Norman Macleod. John Wellwood
Читать онлайн книгу.
Macleod had been appointed tutor to a young English gentleman, the son of Henry Preston, of Moreby Hall, Yorkshire. In the spring of 1834, at the close of his theological course at Edinburgh, he went with his pupil to Weimar, carrying letters for the ducal Court. These were from Lady Vavasour, who had drilled him ‘how to speak to Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess, sister to the late Empress of Russia.’ The Court of Weimar! that was indeed a change. But there and thereabout he was to be for a whole year, mixing in the very society which, a few years before, had been adorned by Goethe. ‘There are indeed many advantages for young men here,’ the seer wrote to Carlyle in 1828, ‘especially for those of your own country. The Double-Court of the reigning Grand Duke and the Hereditary Family, at which they are always kindly and generously received, constrains them by this mark of distinction to a refined demeanour at social entertainments of various kinds.’ Imagine Norman waltzing at the State balls, dressed in cocked hat and sword, with silk stockings and buckled shoes, and haunting the gardens, the cafés, the theatres, and the glorious park ‘where the nightingales never ceased to sing.’ Nevertheless he kept his head, constituting himself mentor (always a favourite rôle of his) to the young English residents. As he observed the German laxity he called for a new Luther, though he condemned the contrary vice of the Church at home, that would measure his piety by his reading a newspaper on Sunday. He made excursions, one as far as the Tyrol, in the course of which he visited the picture galleries of Vienna, Munich, and Dresden. But the great event of his life in Weimar was his falling in love with the Court beauty,—’La Baronne,’ he calls her,—which he did in a fashion of poetic worship, worthy of a hero of romance or song. For years afterwards, let him hear old Weimar tunes upon the piano, and his heart will overflow with thoughts that he cannot utter; a German waltz, and his brain will reel.
In the autumn of 1835, after a residence of some months at Moreby Hall, where he mingled with the local squires, and met certain legislators fresh from St. Stephen’s, he entered the Divinity Hall at Glasgow. But he did not now cross the quadrangle as if it were a ship’s deck. For one thing, he was no longer an idle student, but rose at unearthly hours to grind, or if he did not, his conscience put in for damages, which took the form of pages of eloquent remorse. Besides, he was a great handsome fellow, and, not to speak of his inner life,—so vitalised by various experience,—he had seen more than most Scottish students. Add his conversational powers and boundless vivacity, and he should be something of a lion in college society. He became the leader of the Tories, and it was in that capacity that he had his first taste of fame. At the Scottish Universities there falls to be elected by the students, once in three years, an honorary official called the Lord Rector. The candidates are usually leaders in the rival political camps. In Glasgow there seemed to be no chance for a Tory,—men like Jeffrey, Brougham, Cockburn, and Stanley having carried the day time out of mind;—but in 1836, under Norman Macleod’s leadership, the Whig tradition was broken by the triumphant return of Sir Robert Peel. At the Peel Banquet, which is almost historical, as the rise of the Tory tide dates from the oration delivered by the honoured guest, Norman made his first public appearance, replying to the toast of the Conservative students. ‘I think I can see him now,’ says Principal Shairp, ‘standing forth prominently conspicuous to the whole vast assemblage, his dark hair, glossy as a black-cock’s wing, massed over his forehead, the purple hue of youth on his cheek.’ His speech was striking, and impressed even Peel. Thus, if the first period of his college career was obscure, the last ended in a blaze of glory.
The family were now resident in Glasgow (his father having been translated to St. Columba’s), and in the house a number of young gentlemen, some of them boarders, pursued their college studies under Norman’s supervision. The scene of their work was ‘the coffee-room,’ and it was always a great moment when their tutor burst in upon them from his own den, radiant with life and joy. Among them was John Macintosh and John Campbell Shairp. Macintosh had come from Edinburgh with the laurels of first pupil of the New Academy. In Glasgow College he was at the head of all his classes, and his scholarship was not more remarkable than his piety. He was the sort of boy that takes all the prizes, including the prize for good conduct. As for Shairp, there is no one with a knowledge of the best Scotsmen of the last generation but reveres and loves the memory of that gifted and high-souled man. Though Macleod was more impressed by the saintly Macintosh, he found in Shairp, owing to the wider range of their mutual sympathies, a fitter companion. They were both Wordsworthians. Macleod could tell how his enthusiasm had once carried him to Ambleside, how he had seen and talked with the poet, how the old man had appeared in a brown greatcoat and a large straw hat, and had read ‘in his deep voice some of his own imperishable verses.’ The two students, many a night under the frosty starlight, walking home from the Peel Club (of which Macleod was president), kept firing at each other quotations from their favourite bard.
For Wordsworth’s poetry Macleod had been prepared, because its materials were within his own emotional experience. Passage after passage only interpreted and defined for him feelings which he had long known in the presence of wild nature. Of the influences that went to form his moral constitution not the least marked was that of Highland scenery. Even amidst the gaieties of Weimar, he would shut his eyes, and, whistling a Highland tune, see the old hills. The autumn after he was licensed—1837—the last before his life-work began—was spent in Morven and Skye. He speaks of ‘passionate hours in the lonely mountains,’ and, to judge from his journal, his excitement in these scenes was wonderful, varying from ecstatic delight to solemn awe and worship. On a peak of the Coolins he burst out singing the Hundredth Psalm. Along with this must be taken his keen consciousness of the hereditary associations. During his holiday he preached in ‘the same pulpit where once stood a revered grandfather and father.’ ‘As I went to the church,’ he writes, ‘hardly a stone or knoll but spoke of something which was gone, and past days crowded upon me like the ghosts of Ossian, and seemed, like them, to ride even on the passing wind and along the mountain tops. What a marvellous, mysterious world is this, that I in this pulpit, the third generation, should now, by the grace of God, be keeping the truth alive on the earth, and telling how faithful has been the God of our fathers.’
CHAPTER II
1838-1843
LOUDOUN—NON-INTRUSION CONTROVERSY
Just after his return from this tour, Macleod was presented, virtually at the instance of Chalmers, to the living of Loudoun, in Ayrshire. On March 5, 1838, he was ordained. From this time onward his private journal is largely the record of religious introspection. With the other earnest ministers of that period, he took up the feelings and the language of the old Puritans. One cannot forget Robertson, on his appointment to the charge of Ellon, pacing the room for hours in the silence of the night, ‘and, all unconscious of being overheard, praying for mercy to pardon his sin and grace to help him in his embassy for Christ.’ This is good to know, but a little of it goes a long way. When my brother has entered into his closet and shut the door, I do not wish to spy upon his spiritual straits, or listen at the keyhole to his penitential groans. That Macleod, on assuming his first ministerial charge, deeply felt his responsibility, is clear from his doings as well as from his diary. The young minister had never doubted the truth of the religion which, more by example than by precept, had come down to him from his fathers. And the doctrines of Christianity were to him not merely true, they were vividly realised in his heart and imagination. In criticism, at this time, his highest flight was to name certain antinomies of Calvinism as nuts to crack. On the other hand, in his frank acceptance of the goodly world, and in his passion for characters (which was such that he would go scouting for the ludicrous), he seemed to have more of the humanist than the saintly temperament. Nothing could have been more alien to him than the plaint of a latter-day poet—
‘Strange the world about me lies,
Never yet familiar grown,
Still disturbs me with surprise,
Haunts me like a face half-known.’
And he had met in Germany, somewhat to his astonishment, men who danced on a Sunday, and still showed Christian graces; nay, men who were reverent and pious, though they could not have subscribed to the Westminster Confession.
The parish of Loudoun is a broad green wooded valley, through which runs the Irvine Water, celebrated in song. At one end, on a pleasant slope, the towers