London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

by Arthur Warren

He had fluttered the theologians, not flattered them. He was a theologian himself. His object was to stretch theology to man's size. The champions of a hundred orthodoxies and heterodoxies chattered fiercely behind their bulwarks of texts. It seems a very small matter now, but, after all, it helped us all, for Drummond was a helpful man. He was a young man's man, and there you have one of the keys to him.

To be a professor of anything in the Free Kirk College might imply that a man was hampered as to words and views. It was not so in Drummond's case, at any rate. I have said that he was a theologian; I will add that he was a geologist. When I knew him, he was famous and forty-two, and he had recently discovered in Glasgow the remains of a fossil forest. He had just returned from America, where he had been lecturing at the Lowell Institute, in Boston, on "The Evolution of Man." How he laughed over his Boston surprise! Of course he knew the Lowell Institute by name, but he had n't an idea of what it really was. He had supposed that he would have an audience of two or three dozen old fogies and a number of short-haired blue-stockings. He found the place crammed with alert human beings, mostly young, and all enthusiastic. There was a greater crowd outside, hoping vainly to get in. His thought was, as he mounted the platform: "My lecture won't do. I must popularise it. There are no Dryasdusts here." He altered the lecture as he went along, and when he had finished, he returned to his hotel and undertook to rewrite all the lectures he had brought from Scotland. There were no fogies in the throngs that heard him. He had already been two or three times to America; now he began to understand what it really was,—the country of the young.

Drummond lived at Number 3 Park Circus, Glasgow. He kept bachelor's hall there, and kept it very well, indeed. The house was spacious, "rich not gaudy", the rooms set in carved woods and trophies of ivory, and everything about them suggesting comfort and agreeable taste. It did not in the least suggest the abiding place of a theologian, Scottish or otherwise, and it did not hint at the granite-like hardness of the houses of some geologists I have known. If I say that we had jolly evenings there, smoking churchwardens and talking of travel, the life of cities, and Scottish tales, and New England and Old England, and the Academy, and books, and Gladstone, and Hyde Park, and the Rocky Mountains, it is only to show that theological-geologists can be human. Drummond was more than human; he was companionable. He had always the appearance of ease, but he was a persistent worker. Work never drove him, though; he held the reins over it and mastered it. If you had an appointment with him, the time was yours; he had set it apart; you were not made to feel that there was any pressure. This may seem a simple thing to do; but, as most men live, it is not.

Drummond's person was tall and slender; he had brown hair; his eyes were—shall I call them brownish-grey?—his moustache and short side whiskers inclined to a sandy tint; his voice was pleasing, and he shook hands with a hearty grip. He attracted you not so much by cordiality as by sincerity. He went to the point at once.

I was making a study of British municipal policy and administration, with a view to certain movements in America. Drummond was helpful daily. He knew the things that had been done and the men who did them; he knew the practical fellows and the extremists; the men who worked at reforms and the men who merely talked about them; the originators and the copyists; the men who were out for politics and party, and the men who were out for the good they could do. And so I got at results and saved time and weariness, though not without much weariness and time. Down narrow, grimy streets, piloted by Bailie This, or Bailie That, or Superintendent Thus and So, or Overseer of T'other, I went by day and night through the densest, soul-rending parts of Glasgow; up twisting flights of stairs, through murky alleys and through atrocious smells; people were shovelled there to live as they could. At every little distance we would come to spaces where old masonry was being levelled, and new bright buildings going up; lodging houses, tenements, model dwellings, bathhouses, feeding places, washing places, drying places, places where the sunlight and air could enter, could sweep about,—the municipality was overhauling things.

I would return to Drummond's, rid myself of the everlasting Scotch mist, have a bath, a nap, a change of clothing, and then tuck my knees under his mahogany, tell about what I 'd seen, and the drenching, fatiguing day, and, "as sure as eggs is eggs", his explanations would bring in Moody.

"That was Moody's doing," he would say; or "Moody started us," or "Moody collected the money to begin this work, or that," or "Moody showed us the way."

Moody was "the biggest man I ever knew," he said.

"Then why not talk of him?"

"I 'd like nothing better. Unless you knew him, and knew him at work, you could n't half appreciate him." I feared I never did. "Well, then, take him as a manager of men—" and there would begin a run of anecdote showing that the renowned evangelist was a great organiser, and would have been as great in the business world, or the political world, or the military world, had he chosen to enter, as he had been in the hearts of Scotsmen, Englishmen, and Americans.