Yit, and thow fyle the veritie,
Than downe thow sall cum, downe.”
Most pleasant of all it was when, later in the evening, we moved to the low trellised verandah on the south side of the house, opening on the beautiful garden of flowers and evergreens in which Syme took such delight. It was a fine, still evening; and, as the talk went on in the open air, with the garden stretching in front of us and the views of the hills beyond, only with the accompaniment now of wreaths of tobacco-smoke, Syme, who disliked tobacco, was smilingly tolerant even of that accompaniment, in honour of the chief smoker.
For more than twelve years after that evening, which I remember now like a dream, Carlyle was still in the land of the living, advancing from his seventy-third year to his eighty-sixth; but hardly a year of the twelve had elapsed when the great surgeon who had entertained him, and who was so much his junior, was struck by the paralysis which carried him off. It is from Dr. John Brown that we have this touching record of Syme’s last days:—
“I was the first to see him when struck down by hemiplegia. It was in Shandwick Place, where he had his chambers,—sleeping and enjoying his evenings in his beautiful Millbank, with its flowers, its matchless orchids and heaths and azaleas, its bananas and grapes and peaches: with Blackford Hill,—where Marmion saw the Scottish host mustering for Flodden,—in front, and the Pentlands, with Cairketton Hill, their advanced guard, cutting the sky, its ruddy porphyry scaur holding the slanting shadows in its bosom. He was, as before said, in his room in Shandwick Place, sitting in his chair, having been set up by his faithful Blackbell. His face was distorted. He said—‘John, this is the conclusion’; and so it was, to his, and our, and the world’s sad cost. He submitted to his fate with manly fortitude, but he felt it to the uttermost,—struck down in his prime, full of rich power, abler than ever to do good to men, his soul surviving his brain, and looking on at its steady ruin during many sad months. He became softer, gentler,—more easily moved, even to tears; but the judging power, the perspicacity, the piercing to the core, remained untouched. Henceforward, of course, life was maimed. How he bore up against this, resigning his delights of teaching, of doing good to men, of seeing and cherishing his students, of living in the front of the world,—how he accepted all this only those nearest him can know. I have never seen anything more pathetic than when, near his death, he lay speechless, but full of feeling and mind, and made known in some inscrutable way to his old gardener and friend that he wished to see a certain orchid which he knew should be then in bloom. The big, clumsy, knowing Paterson, glum and victorious (he was for ever getting prizes at the Horticultural), brought it,—the Stanhopea Tigrina,—in without a word. It was the very one,—radiant in beauty, white, with a brown freckle, like Imogen’s mole, and, like it, ‘right proud of that most delicate lodging.’ He gazed at it, and, bursting into a passion of tears, motioned it away as insufferable.”
To have been such a chronicler of the excellent as Dr. John Brown was required more than endowment, however extraordinary, in any mere passive quality of appreciativeness. It required the poetic eye, the imaginative faculty in its active form, the power of infusing himself into his subject, the discernment and subtlety of a real artist. Visible to some extent in his criticisms of books and pictures, and also in his memoirs and character-sketches, and in a still higher degree in those papers of local Scottish description, legend, and reminiscence to which I have already referred,—Queen Mary’s Child Garden, Minchmoor, The Enterkin, A Jacobite Family, and Biggar and the House of Fleming,—this rising of sympathetic appreciation into poetic art and phantasy appears most conspicuously of all in those papers or parts of papers in which the matter is whimsical or out of the common track. Perhaps it is his affection for out-of-the-way subjects, evident even in the titles of some of his papers, that has led to the comparison of Dr. John Brown with Charles Lamb. Like that English humourist, he did go into odd corners for his themes,—still, however, keeping within Scottish ground, and finding his oddities, whether of humour or of pathos, in native Scottish life and tradition. Or rather, by his very appreciativeness, he was a kind of magnet to which stray and hitherto unpublished curiosities, whether humorous or pathetic, floating in Scottish society, attached themselves naturally, as if seeking an editor. In addition to the illustrations of this furnished by the already-mentioned papers of Scottish legend, or by parts of them, one may mention now his paper entitled The Black Dwarf’s Bones, that entitled Mystifications, his Marjorie Fleming or Pet Marjorie, his Jeems the Doorkeeper, and the quaint little trifle entitled Oh! I’m wat, wat. In the first three of these Dr. John Brown is seen distinctly as the editor of previously unpublished curiosities. There were relics of information respecting that strange being, David Ritchie, the deformed misanthropist of Peeblesshire, who had been the original of one of Scott’s shorter novels. These came to Dr. John Brown, and he strung them together, extracts and quotations, on a thread of connecting narrative. Again, having had the privilege of knowing intimately that venerable Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune who is the subject of one of his memorial sketches, and who used to reside in Edinburgh every winter till within a few years of her death in 1877 at the age of ninety-five, who but Dr. John Brown first persuaded the venerable lady to give to the world her recollections of her marvellous dramatic feats in her earlier days, when she used to mystify Scott, and Jeffrey, and Lord Gillies, and John Clerk of Eldin, and Count Flahault, and whole companies of their contemporaries in Edinburgh drawing-rooms, by her disguised appearances in the dress and character of an eccentric old Scottish gentlewoman; and who but Dr. John immortalised the tradition by telling her story over again, and re-imagining for us the whole of that Edinburgh society of 1820–21 in which Miss Stirling Graham had moved so bewitchingly? Ten years before that, or in December 1811, there had died in Edinburgh a little girl of a family with whom Scott was particularly intimate, and who lived near him. She was but in her ninth year; but for several years she had been the pet and wonder of her friends, for her childish humours and abilities, her knowledge of books and poetry, the signs of a quaint genius in her behaviour, and in her own little exercises in prose and in verse. Many a heart was sore, Scott’s for one, we are told, when poor little “Pet Marjorie” died; and no one that knew her ever forgot her. One sister of hers, who survived her for seventy years, cherished her memory to the last like a religion, and had preserved all her childish and queerly spelt letters and journals, with other scraps of writing, tied up with a lock of her light-brown hair. To these faded letters and papers Dr. John Brown had access; and the result was his exquisitely tender Pet Marjorie or Marjorie Fleming,—the gem in its kind among all his papers, and perhaps the most touching illustration in our language of Shakespeare’s text, “How quick bright things come to confusion!” Here, as in some other cases, it may be said that Dr. John Brown only edited material that came ready to his hand. Even in that view of the matter, one could at least wish that there were more such editing; but it is an insufficient view. He had recovered the long-dead little Marjorie Fleming for himself; and the paper, though consisting largely of quotations and extracts, is as properly his own as any of the rest. But, should there be a disposition still with some to distinguish between editing and invention, and to regard Mystifications and Marjorie Fleming as merely well-edited curiosities of a fascinating kind, no such distinction will trouble one who passes to Jeems the Doorkeeper. A real person, as the writer tells us, sat for that sketch too, and we have a portrait of the actual Jeems who officiated as his father’s beadle in Broughton Place Church; but with what originality and friskiness of humour is the portrait drawn, and how fantastically the paper breaks in the end into streaks of a skyward sermon! There is the same quaint originality, or Lamb-like oddity of conglomerate, in the little fragment called “Oh, I’m wat, wat,” and in one or two other trifles, with similarly fantastic titles, which I have not named.
There is no better test of imaginative or poetic faculty in a man than susceptibility to anything verging on the preternaturally solemn or ghastly. Of the strength of this susceptibility in Dr. John Brown’s nature there are evidences, here and there, in not a few of his writings. Take for example the following reminiscence, in his paper entitled Thackeray’s Death, of a walk with Thackeray in one of the suburbs of Edinburgh:—
“We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December when he was walking with two friends along the Dean Road, to the west of Edinburgh,—one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening,—such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip colour, lucid, and as it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The north-west end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross: there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance, in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what we all were feeling, in the word ‘Calvary!’ The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things.”
Even a more remarkable example is that furnished by the paper entitled “In Clear Dream and Solemn Vision.” The paper purports to be the record of a singular dream, dreamt by a man whom Dr. John Brown counted among his friends, and of whose great abilities, powers of jest and whimsical humour, and powers of a still higher kind, there are yet recollections in the lawyer-world of Edinburgh,—the late A. S. Logan, Sheriff of Forfarshire. I prefer here to tell the dream in my own words, as it has remained in my memory since I first heard it described many years ago. This I do because, while the version of it I have so retained came to me originally from Dr. John Brown himself, it seems to me better than the version subsequently given by him in his own paper, attenuated as it is there by explanations and comments, and by the insertion of a weak metrical expansion of it by Logan himself.
The Dream may be entitled The Death of Judas, and was as follows:—The dreamer seemed to be in a lonely, dreary landscape somewhere, the nearer vicinity of which consisted of a low piece of marshy ground, with dull, stagnant pools, overgrown with reeds. The air was heavy and thick: not a sound of life, or sight of anything indicating human presence or habitation, save that on the other side of the marshy ground from the dreamer, and near the margin of the pools and reeds, was what seemed to be a deserted wooden hut, the door half-broken, and the side-timbers and rafters also ragged, so that through the rifts there was a dim perception of the dark interior. But lo! as the dreamer gazed, it appeared as if there were a motion of something or other within the hut, signs of some living thing in it moving uneasily and haggardly to and fro. Hardly has one taken notice of this when one is aware of a new sight outside the hut,—a beautiful dove, or dove-like bird, of spotless white, that has somehow stationed itself close to the door, and is brooding there, intent and motionless, in a guardian-like attitude. For a while the ugly, ragged hut, with the mysterious signs of motion inside of it, and this white dove-like creature outside at its door, are the only things in the marshy tract of ground that hold the eye. But, suddenly, what is this third thing? Round from the gable of the hut it emerges slowly towards the marshy front, another bird-like figure, but dark and horrible-looking, with long and lean legs and neck, like a crane. Past the hut it stalks and still forward, slowly and with loathsome gait, its long neck undulating as it moves, till it has reached the pools and their beds of reeds. There, standing for a moment, it dips down its head among the reeds into the ooze of one of the pools; and, when it raises its head again, there is seen wriggling in its mouth something like a small, black, slimy snake, or worm. With this in its mouth, it stalks slowly back, making straight for the white dove that is still brooding at the door of the hut. When it has reached the door, there seems to be a struggle of life and death between the two creatures,—the obscene, hideous, crane-like bird, and the pure, white innocent,—till, at last, by force, the dove is compelled to open its throat, into which its enemy drops the worm or snake. Immediately the dove drops dead; and at that same instant the mysterious motion within the hut increases and becomes more violent,—no mere motion now, but a fierce strife and commotion, with nothing distinctly visible or decipherable even yet, but a vague sense of some agony transacting itself in the dark interior within the loop-holed timbers and rafters, and of two human arms swung round and round like flails. Then, all at once, it flashed upon the dreamer what he had been beholding. It was Judas that was within the hut, and that was the suicide of the Betrayer.