EDITOR AND AUTHOR

Pursuing his aim of putting life into the Establishment Macleod had, in 1849, started a little paper, the Edinburgh Christian Magazine, which may be described as a miniature plan or first sketch of Good Words. Its circulation did not exceed five thousand, but ‘the blue magazine,’ as it was called, was no mean agent in the revival of the drooping Church. While yet minister of Dalkeith he was frequently seen about the office of the publishers, Messrs. Paton & Ritchie, in George Street, Edinburgh; but after his removal to Glasgow the editorial instructions were given in correspondence with the head printer, Mr. J. C. Erskine. That gentleman writes: ‘Usually he was behind time, and I had consequently to poke him up about the middle of each month. But we were always on the best of terms, and I always felt honoured as well as delighted in being associated with so lovable a man and having the privilege of his acquaintance.’ These are some of the letters, in whole or part:—

The next refers to the birth of his first child:

‘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:

A devil rises in my heart
Far worse than any death to me’—

there will be in him still some nobility of irrepressible impulse, some leap of the spirit unawares. Macleod’s usual method, however, is to take some unregenerate character—a wild tramp, a godless seaman, an express ecclesiastic—and reform him, not by religious admonition, but by living influences that seize upon the better feelings. In his Vanity Fair the evangelists are the affections. Thus in Billy Buttons the captain and crew are humanised by the accident of having upon their hands, in the middle of the Atlantic, the care of a new-born infant; the father of Wee Davie is made another being by his wife’s cry over the little coffin:—’O Willie, forgi’e me, for it’s no’ ma pairt to speak, but I canna help it enoo, and just, ma bonnie man, just agree wi’ me that we’ll gi’e oor hearts noo and for ever to oor ain Saviour, and the Saviour o’ wee Davie’; Jock Hall, the outcast in The Starling, thinking that he hates everybody and that everybody hates him, is made a new creature through the kindness and encouragement of an old soldier, who, when the bird cries, A man’s a man for a’ that, drives the lesson home, ‘And ye are a man; cheer up, Jock.’ Macleod’s good people are no hymn-book pietists, but, like those of Dickens, gentle and true. And his stories are entertaining, so that the most bigoted agnostic might put up with the religion for the sake of the amusement.

The most prevailing quality of Macleod’s fiction is the pathos, and though one must be a Christian to feel it all, there is much that no humane reader will be able to resist. To be sure the occasion is always simple and ordinary, never such, for instance, as the elaborate decline of a consumptive scholar in his garden-chair; and the cause of these tears may be only a remark or a gesture. Under the restrictions of Good Words he could not do his best as a humorist, yet he permitted himself to be thoroughly Scottish and provoke hearty laughter. Within a modest range he displays real genius in the portrayal of character and the rendering of Scottish conversation.

The Old Lieutenant, begun in Good Words before he knew it was to be a story, and continued without sight of an end, is disjointed in the narrative, and loaded with extraneous matter; but the elder Fleming is like one of Thackeray’s men, and, of the domestics of the good old days when the social bond was not cash payment but affection, where, outside of Scott, will you find a more delightful type than Babby? When Ned was about to leave home for his first voyage, ‘no one saw the tears which filled her large eyes, or heard her blowing her little nose half the night.’ After Ned’s marriage, his father, inviting the young couple to visit the old home, says simply, ‘I think that Babby will expect it.’ Babby has a tongue in her head, and is never so eloquent as when she rails at the new minister. Under the old one she had felt many a time ‘jist mad at hersel’ that she wasna a better woman.’ ‘But this chield Dalrymple that’s cam’ among us! Hech, sirs! what a round black crappit heid he has, like a bull-dog’s, and a body round and fat like a black pudding; and the cratur gangs struttin’ aboot wi’ his umbrella under his oxter, crawin’ like a midden cock, wha but him, keep us a’! an’ pittin’ his neb into every ane’s brose wi’ his impudence. And syne he rages and rampages in the poopit, wi’ the gowk’s spittle in his mouth, flytin’ on folk, and abusin’ them for a’ that’s bad, till my nerves rise, and I could jist cry oot, if it wasna for shame, “Haud yer tongue, ye spitefu’ cratur!” And again,—“Eh, I was glad ye werena married by Dalrymple! He routs in the poopit like a bull, and when the body’s crackin’ wi’ ye, he cheeps, cheeps like a chirted puddock.” “A what?” asked Kate. “A squeezed tade!” replied Babby; “d’ye no’ ken yer ain lang’age? And as for his sermons, they’re jist like a dog’s tail, the langer the sma’er.”’ If Ned is partly made to order, the crew are real old salts. Their conversation finally recalls Flint’s buccaneers, as when one (a milder Israel Hands) remarks, ‘But what, suppose I makes up my mind, do you see, to go ahead, and says, as it were, says I, I’ll not pray, nor read the Bible, nor give up my grog, nor anything else, nor be a saint, but a sinner, and sail when I like, and where I like, and be my own captain—eh?’

Macleod’s best effort in fiction is The Starling. Art demands some abatement of the happy close; there is didactic and explanatory matter that might well be spared; and the episode of the quack is an astounding excrescence. But it is a fine and touching story, and shows that the author possessed the distinctive power of a novelist. The starling was the pet of a little boy called Charlie. It could say, ‘I’m Charlie’s bairn,’ and ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and whistle a few bars of the song, ‘Wha’ll be king but Charlie?’ To feed the bird and hear it speak and sing was the bairn’s delight. He was the only child of his parents, a pious and happy couple, the wife young, the husband a retired sergeant of the army, back at his old trade of shoemaker. The boy died, and there was the bird still repeating its remarks and tunes, and daily becoming dearer to the bereaved parents for Charlie’s sake. One Sunday morning, the starling being dowie, the sergeant hung out its cage at the door, for the sun was shining and the air sweet. Immediately the bird began to pour forth its budget; and a crowd of children gathered about the cage, and the street rang with their delight. Suddenly appeared the minister! at sight of whom the children fled, tumbling over one another and screaming in their fright, so that windows were thrown up, and mothers came flying into the rout, and there was a terrible ado. The Rev. Daniel Porteous, who was on his way to church, was scandalised at such a desecration of the Lord’s day. But what was his horror when he found that the prime offender was the sergeant, one of his elders? To the good couple, who looked up to Mr. Porteous with awe, and whose standing in the congregation was their greatest honour, the minister’s anger was no light matter; the wife was in distraction, the husband grave and puzzled. The clerical decree was that the starling should be destroyed. This the sergeant, with all deference, refused, whereupon the minister went away, uttering vague threats. But as the poor wife seemed to think it their duty to obey, her husband said, ‘If you, that kens as weel as me a’ the bird has been to us, but speak the word, the deed will be allowed by me.’ And he took down the cage, consenting that the other should put an end to the bird. ‘I’m Charlie’s bairn,’ exclaimed the starling. The wife thought that the killing should be the man’s work, but you see that she is beginning to waver, and when her husband lays his hand on the bird, saying, ‘Bid fareweel to your mistress, Charlie,’ she sprang forward with a cry, and prevented the deed. The sergeant was suspended from the eldership for contumacy, and shunned in the village like a leper. But it all comes right in the end. The motive of the tale would seem to verge on the ludicrous; a single false or strained note, and the whole thing were ruined; yet—call it literary skill or the unconscious art of perfect sympathy—the treatment is such that there is no improbability, and for the starling—as one might have felt when Marie Antoinette was in the cart, if it were a question whether some force might not come dashing up a back street to the rescue, so the reader feels when the fate of the bird is trembling in the balance. The minister with his scorn of the feelings and worship of church principles; his sister, who is like himself, only adding malice; the hypocritical elder who confesses, ‘There’s nane perfect, nane—the fac’ is, I’m no’ perfect masel’’; above all, the ne’er-do-weel, Jock Hall,—are depicted to the life.

That Macleod’s fiction has particular merits none will deny, though the critic, making the most of the defects, might say that his stories fail as wholes. His best achievement is perhaps The Reminiscences of a Highland Parish. This, at any rate, is a book, and it justifies the saying in The Old Lieutenant about the Highlands:—’In all this kind of scenery, along with the wild traditions which ghostlike float around its ancient keeps, and live in the tales of its inhabitants, there is a glory and a sadness most affecting to the imagination, and suggestive of a period of romance and song.’ The earlier chapters, describing his grandfather’s patriarchal home and the open-air education of the boys and girls of the manse, form a complete and charming piece—the idyll of Fiunary. There are exciting adventures on the misty hill and in the furious Sound.

What a sight it was to see that old man, when the storm was fiercest, with his one eye, under its shaggy grey brow, looking to windward, sharp, calm, and luminous as a spark: his hand clutching the tiller—never speaking a word, and displeased if any other broke the silence, except the minister who sat beside him, assigning this post of honour as a great favour to Rory during the trying hour. That hour was generally when wind and tide met, and gurly grew the sea, whose green waves rose with crested heads, hanging against the cloud-rack, and sometimes concealing the land; while black sudden squalls, rushing down from the glens, struck the foaming billows in fury and smote the boat, threatening with a sharp scream to tear the tiny sail in tatters, break the mast, or blow out of the water the small dark speck that carried the manse treasures. There was one moment of peculiar difficulty and concentrated danger when the hand of a master was needed to save them. The boat has entered the worst part of the tideway. How ugly it looks! Three seas higher than the rest are coming; and you can see the squall blowing their white crests into smoke.[6] In a few minutes they will be down upon the Row. ‘Look out, Ruari!’ whispers the minister. ‘Stand by the sheets!’ cries Rory to the boys, who, seated on the ballast, gaze on him like statues, watching his face and eagerly listening in silence. ‘Ready!’ is their only reply. Down come the seas, rolling, rising, breaking; falling, rising again, and looking higher and fiercer than ever. The tide is running like a race-horse and the gale meets it; and these three seas appear now to rise like huge pyramids of green water, dashing their foam up into the sky. The first may be encountered and overcome, for the boat has good way upon her; but the others will rapidly follow up the thundering charge and shock, and a single false movement of the helm by a hair’s breadth will bring down a cataract like Niagara, that would shake a frigate, and sink the Row into the depths like a stone. The boat meets the first wave, and rises dry over it. ‘Slack out the main-sheet, quick, and hold hard: there—steady!’ commands Rory, in a low, firm voice, and the huge back of the second wave is seen breaking to leeward. ‘Haul in, boys, and belay!’ Quick as lightning the little craft, having again gathered way, is up in the teeth of the wind and soon is spinning over the third topper, not a drop of water having come over the lee gunwale. ‘Nobly done, Rory!’ exclaims the minister, as he looks back to the fierce tideway which they have passed.

But what one least forgets is the figure of the aged pastor taking farewell of his flock. Blind he was, and lost his bearings in the pulpit, till the beadle, old Rory, who had accompanied him from Skye fifty years before, went up and turned him round so as to face the congregation.

And then stood up that venerable man, a Saul in height among the people, with his pure white hair falling back from his ample forehead over his shoulders. Few and loving and earnest were the words he spoke, amidst the silence of a passionately devoted people, which was broken only by their low sobs when he told them that they should see his face no more.

All Morven is in the book,—scenery from the heather to the waves, life from the manse to the shieling, mixed with strange old legends and romantic tales.

Was Norman Macleod a poet? Pre-eminently so, said Principal Shairp, relying on Wordsworth’s paradox. But that is a broken reed. Expression is the final cause of poetry, the form’s the thing. Now, from Macleod’s habit of misquoting the finest lines it would seem that his love for poetry was not a poet’s love. Still in his verse he could stumble on such rhythm as this—

‘Ah, where is he now, in what mansion,
In what star of the infinite sky?’

and in the conclusion of a piece about a grey-headed father seeing his children dance, there is a gleam of real poetry—

‘But he hears a far-off music
Guiding all the stately spheres,

In his father-heart it echoes,
So he claps his hands and cheers.’

The hymn ‘Courage, brothers,’ has a telling ring, though only of rhetoric; and in a song that had the honour of a place in Maga he has roughly rendered the spirit and atmosphere of the roaring game. But his cleverest achievement in rhyme is ‘Captain Frazer’s Nose,’ which we are told was written during violent pain.

Oh, if ye’re at Dumbarton fair,
Gang to the castle when ye’re there,
And see a sicht baith rich and rare—

The nose o’ Captain Frazer.

Unless ye’re blin’ or unco glee’t,
A mile awa’ ye’re sure to see’t,
And nearer han’ a man gauns wi’t

That owns the nose o’ Frazer.

It’s great in length, it’s great in girth,
It’s great in grief, it’s great in mirth,
Tho’ grown wi’ years, ‘twas great at birth—

It’s greater far than Frazer!

I’ve heard volcanoes loudly roarin’,
And Niagara’s waters pourin’;
But oh, gin ye had heard the snorin’

Frae the nose o’ Captain Frazer!

To wauken sleepin’ congregations,
Or rouse to battle sleepin’ nations,
Gae wa’ wi’ preachin’s and orations,

And try the nose o’ Frazer!

Gif French invaders try to lan’
Upon our glorious British stran’,
Fear nocht if ships are no’ at han’,

But trust the nose o’ Frazer.

Jist crack that cannon ower the shore,
Weel rammed wi’ snuff, then let it roar
Ae Hielan’ sneeze! then never more

They’ll daur the nose o’ Frazer.

If that great Nose is ever deid,
To bury it ye dinna need,
Nae coffin made o’ wood or leed,

Could hand the nose o’ Frazer.

But let it stan’ itsel’ alane,
Erect, like some big Druid stane,
That a’ the warl’ may see its bane,

‘In memory o’ Frazer!’