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 PhershonFor his personal diversion,Sang the chorus U-pi-dee,Sang about the Barley Bree.In that hour when all is quietSang he songs of noise and riot,In a voice so loud and queerThat I wakened up to hear.Songs that distantly resembledThose one hears from men assembledIn the old Cross Keys Hotel,Only sung not half so well.For the time of this ecstaticAmateur was most erratic,And he only hit the keyOnce in every melody.If “he wot prigs wot isn’t his’nVen he’s cotched is sent to prison,”He who murders sleep might wellAdorn a solitary cell.But, if no obliging peelerWill arrest this midnight squealer,My own peculiar arm of mightMust 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 asideA strongly built provision-dealerWho 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 beginThose 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 lightSleeps on St. Andrews Bay —   Blue, fringed with white.That’s no December sky!   Surely ’tis JuneHolds 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 stillWinter, the aged chief,   Mighty in power,Exiles the tender leaf,   Exiles the flower.Is there a heart to-day,   A heart that grievesFor flowers that fade away,   For fallen leaves?Oh, not in leaves or flowers   Endures the charmThat clothes those naked towers   With love-light warm.O dear St. Andrews Bay,   Winter or SpringGives not nor takes away   Memories that clingAll 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

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 lightOf very bad gas, must painfully write   Some stuff that a Greek   With his delicate cheekWould 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.

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1

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