part with the Sadducee or the infidel. 1 Such was the powerful influence,5 says Mrs Miller, ' to which little Hugh was subjected for the first six years of his life — a kind of education the force of which he himself could scarcely estimate. Add to everything else that much of his mother's sewing was making garments for the dead. Fancy that little low room in the winter evenings, its atmosphere at all times murky from the dark earthen floor, the small windows, the fire on the hearth which, though furnished with a regular chimney, allowed much smoke to escape before it found passage. Fancy little Hugh sitting on a low stool by that hearth-fire, his mother engaged at a large chest which serves her for a table on which stands a single candle. Her work is dressing the shroud and the winding-sheet, the dead irons click incessantly, and her conversation as she passes to and fro to heat her irons at the fire is of the departed, and of mysterious warnings and spectres. Suddenly, as the hour grows late, distinct raps are heard on this chest -the forerunners, she says, of another dissolution. Her tall thin figure is drawn up in an attitude of intense listening for these signs from the unseen world. The child has been surrounded and permeated with the