Rab and His Friends and Other Papers. Brown John
singular man came to the manse every Friday evening for many years, and he and my father discussed everything and everybody; – beginning with tough, strong head work – a bout at wrestling, be it Caesar's Bridge, the Epistles of Phalaris, the import of [Greek], the Catholic question, or the great roots of Christian faith; ending with the latest joke in the town or the West Raw, the last effusion by Affleck, tailor and poet, the last blunder of Æsop the apothecary, and the last repartee of the village fool, with the week's Edinburgh and Glasgow news by their respective carriers; the whole little life, sad and humorous – who had been born, and who was dying or dead, married or about to be, for the past eight days. 16
This amused, and, in the true sense, diverted my father, and gratified his curiosity, which was great, and his love of men as well as for man. He was shy, and unwilling to ask what he longed to know, liking better to have it given him without the asking; and no one could do this better than "Uncle Johnston."
You may readily understand what a thorough exercise and diversion of an intellectual and social kind this was, for they were neither of them men to shirk from close gripes, or trifle and flourish with their weapons; they laid on and spared not. And then my uncle had generally some special nut of his own to crack, some thesis to fling down and offer battle on, some "particle" to energize upon; for though quiet and calm, he was thoroughly combative, and enjoyed seeing his friend's blood up, and hearing his emphatic and bright speech, and watching his flashing eye. Then he never spared him; criticised and sometimes quizzed – for he had great humour – his style, as well as debated and weighed his apprehendings and exegeses, shaking them heartily to test their strength. He was so thoroughly independent of all authority, except that of reason and truth, and his own humour; so ready to detect what was weak, extravagant, or unfair; so full of relish for intellectual power and accuracy, and so attached to and proud of my father, and bent on his making the best of himself, that this trial was never relaxed. His firm and close-grained mind was a sort of whetstone on which my father sharpened his wits at this weekly "setting."
The very difference of their mental tempers and complexions drew them together – the one impatient, nervous, earnest, instant, swift, vehement, regardless of exertion, bent on his goal, like a thorough-bred racer, pressing to the mark; the other leisurely to slowness and provokingness, with a constitution which could stand a great deal of ease, unimpassioned, still, clear, untroubled by likings or dislikings, dwelling and working in thought and speculation and observation as ends in themselves, and as their own rewards: 17 the one hunting for a principle or a "divine method;" the other sapping or shelling from a distance, and for his pleasure, a position, or gaining a point, or settling a rule, or verifying a problem, or getting axiomatic and proverbial.
In appearance they were as curiously unlike; my uncle short and round to rotundity, homely and florid in feature. I used to think Socrates must have been like him in visage as well as in much of his mind. He was careless in his dress, his hands in his pockets as a rule, and strenuous only in smoking or in sleep: with a large, full skull, a humorous twinkle in his cold, blue eye, a soft, low voice, expressing every kind of thought in the same, sometimes plaguily douce tone; a great power of quiet and telling sarcasm, large capacity of listening to and of enjoying other men's talk, however small.
My father – tall, slim, agile, quick in his movements, graceful, neat to nicety in his dress, with much in his air of what is called style, with a face almost too beautiful for a man's, had not his eyes commanded it and all who looked at it, and his close, firm mouth been ready to say what the fiery spirit might bid; his eyes, when at rest, expressing – more than almost any other I ever saw – sorrow and tender love, a desire to give and to get sympathy, and a sort of gentle, deep sadness, as if that was their permanent state, and gladness their momentary act; but when awakened, full of fire, peremptory, and not to be trifled with; and his smile, and flash of gaiety and fun, something no one could forget; his hair in early life a dead black; his eyebrows of exquisite curve, narrow and intense; his voice deep when unmoved and calm; keen and sharp to piercing fierceness when vehement and roused – in the pulpit, at times a shout, at times a pathetic wail; his utterance hesitating, emphatic, explosive, powerful, – each sentence shot straight and home; his hesitation arising from his crowd of impatient ideas, and his resolute will that they should come in their order, and some of them not come at all, only the best, and his settled determination that each thought should be dressed in the very and only word which he stammered on till it came, – it was generally worth his pains and ours.
Uncle Johnston, again, flowed on like Cæsar's Arar, incredibili lenitate, or like linseed out of a poke. You can easily fancy the spiritual and bodily contrast of these men, and can fancy too, the kind of engagements they would have with their own proper weapons on these Friday evenings, in the old manse dining-room, my father showing uncle out into the darkness of the back-road, and uncle, doubtless, lighting his black and ruminative pipe.
If my uncle brought up nuts to crack, my father was sure to have some difficulties to consult about, or some passages to read, something that made him put his whole energy forth; and when he did so, I never heard such reading. To hear him read the story of Joseph, or passages in David's history, and Psalms 6th, 11th, and 15th, or the 53d, 53d, 54th, 55th, 63d, 64th, and 40th chapters of Isaiah, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the Journey to Emmaus, or our Saviour's prayer in John, or Paul's speech on Mars Hill, or the first three chapters of Hebrews and the latter part of the nth, or Job, or the Apocalypse; or to pass from those divine themes – Jeremy Taylor, or George Herbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, or Milton's prose, such as the passage beginning, "Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O thou Prince of all the kings of the earth!" and "Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her divine Master," or Charles Wesley's Hymns, or, most loved of all, Cowper, from the rapt "Come thou, and, added to thy many crowns," or "O that those lips had language!" to the Jackdaw, and his incomparable Letters; or Gray's Poems, Burns's "Tam O'Shanter," or Sir Walter's "Eve of St. John," 18 and "The Grey Brother."
and pointing out the "Watchfold height," "the eiry Beacon Hill," and "Brotherstone."
But I beg your pardon: Time has run back with me, and fetched that blessed past, and awakened its echoes. I hear his voice; I feel his eye; I see his whole nature given up to wrhat he is reading, and making its very soul speak.
Such a man then as I have sketched, or washed faintly in, as the painters say, was that person who sat in the corner under the gallery every Sabbath-day, and who knew his Greek Testament better than his minister. He is dead, too, a few months ago, dying surrounded with his cherished hoard of books of all sizes, times, and tongues – tatterdemalion many; all however drawn up in an order of his own; all thoroughly mastered and known; among them David Hume's copy of Shaftesbury's Characteristics, with his autograph, which he had picked up at some stall.
I have said that my mother's death was the second epoch in my father's life. I should perhaps have said the third; the first being his mother's long illness and death, and the second his going to Elie, and beginning the battle of life at fifteen. There must have been something very delicate and close and exquisite in the relation between the ailing, silent, beautiful and pensive mother, and that dark-eyed, dark-haired, bright and silent son; a sort of communion it is not easy to express. You can think of him at eleven slowly writing out that small book of promises in a distinct and minute hand, quite as like his mature hand, as the shy, lustrous-eyed boy was to his after self in his manly years, and sitting by the bedside while the rest were out and shouting, playing at hide-and-seek round the little church, with the winds from Benlomond or the wild uplands of Ayrshire blowing through their hair. He played seldom, but when he did run out, he jumped higher and farther, and ran faster than any of them. His peculiar beauty must have come from his mother. He used at rare times, and with a sort of shudder, to tell of her when a lovely girl of fifteen, having been seen by a gentleman of rank, in Cheap-side, hand in hand with an evil woman, who was decoying her to ruin, on pretence of showing her the way home; and how he stopped his carriage, and taking in the unconscious girl, drove her to her uncle's door. But you have said all this better than I can.
His time with his mother, and the necessary confinement and bodily depression caused by it, I doubt not deepened his native thoughtful turn, and
I believe this was the true though secret source of much of my father's knowledge of the minute personal history of every one in his region, which – to his people, knowing his reserved manner and his devotion to his studies, and his so rarely meeting them or speaking to them, except from the pulpit, or at a diet of visitation – was a perpetual wonder, and of which he made great use in his dealings with his afflicted or erring members."
He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show; like the cactus in the desert, always plump, always taking in the dew of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He wrote many papers in the Repository and Monitor, an acute and clever tract on the Voluntary controversy, entitled Calm Answers to Angry Questions, and was the author of a capital bit of literary banter – a Congratulatory Letter to the Minister of Liber-ton, who had come down upon my father in a pamphlet, for his sermon on "There remaineth much land to be possessed." It is a mixture of Swift and Arbuthnot. I remember one of the flowers he culls from him he is congratulating, in which my father is characterized as one of those "shallow, sallow souls that would swallow the bait "without perceiving the cloven foot!" But a man like this never is best in a book; he is always greater than his work.
Well do I remember when driving him from Melrose to Kelso, long ago, we came near Sandyknowe, that grim tower of Smailholm, standing erect like a warrior turned to stone, defying time and change, his bursting into that noble ballad —