Robert F. Murray (Author of the Scarlet Gown): His Poems; with a Memoir - Andrew Lang 2 стр.

Till 1869 he lived in various parts of New England, his father being a Unitarian minister. He was a remarkably cheerful and affectionate child, and seldom seemed to find anything to trouble him. In 1869 his father carried him to England, Mrs. Murray and a child remaining in America. For more than a year the boy lived with kinsfolk near Kelso, the beautiful old town on the Tweed where Scott passed some of his childish days. In 1871 the family were reunited at York, where he was fond of attending the services in the Cathedral. Mr. Murray then took charge of the small Unitarian chapel of Blackfriars, at Canterbury. Thus Murrays early youth was passed in the mingled influences of Unitarianism at home, and of Cathedral services at York, and in the church where Becket suffered martyrdom. A not unnatural result was a somewhat eclectic and unconstrained religion. He thought but little of the differences of creed, believing that all good men held, in essentials, much the same faith. His view of essentials was generous, as he admitted. He occasionally spoke of himself as sceptical, that is, in contrast with those whose faith was more definite, more dogmatic, more securely based on articles. To illustrate Murrays religious attitude, at least as it was in 1887, one may quote from a letter of that year (April 17).

There was a University sermon, and I thought I would go and hear it. So I donned my old cap and gown and felt quite proud of them. The preacher was Bishop Wordsworth. He goes in for the union of the Presbyterian and Episcopalian Churches, and is glad to preach in a Presbyterian Church, as he did this morning. How the aforesaid Union is to be brought about, Im sure I dont know, for I am pretty certain that the Episcopalians wont give up their bishops, and the Presbyterians wont have them on any account. However, thats neither here nor there at least it does not affect the fact that Wordsworth is a first-rate man, and a fine preacher. I dare say you know he is a nephew or grand-nephew of the Poet. He is a most venerable old man, and worth looking at, merely for his exterior. He is so feeble with age that he can with difficulty climb the three short steps that lead into the pulpit; but, once in the pulpit, it is another thing. There is no feebleness when he begins to preach. He is one of the last voices of the old orthodox school, and I wish there were hundreds like him. If ever a man believed in his message, Wordsworth does. And though I cannot follow him in his veneration for the Thirty-nine Articles, the way in which he does makes me half wish I could It was full of wisdom and the beauty of holiness, which even I, poor sceptic and outcast, could recognise and appreciate. After all, he didnt get it from the Articles, but from his own human heart, which, he told us, was deceitful and desperately wicked.

Confound it, how stupid we all are! Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Agnostics; the whole lot of us. We all believe the same things, to a great extent; but we must keep wrangling about the data from which we infer these beliefs.. I believe a great deal that he does, but I certainly dont act up to my belief as he does to his.

The belief up to which Murray lived was, if it may be judged by its fruits, that of a Christian man. But, in this age, we do find the most exemplary Christian conduct in some who have discarded dogma and resigned hope. Probably Murray would not the less have regarded these persons as Christians. If we must make a choice, it is better to have love and charity without belief, than belief of the most intense kind, accompanied by such love and charity as John Knox bore to all who differed from him about a mass or a chasuble, a priest or a presbyter. This letter, illustrative of the effect of cathedral services on a young Unitarian, is taken out of its proper chronological place.

From Canterbury Mr. Murray went to Ilminster in Somerset. Here Robert attended the Grammar School; in 1879 he went to the Grammar School of Crewkerne. In 1881 he entered at the University of St. Andrews, with a scholarship won as an external student of Manchester New College. This he resigned not long after, as he had abandoned the idea of becoming a Unitarian minister.

No longer a schoolboy, he was now a Bejant (bec jaune?), to use the old Scotch term for freshman. He liked the picturesque word, and opposed the introduction of freshman. Indeed he liked all things old, and, as a senior man, was a supporter of ancient customs and of esprit de corps in college. He fell in love for life with that old and grey enchantress, the city of St. Margaret, of Cardinal Beaton, of Knox and Andrew Melville, of Archbishop Sharp, and Samuel Rutherford. The nature of life and education in a Scottish university is now, probably, better understood in England than it used to be. Of the Scottish universities, St. Andrews varies least, though it varies much, from Oxford and Cambridge. Unlike the others, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, the United College of St. Leonard and St. Salvator is not lost in a large town. The College and the Divinity Hall of St. Marys are a survival from the Middle Ages. The University itself arose from a voluntary association of the learned in 1410. Privileges were conferred on this association by Bishop Wardlaw in 1411. It was intended as a bulwark against Lollard ideas. In 1413 the Antipope Benedict XIII., to whom Scotland then adhered, granted six bulls of confirmation to the new University. Not till 1430 did Bishop Wardlaw give a building in South Street, the Pædagogium. St. Salvators College was founded by Bishop Kennedy (1440-1466): it was confirmed by Pius II. in 1458. Kennedy endowed his foundation richly with plate (a silver mace is still extant) and with gorgeous furniture and cloth of gold. St. Leonards was founded by Prior Hepburn in 1512. Of St. Salvators the ancient chapel still remains, and is in use. St. Leonards was merged with St. Salvators in the last century: its chapel is now roofless, some of the old buildings remain, much modernised, but on the south side fronting the gardens they are still picturesque. Both Colleges were, originally, places of residence for the students, as at Oxford and Cambridge, and the discipline, especially at St. Leonards, was rather monastic. The Reformation caused violent changes; all through these troubled ages the new doctrines, and then the violent Presbyterian pretensions to clerical influence in politics, and the Covenant and the Restoration and Revolution, kept busy the dwellers in what should have been quiet collegiate cloisters. St. Leonards was more extreme, on Knoxs side, than St. Salvators, but was also more devoted to King James in 1715. From St. Andrews Simon Lovat went to lead his abominable old fathers clan, on the Prince Regents side, in 1745. Golf and archery, since the Reformation at least, were the chief recreations of the students, and the archery medals bear all the noblest names of the North, including those of Argyll and the great Marquis of Montrose. Early in the present century the old ruinous college buildings of St. Salvators ceased to be habitable, except by a ghost! There is another spectre of a noisy sort in St. Leonards. The new buildings are mere sets of class-rooms, the students live where they please, generally in lodgings, which they modestly call bunks. There is a hall for dinners in common; it is part of the buildings of the Union, a new hall added to an ancient house.

It was thus to a university with ancient associations, with a religio loci, and with more united and harmonious student-life than is customary in Scotland, that Murray came in 1881. How clearly his biographer remembers coming to the same place, twenty years earlier! how vivid is his memory of quaint streets, grey towers, and the North Sea breaking in heavy rollers on the little pier!

It was thus to a university with ancient associations, with a religio loci, and with more united and harmonious student-life than is customary in Scotland, that Murray came in 1881. How clearly his biographer remembers coming to the same place, twenty years earlier! how vivid is his memory of quaint streets, grey towers, and the North Sea breaking in heavy rollers on the little pier!

Though, like a descendant of Archbishop Sharp, and a winner of the archery medal, I boast myself Sancti Leonardi alumnus addictissimus, I am unable to give a description, at first hand, of student life in St. Andrews. In my time, a small set of men lived together in what was then St. Leonards Hall. The buildings that remain on the site of Prior Hepburns foundation, or some of them, were turned into a hall, where we lived together, not scattered in bunks. The existence was mainly like that of pupils of a private tutor; seven-eighths of private tutor to one-eighth of a college in the English universities. We attended the lectures in the University, we distinguished ourselves no more than Murray would have approved of, and many of us have remained united by friendship through half a lifetime.

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. Leonards, is fragrant in our memories. It was pleasant, but St. Leonards 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

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

TO NUMBER 27x

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 WASTERS PRESENTIMENT

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

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 Universitys 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. Sellars). 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 Knights (Moral Philosophy) or in Butlers. 1