Adventures Among Books Part 16

Naturally Gilbert Campbell carried his tale of sorrow to the parish Minister. This did not avail him. His warp and threads were cut on his loom, and even the clothes of his family were cut while they were wearing them. At night something tugged the blankets off their beds, a favourite old spiritual trick, which was played, if I remember well, on a Roman Emperor, according to Suetonius. Poor Campbell had to remove his stock- in-trade, and send his children to board out, "to try whom the trouble did most follow." After this, all was quiet (as perhaps might be expected), and quiet all remained, till a son named Thomas was brought home again. Then the house was twice set on fire, and it might have been enough to give Thomas a beating. On the other hand, Campbell sent Thomas to stay with the Minister. But the troubles continued in the old way. At last the family became so accustomed to the Devil, "that they were no more afraid to keep up the Clash" (chatter) "with the Foul Fiend than to speak to each other." They were like the Wesleys, who were so familiar with the fiend Jeffrey, that haunted their home.

The Minister, with a few of the gentry, heard of their unholy friendship, and paid Campbell a visit. "At their first coming in the Devil says: '_Quum Literarum_ is good Latin.'" These are the first words of the Latin rudiments which scholars are taught when they go to the Grammar School. Then they all prayed, and a Voice came from under the bed: "Would you know the Witches of Glenluce?" The Voice named a few, including one long dead. But the Minister, with rare good sense, remarked that what Satan said was not evidence.

Let it be remarked that "the lad Tom" had that very day "come back with the Minister." The Fiend then offered terms. "Give me a spade and shovel, and depart from the house for seven days, and I will make a grave, and lie down in it, and trouble you no more." Hereon Campbell, with Scottish caution, declined to give the Devil the value of a straw.

The visitors then hunted after the voice, observing that some of the children were in bed. They found nothing, and then, as the novelists say, "a strange thing happened."

There appeared a naked hand and an arm, from the elbow down, beating upon the floor till the house did shake again. "The Fiend next exclaimed that if the candle were put out he would appear in the shape of Fireb.a.l.l.s."

Let it be observed that now, for the first time, we learn that all the scene occurred in candle-light. The appearance of floating b.a.l.l.s of fire is frequent (if we may believe the current reports) at spiritualistic seances. But what a strange, ill-digested tale is Mr. Sinclair's! He lets slip an expression which shows that the investigators were in one room, the But, while the Fiend was diverting himself in the other room, the Ben! The Fiend (n.o.body going Ben) next chaffed a gentleman who wore a fashionable broad-brimmed hat, "whereupon he presently imagined that he felt a pair of shears going about his hat," but there was no such matter.

The voice asked for a piece of bread, which the others were eating, and said the maid gave him a crust in the morning. This she denied, but admitted that something had "clicked" a piece of bread out of her hand.

The seance ended, the Devil slapping a safe portion of the children's bodies, with a sound resembling applause. After many months of this really annoying conduct, poor Campbell laid his case before the Presbyters, in 1655, thirty years before the date of publication. So a "solemn humiliation" was actually held all through the bounds of the synod. But to little purpose did Glenluce sit in sackcloth and ashes.

The good wife's plate was s.n.a.t.c.hed away before her very eyes, and then thrown back at her. In similar "stirs," described by a Catholic missionary in Peru soon after Pizarro's conquest, the cup of an Indian chief was lifted up by an invisible hand, and set down empty. In that case, too, stones were thrown, as by the Devil of Glenluce.

And what was the end of it all? Mr. Sinclair has not even taken the trouble to inquire. It seems by some conjuration or other, the Devil suffered himself to be put away, and gave the weaver a habitation. The weaver "has been a very Odd man that endured so long these marvellous disturbances."

This is the tale which Mr. Sinclair offers, without mentioning his authority. He complains that Dr. Henry More had plagiarised it, from his book of Hydrostatics. Two points may be remarked. First: modern Psychical Inquirers are more particular about evidence than Mr. Sinclair.

Not for nothing do we live in an age of science. Next: the stories of these "stirs" are always much the same everywhere, in Glenluce, at Tedworth, where the Drummer came, in Peru, in Wesley's house, in heroic Iceland, when Glam, the vampire, "rode the roofs." It is curious to speculate on how the tradition of making themselves little nuisances in this particular manner has been handed down among children, if we are to suppose that children do the trick. Last autumn a farmer's house in Scotland was annoyed exactly as the weaver's home was, and that within a quarter of a mile of a well-known man of science. The mattress of the father was tenanted by something that wriggled like a snake. The mattress was opened, nothing was found, and the disturbance began again as soon as the bed was restored to its place. This occurred when the farmer's children had been sent to a distance.

One cannot but be perplexed by the problem which these tales suggest.

Almost bare of evidence as they are, their great number, their wide diffusion, in many countries and in times ancient and modern, may establish some substratum of truth. Scott mentions a case in which the imposture was detected by a sheriff's officer. But a recent anecdote makes me almost distrust the detection.

Some English people, having taken a country house in Ireland, were vexed by the usual rappings, stone-throwings, and all the rest of the business.

They sent to Dublin for two detectives, who arrived. On their first night, the lady of the house went into a room, where she found one of the policemen asleep in his chair. Being a lively person, she rapped twice or thrice on the table. He awakened, and said: "Ah, so I suspected. It was hardly worth while, madam, to bring us so far for this." And next day the worthy men withdrew in dudgeon, but quite convinced that they had discovered the agent in the hauntings.

But they had not!

On the other hand, Scott (who had seen one ghost, if not two, and had heard a "warning") states that Miss Anne Robinson managed the Stockwell disturbances by tying horsehairs to plates and light articles, which then demeaned themselves as if possessed.

Here we have _vera causa_, a demonstrable cause of "stirs," and it may be inferred that all the other historical occurrences had a similar origin.

We have, then, only to be interested in the persistent tradition, in accordance with which mischievous persons always do exactly the same sort of thing. But this is a mere example of the ident.i.ty of human nature.

It is curious to see how Mr. Sinclair plumes himself on this Devil of Glenluce as a "moliminous rampier" against irreligion. "This one Relation is worth all the price that can be given for the Book." The price I have given for the volume is Ten Golden Guineas, and perhaps the Foul Thief of Glenluce is hardly worth the money.

"I believe if the Obdurest Atheist among men would seriously and in good earnest consider that relation, and ponder all the circ.u.mstances thereof, he would presently cry out, as a Dr. of Physick did, hearing a story less considerable, 'I believe I have been in the wrong all the time--if this be true.'"

Mr. Sinclair is also a believer in the Woodstock devils, on which Scott founded his novel. He does not give the explanation that Giles Sharp, alias Joseph Collins of Oxford, alias Funny Joe, was all the Devil in that affair. Scott had read the story of Funny Joe, but could never remember "whether it exists in a separate collection, or where it is to be looked for."

Indifferent to evidence, Mr. Sinclair confutes the Obdurest Atheists with the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with the young lady from Howells' "Letters,"

whose house, like Rahab's, was "on the city wall," and with the ghost of the Major who appeared to the Captain (as he had promised), and scolded him for not keeping his sword clean. He also gives us Major Weir, at full length, convincing us that, as William Erskine said, "The Major was a disgusting fellow, a most ungentlemanlike character." Scott, on the other hand, remarked, long before "Waverley," "if I ever were to become a writer of prose romances, I think I would choose Major Weir, if not for my hero, at least for an agent and a leading one, in my production." He admitted that the street where the Major lived was haunted by a woman "twice the common length," "but why should we set him down for an ungentlemanly fellow?" Readers of Mr. Sinclair will understand the reason very well, and it is not necessary, nor here even possible, to justify Erskine's opinion by quotations. Suffice it that, by virtue of his enchanted staff, which was burned with him, the Major was enabled "to commit evil not to be named, yea, even to reconcile man and wife when at variance." His sister, who was hanged, had Redgauntlet's horse-shoe mark on her brow, and one may marvel that Scott does not seem to have remembered this coincidence. "There was seen an exact Horse-shoe, shaped for nails, in her wrinkles. Terrible enough, I a.s.sure you, to the stoutest beholder!"

Most modern readers will believe that both the luckless Major and his sister were religious maniacs. Poverty, solitude, and the superst.i.tion of their time were the true demon of Major Weir, burned at the stake in April 1670. Perhaps the most singular impression made by "Satan's Invisible World Discovered" is that in Sinclair's day, people who did not believe in bogies believed in nothing, while people who shared the common creed of Christendom were capable of believing in everything.

Atheists are as common as ghosts in his marvellous relations, and the very wizards themselves were often Atheists.

NOTE.--I have said that Scott himself had seen one ghost, if not two, and heard a "warning." The ghost was seen near Ashestiel, on an open spot of hillside, "please to observe it was before dinner." The anecdote is in Gillis's, "Recollections of Sir Walter Scott," p. 170. The vision of Lord Byron standing in the great hall of Abbotsford is described in the "Demonology and Witchcraft ." Scott alleges that it resolved itself into "great coats, shawls, and plaids"--a hallucination. But Lockhart remarks ("Life," ix. p. 141) that he did not care to have the circ.u.mstance discussed in general. The "stirs" in Abbotsford during the night when his architect, Bullock, died in London, are in Lockhart, v. pp. 309-315.

"The noise resembled half-a-dozen men hard at work putting up boards and furniture, and nothing can be more certain than that there was n.o.body on the premises at the time." The noise, unluckily, occurred twice, April 28 and 29, 1818, and Lockhart does not tell us on which of these two nights Mr. Bullock died. Such is the casualness of ghost story-tellers.

Lockhart adds that the coincidence made a strong impression on Sir Walter's mind. He did not care to ascertain the point in his own mental const.i.tution "where incredulity began to waver," according to his friend, Mr. J. L. Adolphus.

CHAPTER XVII: THE BOY

As a humble student of savage life, I have found it necessary to make researches into the manners and customs of boys. Boys are not what a vain people supposes. If you meet them in the holidays, you find them affable and full of kindness and good qualities. They will condescend to your weakness at lawn-tennis, they will aid you in your selection of fly- hooks, and, to be brief, will behave with much more than the civility of tame Zulus or Red Men on a missionary settlement. But boys at school and among themselves, left to the wild justice and traditional laws which many generations of boys have evolved, are entirely different beings.

They resemble that Polynesian prince who had rejected the errors of polytheism for those of an extreme sect of Primitive Seceders. For weeks at a time this prince was known to be "steady," but every month or so he disappeared, and his subjects said he was "lying off." To adopt an American idiom, he "felt like brandy and water"; he also "felt like"

wearing no clothes, and generally rejecting his new conceptions of duty and decency. In fact, he had a good bout of savagery, and then he returned to his tall hat, his varnished boots, his hymn-book, and his edifying principles. The life of small boys at school (before they get into long-tailed coats and the upper-fifth) is often a mere course of "lying-off"--of relapse into native savagery with its laws and customs.

If any one has so far forgotten his own boyhood as to think this description exaggerated, let him just fancy what our comfortable civilised life would be, if we could become boys in character and custom.

Let us suppose that you are elected to a new club, of which most of the members are strangers to you. You enter the doors for the first time, when two older members, who have been gossiping in the hall, pounce upon you with the exclamation, "Hullo, here's a new fellow! You fellow, what's your name?" You reply, let us say, "Johnson." "I don't believe it, it's such a rum name. What's your father?" Perhaps you are constrained to answer "a Duke" or (more probably) "a solicitor." In the former case your friends bound up into the smoking-room, howling, "Here's a new fellow says his father is a Duke. Let's take the cheek out of him." And they "take it out" with umbrellas, slippers, and other surgical instruments. Or, in the latter case (your parent being a solicitor) they reply, "Then your father must be a beastly cad. All solicitors are sharks. _My_ father says so, and he knows. How many sisters have you?" The new member answers, "Four." "Any of them married?" "No." "How awfully awkward for you."

By this time, perhaps, luncheon is ready, or the evening papers come in, and you are released for a moment. You sneak up into the library, where you naturally expect to be entirely alone, and you settle on a sofa with a novel. But an old member bursts into the room, spies a new fellow, and puts him through the usual catechism. He ends with, "How much tin have you got?" You answer "twenty pounds," or whatever the sum may be, for perhaps you had contemplated playing whist. "Very well, fork it out; you must give a dinner, all new fellows must, and _you_ are not going to begin by being a stingy beast?" Thus addressed, as your friend is a big bald man, who looks mischievous, you do "fork out" all your ready money, and your new friend goes off to consult the cook. Meanwhile you "shed a blooming tear," as Homer says, and go home heart-broken. Now, does any grown-up man call this state of society civilisation? Would life be worth living (whatever one's religious consolations) on these terms? Of course not, and yet this picture is a not overdrawn sketch of the career of some new boy, at some schools new or old. The existence of a small schoolboy is, in other respects, not unlike that of an outsider in a lawless "Brotherhood," as the Irish playfully call their murder clubs.

The small boy is _in_ the society, but not _of_ it, as far as any benefits go. He has to field out (and I admit that the discipline is salutary) while other boys bat. Other boys commit the faults, and compel him to copy out the impositions--say five hundred lines of Virgil--with which their sins are visited. Other boys enjoy the pleasures of football, while the small boy has to run vaguely about, never within five yards of the ball. Big boys reap the glories of paperchases, the small boy gets lost in the bitter weather, on the open moors, or perhaps (as in one historical case) is frozen to death within a measurable distance of the school playground. And the worst of it is that, as a member of the great school secret society, the small boy can never complain of his wrongs, or divulge the name of his tormentors. It is in this respect that he resembles a harmless fellow, dragged into the coils of an Anarchist "Inner Brotherhood." He is exposed to all sorts of wrongs from his neighbours, and he can only escape by turning "informer," by breaking the most sacred law of his society, losing all social status, and, probably, obliging his parents to remove him from school. Life at school, as among the Celtic peoples, turns on the belief that law and authority are natural enemies, against which every one is banded.

The chapter of bullying among boys is one on which a man enters with reluctance. Boys are, on the whole, such good fellows, and so full of fine unsophisticated qualities, that the mature mind would gladly turn away its eyes from beholding their iniquities. Even a cruel bully does not inevitably and invariably develop into a bad man. He is, let us hope, only pa.s.sing through the savage stage, in which the torture of prisoners is a recognised inst.i.tution. He has, perhaps, too little imagination to understand the pain he causes. Very often bullying is not physically cruel, but only a perverted sort of humour, such as Kingsley, in "Hypatia," recognised among his favourite Goths. I remember a feeble foolish boy at school (feeble he certainly was, and was thought foolish) who became the subject of much humorous bullying. His companions used to tie a thin thread round his ear, and attach this to a bar at such a height that he could only avoid breaking it by standing on tiptoe. But he was told that he must not break the thread. To avoid infringing this commandment, he put himself to considerable inconvenience and afforded much enjoyment to the spectators.

Men of middle age, rather early middle age, remember the two following species of bullying to which they were subjected, and which, perhaps, are obsolescent. Tall stools were piled up in a pyramid, and the victim was seated on the top, near the roof of the room. The other savages brought him down from this bad eminence by hurling other stools at those which supported him. Or the victim was made to place his hands against the door, with the fingers outstretched, while the young tormentors played at the Chinese knife-trick. They threw knives, that is to say, at the door between the apertures of the fingers, and, as a rule, they hit the fingers and not the door. These diversions I know to be correctly reported, but the following pretty story is, perhaps, a myth. At one of the most famous public schools, a praepostor, or monitor, or sixth-form boy having authority, heard a pistol-shot in the room above his own. He went up and found a big boy and a little boy. They denied having any pistol. The monitor returned to his studies, again was sure he heard a shot, went up, and found the little boy dead. The big boy had been playing the William Tell trick with him, and had hit his head instead of the apple. That is the legend. Whether it be true or false, all boys will agree that the little victim could not have escaped by complaining to the monitor. No. Death before dishonour. But the side not so seamy of this picture of school life is the extraordinary power of honour among boys. Of course the laws of the secret society might well terrify a puerile informer. But the sentiment of honour is even more strong than fear, and will probably outlast the very disagreeable circ.u.mstances in which it was developed.

People say bullying is not what it used to be. The much abused monitorial system has this in it of good, that it enables a clever and kindly boy who is high up in the school to stop the cruelties (if he hears of them) of a much bigger boy who is low in the school. But he seldom hears of them. Habitual bullies are very cunning, and I am acquainted with instances in which they carry their victims off to lonely torture cells (so to speak) and deserted places fit for the sport. Some years ago a small boy, after a long course of rope's-ending in out-of-the- way dens, revealed the abominations of some naval cadets. There was not much sympathy with him in the public mind, and perhaps his case was not well managed. But it was made clear that whereas among men an unpopular person is only spoken evil of behind his back, an unpopular small boy among boys is made to suffer in a more direct and very unpleasant way.

Most of us leave school with the impression that there was a good deal of bullying when we were little, but that the inst.i.tution has died out. The truth is that we have grown too big to be bullied, and too good-natured to bully ourselves. When I left school, I thought bullying was an extinct art, like encaustic painting (before it was rediscovered by Sir William Richmond). But a distinguished writer, who was a small boy when I was a big one, has since revealed to me the most abominable cruelties which were being practised at the very moment when I supposed bullying to have had its day and ceased to be. Now, the small boy need only have mentioned the circ.u.mstances to any one of a score of big boys, and the tormentor would have been first thrashed, and then, probably, expelled.

A friend of my own was travelling lately in a wild and hilly region on the other side of the world, let us say in the Mountains of the Moon. In a mountain tavern he had thrust upon him the society of the cook, a very useless young man, who astonished him by references to one of our universities, and to the enjoyments of that seat of learning. This youth (who was made cook, and a very bad cook too, because he could do nothing else) had been expelled from a large English school. And he was expelled because he had felled a bully with a paving-stone, and had expressed his readiness to do it again. Now, there was no doubt that this cook in the mountain inn was a very unserviceable young fellow. But I wish more boys who have suffered things literally unspeakable from bullies would try whether force (in the form of a paving stone) is really no remedy.

The Catholic author of a recent book ("Schools," by Lieut.-Col. Raleigh Chichester), is very hard on "Protestant Schools," and thinks that the Catholic system of constant watching is a remedy for bullying and other evils. "Swing-doors with their upper half glazed, might have their uses," he says, and he does not see why a boy should not be permitted to complain, if he is roasted, like Tom Brown, before a large fire. The boys at one Catholic school described by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, "are never without surveillance of some sort." This is true of most French schools, and any one who wishes to understand the consequences (there) may read the published confessions of a _pion_--an usher, or "spy." A more degraded and degrading life than that of the wretched _pion_, it is impossible to imagine. In an English private school, the system of _espionnage_ and tale bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike what Mr. Anstey describes in _Vice Versa_. But in the Catholic schools spoken of by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, the surveillance may be, as he says, "that of a parent; an aid to the boys in their games rather than a check." The religious question as between Catholics and Protestants has no essential connection with the subject. A Protestant school might, and Grimstone's did, have tale-bearers; possibly a Catholic school might exist without parental surveillance. That system is called by its foes a "police," by its friends a "paternal" system. But fathers don't exercise the "paternal" system themselves in this country, and we may take it for granted that, while English society and religion are as they are, surveillance at our large schools will be impossible. If any one regrets this, let him read the descriptions of French schools and schooldays, in Balzac's _Louis Lambert_, in the "Memoirs" of M. Maxime du Camp, in any book where a Frenchman speaks his mind about his youth. He will find spying (of course) among the ushers, contempt and hatred on the side of the boys, unwholesome and cruel punishments, a total lack of healthy exercise; and he will hear of holidays spent in premature excursions into forbidden and shady quarters of the town.

No doubt the best security against bullying is in constant occupation.

There can hardly (in spite of Master George Osborne's experience in "Vanity Fair") be much bullying in an open cricket-field. Big boys, too, with good hearts, should not only stop bullying when they come across it, but make it their business to find out where it exists. Exist it will, more or less, despite all precautions, while boys are boys--that is, are pa.s.sing through a modified form of the savage state.

There is a curious fact in the boyish character which seems, at first sight, to make good the opinion that private education, at home, is the true method. Before they go out into school life, many little fellows of nine, or so, are extremely original, imaginative, and almost poetical.

They are fond of books, fond of nature, and, if you can win their confidence, will tell you all sorts of pretty thoughts and fancies which lie about them in their infancy. I have known a little boy who liked to lie on the gra.s.s and to people the alleys and glades of that miniature forest with fairies and dwarfs, whom he seemed actually to see in a kind of vision. But he went to school, he instantly won the hundred yards race for boys under twelve, and he came back a young barbarian, interested in "the theory of touch" (at football), curious in the art of bowling, and no more capable than you or I of seeing fairies in a green meadow. He was caught up into the air of the boy's world, and his imagination was in abeyance for a season.

This is a common enough thing, and rather a melancholy spectacle to behold. One is tempted to believe that school causes the loss of a good deal of genius, and that the small boys who leave home poets, and come back barbarians, have been wasted. But, on the other hand, if they had been kept at home and encouraged, the chances are that they would have blossomed into infant phenomena and nothing better. The awful infancy of Mr. John Stuart Mill is a standing warning. Mr. Mill would probably have been a much happier and wiser man if he had not been a precocious linguist, economist, and philosopher, but had pa.s.sed through a healthy stage of indifference to learning and speculation at a public school.

Look again, at the childhood of Bishop Thirlwall. His _Primitiae_ were published (by Samuel Tipper, London, 1808), when young Connop was but eleven years of age. His indiscreet father "launched this slender bark,"

as he says, and it sailed through three editions between 1808 and 1809.

Young Thirlwall was taught Latin at three years of age, "and at four read Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him." At seven he composed an essay, "On the Uncertainty of Human Life," but "his taste for poetry was not discovered till a later period." His sermons, some forty, occupy most of the little volume in which these _Primitiae_ were collected.

He was especially concerned about Sabbath desecration. "I confess,"

observes this sage of ten, "when I look upon the present and past state of our public morals, and when I contrast our present luxury, dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue, I feel not merely a sensation of regret, but also of terror, for the result of the change." "The late Revolution in France," he adds, "has afforded us a remarkable lesson how necessary religion is to a State, and that from a deficiency on that head arise the chief evils which can befall society."

He then bids us "remember that the Nebuchadnezzar who may destroy our Israel is near at hand," though it might be difficult to show how Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Israel.

As to the uncertainty of life, he remarks that "Edward VI. died in his minority, and disappointed his subjects, to whom he had promised a happy reign." Of this infant's thirty-nine sermons (just as many as the Articles), it may be said that they are in no way inferior to other examples of this cla.s.s of literature. But sermons are among the least "scarce" and "rare" of human essays, and many parents would rather see their boy patiently acquiring the art of wicket-keeping at school than moralising on the uncertainty of life at home. Some one "having presented to the young author a copy of verses on the trite and familiar subject of the Ploughboy," he replied with an ode on "The Potboy."

"Bliss is not always join'd to wealth, Nor dwells beneath the gilded roof For poverty is bliss with health, Of that my potboy stands a proof."

The volume ends with this determination,