Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

Morrison, some sixty or seventy years ago, was a tall, thin, genteel-looking young man, who travelled the country as a portrait and miniature painter. The profession was new at the time to the north of Scotland; and the people thought highly of an artist who made likenesses that could be recognised. But they could not think more highly of him than Morrison did of himself. He was one of the class who mistake the imitative faculty for genius, and the ambition of rising in a genteel profession for that energy of talent whose efforts, with no higher object often than the mere pleasure of exertion, buoy up the possessor to his proper level among men. There was a time when Morrison’s pictures might be seen in almost every house—in little turf cottages even among halfpenny prints and broadsheet ballads; nor were instances wanting of their finding place among the paintings of a higher school:—some proprietor of the district retained an eccentric piper or gamekeeper in his establishment, or, like the baron of a former age, kept a fool, and Morrison had been employed to confer on all that was droll or picturesque in his appearance, the immortality of colour and canvas. Like the painter in the fable who pleased everybody, he drew, in his serious portraits, all his men after one model, and all his women after another; but, unlike the painter, he copied from neither Apollo nor Venus. His gentlemen had sloping shoulders and long necks, and looked exceeding grave and formidable; his ladies, on the contrary, were sweet simpering creatures, with waists almost tapering to a point, and cheeks and lips of as bright a crimson as that of the bunch of roses which they bore in their hands.

I have said that Morrison thought more highly of his genius than even his country-folk. As the member of a highly liberal profession, too, he naturally enough took rank as a gentleman. Geniuses were eccentric in those days, and gentlemen not very moral; and Morrison, in his double capacity of genius and gentleman, was skilful enough to catch the eccentricity of the one class and the immorality of the other. He raked a little, and drank a great deal; and when in his cups said and did things which were thought very extraordinary indeed. But though all acknowledged his genius, he was less successful in establishing his gentility. There was, indeed, but one standard of gentility in the country at the time, and fate had precluded the painter from coming up to it; no one was deemed a gentleman whose ancestors had not been useless to the community for at least five generations. It must be confessed, too, that some of Morrison’s schemes for establishing his claims were but ill laid. On one occasion he attended an auction of valuable furniture in the neighbouring town, and though a wanderer at the time, as he had been all his life long, and miserably poor to boot, he deemed it essential to the maintenance of his character, that, as all the other gentlemen present were bidding with spirit, he should now and then give a spirited bid too. He warmed gradually as the sale proceeded, offered liberally for beds and carpets, and made a dead set on a valuable pianoforte. The purchasers were sadly annoyed; and the auctioneer, who was a bit of a wag, and laboured to put down the painter by sheer force of wit, found that he had met with as accomplished a wit as himself. Morrison lost the piano, and then fell in love with a moveable wooden house, which had served as a sort of meat preserve, and was secured by a strong lock. “You had better examine it inside, Mr. Morrison,” said the auctioneer; “in fact, the whole merit of the thing lies inside.” Morrison went in, and the auctioneer shut and locked the door. There could not be a more grievous outrage on the feelings of a gentleman; but though the poor man went bouncing against the cruel walls of his prison like an incarcerated monkey, and grinned with uncontrollable wrath at all and sundry through its little wire-woven window, pity or succour was there none; he was kept in close durance for four long hours till the sale terminated, and found his claim to gentility not in the least strengthened when he got out.

After living, as he best could, for about forty years, the painter took to himself a wife. No woman should ever have thought of marriage in connexion with such a person as Morrison, nor should Morrison have ever thought of marriage in connexion with such a person as himself. But so it was—for ladies are proverbially courageous in such matters, and Morrison could bid as dauntlessly for a wife as for a pianoforte—that he determined on marrying, and succeeded in finding a woman bold enough to accept of him for her husband. She was a rather respectable sort of person, who had lived for many years as housekeeper in a gentleman’s family, and had saved some money. They took lodgings in the neighbouring town; Morrison showed as much spirit, and got as often drunk as before; and in little more than a twelvemonth they came to be in want. They lingered on, however, in miserable poverty for a few months longer, and then quitted the place, leaving behind them all Mrs. Morrison’s well-saved wardrobe under arrestment for debt. The large trunk which contained it lay unopened till about five years after the poor woman had been laid in her grave, the victim of her miserable marriage; and the contents formed a strange comment on her history. There were fine silk gowns, sadly marred by mildew, and richly flowered petticoats eaten by the moths. There, too, were there pretty little heads of the virgin and the apostles, and beads and a crucifix of some value; the loss of which, as the poor owner had been a zealous Roman Catholic, had affected her more than the loss of all the rest. And there, also, like the Babylonish garment among the goods of Achan, there was a packet of Morrison’s letters, full of flames and darts, and all those little commonplaces of love which are used by men clever on a small scale, who think highly of their own parts, and have no true affection for any one but themselves.

It has been told me by an acquaintance, who resided for some time in one of our northern towns, that when hurrying to his lodgings on a wet and very disagreeable winter evening, his curiosity was attracted by a red glare of light which he saw issuing through the unglazed window and partially uncovered rafters of a deserted hovel by the wayside. He went up to it, and found the place occupied by two miserable-looking wretches, a man and woman, who were shivering over a smouldering fire of damp straw. These were Morrison and his wife, neither of them wholly sober; for the woman had ere now broken down in character as well as in circumstances. They had neither food nor money; the rain was dropping upon them through the roof, and the winter wind fluttering through their rags; and yet, as if there was too little in all this to make them unhappy enough, they were adding to their miseries by mutual recriminations. The woman, as I have said, soon sank under the hardships of a life so entirely wretched; her unlucky partner survived until the infirmities of extreme old age were added to his other miseries. It is not easy to conceive how any one who passed such a life as Morrison should have lived for the greater part of a century; and yet so it was, that, when he visited the neighbouring town for the last time, he was in his eighty-fifth year. And never, certainly, was the place visited by a more squalid, miserable-looking creature; he resembled rather a corpse set a-walking than a living man. He was still, however, Morrison the painter, feebly eccentric, and meanly proud: even when compelled to beg, which was often, he could not forget that he was an artist and a gentleman. In his younger days he had skill enough to make likenesses that could be recognised; the things he now made scarcely resembled human creatures at all; but he went about pressing his services on every one who had children and spare sixpences, till he had at length well-nigh filled the town with pictures of little boys and girls, which, in every case, the little boys and girls got to themselves. On one occasion he went into the shop of one of the town traders, and insisted on furnishing the trader with the picture of one of his daughters, a little laughing blonde, who was playing in front of the counter. He produced his colours, and began the drawing; but the girl, after wondering at him till his work was about half finished, escaped into the street, and one of her sisters, a sober-eyed brunette, who had heard of the strange old man who was “making pictures,” came running in, and took her place. The painter held fast the intruder, and continued his drawing. “Hold, hold, Mr. Morrison, that is another little girl you have got!” said the trader; “that is but the sister of the first.” “Heaven bless the dear sweet creature!” said Morrison, still plying the pencil, “they are so very like that there can be no mistake.”

The closing scene to poor Morrison came at last. He left his bed one day after an illness of nearly a week, and crawled out into the street to beg. A gentleman in passing dropped him a few coppers, and Morrison felt indignant that any one should have offered an artist less than silver. But on second thoughts he corrected himself. “Heaven help me!” he ejaculated, “I have been a fool all life long, and I am not wise yet!” He crept onwards along the pavement to the house of a gentleman whom he had known thirty years before. “I am dying,” he said, “and I am desirous that you should see my body laid decently under ground; I shall be dead in less than a week.” The gentleman promised to attend the funeral; Morrison crept back to his lodgings, and was dead in less than a day. Yonder he lies in the strangers’ corner; the parish furnished the shroud and the coffin, and the gentleman whom he had invited to his burial carried his head to the grave, and paid the sexton. There are few real stories consistently gloomy throughout. Nature delights in strange compounds of the bizarre and the serious; and Morrison’s story, like some of the old English dramas that terminate unfortunately, has a mixture of the comic in it. And yet, notwithstanding its lighter touches, I question whether we shall be able to find a deeper tragedy among all the volumes of the churchyard.

CHAPTER XVI.

“Like a timeless birth, the womb of fate

Bore a new death of unrecorded date,

And doubtful name.”

—Montgomery.