(5) My first volume is out on Friday—bound in calf-skin, with cloth-guilt on the back and front, and very small type—less than a 64mo. Author and Publisher doing well. But I do not expect the sale to be great for eighteen years. I hope then some great London firm will purchase it for a handsome sum. I cannot, however, complain of the delivery by the trade as yet! I send you MS. All must be printed, and some more beside. Be calm, Erskine.
(6) Master Erskine!—You should have duly informed the editor of the Christian Magazine that you had no sermon, seeing that a parson had pledged himself to send one a month ago, and I was under the impression that it was ‘all right’ until, coming up tonight from the coast, I found all was wrong. I send you—1. A MS. sermon—I cannot read it, but perhaps my friend the Interpreter in the printing-office can; 2. A printed sermon for a patch in case you are too late. If you print the MS. you must not put in the name—just sermon and text. I wrote it at a sitting, and it is imperfect—very. I leave this on Monday at 2 for the coast. Direct to Shandon, Helensburgh. If you have not enough, make up by extracts from the printed sermon.
‘O Erskine, Erskine!
Had I but served my Parish as I have my Printer,
It would not thus have left me in my misery!’
The following reply was sent to an invitation to the editor to grace a social meeting of the workers in the printing-office of Messrs. Paton & Ritchie:—
(7) [B.’s Refreshment Rooms, 10th January 1853.] My dear Messrs. P. & R.,—I must go to Edinburgh early in February. I cannot afford—so hard are my Publishers—to go in January. Besides, feasts without alcohol are like grates without coal. The man who, in this weather, can be pleased with lemonade and become poetic on ginger-pop, is fit for murder. He is wanting in the essential attributes of man. He can have no stomach or nerves, and far less heart, while his brains must be vapid as our friend’s Paste—he of the punch-bowl, I mean. Let Erskine by all means have unalcoholic swipes until his finger-ends distil foam, and his eyelids weep pure water. Let every teetotaller, if he pleases, sit all night up to his neck in a barrel of water, but do give something to cool the poor demons!—Yours truly, Author of ‘A Plea for Temperance.’
The Christian Magazine gave way to Good Words, which was started in 1860. His assumption of the editorship proved to be the most important circumstance in Macleod’s career. Religious papers were the worst in existence, written by narrow saints, not incapable of theological malice, and ignorant of the world and of the age. Good Words, while leading men ‘to know and to love God,’ was to represent various schools of Christian thought, and make a point of human interest and scientific instruction. He had his eye on the intelligent mechanic, whom the evangelical prints repelled. The magazine was the mirror of the editor’s mind, full of spirituality, yet taking in with relish the outer world. For the most part the religion was manly and bracing, but there was enough of another kind to suit the feebler souls. And in the narratives (not to say novels) many a maiden aunt, who thought fiction in general of the devil, snatched a fearful joy. Poor as the early numbers were, Good Words was successful from the first, reaching in two years a circulation of a hundred thousand. But the editor had to contend with virulent opposition on the part of the awful good. The stories were positively secular! Then the association of Tulloch and Stanley, Kingsley and Caird, covered the whole enterprise with suspicion. If Macleod did not give up these dangerous men he was to be crushed. And what could be said for a paper, supposed to be fit for Sunday perusal, which admitted articles in astronomy? Christian parents should not allow their children to handle on the Lord’s day a magazine that made so much of pagan luminaries like Jupiter and Mars. Private remonstrances poured in; the paper was tabooed by religious societies; the Record, an English champion of the faith, kept up for months a savage attack; and the General Assembly of the Free Church was overtured to sit upon Good Words, which it did, much to the increase of our circulation. The editor held his ground, only redoubling his anxiety to keep out ‘every expression that could pain the weakest Christian.’ Rather than publish a novel of Anthony Trollope’s, in which the pious characters were all made odious, he paid an indemnity of £500. Art and morals alike may sneer, but Macleod’s compromise was well considered and justified in the result. The storm blew over, and another step was gained for religious freedom. Good Words carried the name of Norman Macleod over the English-speaking world, and had a vogue in the remotest Hebrides. Principal Tulloch once met in the mountains a man who, on learning the traveller’s name, said, ‘I know you from Good Words.’ The numbers were so cherished that households generally had them bound, and to this day the early volumes are held precious in many a Scottish home. The sight of one of the old familiar pictures still sends a thrill through thousands, recalling the quiet Sabbaths of their childhood, dear old rooms, and faces they shall see no more.’
Before he became the editor of Good Words, Macleod had published little that was of interest outside religious circles. The Earnest Student, doubtless, has considerable merit as a biography, and is written with a tender grace; but it suffers from the inherent unfitness of the subject for extended treatment,—an uneventful life and a character wanting in colour. To say that it deserved a place beside the Life of M’Cheyne, to which it bears a resemblance, would be high praise. In the mass of his contributions to Good Words there is, of course, much that need not be criticised. The sermons put one in mind of the student who, being asked why he was not going in for the ministry, answered, ‘I don’t want to spoil my style.’ His records of travel were eagerly read when they appeared, having a certain interest from the person of the adventurer, with humorous and graphic touches; but to give permanence of charm to the account of voyages and journeys requires all the arts of a Kinglake or a Stevenson.
Enough remains to entitle Norman Macleod to a certain recognition in Scottish letters. Among the ‘Character Sketches’ there are some striking portraits—Mr. Joseph Walker, for instance, the highly respectable man, who never drank, never cheated, never lied, and yet ‘could do a very sneaking, mean thing.’ That is a subtle study, vigorously composed. As a writer of fiction it is remarkable that Macleod should be forgotten, when work similar to his, only duller, is boomed over all the earth. His stories, it is true, have a set religious aim, but that should be no offence in days when the most belauded fiction is nothing if not didactic, nay, when the novel is made a pulpit for the promulgation of moral heresy. If art in fiction is to be strangled, religion may as well be the executioner as the last indecency. The evangelical tale, no doubt, is usually in a sense immoral, not only taking mere church piety for the height of human perfection and setting up as its reward material success, but deliberately distorting, in the name of Jesus, the truth of nature and the facts of life. Macleod purposed to write stories which should be religious, and yet do no violence to reality. And his characters are plainly genuine, except, perhaps, the hero of his first attempt—The Old Lieutenant and his Son. Ned is to be a sailor and an exemplary Christian. Fall he does indeed, but not very far, and we know for sure that the author will set him up again at once, and higher than ever, on the plane of paragons. A sea-captain may be a good and pious man, but if, like Ned, he has chosen his profession at the cost of a mother’s tears, driven by the need of adventure—
‘God help me save I take my part
Of danger on the roaring sea: