Robert F. Murray (Author of the Scarlet Gown): His Poems; with a Memoir. Lang Andrew
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. Mary’s 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. Salvator’s 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. Leonard’s was founded by Prior Hepburn in 1512. Of St. Salvator’s the ancient chapel still remains, and is in use. St. Leonard’s was merged with St. Salvator’s 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. Leonard’s, 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. Leonard’s was more extreme, on Knox’s side, than St. Salvator’s, but was also more devoted to King James in 1715. From St. Andrews Simon Lovat went to lead his abominable old father’s clan, on the Prince Regent’s 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. Salvator’s ceased to be habitable, except by a ghost! There is another spectre of a noisy sort in St. Leonard’s. 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!
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. Leonard’s Hall. The buildings that remain on the site of Prior Hepburn’s 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. 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 Phershon
For his personal diversion,
Sang the chorus U-pi-dee,
Sang about the Barley Bree.
In that hour when all is quiet
Sang he songs of noise and riot,
In a voice so loud and queer
That I wakened up to hear.
Songs that distantly resembled
Those one hears from men assembled
In the old Cross Keys Hotel,
Only sung not half so well.
For the time of this ecstatic
Amateur was most erratic,
And he only hit the key
Once in every melody.
If “he wot prigs wot isn’t his’n
Ven he’s cotched is sent to prison,”
He who murders sleep might well
Adorn a solitary cell.
But, if no obliging peeler
Will arrest this midnight squealer,
My own peculiar arm of might
Must undertake the job to-night.
The following fragment is but doubtfully autobiographical. ‘The swift four-wheeler’ seldom devastates the streets where,