An Edinburgh Eleven Part 2

PROFESSOR CAMPBELL FRASER.

VI.

PROFESSOR CAMPBELL FRASER.

Not long ago I was back in the Old University--how well I remember pointing it out as the jail to a stranger, who had asked me to show him round. I was in one of the library ante-rooms, when some one knocked, and I looked up, to see Campbell Fraser framed in the doorway. I had not looked on that venerable figure for half a dozen years. I had forgotten all my metaphysics. Yet it all came back with a rush. I was on my feet, wondering if I existed strictly so called.

Calderwood and Fraser had both their followings. The moral philosophers wore an air of certainty, for they knew that if they stuck to Calderwood he would pull them through. You cannot lose yourself in the back garden. But the metaphysicians had their doubts. Fraser led them into strange places, and said he would meet them there again next day.

They wandered to their lodgings, and got into difficulties with their landlady for saying that she was only an aggregate of sense phenomena.

Fraser was rather a hazardous cure for weak intellects. Young men whose anchor had been certainty of themselves went into that cla.s.s floating buoyantly on the sea of facts, and came out all adrift--on the sea of theory--in an open boat--rudderless--one oar--the boat scuttled. How could they think there was any chance for them, when the professor was not even sure of himself? I see him rising in a daze from his chair and putting his hands through his hair. "Do I exist," he said, thoughtfully, "strictly so called?" The students (if it was the beginning of the session) looked a little startled. This was a matter that had not previously disturbed them. Still, if the professor was in doubt, there must be something in it. He began to argue it out, and an uncomfortable silence held the room in awe. If he did not exist, the chances were that they did not exist either. It was thus a personal question. The professor glanced round slowly for an ill.u.s.tration. "Am I a table?" A pained look travelled over the cla.s.s. Was it just possible that they were all tables? It is no wonder that the students who do not go to the bottom during their first month of metaphysics begin to give themselves airs strictly so called. In the privacy of their room at the top of the house, they pinch themselves to see if they are still there.

He would, I think, be a sorry creature who did not find something to admire in Campbell Fraser. Metaphysics may not trouble you, as it troubles him, but you do not sit under the man without seeing his transparent honesty and feeling that he is genuine. In appearance and in habit of thought he is an ideal philosopher, and his communings with himself have lifted him to a level of serenity that is worth struggling for. Of all the arts professors in Edinburgh, he is probably the most difficult to understand, and students in a hurry have called his lectures childish. If so, it may be all the better for them. For the first half of the hour, they say, he tells you what he is going to do, and for the second half he revises. Certainly he is vastly explanatory, but then he is not so young as they are, and so he has his doubts. They are so c.o.c.k-sure that they wonder to see him hesitate. Often there is a mist on the mountain when it is all clear in the valley.

Fraser's great work is his edition of Berkeley, a labor of love that should live after him. He has two Berkeleys, the large one and the little one, and, to do him justice, it was the little one he advised us to consult. I never read the large one myself, which is in a number of monster tomes, but I often had a look at it in the library, and I was proud to think that an Edinburgh professor was the editor. When Glasgow men came through to talk of their professors, we showed them the big Berkeley, and after that they were reasonable. There was one man in my year who really began the large Berkeley, but after a time he was missing, and it is believed that some day he will be found flattened between the pages of the first volume.

The "Selections" was the text-book we used in the cla.s.s. It is sufficient to prove that Berkeley wrote beautiful English. I am not sure that any one has written such English since. We have our own "stylists," but how self-conscious they are after Berkeley! It is seven years since I opened my "Selections," but I see that I was once more of a metaphysician than I have been giving myself credit for. The book is scribbled over with posers in my handwriting about dualism and primary realities. Some of the comments are in short-hand, which I must at one time have been able to read, but all are equally unintelligible now.

Here is one of my puzzlers: "Does B here mean impercipient and unperceived subject or conscious and percipient subject?" Observe the friendly B. I dare say further on I shall find myself referring to the professor as F. I wonder if I ever discovered what B meant. I could not now tell what I meant, myself.

As many persons are aware, the "Selections" consist of Berkeley's text with the professor's notes thereon. The notes are explanatory of the text, and the student must find them an immense help. Here, for instance, is a note: "Phenomenal or sense dependent existence can be substantiated and caused only by a self-conscious spirit, for otherwise there could be no propositions about it expressive of what is conceivable; on the other hand, to affirm that phenomenal or sense dependent existence, which alone we know, and which alone is conceivable, is, or even represents, an inconceivable non-phenomenal or abstract existence, would be to affirm a contradiction in terms." There we have it.

As a metaphysician I was something of a disappointment. I began well, standing, if I recollect aright, in the three examinations, first, seventeenth, and seventy-seventh. A man who sat beside me--man was the word we used--gazed at me reverently when I came out first, and I could see by his eye that he was not sure whether I existed properly so called. By the second exam. his doubts had gone, and by the third he was surer of me than of himself. He came out fifty-seventh, this being the grand triumph of his college course. He was the same whose key translated _cras donaberis haedo_ "To-morrow you will be presented with a kid," but who, thinking that a little vulgar, refined it down to "To-morrow you will be presented with a small child."

In the metaphysics cla.s.s I was like the fountains in the quadrangle, which ran dry toward the middle of the session. While things were still looking hopeful for me, I had an invitation to breakfast with the professor. If the fates had been so propitious as to forward me that invitation, it is possible that I might be a metaphysician to this day, but I had changed my lodgings, and, when I heard of the affair, all was over. The professor asked me to stay behind one day after the lecture, and told me that he had got his note back with "Left: no address" on it. "However," he said, "you may keep this," presenting me with the invitation for the Sat.u.r.day previously. I mention this to show that even professors have hearts. That letter is preserved with the autographs of three editors, none of which anybody can read.

There was once a medical student who came up to my rooms early in the session, and I proved to him in half an hour that he did not exist. He got quite frightened, and I can still see his white face as he sat staring at me in the gloaming. This shows what metaphysics can do. He has recovered, however, and is sheep-farming now, his examiners never having asked him the right questions.

The last time Fraser ever addressed me was when I was capped. He said, "I congratulate you, Mr. Smith," and one of the other professors said, "I congratulate you, Mr. Fisher." My name is neither Smith nor Fisher, but no doubt the thing was kindly meant. It was then, however, that the professor of metaphysics had his revenge on me. I had once spelt Fraser with a "z."

PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL.

VII.

PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL.

When Chrystal came to Edinburgh, he rooted up the humors of the cla.s.s-room as a dentist draws teeth. Souls were sold for keys that could be carried in the waistcoat pocket. Ambition fell from heights, and lay with its eye on a certificate. By night was a rush of ghosts, shrieking for pa.s.ses. Horse-play fled before the Differential Calculus in spectacles.

I had Chrystal's first year, and recall the gloomy student sitting before me who hacked "All hope abandon, ye who enter here" into a desk that may have confined Carlyle. It took him a session, and he was digging his own grave, for he never got through; but it was something to hold by, something he felt sure of. All else was spiders' webs in chalk.

Chrystal was a fine hare for the hounds who could keep up with him. He started off the first day with such a spurt that most of us were left behind mopping our faces, and saying, "Here's a fellow," which is what Mr. Stevenson says Shakespeare would have remarked about Mr. George Meredith. We never saw him again. The men who were on speaking acquaintance with his symbols revelled in him as students love an enthusiast who is eager to lead them into a world toward which they would journey. He was a rare guide for them. The bulk, however, lost him in labyrinths. They could not but admire their brilliant professor; but while their friend the medallist and he kept the conversation to themselves, they felt like eavesdroppers hearkening to a pair of lovers. It is "beautiful," they cried, "but this is no place for us; let us away."

A good many went, but their truancy stuck in their throats like Otway's last roll. The M.A. was before them. They had fancied it in their hands, but it became shy as a maiden from the day they learned Chrystal's heresy that Euclid is not mathematics, but only some riders in it. This snapped the cord that had tied the blind man to his dog, and the M.A. shot down the horizon. When Rutherford delivered his first lecture in the chair of inst.i.tutes of medicine, boisterous students drowned his voice, and he flung out of the room. At the door he paused to say, "Gentleman, we shall meet again at Philippi." A dire bomb was this in the midst of them, warranted to go off, none able to cast it overboard. We too had our Philippi before us. Chrystal could not be left to his own devices.

I had never a pa.s.sion for knowing that when circles or triangles attempt impossibilities it is absurd; and _x_ was an unknown quant.i.ty I was ever content to walk round about. To admit to Chrystal that we understood _x_ was only a way he had of leading you on to _y_ and _z_.

I gave him his chance, however, by contributing a paper of answers to his first weekly set of exercises. When the hour for returning the slips came round, I was there to accept fame--if so it was to be--with modesty; and if it was to be humiliation, still to smile. The professor said there was one paper, with an owner's name on it, which he could not read, and it was handed along the cla.s.s to be deciphered. My presentiment that it was mine became a certainty when it reached my hand; but I pa.s.sed it on pleasantly, and it returned to Chrystal, a j.a.phet that never found its father. Feeling that the powers were against me, I then retired from the conflict, sanguine that the teaching of my mathematical schoolmaster, the best that could be, would pull me through. The Disowned may be going the round of the cla.s.s-room still.

The men who did not know when they were beaten returned to their seats, and doggedly took notes, their faces lengthening daily. Their note-books reproduced exactly the hieroglyphics of the blackboard, and, examined at night, were as suggestive as the photographs of persons one has never seen. To overtake Chrystal after giving him a start was the presumption that is an offshoot from despair. There was once an elderly gentleman who for years read the _Times_ every day from the first page to the last. For a fortnight he was ill of a fever; but, on recovering, he began at the copy of the _Times_ where he had left off. He struggled magnificently to make up on the _Times_, but it was in vain.

This is an allegory for the way these students panted after Chrystal.

Some succ.u.mbed and joined the majority--literally; for to mathematics they were dead. I never hear of the old university now, nor pa.s.s under the shadow of the walls one loves when he is done with them, without seeing myself as I was the day I matriculated, an awestruck boy, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing the gates, frightened to venture inside, breathing heavily at sight of janitors, Scott and Carlyle in the air.

After that I see nothing fuller of color than the meetings that were held outside Chrystal's door. Adjoining it is a cla.s.s-room so little sought for that legend tells of its door once showing the notice, "There will be no cla.s.s to-day, as the student is unwell." The crowd round Chrystal's could have filled that room. It was composed of students hearkening at the door to see whether he was to call their part of the roll to-day. If he did, they slunk in; if not, the crowd melted into the streets, this refrain in their ears:

"I'm plucked, I do admit; I'm spun, my mother dear: Yet do not grieve for that Which happens every year.

I've waited very patiently, I may have long to wait; But you've another son, mother, And he will graduate."

A professor of mathematics once brought a rowdy student from the back benches to a seat beside him, because: "First, you'll be near the board; second, you'll be near me; and, third, you'll be near the door."

Chrystal soon discovered that students could be too near the door, and he took to calling the roll in the middle of the hour, which insured an increased attendance. It was a silent cla.s.s, nothing heard but the patter of pencils, rats sc.r.a.ping for grain, of which there was abundance, but not one digestion in a bench. To smuggle in a novel up one's waistcoat was perilous, Chrystal's spectacles doing their work.

At a corner of the platform sat the a.s.sistant, with a constable's authority, but, not formed for swooping, uneasy because he had legs, and where to put them he knew not. He got through the hour by shifting his position every five minutes; and, sitting there waiting, he reminded one of the boy who, on being told to remain so quietly where he was that he could hear a pin drop, held his breath a moment, then shouted, "Let it drop!" An excellent fellow was this a.s.sistant, who told us that one of his predecessors had got three months.

A jest went as far in that cla.s.s as a plum in the midshipmen's pudding, and, you remember, when the middies came on a plum they gave three cheers. In the middle of some brilliant reasoning, Chrystal would stop to add 4, 7, and 11. Addition of this kind was the only thing he could not do, and he looked to the cla.s.s for help--"20," they shouted, "24,"

"17," while he thought it over. These appeals to their intelligence made them beam. They woke up as a sleepy congregation shakes itself into life when the minister says, "I remember when I was a little boy----"

The daring spirits--say, those who were going into their father's office, and so did not look upon Chrystal as a door locked to their advancement--sought to bring sunshine into the room. Chrystal soon had the blind down on that. I hear they have been at it recently, with the usual result. To relieve the monotony, a student at the end of bench ten dropped a marble, which toppled slowly downward toward the professor. At every step it took, there was a smothered guffaw; but Chrystal, who was working at the board, did not turn his head. When the marble reached the floor, he said, still with his back to the cla.s.s, "Will the student at the end of bench ten, who dropped that marble, stand up?" All eyes dilated. He had counted the falls of the marble from step to step. Mathematics do not obscure the intellect.

Twenty per cent was a good percentage in Chrystal's examinations; thirty sent you away whistling. As the M.A. drew nigh, students on their prospects might have been farmers discussing the weather. Some put their faith in the professor's goodness of heart, of which symptoms had been showing. He would not, all at once, "raise the standard"--hated phrase until you are through, when you write to the papers advocating it. Courage! was it not told of the Glasgow Snell compet.i.tion that one of the compet.i.tors, as soon as he saw the first paper, looked for his hat and the door; that he was forbidden to withdraw until an hour had elapsed, and that he then tackled the paper and ultimately carried off the Snell? Of more immediate interest, perhaps, was the story of the quaking student, whose neighbor handed him in pencil, beneath the desk, the answer to several questions. It was in an M.A. exam., and the affrighted student found that he could not read his neighbor's notes. Trusting to fortune, he inclosed them with his own answers, writing at the top, "No time to write these out in ink, so inclose them in pencil." He got through: no moral.

A condemned criminal wondering if he is to get a reprieve will not feel the position novel if he has loitered in a university quadrangle waiting for the janitor to nail up the results of a degree exam. A queer gathering we were, awaiting the verdict of Chrystal. Some compressed their lips, others were lively as fireworks dipped in water; there were those who rushed round and round the quadrangle; only one went the length of saying that he did not want to pa.s.s. H. I shall call him. I met him the other day in Fleet Street, and he annoyed me by asking at once if I remembered the landlady I quarrelled with because she wore my socks to church of a Sunday: we found her out one wet forenoon. H. waited the issue with a cigar in his mouth. He had purposely, he explained, given in a bad paper. He could not understand why men were so anxious to get through. He had ten reasons for wishing to be plucked. We let him talk. The janitor appeared with the fateful paper, and we lashed about him like waves round a lighthouse, all but H., who strolled languidly to the board to which the paper was being fastened. A moment afterward I heard a shriek: "I'm through! I'm through!" It was H. His cigar was dashed aside, and he sped like an arrow from the bow to the nearest telegraph office, shouting "I'm through!" as he ran.

Those of us who had H.'s fortune now consider Chrystal made to order for his chair, but he has never, perhaps, had a proper appreciation of the charming fellows who get ten per cent.

PROFESSOR SELLAR.

VIII.

PROFESSOR SELLAR.

When one of the distinguished hunting ladies who chase celebrities captured Mr. Mark Pattison, he gave anxious consideration to the quotation which he was asked to write above his name. "Fancy," he said with a shudder, "going down to posterity arm in arm with _carpe diem_!"

Remembering this, I forbear tying Sellar to _odi profanum vulgus_. Yet the name opens the door to the quotation. Sellar is a Roman senator. He stood very high at Oxford, and took a prize for boxing. If you watch him in the cla.s.s, you will sometimes see his mind murmuring that Edinburgh students do not take their play like Oxford men. The difference is in manner. A courteous fellow-student of Sellar once showed his relatives over Balliol. "You have now, I think," he said at last, "seen everything of interest except the master." He flung a stone at a window, at which the master's head appeared immediately, menacing, wrathful. "And now," concluded the polite youth, "you have seen him also."