Spare Hours

“Who bore the blue sky intermixed with flameIn their fair eyes,”

came to him for their competitive examination, to scan them well, and then, without one word, present each with a flower, which was of a certain fixed and well-known value in Davie’s standard calimeter.

I have heard that there was one kind of rose, his καλλιστεῖον, which he was known to have given only to three, and I remember seeing one of the three, when she was past seventy. Margaret Murray, or Morra, was her maiden name, and this fine old lady, whom an Oxonian would call a Double First, grave and silent, and bent with “the pains,” when asked by us children, would, with some reluctance, and a curious grave smile, produce out of her Bible, Bowed Davie’s withered and flattened rose; and from her looks, even then, I was inclined to affirm the decision of the connoisseur of Manor Water. One can fancy the scene in that sweet solitary valley, informed like its sister Yarrow with pastoral melancholy, with a young May, bashful and eager, presenting herself for honors, encountering from under that penthouse of eyebrows the steady gaze of the strange eldritch creature; and then his making up his mind, and proceeding to pluck his award and present it to her, “herself a fairer flower,” and then turning with a scowl, crossed with a look of tenderness, crawl into his den. Poor “gloomy Dis,” slinking in alone.

They say, that when the candidate came, he surveyed her from his window, his eyes gleaming out of the darkness, and if he liked her not he disappeared; if he would entertain her, he beckoned her into the garden.

I have often thought that the Brownie, of whom the south country legends are so full, must have been some such misshapen creature, strong, willing, and forlorn, conscious of his hideous forbidding looks, and ready to purchase affection at any cost of labor, with a kindly heart, and a longing for human sympathy and intercourse. Such a being looks like the prototype of the Aiken-Drum of our infancy, and of that “drudging goblin,” of whom we all know how he

“… SweatTo earn his cream-bowl daily set,When in one night, ere glimpse of morn,His shadowy flail hath thresh’d the corn,That ten day lab’rers could not end;Then lies him down, the lubber56 fiend,And stretch’d out all the chimney’s length,Basks at the fire his hairy strength,And cropful out of doors he flings,Ere the first cock his matin rings.”

My readers will, I am sure, more than pardon me for giving them the following poem on Aiken-Drum, for the pleasure of first reading which, many years ago, I am indebted to Mr. R. Chambers’s Popular Rhymes of Scotland, where its “extraordinary merit” is generously acknowledged.

THE BROWNIE OF BLEDNOCHThere cam’ a strange wicht to our town-en’,An’ the fient a body did him ken;He tirl’d na lang, but he glided benWi’ a dreary, dreary hum.His face did glow like the glow o’ the west,When the drumlie cloud has it half o’ercast;Or the struggling moon when she’s sair distrest,O sirs! ’twas Aiken-drum.I trow the bauldest stood aback,Wi’ a gape an’ a glow’r till their lugs did crack,As the shapeless phantom mum’ling spak,Hae ye wark for Aiken-drum!O! had ye seen the bairns’ fricht,As they stared at this wild and unyirthly wicht,As they skulkit in ’tween the dark an’ the licht,An’ graned out, Aiken-drum!“Sauf us!” quoth Jock, “d’ye see sick e’en?”Cries Kate, “There’s a hole where a nose should ha’ been;An’ the mouth’s like a gash that a horn had ri’en;Wow! keep’s frae Aiken-drum!”The black dog growlin’ cow’red his tail,The lassie swarf’d, loot fa’ the pail;Rob’s lingle brack as he mendit the flail,At the sicht o’ Aiken-drum.His matted head on his breast did rest,A lang blue beard wan’ered down like a vest;But the glare o’ his e’e hath nae bard exprest,Nor the skimes o’ Aiken-drum.Roun’ his hairy form there was naething seen,But a philabeg o’ the rashes green,An’ his knotted knees play’d aye knoit between;What a sicht was Aiken-drum!On his wauchie arms three claws did meet,As they trail’d on the grim’ by his taeless feet;E’en the auld gudeman himsel’ did sweat,To look at Aiken-drum.But he drew a score, himsel’ did sain,The auld wife tried, but her tongue was gane;While the young ane closer clespit her wean,And turn’d frae Aiken-drum.But the canty auld wife cam till her braith,And she thocht the Bible micht ward aif scaith;Be it benshee, bogle, ghaist, or wraith —But it fear’d na Aiken-drum.“His presence protect us!” quoth the auld gudeman;“What wad ye, whare won ye, – by sea or by lan’?I conjure ye – speak – by the Beuk in my han’!”What a grane gae Aiken-drum!“I lived in a lan’ whare we saw nae sky,I dwalt in a spot whare a burn rins na by;But I’se dwall noo wi’ you if ye like to try —Hae ye wark for Aiken drum?“I’ll shiel a’ your sheep i’ the mornin’ sune,57I’ll berry your crap by the licht o’ the moon,An’ ba the bairns wi’ an unkenn’d tune,If ye’ll keep puir Aiken-drum.“I’ll loup the linn when ye canna wade,I’ll kirn the kirn, an’ I’ll turn the bread;An’ the wildest fillie that e’er ran redeI’se tame’t,’ quoth Aiken-drum!“To wear the tod frae the flock on the fell —To gather the dew frae the heather-bell —An’ to look at my face in your clear crystal well,Micht gie pleasure to Aiken-drum.“I’se seek nae guids, gear, bond, nor mark;I use nae beddin’, shoon, nor sark;But a cogfu’ o’ brose ’tween the licht an’ the darkIs the wage o’ Aiken-drum.”Quoth the wylie auld wife, “The thing speaks weel;Our workers are scant – we hae routh o’ meal;Giff he’ll do as he says – be he man, be he de’il,Wow! we’ll try this Aiken-drum.”But the wenches skirl’d, “He’s no’ be here!His eldritch look gars us swarf wi’ fear;An’ the feint a ane will the house come near,If they think but o’ Aiken-drum.“For a foul and a stalwart ghaist is he,Despair sits broodin’ aboon his e’e-bree,And unchancie to light o’ a maiden’s e’e,Is the glower o’ Aiken-drum.”“Puir clipmalabors! ye hae little wit;Is’t na hallowmas noo, an’ the crap out yet?”Sae she seelenc’d them a’ wi’ a stamp o’ her fit,“Sit-yer-wa’s-down, Aiken-drum.”Roun’ a’ that side what wark was dune,By the streamer’s gleam, or the glance o’ the moon;A word, or a wish – an’ the Brownie cam sune,Sae helpfu’ was Aiken-drum.But he slade aye awa or the sun was up,He ne’er could look straught on Macmillan’s cup;58They watch’d – but nane saw him his brose ever supNor a spune sought Aiken-drum.On Blednoch banks, an’ on crystal Cree,For mony a day a toil’d wicht was he;And the bairns they play’d harmless roun’ his knee,Sae social was Aiken-drum.But a new-made wife, fu’ o’ rippish freaks,Fond o’ a things feat for the five first weeks,Laid a mouldy pair o her ain man’s breeksBy the brose o’ Aiken-drum.Let the learn’d decide when they convene,What spell was him an’ the breeks between;For frae that day forth he was nae mair seen,An’ sair miss’d was Aiken-drum.He was heard by a herd gaun by the Thrieve,Crying, “Lang, lang now may I greet an’ grieve;For alas! I hae gotten baith fee an’ leave,O luckless Aiken-drum!”Awa! ye wrangling sceptic tribe,Wi’ your pro’s an’ your con’s wad ye decide’Gainst the ’sponsible voice o’ a hale country-sideOn the facts ’bout Aiken-drum?Tho’ the “Brownie o’ Blednoch” lang be gane,The mark o’ his feet’s left on mony a stane;An’ mony a wife an’ mony a weanTell the feats o’ Aiken-drum.E’en now, licht loons that jibe an’ sneerAt spiritual guests an’ a’ sic gear,At the Glasnock mill hae swat wi’ fear,An’ look’d roun’ for Aiken-drum.An’ guidly folks hae gotten a fricht,When the moon was set, an’ the stars gaed nac licht,At the roaring linn in the howe o’ the nicht,Wi’ sughs like Aiken-drum.

We would rather have written these lines than any amount of Aurora Leighs, Festuses, or such like, with all their mighty “somethingness,” as Mr. Bailey would say. For they, are they not the “native wood-notes wild” of one of nature’s darlings? Here is the indescribable, inestimable, unmistakable impress of genius. Chaucer, had he been a Galloway man, might have written it, only he would have been more garrulous, and less compact and stern. It is like Tam o’ Shanter, in its living union of the comic, the pathetic, and the terrible. Shrewdness, tenderness, imagination, fancy, humor, word-music, dramatic power, even wit – all are here. I have often read it aloud to children, and it is worth any one’s while to do it. You will find them repeating all over the house for days such lines as take their heart and tongue.

The author of this noble ballad was William Nicholson, the Galloway poet, as he was, and is still called in his own district. He was born at Tanimaus, in the parish of Borgue, in August 1783; he died circa 1848, unseen, like a bird. Being extremely short-sighted, he was unfitted for being a shepherd or ploughman, and began life as a packman, like the hero of “the Excursion;” and is still remembered in that region for his humor, his music, his verse, and his ginghams; and also, alas! for his misery and his sin. After travelling the country for thirty years, he became a packless pedler, and fell into “a way of drinking;” this led from bad to worse, and the grave closed in gloom over the ruins of a man of true genius. Mr. M’Diarmid of Dumfries prefixed a memoir of him to the Second Edition of his Tales in Verse and Miscellaneous Poems. These are scarcely known out of Galloway, but they are worth the knowing; none of them have the concentration and nerve of the Brownie, but they are from the same brain and heart. “The Country Lass,” a long poem, is excellent; with much of Crabbe’s power and compression. This, and the greater part of the volume, is in the Scottish dialect, but there is a Fable – the Butterfly and Bee – the English and sense, the fine, delicate humor and turn of which might have been Cowper’s; and there is a bit of rugged sarcasm called “Siller,” which Burns need not have been ashamed of. Poor Nicholson, besides his turn for verse, was an exquisite musician, and sang with a powerful and sweet voice. One may imagine the delight of a lonely town-end, when Willie the packman and the piper made his appearance, with his stories, and jokes, and ballads, his songs, and reels, and “wanton wiles.”

There is one story about him which has always appeared to me quite perfect. A farmer, in a remote part of Galloway, one June morning before sunrise, was awakened by music; he had been dreaming of heaven, and when he found himself awake, he still heard the strains. He looked out, and saw no one, but at the corner of a grass-field he saw his cattle, and young colts and fillies, huddled together, and looking intently down into what he knew was an old quarry. He put on his clothes, and walked across the field, everything but that strange wild melody, still and silent in this the “sweet hour of prime.” As he got nearer the “beasts,” the sound was louder; the colts with their long manes, and the nowt with their wondering stare, took no notice of him, straining their necks forward entranced. There, in the old quarry, the young sun “glintin” on his face, and resting on his pack, which had been his pillow, was our Wandering Willie, playing and singing like an angel – “an Orpheus; an Orpheus.” What a picture! When reproved for wasting his health and time by the prosaic farmer, the poor fellow said: “Me and this quarry are lang acquant, and I’ve mair pleasure in pipin to thae daft cowts, than if the best leddies in the land were figurin away afore me.”

NOTES ON ART

“The use of this feigned history” (the Ideal Arts of Poesy, Painting, Music, &c.) “hath been to give SOME SHADOW OF SATISFACTION TO THE MIND OF MAN IN THESE POINTS WHEREIN THE NATURE OF THINGS DOTH DENY IT, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof, there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, A MORE AMPLE GREATNESS, A MORE EXACT GOODNESS AND A MORE ABSOLUTE VARIETY, than can be found in the nature of things. So it appeareth that Poesy” (and the others) “serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was even thought to have some participation of divineness because IT DOTH RAISE AND DIRECT THE MIND, BY SUBMITTING THE SHEWS OF THINGS TO THE DESIRES OF THE MIND; whereas reason” (science, philosophy) “doth buckle and bow the mind to the nature of things.” —Of the Proficience and advancement of Learning.

“To look on noble forms

Makes noble through the sensuous organism

That which is higher.” —The Princess.

NOTES ON ART.59

One evening in the spring of 1846, as my wife and I were sitting at tea, Parvula in bed, and the Sputchard reposing, as was her wont, with her rugged little brown forepaws over the edge of the fender, her eyes shut, toasting, and all but roasting herself at the fire, – a note was brought in, which from its fat, soft look, by a hopeful and not unskilled palpation I diagnosed as that form of lucre which in Scotland may well be called filthy. I gave it across to Madam, who, opening it, discovered four five-pound notes, and a letter addressed to me. She gave it me. It was from Hugh Miller, editor of the Witness newspaper, asking me to give him a notice of the Exhibition of the Scottish Academy then open, in words I now forget, but which were those of a thorough gentleman, and enclosing the aforesaid fee. I can still remember, or indeed feel the kind of shiver, half of fear and pleasure, on encountering this temptation; but I soon said, “You know I can’t take this; I can’t write; I never wrote a word for the press.” She, with “wifelike government,” kept the money, and heartened me to write, and write I did but with awful sufferings and difficulty, and much destruction of sleep. I think the only person who suffered still more must have been the compositor. Had this packet not come in, and come in when it did, and had the Sine Qua Non not been peremptory and retentive, there are many chances to one I might never have plagued any printer with my bad hand and my endless corrections, and general incoherency in all transactions as to proofs.

I tell this small story, partly for my own pleasure, and as a tribute to that remarkable man, who stands alongside of Burns, and Scott, Chalmers, and Carlyle, the foremost Scotsmen of their time, – a rough, almost rugged nature, shaggy with strength, clad with zeal as with a cloak, in some things sensitive and shamefaced as a girl; moody and self-involved, but never selfish, full of courage, and of keen insight into nature and men, and the principles of both, but simple as a child in the ways of the world; self-taught and self-directed, argumentative and scientific, as few men of culture have ever been, and yet with more imagination than either logic or knowledge; to the last as shy and blate as when working in the quarries at Cromarty. In his life a noble example of what our breed can produce, of what energy, honesty, intensity, and genius can achieve; and in his death a terrible example of that revenge which the body takes upon the soul when brought to bay by its inexorable taskmaster. I need say no more. His story is more tragic than any tragedy. Would to God it may warn those who come after to be wise in time, to take the same – I ask no more – care of their body, which is their servant, their beast of burden, as they would of their horse.

Few men are endowed with such a brain as Hugh Miller – huge, active, concentrated, keen to fierceness; and therefore few men need fear, even if they misuse and overtask theirs as he did, that it will turn, as it did with him, and rend its master. But as assuredly as there is a certain weight, which a bar of iron will bear and no more, so is there a certain weight of work which the organ by which we act, by which we think, and feel, and will – cannot sustain, blazing up into brief and ruinous madness, or sinking into idiocy. At the time he wrote to me, Mr. Miller and I were strangers, and I don’t think I ever spoke to him: but his manner of doing the above act made me feel, that in that formidable and unkempt nature there lay the delicacy, the generosity, the noble trustfulness of a gentleman born – not made.

Most men have, and almost every man should have a hobby: it is exercise in a mild way, and does not take him away from home; it diverts him; and by having a double line of rails, he can manage to keep the permanent way in good condition. A man who has only one object in life, only one line of rails, who exercises only one set of faculties, and these only in one way, will wear himself out much sooner than a man who shunts himself every now and then, and who has trains coming as well as going; who takes in as well as gives out.

My hobby has always been pictures, and all we call Art. I have fortunately never been a practitioner, though I think I could have made a tolerable hand; but unless a man is a thoroughly good artist, he injures his enjoyment, generally speaking, of the art of others. I am convinced, however, that to enjoy art thoroughly, every man must have in him the possibility of doing it as well as liking it. He must feel it in his fingers, as well as in his head and at his eyes; and it must find its way from all the three to his heart, and be emotive.

Much has been said of the power of Art to refine men, to soften their manners, and make them less of wild beasts. Some have thought it omnipotent for this; others have given it as a sign of the decline and fall of the nobler part of us. Neither is, and both are true. Art does, as our Laureate says, make nobler in us what is higher than the senses through which it passes; but it can only make nobler what is already noble; it cannot regenerate, neither can it of itself debase and emasculate and bedevil mankind; but it is a symptom, and a fatal one, when Art ministers to a nation’s vice, and glorifies its naughtiness – as in old Rome, as in Oude – as also too much in places nearer in time and place than the one and the other. The truth is, Art, unless quickened from above and from within, has in it nothing beyond itself, which is visible beauty – the ministration to the lust, the desire of the eye. But apart from direct spiritual worship, and self-dedication to the Supreme, I do not know any form of ideal thought and feeling which may be made more truly to subserve, not only magnanimity, but the purest devotion and godly fear; by fear meaning that mixture of love and awe, which is specific of the realization of our relation to God. I am not so silly as to seek painters to paint religious pictures in the usual sense; for the most part, I know nothing so profoundly profane and godless as our sacred pictures; and I can’t say I like our religious beliefs to be symbolized, even as Mr. Hunt has so grandly done in his picture of the Light of the World. But if a painter is himself religious; if he feels God in what he is looking at, and in what he is rendering back on his canvas; if he is impressed with the truly divine beauty, infinity, perfection, and meaning of unspoiled material nature – the earth and the fulness thereof, the heaven and all its hosts, the strength of the hills, the sea and all that is therein; if he is himself impressed with the divine origin and divine end of all visible things, – then will he paint religious pictures and impress men religiously, and thus make good men listen, and possibly make bad men good. Take the landscapes of our own Harvey. He is my dear old friend of thirty years, and his power as a painter is only less than his fidelity and ardor as a friend, and that than his simple, deep-hearted piety; I never see one of his transcripts of nature, be they solemn and full of gloom, with a look “that threatens the profane;” or laughing all over with sunshine and gladness, but I feel something beyond, something greater and more beautiful than their greatness and their beauty – the idea of God, of the beginning and the ending, the first and the last, the living One; of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things; who is indeed God over all, blessed forever; and whom I would desire, in all humbleness of mind, to sanctify in my heart, and to make my fear and my dread. This is the true moral use of Art, to quicken and deepen and enlarge our sense of God. I don’t mean so much our belief in certain articulate doctrines, though I am old-fashioned enough to think that we must know what as well as in whom we believe – that our religion, like everything else, must “have its seat in reason, and be judicious;” I refer rather to that temper of the soul, that mood of the mind in which we feel the unseen and eternal, and bend under the power of the world to come.

In my views as to the office of the State I hold with John Locke and Coventry Dick,60 that its primary, and probably its only function is to protect us from our enemies and from ourselves; that to it is intrusted by the people “the regulation of physical force;” and that it is indeed little more than a transcendental policeman. This is its true sphere, and here lies its true honor and glory. When it intermeddles with other things, – from your Religion, Education, and Art, down to the number, and size, and metal of your buttons, it goes out of its line and fails; and I am convinced that with some benefits, specious and partial, our Government interference has, in the main and in the long run, done harm to the real interests of Art. Spontaneity, the law of free choice, is as much the life of Art as it is of marriage, and it is not less beyond the power of the State to choose the nation’s pictures, than to choose its wives. Indeed there is a great deal on the physiological side to be said for law interfering in the matter of matrimony. I would certainly make it against law, as it plainly is against nature, for cousins-german to marry; and if we could pair ourselves as we pair our live stock, and give ear to the teaching of an enlightened zoönomy, we might soon drive many of our fellest diseases out of our breed; but the law of personality, of ultroneousness, of free will, that which in a great measure makes us what we are, steps in and forbids anything but the convincement and force of reason. Much in the same way, though it be a more trivial matter, pleasure, in order to please, must be that which you yourself choose. You cannot make an Esquimaux forswear train oil, and take to tea and toast like ourselves, still less to boiled rice like a Hindoo; neither can you all at once make a Gilmerton carter prefer Raphael and claret to a glass of raw whiskey and the Terrific Register. Leviathan is not so tamed or taught. And our Chadwicks and Kaye Shuttleworths and Coles – kings though they may be – enlightened, energetic, earnest, and as full of will as an egg is full of meat, cannot in a generation make the people of England as intelligent as themselves, or as fond and appreciative of the best Art as Mr. Ruskin. Hence all their plans are failing and must fail; and I cannot help thinking that in the case of Art, the continuance of the Cole dynasty is not to be prayed for very much. As far as I can judge, it has done infinitely more harm than good. These men think they are doing a great work, and, worse still, the country thinks so too, and helps them, whereas I believe they are retarding the only wholesome, though slow growth of knowledge and taste.

Take the Kensington Museum: the only thing there (I speak in all seriousness) worth any man spending an hour or a shilling upon, are the Sheepshank and Turner galleries; all those costly, tawdry, prodigious, and petty displays of arts and manufactures, I look upon as mere delusions and child’s play. Take any one of them, say the series illustrating the cotton fabrics; you see the whole course of cotton from its Alpha to its Omega, in the neatest and prettiest way. What does that teach? what impression does that make upon any young mind? Little beyond mere vapid wonder. The eye is opened, but not filled; it is a stare, not a look.

If you want to move, and permanently rivet, a young mind with what is worth the knowing, with what is to deepen his sense of the powers of the human mind, and the resources of nature, and the grandeur of his country, take him to a cotton-mill. Let him hear and come under the power of that wonderful sound pervading the whole vast house, and filling the air with that diapason of regulated, harmonious energy. Let him enter it, and go round with a skilled workman, and then follow the Alpha through all its marvellous transformations to the Omega; do this, and you bring him out into the fresh air not only more knowing, but more wise. He has got a lesson. He has been impressed. The same with calico-printing, and pottery, and iron-founding, and, indeed, the whole round of that industry which is our glory. Do you think a boy will get half the good from the fine series of ores and specimens of pig-iron, and all the steels he may see in cold blood, and with his grandmother or his sweetheart beside him at Kensington, that he will from going into Dixon’s foundry at Govan, and seeing the half-naked men toiling in that place of flame and energy and din – watching the mighty shears and the Nasmyth-hammers, and the molten iron kneaded like dough, and planed and shaved like wood; he gets the dead and dissected body in the one case; he sees and feels the living spirit and body working as one, in the other. And upon all this child’s-play, this mere make-believe, our good-natured nation is proud of spending some half-million of money. Then there is that impertinent, useless, and unjust system of establishing Government Schools of Design in so many of our towns, avowedly, and, I believe (though it is amazing that clever men should do such a foolish thing), honestly, for the good of the working-classes, but actually and lamentably, and in every way harmfully, for the amusement and benefit of the wealthy classes, and to the ruin of the hard-working and legitimate local teachers.