Every author is to be estimated by specimens of him at his very best. Dr. John Brown had a favourite phrase for such specimens of what he thought the very best in the authors he liked. Of a passage, or of a whole paper, that seemed to him perfect in its kind, perfect in workmanship as well as in conception, he would say that it was “done to the quick.” The phrase indicates, in the first place, Dr. John Brown’s notions of what constitutes true literature of any kind, or at least true literature of a popular kind, as distinct from miscellaneous printed matter. It must be something that will reach the feelings. This being presupposed, then that is best in any author which reaches the feelings most swiftly and directly,—cuts at once, as it were, with knife-like acuteness, to the most sensitive depths. That there are not a few individual passages scattered through Dr. John’s own writings, and also some entire papers of his, that answer this description, will have appeared by our review of his writings so far as they have been yet enumerated. In such papers and passages, as every reader will observe, even the workmanship is at its best. The author gathers himself up, as it were; his artistic craft becomes more decisive and subtle with the heightened glow of his feelings; and his style, apt to be a little diffuse and slipshod at other times, becomes nervous and firm.
Of whatever other productions of Dr. John Brown’s pen this may be asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they are thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme praise must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have reserved to the last,—Rab and his Friends and Our Dogs. Among the many fine and humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so happened that love of the lower animals, and especially of the most faithful and most companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since Sir Walter Scott limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs used to fawn upon him, recognising him as the friend of their kind, there has been no such lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature, in this city at least, as was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he should leave this part of himself, one of the ruling affections of his life, unrepresented in his literary effusions. Hence, while there are dogs incidentally elsewhere in his writings, these two papers are all but dedicated to dogs. What need to quote from them? What need to describe them? They have been read, one of them at least, by perhaps two millions of the English-reading population of the earth: the very children of our Board Schools know the story of Rab and his Friends. How laughingly it opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two boys in their scamper through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago after the hullabaloo of the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a sensation on our first introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South Bridge, to the great Rab, the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if with his hands in his pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been baulked of his victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and finds the consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we come, six years afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and his wife, and the wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and the carrier and Rab remain there till the operation is over, and the dead body of poor Ailie is carried home by her husband in his cart over the miles of snowy country road, and the curtain falls black at last over the death of the carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself! Though the story, as the author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly matter of fact,” who could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little wonder that it has taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so commonly spoken of while he was alive as “The author of Rab and His Friends.” It is by that story, and by those other papers that may be associated with it as also masterly in their different varieties, as all equally “done to the quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long years hence, when all of us are gone, I can imagine that a little volume will be in circulation, containing Rab and his Friends and Our Dogs, and also let us say the Letter to Dr. Cairns, and Queen Mary’s Child-Garden, and Jeems the Doorkeeper, and the paper called Mystifications, and that called Pet Marjorie or Marjorie Fleming, and that then readers now unborn, thrilled by that peculiar touch which only things of heart and genius can give, will confess to the charm that now fascinates us, and will think with interest of Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh.
LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH
A GENERAL REVIEW[[51]]
I
The Literary History of Edinburgh, in any special sense, may be said to have begun in the reigns of the Scottish Kings James IV. (1488–1513) and James V. (1513–1542.) There had been a good deal of scattered literary activity in Scotland before,—all, of course, in manuscript only,—in which Edinburgh had shared; but it was not till those two reigns,—when Edinburgh had become distinctly the capital of the Scottish Kingdom, and was in possession of a printing-press or two,—it was not till then that Edinburgh could claim to be the central seat of the Scottish Muses. What was there anywhere over the rest of Scotland in the shape of new literary product that could then compete with the novelties that came from that cluster of “makars” and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual residence was in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in the picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood?
From the Edinburgh of the two reigns mentioned we pass to the Edinburgh of the Regencies for the infant and absent Queen Mary, of Queen Mary’s own short resident reign, and of the beginnings of the reign of James VI. Through this period, carrying us from 1542 to about 1580, Edinburgh still maintained her metropolitan distinction in literature, as in other things; though with the enormous difference imported into literature, as into other things, by the Reformation struggle and its consequences. Lindsay, the last of the bright poetic triad of the two bygone reigns, survived far into the Reformation struggle,—in which indeed he was a champion of the first mark and importance on the Protestant side; and, though he died before the conclusive Reformation enactment of the Scottish Estates in 1560, he had lived long enough to know personally, and as it were to put his hands on, those who were to be the foremost intellects of Scotland in her new and Protestantised condition. When John Knox and George Buchanan returned from their Continental exile and wanderings to spend their veteran days in their native land,—Knox with his already acquired reputation by English theological writings and pamphlets, and Buchanan with the rarer European fame of superb Latinist and scholar, poetarum sui sæculi facile princeps, as his foreign admirers already universally applauded him,—where could they settle but in Edinburgh? For thirteen years, accordingly, Knox was minister of Edinburgh and her most powerful citizen, writing industriously still, while he preached and directed Scottish politics; and it was in Edinburgh, in 1572, that he died and was buried. Of Buchanan’s life after his return to Scotland, portions were spent at St. Andrews or in Stirling; but Edinburgh had most of him too. It was in Edinburgh that he published his Baptistes, his De Jure Regni apud Scotos, and others of his writings in verse or in prose; and it was in an Edinburgh lodging that he died in 1582, after having sent to the press the last proof-sheets of his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, or Latin History of Scotland. Recollect such minor Edinburgh contemporaries of those two, of literary repute of one kind or another, as Sir Richard Maitland, Robert Pont, Thomas Craig, and the collector George Bannatyne,—not forgetting that before 1580 Edinburgh had glimpses of the new force that was at hand for all Scotland, literary as well as ecclesiastical, in Andrew Melville,—and it will be seen that, though the Reformation had changed notably the character of the intellectual pursuits and interests of the Scottish capital, as of Scotland generally, yet there had been no real interruption so far of that literary lustre of the town which had begun with Dunbar at the Court of James IV. In fact, the first eighty years of the sixteenth century may be regarded (the pre-Reformation authorship and the post-Reformation authorship taken together) as one definitely marked age, and the earliest, in the literary history of Edinburgh. It was an age of high credit in Scottish literary history all in all. Scotland was then no whit inferior to contemporary England in literary power and productiveness. On the contrary, as it is admitted now by the historians of English Literature that in the long tract of time between the death of Chaucer and the appearance of Spenser it was in Scotland rather than in England that the real succession to Chaucer was kept up in the British Islands, so it must be admitted that it was in the last eighty years of that long period of comparative gloom in England that the torch that had been kindled in Scotland was passed there most nimbly and brilliantly from hand to hand.
From 1580 onwards there was a woeful change. “Let not your Majesty doubt,” Napier of Merchiston ventured to say to James VI., while that King was still Sovereign of Scotland only, but after he had shown his own literary ambition in his Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie and other Edinburgh publications, “let not your Majesty doubt that there are within your realm, as well as in other countries, godly and good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner of honest science and godly discipline, who by your Majesty’s instigation might yield forth works and fruits worthy of memory, which otherwise, lacking some mighty Mæcenas to encourage them, may perchance be buried with eternal silence.” The augury, so far as it was one of hope, was not fulfilled. Through the last forty-five years of the reign of James, and then through all the rest of the seventeenth century, including the reign of Charles I., the interregnum of the English Commonwealth and the Oliverian Protectorate, the Restoration reigns of Charles II., and James II., and the reign of William and Mary,—through all that long period, the greatest and richest in the literary annals of England, the time when she made herself the astonishment of the nations by her Elizabethan splendour in Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and their many contemporaries, and then by the succession to these in the great series of which Hobbes, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan, Dryden, and Locke were the chiefs,—what had Scotland to show in comparison? In the first section of the period Napier of Merchiston himself and Drummond of Hawthornden,—a pair well worthy of attention, and both of them specially Edinburgh men; but after these only or mainly a straggle of mediocrities, or of lower than mediocrities. A tradition, it is true, in Arthur Johnston and others, of an excellent Scottish Latinity in discipleship to Buchanan,—the more the pity in so far as this prevented a free and brave exercise of the vernacular; the apparition here and there, too, of a spirit of finer quality among the ecclesiastics, such as Rutherford and Leighton, or of an individual book of mark, such as Baillie’s Letters or Stair’s Institutes; but, for the rest, within Scotland, and without tracking any continuation of the old race of the Scoti extra Scotiam agentes, only such small mercies as a Mure of Rowallan, a Semple of Beltrees, or a Cleland, among the versifiers, or, in prose, a Hume of Godscroft, a Spotswood, a Sir Thomas Urquhart, or a Sir George Mackenzie!
What was the cause of this poverty? The loss of the benefits of a resident Scottish kingship, consequent on the removal of the Court to England in 1603, may have had some effect. No chance after that of Napier’s desired agency of a mighty royal Mæcenas in Holyrood for stirring the Scottish “ingines.” A more certain cause, however, is to be found in the agonising intensity with which, through the whole of the century and a quarter from 1580 onwards, the soul and heart of Scotland, in all classes of the community alike, were occupied with the successive phases of the one vexed question of Presbytery-versus-Episcopacy in Church government, and its theological and political concomitants. It was in the nature of this controversy, agitated as it was with such persevering, such life-or-death vehemence, in Scotland, to strangle all the ordinary muses. Here, however, lies the historical compensation. There are other interests in a nation, other duties, than those of art and literature; and he would be but a wretched Scotsman who, while hovering over the history of his country in the seventeenth century and noting her deficiencies then in literary respects in comparison with England, should forget that this very century was the time of the most powerful action ever exerted by Scotland in the general history of the British Islands, and that, when the great British Revolution of that century was over, its accounts balanced, and the residuum of indubitably successful and useful result summed up, no little of that residuum was traceable to Scotland’s obstinate perseverance so long in her own peculiar politico-ecclesiastical controversy, and to what had been argued or done in the course of it, on one side or the other, by such men as Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, Argyle, Montrose, Claverhouse, and Carstares. But it is on Scottish Literature that we are now reporting, and for that the report must remain as has been stated. From Dan to Beersheba, from Hawick to Thurso, all through the Scottish century and a quarter under view, very few roses or other flowers, and not much even of happy thistle-bloom!
A revival came at last. It came in the beginning of the eighteenth century, just after the union of Scotland with England in the reign of Queen Anne, when the literary succession to Dryden in England was represented by such of the Queen Anne wits and their Georgian recruits as Defoe, Matthew Prior, Swift, Congreve, Steele, Addison, Gay, and Pope. It was then that, from a group of lingering Scottish literary stagers of the antique type, such as Bishop Sage, Dr. Pitcairn, Pennicuik, Fletcher of Saltoun, Wodrow, and Ruddiman, there stepped forth the shrewd Edinburgh periwig-maker who was to be for so many years the popular little Horace of Auld Reekie, not only supplying the lieges with such songs and poems as they had not had the like of for many a day, but actually shaking them again into some sense of the importance of popular books and of a taste for lightsome reading. Yes, it was Allan Ramsay,—the placid little man of the night-cap that one sees in the white statue of him in Princes Street,—it was he that was the real reviver of literature and of literary enthusiasm in Scotland after their long abeyance. He was conscious of his mission:—