Robert F. Murray (Author of the Scarlet Gown): His Poems; with a Memoir

But when they left him to himself again,
Twist, like a fiend’s breath from a distant room
Diffusing through the passage, crept; the smell
Deepening had power upon him, and he mixt
His fancies with the billow-lifted bay
Of Biscay, and the rollings of a ship.

And on that night he made a little song,
And called his song ‘The Song of Twist and Plug,’
And sang it; scarcely could he make or sing.

‘Rank is black plug, though smoked in wind and rain;
And rank is twist, which gives no end of pain;
I know not which is ranker, no, not I.

‘Plug, art thou rank? then milder twist must be;
Plug, thou art milder: rank is twist to me.
O twist, if plug be milder, let me buy.

‘Rank twist, that seems to make me fade away,
Rank plug, that navvies smoke in loveless clay,
I know not which is ranker, no, not I.

‘I fain would purchase flake, if that could be;
I needs must purchase plug, ah, woe is me!
Plug and a cutty, a cutty, let me buy.

His was the best good thing of the night’s talk, and the thing that was remembered. He excited himself a good deal over Rectorial Elections. The duties of the Lord Rector and the mode of his election have varied frequently in near five hundred years. In Murray’s day, as in my own, the students elected their own Rector, and before Lord Bute’s energetic reign, the Rector had little to do, but to make a speech, and give a prize. I vaguely remember proposing the author of Tom Brown long ago: he was not, however, in the running.

Politics often inspire the electors; occasionally (I have heard) grave seniors use their influence, mainly for reasons of academic policy.

In December 1887 Murray writes about an election in which Mr. Lowell was a candidate. ‘A pitiful protest was entered by an’ (epithets followed by a proper name) ‘against Lowell, on the score of his being an alien. Mallock, as you learn, was withdrawn, for which I am truly thankful.’ Unlucky Mr. Mallock! ‘Lowell polled 100 and Gibson 92.. The intrigues and corruption appear to be almost worthy of an American Presidential election.’ Mr. Lowell could not accept a compliment which pleased him, because of his official position, and the misfortune of his birth!

Murray was already doing a very little ‘miniature journalism,’ in the form of University Notes for a local paper. He complains of the ultra Caledonian frankness with which men told him that they were very bad. A needless, if friendly, outspokenness was a feature in Scottish character which he did not easily endure. He wrote a good deal of verse in the little University paper, now called College Echoes.

If Murray ever had any definite idea of being ordained for the ministry in any ‘denomination,’ he abandoned it. His ‘bursaries’ (scholarships or exhibitions), on which he had been passing rich, expired, and he had to earn a livelihood. It seems plain to myself that he might easily have done so with his pen. A young friend of my own (who will excuse me for thinking that his bright verses are not better than Murray’s) promptly made, by these alone, an income which to Murray would have been affluence. But this could not be done at St. Andrews. Again, Murray was not in contact with people in the centre of newspapers and magazines. He went very little into general society, even at St. Andrews, and thus failed, perhaps, to make acquaintances who might have been ‘useful.’ He would have scorned the idea of making useful acquaintances. But without seeking them, why should we reject any friendliness when it offers itself? We are all members one of another. Murray speaks of his experience of human beings, as rich in examples of kindness and good-will. His shyness, his reserve, his extreme unselfishness, – carried to the point of diffidence, – made him rather shun than seek older people who were dangerously likely to be serviceable. His manner, when once he could be induced to meet strangers, was extremely frank and pleasant, but from meeting strangers he shrunk, in his inveterate modesty.

In 1886 Murray had the misfortune to lose is father, and it became, perhaps, more prominently needful that he should find a profession. He now assisted Professor Meiklejohn of St. Andrews in various kinds of literary and academic work, and in him found a friend, with whom he remained in close intercourse to the last. He began the weary path, which all literary beginners must tread, of sending contributions to magazines. He seldom read magazine articles. ‘I do not greatly care for “Problems” and “vexed questions.” I am so much of a problem and a vexed question that I have quite enough to do in searching for a solution of my own personality.’ He tried a story, based on ‘a midnight experience’ of his own; unluckily he does not tell us what that experience was. Had he encountered one of the local ghosts?

‘My blood-curdling romance I offered to the editor of Longman’s Magazine, but that misguided person was so ill-advised as to return it, accompanied with one of these abominable lithographed forms conveying his hypocritical regrets.’ Murray sent a directed envelope with a twopenny-halfpenny stamp. The paper came back for three-halfpence by book-post. ‘I have serious thoughts of sueing him for the odd penny!’ ‘Why should people be fools enough to read my rot when they have twenty volumes of Scott at their command?’ He confesses to ‘a Scott-mania almost as intense as if he were the last new sensation.’ ‘I was always fond of him, but I am fonder than ever now.’ This plunge into the immortal romances seems really to have discouraged Murray; at all events he says very little more about attempts in fiction of his own. ‘I am a barren rascal,’ he writes, quoting Johnson on Fielding. Like other men, Murray felt extreme difficulty in writing articles or tales which have an infinitesimal chance of being accepted. It needs a stout heart to face this almost fixed certainty of rejection: a man is weakened by his apprehensions of a lithographed form, and of his old manuscript coming home to roost, like the Graces of Theocritus, to pine in the dusty chest where is their chill abode. If the Alexandrian poets knew this ill-fortune, so do all beginners in letters. There is nothing for it but ‘putting a stout heart to a stey brae,’ as the Scotch proverb says. Editors want good work, and on finding a new man who is good, they greatly rejoice. But it is so difficult to do vigorous and spontaneous work, as it were, in the dark. Murray had not, it is probable, the qualities of the novelist, the narrator. An excellent critic he might have been if he had ‘descended to criticism,’ but he had, at this time, no introductions, and probably did not address reviews at random to editors. As to poetry, these much-vexed men receive such enormous quantities of poetry that they usually reject it at a venture, and obtain the small necessary supplies from agreeable young ladies. Had Murray been in London, with a few literary friends, he might soon have been a thriving writer of light prose and light verse. But the enchantress held him; he hated London, he had no literary friends, he could write gaily for pleasure, not for gain. So, like the Scholar Gypsy, he remained contemplative,

‘Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.’

About this time the present writer was in St. Andrews as Gifford Lecturer in Natural Theology. To say that an enthusiasm for totems and taboos, ghosts and gods of savage men, was aroused by these lectures, would be to exaggerate unpardonably. Efforts to make the students write essays or ask questions were so entire a failure that only one question was received – as to the proper pronunciation of ‘Myth.’ Had one been fortunate enough to interest Murray, it must have led to some discussion of his literary attempts. He mentions having attended a lecture given by myself to the Literary Society on ‘Literature as a Profession,’ and he found the lecturer ‘far more at home in such a subject than in the Gifford Lectures.’ Possibly the hearer was ‘more at home’ in literature than in discussions as to the origin of Huitzilopochtli. ‘Literature,’ he says, ‘never was, is not, and never will be, in the ordinary sense of the term, a profession. You can’t teach it as you can the professions, you can’t succeed in it as you can in the professions, by dint of mere diligence and without special aptitude.. I think all this chatter about the technical and pecuniary sides of literature is extremely foolish and worse than useless. It only serves to glut the idle curiosity of the general public about matters with which they have no concern, a curiosity which (thanks partly to American methods of journalism) has become simply outrageous.’

Into chatter about the pecuniary aspect of literature the Lecturer need hardly say that he did not meander. It is absolutely true that literature cannot be taught. Maupassant could have dispensed with the instructions of Flaubert. But an ‘aptitude’ is needed in all professions, and in such arts as music, and painting, and sculpture, teaching is necessary. In literature, teaching can only come from general education in letters, from experience, from friendly private criticism. But if you cannot succeed in literature ‘by dint of mere diligence,’ mere diligence is absolutely essential. Men must read, must observe, must practise. Diligence is as necessary to the author as to the grocer, the solicitor, the dentist, the barrister, the soldier. Nothing but nature can give the aptitude; diligence must improve it, and experience may direct it. It is not enough to wait for the spark from heaven to fall; the spark must be caught, and tended, and cherished. A man must labour till he finds his vein, and himself. Again, if literature is an art, it is also a profession. A man’s very first duty is to support himself and those, if any, who are dependent on him. If he cannot do it by epics, tragedies, lyrics, he must do it by articles, essays, tales, or how he honestly can. He must win his leisure by his labour, and give his leisure to his art. Murray, at this time, was diligent in helping to compile and correct educational works. He might, but for the various conditions of reserve, hatred of towns, and the rest, have been earning his leisure by work more brilliant and more congenial to most men. But his theory of literature was so lofty that he probably found the other, the harder, the less remunerative, the less attractive work, more congenial to his tastes.

He describes, to Mrs. Murray, various notable visitors to St. Andrews: Professor Butcher, who lectured on Lucian, and is ‘very handsome,’ Mr. Arthur Balfour, the Lord Rector, who is ‘rather handsome,’ and delights the listener by his eloquence; Mr. Chamberlain, who pleases him too, though he finds Mr. Chamberlain rather acrimonious in his political reflections. About Lucian, the subject of Mr. Butcher’s lecture, Murray says nothing. That brilliant man of letters in general, the Alcibiades of literature, the wittiest, and, rarely, the most tender, and, always, the most graceful, was a model who does not seem to have attracted Murray. Lucian amused, and amuses, and lived by amusing: the vein of romance and poetry that was his he worked but rarely: perhaps the Samosatene did not take himself too seriously, yet he lives through the ages, an example, in many ways to be followed, of a man who obviously delighted in all that he wrought. He was no model to Murray, who only delighted in his moments of inspiration, and could not make himself happy even in the trifles which are demanded from the professional pen.

He did, at last, endeavour to ply that servile engine of which Pendennis conceived so exalted an opinion. Certainly a false pride did not stand in his way when, on May 5, 1889, he announced that he was about to leave St. Andrews, and attempt to get work at proof-correcting and in the humblest sorts of journalism in Edinburgh. The chapter is honourable to his resolution, but most melancholy. There were competence and ease waiting for him, probably, in London, if he would but let his pen have its way in bright comment and occasional verse. But he chose the other course. With letters of introduction from Mr. Meiklejohn, he consulted the houses of Messrs. Clark and Messrs. Constable in Edinburgh. He did not find that his knowledge of Greek was adequate to the higher and more remunerative branches of proof-reading, that weary meticulous toil, so fatiguing to the eyesight. The hours, too, were very long; he could do more and better work in fewer hours. No time, no strength, were left for reading and writing. He did, while in Edinburgh, send a few things to magazines, but he did not actually ‘bombard’ editors. He is ‘to live in one room, and dine, if not on a red herring, on the next cheapest article of diet.’ These months of privation, at which he laughed, and some weeks of reading proofs, appear to have quite undermined health which was never strong, and which had been sorely tried by ‘the wind of a cursed to-day, the curse of a windy to-morrow,’ at St. Andrews. If a reader observes in Murray a lack of strenuous diligence, he must attribute it less to lack of resolution, than to defect of physical force and energy. The many bad colds of which he speaks were warnings of the end, which came in the form of consumption. This lurking malady it was that made him wait, and dally with his talent. He hit on the idea of translating some of Bossuet’s orations for a Scotch theological publisher. Alas! the publisher did not anticipate a demand, among Scotch ministers, for the Eagle of Meaux. Murray, in his innocence, was startled by the caution of the publisher, who certainly would have been a heavy loser. ‘I honestly believe that, if Charles Dickens were now alive and unknown, and were to offer the MS. of Pickwick to an Edinburgh publisher, that sagacious old individual would shake his prudent old head, and refuse (with the utmost politeness) to publish it!’ There is a good deal of difference between Pickwick and a translation of old French sermons about Madame, and Condé, and people of whom few modern readers ever heard.

Alone, in Edinburgh, Murray was saddened by the ‘unregarding’ irresponsive faces of the people as they passed. In St. Andrews he probably knew every face; even in Edinburgh (a visitor from London thinks) there is a friendly look among the passers. Murray did not find it so. He approached a newspaper office: ‘he [the Editor whom he met] was extremely frank, and told me that the tone of my article on – was underbred, while the verses I had sent him had nothing in them. Very pleasant for the feelings of a young author, was it not?.. Unfavourable criticism is an excellent tonic, but it should be a little diluted.. I must, however, do him the justice to say that he did me a good turn by introducing me to – … who was kind and encouraging in the extreme.’

Murray now called on the Editor of the Scottish Leader, the Gladstonian organ, whom he found very courteous. He was asked to write some ‘leader-notes’ as they are called, paragraphs which appear in the same columns as the leading articles. These were published, to his astonishment, and he was ‘to be taken on at a salary of – a week.’ Let us avoid pecuniary chatter, and merely say that the sum, while he was on trial, was not likely to tempt many young men into the career of journalism. Yet ‘the work will be very exacting, and almost preclude the possibility of my doing anything else.’ Now, as four leader notes, or, say, six, can be written in an hour, it is difficult to see the necessity for this fatigue. Probably there were many duties more exacting, and less agreeable, than the turning out of epigrams. Indeed there was other work of some more or less mechanical kind, and the manufacture of ‘leader notes’ was the least part of Murray’s industry. At the end of two years there was ‘the prospect of a very fair salary.’ But there was ‘night-work and everlasting hurry.’ ‘The interviewing of a half-bred Town-Councillor on the subject of gas and paving’ did not exhilarate Murray. Again, he had to compile a column of Literary News, from the Athenæum, the Academy, and so on, ‘with comments and enlargements where possible.’ This might have been made extremely amusing, it sounds like a delightful task, – the making of comments on ‘Mr. – has finished a sonnet:’ ‘Mr. – ’s poems are in their fiftieth thousand:’ ‘Miss – has gone on a tour of health to the banks of the Yang-tse-kiang:’ ‘Mrs. – is engaged on a novel about the Pilchard Fishery.’ One could make comments (if permitted) on these topics for love, and they might not be unpopular. But perhaps Murray was shackled a little by human respect, or the prejudices of his editor. At all events he calls it ‘not very inspiring employment.’ The bare idea, I confess, inspirits me extremely.

But the literary follet, who delights in mild mischief, did not haunt Murray. He found an opportunity to write on the Canongate Churchyard, where Fergusson lies, under the monument erected by Burns to the boy of genius whom he called his master. Of course the part of the article which dealt with Fergusson, himself a poet of the Scarlet Gown, was cut out. The Scotch do not care to hear about Fergusson, in spite of their ‘myriad mutchkined enthusiasm’ for his more illustrious imitator and successor, Burns.

At this time Edinburgh was honouring itself, and Mr. Parnell, by conferring its citizenship on that patriot. Murray was actually told off ‘to stand at a given point of the line on which the hero marched,’ and to write some lines of ‘picturesque description.’ This kind of thing could not go on. It was at Nelson’s Monument that he stood: his enthusiasm was more for Nelson than for Mr. Parnell; and he caught a severe cold on this noble occasion. Murray’s opinions clashed with those of the Scottish Leader, and he withdrew from its service.

Just a week passed between the Parnellian triumph and Murray’s retreat from daily journalism. ‘On a newspaper one must have no opinions except those which are favourable to the sale of the paper and the filling of its advertisement columns.’ That is not precisely an accurate theory. Without knowing anything of the circumstances, one may imagine that Murray was rather impracticable. Of course he could not write against his own opinions, but it is unusual to expect any one to do that, or to find any one who will do it. ‘Incompatibility of temper’ probably caused this secession from the newspaper.

After various attempts to find occupation, he did some proof-reading for Messrs. Constable. Among other things he ‘read’ the journal of Lady Mary Coke, privately printed for Lord Home. Lady Mary, who appears as a lively child in The Heart of Midlothian, ‘had a taste for loo, gossip, and gardening, but the greatest of these is gossip.’ The best part of the book is Lady Louisa Stuart’s inimitable introduction. Early in October he decided to give up proof-reading: the confinement had already told on his health. In the letter which announces this determination he describes a sermon of Principal Caird: ‘Voice, gesture, language, thought – all in the highest degree, – combined to make it the most moving and exalted speech of a man to men that I ever listened to.’ ‘The world is too much with me,’ he adds, as if he and the world were ever friends, or ever likely to be friendly.

October 27th found him dating from St. Andrews again. ‘St. Andrews after Edinburgh is Paradise.’ His Dalilah had called him home to her, and he was never again unfaithful. He worked for his firm friend, Professor Meiklejohn, he undertook some teaching, and he wrote a little. It was at this time that his biographer made Murray’s acquaintance. I had been delighted with his verses in College Echoes, and I asked him to bring me some of his more serious work. But he never brought them: his old enemy, reserve, overcame him. A few of his pieces were published ‘At the Sign of the Ship’ in Longman’s Magazine, to which he contributed occasionally.

From this point there is little in Murray’s life to be chronicled. In 1890 his health broke down entirely, and consumption declared itself. Very early in 1891 he visited Egypt, where it was thought that some educational work might be found for him. But he found Egypt cold, wet, and windy; of Alexandria and the Mediterranean he says little: indeed he was almost too weak and ill to see what is delightful either in nature or art.

‘To aching eyes each landscape lowers,
To feverish pulse each gale blows chill,
And Araby’s or Eden’s bowers
Were barren as this moorland hill,’

says the least self-conscious of poets. Even so barren were the rich Nile and so bleak the blue Mediterranean waters. Though received by the kindest and most hospitable friends, Murray was homesick, and pined to be in England, now that spring was there. He made the great mistake of coming home too early. At Ilminster, in his mother’s home, he slowly faded out of life. I have not the heart to quote his descriptions of brief yet laborious saunters in the coppices, from the letters which he wrote to the lady of his heart. He was calm, cheerful, even buoyant. His letters to his college friends are all concerned with literature, or with happy old times, and are full of interest in them and in their happiness.

He was not wholly idle. He wrote a number of short pieces of verse in Punch, and two or three in the St. James’s Gazette. Other work, no doubt, he planned, but his strength was gone. In 1891 his book, The Scarlet Gown, was published by his friend, Mr. A. M. Holden. The little volume, despite its local character, was kindly received by the Reviews. Here, it was plain, we had a poet who was to St. Andrews what the regretted J. K. S. was to Eton and Cambridge. This measure of success was not calculated to displease our alumnus addictissimus.

Friendship and love, he said, made the summer of 1892 very happy to him. I last heard from him in the summer of 1893, when he sent me some of his most pleasing verses. He was in Scotland; he had wandered back, a shadow of himself, to his dear St. Andrews. I conceived that he was better; he said nothing about his health. It is not easy to quote from his letters to his friend, Mr. Wallace, still written in his beautiful firm hand. They are too full of affectionate banter: they also contain criticisms on living poets: he shows an admiration, discriminating and not wholesale, of Mr. Kipling’s verse: he censures Mr. Swinburne, whose Jacobite song (as he wrote to myself) did not precisely strike him as the kind of thing that Jacobites used to sing.

They certainly celebrated

‘The faith our fathers fought for,
The kings our fathers knew,’

in a different tone in the North.

The perfect health of mind, in these letters of a dying man, is admirable. Reading old letters over, he writes to Miss – , ‘I have known a wonderful number of wonderfully kind-hearted people.’ That is his criticism of a world which had given him but a scanty welcome, and a life of foiled endeavour, of disappointed hope. Even now there was a disappointment. His poems did not find a publisher: what publisher can take the risk of adding another volume of poetry to the enormous stock of verse brought out at the author’s expense? This did not sour or sadden him: he took Montaigne’s advice, ‘not to make too much marvel of our own fortunes.’ His biographer, hearing in the winter of 1893 that Murray’s illness was now considered hopeless, though its rapid close was not expected, began, with Professor Meiklejohn, to make arrangements for the publication of the poems. But the poet did not live to have this poor gratification. He died in the early hours of 1894.

Of the merits of his more serious poetry others must speak. To the Editor it seems that he is always at his best when he is inspired by the Northern Sea, and the long sands and grey sea grasses. Then he is most himself. He was improving in his art with every year: his development, indeed, was somewhat late.

It is less of the writer than the man that we prefer to think. His letters display, in passages which he would not have desired to see quoted, the depth and tenderness and thoughtfulness of his affections. He must have been a delightful friend: illness could not make him peevish, and his correspondence with old college companions could never be taken for that of a consciously dying man. He had perfect courage, and resolution even in his seeming irresoluteness. He was resolved to be, and continued to be, himself. ‘He had kept the bird in his bosom.’ We, who regret him, may wish that he had been granted a longer life, and a secure success. Happier fortunes might have mellowed him, no fortunes could have altered for the worse his admirable nature. He lives in the hearts of his friends, and in the pride and sympathy of those who, after him, have worn and shall wear the scarlet gown.

The following examples of his poetry were selected by Murray’s biographer from a considerable mass, and have been seen through the press by Professor Meiklejohn, who possesses the original manuscript, beautifully written.

MOONLIGHT NORTH AND SOUTH

Love, we have heard together
The North Sea sing his tune,
And felt the wind’s wild feather
Brush past our cheeks at noon,
And seen the cloudy weather