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MORE SCHOOLING.
The first opportunity Donal had, he questioned Fergus as to his
share in the ill-usage of Gibbie. Fergus treated the inquiry as an
impertinent interference, and mounted his high horse at once. What
right had his father's herd-boy to question him as to his conduct?
He put it so to him and in nearly just as many words. Thereupon
answered Donal --
"It's this, ye see, Fergus: ye hae been unco guid to me, an' I'm
mair obligatit till ye nor I can say. But it wad be a scunnerfu'
thing to tak the len' o' buiks frae ye, an' spier quest'ons at ye
'at I canna mak oot mysel', an' syne gang awa despisin' ye i' my
hert for cruelty an' wrang. What was the cratur punished for? Tell
me that. Accordin' till yer aunt's ain accoont, he had taen
naething, an' had dune naething but guid."
"Why didn't he speak up then, and defend himself, and not be so
damned obstinate?" returned Fergus. "He wouldn't open his mouth to
tell his name, or where he came from even. I couldn't get him to
utter a single word. As for his punishment, it was by the laird's
orders that Angus Mac Pholp took the whip to him. I had nothing to
do with it. -- " Fergus did not consider the punishment he had himself
given him as worth mentioning -- as indeed, except for honesty's sake,
it was not, beside the other.
"Weel, I'll be a man some day, an' Angus 'll hae to sattle wi' me!"
said Donal through his clenched teeth. "Man, Fergus! the cratur's as
dumb's a worum. I dinna believe 'at ever he spak a word in's life."
This cut Fergus to the heart, for he was far from being without
generosity or pity. How many things a man who is not awake to side
strenuously with the good in him against the evil, who is not on his
guard lest himself should mislead himself, may do, of which he will
one day be bitterly ashamed! -- a trite remark, it may be, but,
reader, that will make the thing itself no easier to bear, should
you ever come to know you have done a thing of the sort. I fear,
however, from what I know of Fergus afterwards, that he now, instead
of seeking about to make some amends, turned the strength that
should have gone in that direction, to the justifying of himself to
himself in what he had done. Anyhow, he was far too proud to
confess to Donal that he had done wrong -- too much offended at being
rebuked by one he counted so immeasurably his inferior, to do the
right thing his rebuke set before him. What did the mighty business
matter! The little rascal was nothing but a tramp; and if he didn't
deserve his punishment this time, he had deserved it a hundred times
without having it, and would ten thousand times again. So reasoned
Fergus, while the feeling grew upon Donal that the cratur was of
some superior race -- came from some other and nobler world. I would
remind my reader that Donal was a Celt, with a nature open to every
fancy of love or awe -- one of the same breed with the foolish
Galatians, and like them ready to be bewitched; but bearing a heart
that welcomed the light with glad rebound -- loved the lovely, nor
loved it only, but turned towards it with desire to become like it.
Fergus too was a Celt in the main, but was spoiled by the paltry
ambition of being distinguished. He was not in love with
loveliness, but in love with praise. He saw not a little of what
was good and noble, and would fain be such, but mainly that men
might regard him for his goodness and nobility; hence his practical
notion of the good was weak, and of the noble, paltry. His one
desire in doing anything, was to be approved of or admired in the
same -- approved of in the opinions he held, in the plans he pursued,
in the doctrines he taught; admired in the poems in which he went
halting after Byron, and in the eloquence with which he meant one
day to astonish great congregations. There was nothing original as
yet discoverable in him; nothing to deliver him from the poor
imitative apery in which he imagined himself a poet. He did possess
one invaluable gift -- that of perceiving and admiring more than a
little, certain forms of the beautiful; but it was rendered merely
ridiculous by being conjoined with the miserable ambition -- poor as
that of any mountebank emperor -- to be himself admired for that
admiration. He mistook also sensibility for faculty, nor perceived
that it was at best but a probable sign that he might be able to do
something or other with pleasure, perhaps with success. If any one
judge it hard that men should be made with ambitions to whose
objects they can never attain, I answer, ambition is but the evil
shadow of aspiration; and no man ever followed the truth, which is
the one path of aspiration, and in the end complained that he had
been made this way or that. Man is made to be that which he is made
most capable of desiring -- but it goes without saying that he must
desire the thing itself and not its shadow. Man is of the truth,
and while he follows a lie, no indication his nature yields will
hold, except the fear, the discontent, the sickness of soul, that
tell him he is wrong. If he say, "I care not for what you call the
substance -- it is to me the shadow; I want what you call the shadow,"
the only answer is, that, to all eternity, he can never have it: a
shadow can never be had.
Ginevra was hardly the same child after the experience of that
terrible morning. At no time very much at home with her father,
something had now come between them, to remove which all her
struggles to love him as before were unavailing. The father was too
stupid, too unsympathetic, to take note of the look of fear that
crossed her face if ever he addressed her suddenly; and when she was
absorbed in fighting the thoughts that would come, he took her
constraint for sullenness.
With a cold spot in his heart where once had dwelt some genuine
regard for Donal, Fergus went back to college. Donal went on
herding the cattle, cudgeling Hornie, and reading what books he
could lay his hands on: there was no supply through Fergus any more,
alas! The year before, ere he took his leave, he had been careful
to see Donal provided with at least books for study; but this time
he left him to shift for himself. He was small because he was
proud, spiteful because he was conceited. He would let Donal know
what it was to have lost his favour! But Donal did not suffer much,
except in the loss of the friendship itself. He managed to get the
loan of a copy of Burns -- better meat for a strong spirit than the
poetry of Byron or even Scott. An innate cleanliness of soul
rendered the occasional coarseness to him harmless, and the mighty
torrent of the man's life, broken by occasional pools reflecting the
stars; its headlong hatred of hypocrisy and false religion; its
generosity, and struggling conscientiousness; its failures and its
repentances, roused much in the heart of Donal. Happily the copy he
had borrowed, had in it a tolerable biography; and that, read along
with the man's work, enabled him, young as he was, to see something
of where and how he had failed, and to shadow out to himself, not
altogether vaguely, the perils to which the greatest must be exposed
who cannot rule his own spirit, but, like a mere child, reels from
one mood into another -- at the will of -- what?
From reading Burns, Donal learned also not a little of the
capabilities of his own language; for, Celt as he was by birth and
country and mental character, he could not speak the Gaelic: that
language, soft as the speech of streams from rugged mountains, and
wild as that of the wind in the tops of fir-trees, the language at
once of bards and fighting men, had so far ebbed from the region,
lingering only here and there in the hollow pools of old memories,
that Donal had never learned it; and the lowland Scotch, an ancient
branch of English, dry and gnarled, but still flourishing in its old
age, had become instead, his mother-tongue; and the man who loves
the antique speech, or even the mere patois, of his childhood, and
knows how to use it, possesses therein a certain kind of power over
the hearts of men, which the most refined and perfect of languages
cannot give, inasmuch as it has travelled farther from the original
sources of laughter and tears. But the old Scotish itself is, alas!
rapidly vanishing before a poor, shabby imitation of modern
English -- itself a weaker language in sound, however enriched in
words, since the days of Shakspere, when it was far more like Scotch
in its utterance than it is now.
My mother-tongue, how sweet thy tone!
How near to good allied!
Were even my heart of steel or stone,
Thou wouldst drive out the pride.
So sings Klaus Groth, in and concerning his own Plattdeutsch -- so
nearly akin to the English.
To a poet especially is it an inestimable advantage to be able to
employ such a language for his purposes. Not only was it the speech
of his childhood, when he saw everything with fresh, true eyes, but
it is itself a child-speech; and the child way of saying must always
lie nearer the child way of seeing, which is the poetic way.
Therefore, as the poetic faculty was now slowly asserting itself in
Donal, it was of vast importance that he should know what the genius
of Scotland had been able to do with his homely mother-tongue, for
through that tongue alone, could what poetry he had in him have
thoroughly fair play, and in turn do its best towards his
development -- which is the first and greatest use of poetry. It is a
ruinous misjudgment -- too contemptible to be asserted, but not too
contemptible to be acted upon, that the end of poetry is
publication. Its true end is to help first the man who makes it
along the path to the truth: help for other people may or may not be
in it; that, if it become a question at all, must be an after one.
To the man who has it, the gift is invaluable; and, in proportion
as it helps him to be a better man, it is of value to the whole
world; but it may, in itself, be so nearly worthless, that the
publishing of it would be more for harm than good. Ask any one who
has had to perform the unenviable duty of editor to a magazine: he
will corroborate what I say -- that the quantity of verse good enough
to be its own reward, but without the smallest claim to be uttered
to the world, is enormous.
Not yet, however, had Donal written a single stanza. A line, or at
most two, would now and then come into his head with a buzz, like a
wandering honey-bee that had mistaken its hive -- generally in the
shape of a humorous malediction on Hornie -- but that was all.
In the mean time Gibbie slept and waked and slept again, night after
night -- with the loveliest days between, at the cottage on Glashgar.
The morning after his arrival, the first thing he was aware of was
Janet's face beaming over him, with a look in its eyes more like
worship then benevolence. Her husband was gone, and she was about
to milk the cow, and was anxious lest, while she was away, he should
disappear as before. But the light that rushed into his eyes was in
full response to that which kindled the light in hers, and her
misgiving vanished; he could not love her like that and leave her.
She gave him his breakfast of porridge and milk, and went to her
cow.
When she came back, she found everything tidy in the cottage, the
floor swept, every dish washed and set aside; and Gibbie was
examining an old shoe of Robert's, to see whether he could not mend
it. Janet, having therefore leisure, proceeded at once with joy to
the construction of a garment she had been devising for him. The
design was simple, and its execution easy. Taking a blue winsey
petticoat of her own, drawing it in round his waist, and tying it
over the chemise which was his only garment, she found, as she had
expected, that its hem reached his feet: she partly divided it up
the middle, before and behind, and had but to backstitch two short
seams, and there was a pair of sailor-like trousers, as tidy as
comfortable! Gibbie was delighted with them. True, they had no
pockets, but then he had nothing to put in pockets, and one might
come to think of that as an advantage. Gibbie indeed had never had
pockets, for the pockets of the garments he had had were always worn
out before they reached him. Then Janet thought about a cap; but
considering him a moment critically, and seeing how his hair stood
out like thatch-eaves round his head, she concluded with herself
"There maun be some men as weel's women fowk, I'm thinkin', whause
hair's gien them for a coverin'," and betook herself instead to her
New Testament.
Gibbie stood by as she read in silence, gazing with delight, for he
thought it must be a book of ballads like Donal's that she was
reading. But Janet found his presence, his unresting attitude, and
his gaze, discomposing. To worship freely, one must be alone, or
else with fellow-worshippers. And reading and worshipping were
often so mingled with Janet, as to form but one mental
consciousness. She looked up therefore from her book, and said --
"Can ye read, laddie?"
Gibbie shook his head.
"Sit ye doon than, an' I s' read till ye."
Gibbie obeyed more than willingly, expecting to hear some ancient
Scots tale of love or chivalry. Instead, it was one of those
love-awful, glory-sad chapters in the end of the Gospel of John,
over which hangs the darkest cloud of human sorrow, shot through and
through with the radiance of light eternal, essential, invincible.
Whether it was the uncertain response to Janet's tone merely, or to
truth too loud to be heard, save as a thrill, of some chord in his
own spirit, having its one end indeed twisted around an earthly peg,
but the other looped to a tail-piece far in the unknown -- I cannot
tell; it may have been that the name now and then recurring brought
to his mind the last words of poor Sambo; anyhow, when Janet looked
up, she saw the tears rolling down the child's face. At the same
time, from the expression of his countenance, she judged that his
understanding had grasped nothing. She turned therefore to the
parable of the prodigal son, and read it. Even that had not a few
words and phrases unknown to Gibbie, but he did not fail to catch
the drift of the perfect story. For had not Gibbie himself had a
father, to whose bosom he went home every night? Let but love be
the interpreter, and what most wretched type will not serve the turn
for the carriage of profoundest truth! The prodigal's lowest
degradation, Gibbie did not understand; but Janet saw the expression
of the boy's face alter with every tone of the tale, through all the
gamut between the swine's trough and the arms of the father. Then
at last he burst -- not into tears -- Gibbie was not much acquainted
with weeping -- but into a laugh of loud triumph. He clapped his
hands, and in a shiver of ecstasy, stood like a stork upon one leg,
as if so much of him was all that could be spared for this lower
world, and screwed himself together.
Janet was well satisfied with her experiment. Most Scotch women,
and more than most Scotch men, would have rebuked him for laughing,
but Janet knew in herself a certain tension of delight which nothing
served to relieve but a wild laughter of holiest gladness; and never
in tears of deepest emotion did her heart appeal more directly to
its God. It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God, that is
afraid to laugh in his presence.
Thus had Gibbie his first lesson in the only thing worth learning,
in that which, to be learned at all, demands the united energy of
heart and soul and strength and mind; and from that day he went on
learning it. I cannot tell how, or what were the slow stages by
which his mind budded and swelled until it burst into the flower of
humanity, the knowledge of God. I cannot tell the shape of the door
by which the Lord entered into that house, and took everlasting
possession of it. I cannot even tell in what shape he appeared
himself in Gibbie's thoughts -- for the Lord can take any shape that
is human. I only know it was not any unhuman shape of earthly
theology that he bore to Gibbie, when he saw him with "that inward
eye, which is the bliss of solitude." For happily Janet never
suspected how utter was Gibbie's ignorance. She never dreamed that
he did not know what was generally said about Jesus Christ. She
thought he must know as well as she the outlines of his story, and
the purpose of his life and death, as commonly taught, and therefore
never attempted explanations for the sake of which she would
probably have found herself driven to use terms and phrases which
merely substitute that which is intelligible because it appeals to
what in us is low, and is itself both low and false, for that which,
if unintelligible, is so because of its grandeur and truth.
Gibbie's ideas of God he got all from the mouth of Theology
himself, the Word of God; and to the theologian who will not be
content with his teaching, the disciple of Jesus must just turn his
back, that his face may be to his Master.
So, teaching him only that which she loved, not that which she had
been taught, Janet read to Gibbie of Jesus, talked to him of Jesus,
dreamed to him about Jesus; until at length -- Gibbie did not think to
watch, and knew nothing of the process by which it came about -- his
whole soul was full of the man, of his doings, of his words, of his
thoughts, of his life. Jesus Christ was in him -- he was possessed by
him. Almost before he knew, he was trying to fashion his life after
that of his Master.
Between the two, it was a sweet teaching, a sweet learning. Under
Janet, Gibbie was saved the thousand agonies that befall the
conscientious disciple, from the forcing upon him, as the thoughts
and will of the eternal Father of our spirits, of the ill expressed
and worse understood experiences, the crude conjectures, the vulgar
imaginations of would-be teachers of the multitude. Containing
truth enough to save those of sufficiently low development to
receive such teaching without disgust, it contains falsehood enough,
but for the Spirit of God, to ruin all nobler -- I mean all childlike
natures, utterly; and many such it has gone far to ruin, driving
them even to a madness in which they have died. Jesus alone knows
the Father, and can reveal him. Janet studied only Jesus, and as a
man knows his friend, so she, only infinitely better, knew her more
than friend -- her Lord and her God. Do I speak of a poor Scotch
peasant woman too largely for the reader whose test of truth is the
notion of probability he draws from his own experience? Let me put
one question to make the real probability clearer. Should it be any
wonder, if Christ be indeed the natural Lord of every man, woman,
and child, that a simple, capable nature, laying itself entirely
open to him and his influences, should understand him? How should
he be the Lord of that nature if such a thing were not possible, or
were at all improbable -- nay, if such a thing did not necessarily
follow? Among women, was it not always to peasant women that
heavenly messages came? See revelation culminate in Elizabeth and
Mary, the mothers of John the Baptist and Jesus. Think how much
fitter that it should be so; -- that they to whom the word of God
comes should be women bred in the dignity of a natural life, and
familiarity with the large ways of the earth; women of simple and
few wants, without distraction, and with time for
reflection -- compelled to reflection, indeed, from the enduring
presence of an unsullied consciousness: for wherever there is a
humble, thoughtful nature, into that nature the divine
consciousness, that is, the Spirit of God, presses as into its own
place. Holy women are to be found everywhere, but the prophetess is
not so likely to be found in the city as in the hill-country.
Whatever Janet, then, might, perhaps -- I do not know -- have imagined
it her duty to say to Gibbie had she surmised his ignorance, having
long ceased to trouble her own head, she had now no inclination to
trouble Gibbie's heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It
was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. Being in the
light she understood the light, and had no need of system, either
true or false, to explain it to her. She lived by the word
proceeding out of the mouth of God. When life begins to speculate
upon itself, I suspect it has begun to die. And seldom has there
been a fitter soul, one clearer from evil, from folly, from human
device -- a purer cistern for such water of life as rose in the heart
of Janet Grant to pour itself into, than the soul of Sir Gibbie.
But I must not call any true soul a cistern: wherever the water of
life is received, it sinks and softens and hollows, until it
reaches, far down, the springs of life there also, that come
straight from the eternal hills, and thenceforth there is in that
soul a well of water springing up into everlasting life.
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