Pilgrim's Way

I

MY boyhood must have been one of the idlest on record. Except in the last year of my Glasgow grammar school, I do not think that I ever consciously did any work. I sat far down in my classes, absorbing automatically the rudiments of grammar and mathematics, without conviction and with no shadow of a desire to excel. Now and then I shone, it is true, when I showed a surprising knowledge of things altogether outside the curriculum, for I was always reading, except in the Border holidays. Early in my teens I had read Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and a host of other storytellers; all Shakespeare; a good deal of history, and many works of travel; essayists like Bacon and Addison, Hazlitt and Lamb, and a vast assortment of poetry, including Milton, Pope, Dante (in a translation), Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Matthew Arnold I knew almost by heart; Browning I still found too difficult except in patches. My taste was for solemn gnomic verse with a theological flavor; my special favorites were Yesterday, Today and Forever by a former Bishop of Exeter, and the celebrated Mr. Robert Pollok’s Course of Time; and my earliest poetic effort was not lyrical but epic, the first canto of a poem on Hell.

But all this was mere absorption, only half-conscious and quite uncritical. I found my first real intellectual interest in the Latin and Greek classics. This came to me when I was in my seventeenth year, just before I went to Glasgow University. For the next three years I was a most diligent student, mediæval in my austerity. Things have changed now, but in my day a Scottish university still smacked of the Middle Ages. The undergraduates lived in lodgings in the city and most of them cultivated the Muses on a slender allowance of oatmeal. The session ran from October to April, and every morning I had to walk four miles to the eight o’clock class through every variety of the winter weather with which Glasgow fortifies her children. My road lay through the south side of the city, across the Clyde, and so to the steeps of Gilmorehill.

Most of that road is as ugly as anything you can find in Scotland, but to me in the retrospect it was all a changing panorama of romance. There was the weather — fog like soup, drenching rains, winds that swirled down the cavernous streets, mornings that dawned bright and clear over snow. There was the sight of humanity going to work and the signs of awakening industry. There was the bridge with the river starred with strange lights, the lit shipping at the Broomielaw, and odors which even at their worst spoke of the sea. There was the occasional lift in the London train, which could be caught at a suburban station, and which for a few minutes brought one into the frowst of a third-class carriage full of sleepy travelers from the remote and unvisited realm of England. And at the end there were the gaunt walls of the college often seen in the glow of a West Highland sunrise.

As a student I was wholly obscure. I made few friends; I attended infrequently one or another of the numerous societies, but I never spoke in a debate; and I acquired the corporate spirit only at a rectorial election, when, though a professed Tory, I chose to support the Liberal candidate, Mr. Asquith, and almost came by my end at the hands of a red-haired savage, one Robert Horne, who has since been Chancellor of the Exchequer. My summers were spent in blessed idleness, fishing, tramping, and bicycling up and down the Lowlands. But my winters were periods of beaverlike toil and monkish seclusion. I returned home early each afternoon and thereafter was at my books until midnight.

After a brief dalliance with mathematics, my subject was classics. In Latin I was fairly proficient, thanks to my father’s tuition, but my Greek was rudimentary, and I was fortunate to find in Gilbert Murray a great teacher. He was then a young man in his middle twenties and was known only by his Oxford reputation. To me his lectures were, in Wordsworth’s phrase, like ‘kindlings of the morning.’ Men are by nature Greeks or Romans, Hellenists or Latinists. Murray was essentially a Greek; my own predilection has always been for Rome; but I owe it to him that I was able to understand something of the Greek spirit, and still more to come under the spell of the classic discipline in letters and life. I labored hard to make myself a good ‘pure’ scholar, but I was not intended by Providence for a philologist; my slender attainments lay rather in classical literature, in history, and presently in philosophy. Always to direct me I had Murray’s delicate critical sense, his imaginative insight into high matters, and his gentle and scrupulous humanism. In those years I read widely in the two literatures, covering much ground quite unfruitful for the schools. The other day I turned up an old paper on Claudian and was amazed at its futile erudition; I found that in another essay I had tried to analyze the mood of that wide-horizoned and fantastic sixth-century Ionia which made the background for Herodotus.

If Gilbert Murray was the principal influence in shaping my interests, another was the Border country, which I regarded as my proper home. In the old song of ‘Leader Haughs and Yarrow,’ Nicol Burn the Violer had given Tweeddale an aura of classical convention, and ‘Pan playing on his aiten reed’ has never ceased to be a denizen of its green valleys. There is a graciousness there, a mellow habitable charm, unlike the harsh Gothic of most of the Scots landscape. I got it into my head that here was the appropriate setting for pastoral, for the shepherds of Theocritus and Vergil, for the lyrists of the Greek Anthology, and for Horace’s Sabine farm. I was wrong in fact; if you seek the true classical landscape outside Italy and Greece you will find it rather in the Cape Peninsula, in places like the Paarl and Stellenbosch. But my fancy had its uses, for I never read classical poetry with such gusto as in my Border holidays, and is served as a link between my gypsy childhood and the new world of scholarship into which I was seeking entrance.

This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. That is why the Oxford school of classical ‘ Greats ‘ seems to me so valuable, for it compels a close study of one or two masters like Plato and Thucydides. The classics enjoined humility; the spectacle of such magnificence was a corrective to youthful immodesty, and, like Dr. Johnson, I lived ‘entirely without my own approbation.’ Again, they corrected a young man’s passion for rhetoric. This was in the nineties, when the Corinthian manner was more in vogue than the Attic. Faulty though my own practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine — the virtue of a clean bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern. Above all, the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed, and also confirmed. For, if the classics widened my sense of the joy of life, they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted the dignity of human nature, they insisted upon its frailties and the aidos with which the temporal must regard the eternal. I lost then any chance of being a revolutionary, for I became profoundly conscious of the dominion of unalterable law. Prometheus might be a fine fellow in his way, but Zeus was king of gods and men.

II

I came to philosophy quite naturally as a consequence of my youthful theological environment. Not that I ever had the itch of the metaphysician to make a rational cosmos of my own, for I did not feel the need for such a contraption. The cosmology of the elder Calvinism, with its anthropomorphism and its material penalties and rewards, I never consciously rejected. It simply faded out of the air, since it meant nothing to me. I remember that an ancient relative assured me that Sir Walter Scott, having neglected certain evangelical experiences, was no doubt in torment; the news gave me much satisfaction, for the prospect of such company removed for me any fear of the infernal regions; thenceforward, like Dante’s Farinata degli Uberti, I ‘entertained great scorn for Hell.’ But the fundamentals of the Christian religion were so entwined with my nature that I never found occasion to question them. I wanted no philosophy to rationalize them, for they seemed to me completely rational. Philosophy was to me always an intellectual exercise, like mathematics, not the quest for a faith.

I had begun to read in the subject long before I took the philosophy classes at the university, my first love being Descartes, to whom I was introduced by our Tweeddale neighbor, Professor John Veitch, the last of the Schoolmen. Henry Jones was the Moral Philosophy professor at Glasgow, and with him I formed a lifelong friendship, for a braver, wiser, kinder human being never lived. But the semireligious Hegelianism then in vogue, first preached by Edward Caird and continued by Jones, did not greatly attract me, and I did not owe allegiance to any school. I read widely, with the consequence that when I went to Oxford I found that I had done most of the work for the final examination, and had leisure there to read more widely than ever.

As I look back, my industry fills me with awe. Before I left Glasgow I had read and analyzed most of the English and Scottish philosophers, most of Kant, and a variety of lesser folk. At Oxford I read — with difficulty and imperfect comprehension — the greater part of Hegel. I kept up this conscientious study right to the eve of the Great War. Then, alas, I fell away, for I found, like Henry James, that history began to oust philosophy from my affections. Science, apart from what I picked up as a field naturalist, was practically unknown to me, though I learned a certain amount of physics from my philosophical reading. That was the biggest gap in my education.

My interests, as I have said, lay not in the search for a creed, but in the study of the patterns which different thinkers made out of the universe. I had a tidy mind and liked to arrange things in compartments even when I did not take the arrangement too seriously. This meant that inevitably I missed much; quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis. My quest for truth, unlike Plato’s, wholly ’lacked the warmth of desire.’ It was a mental gymnastic, for I had neither the uneasiness nor the raptures of the true metaphysician.

‘Philosophy,’ Sir Isaac Newton wrote, ‘is such an impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in law-suits as have to do with her.’ I loved the intricacies of argumentation. A proof is that while I am not conscious of having ever argued about religion, or about politics except professionally, I was always very ready to dispute about philosophy.

I should have been puzzled to set down my views as to the nature of thought and reality, for they were constantly changing. I never considered it necessary to harmonize my conclusions in a system. Had I been a professional philosopher, I should have been forced to crystallize my thought, but, as it was, I could afford to keep it, so to speak, in solution. ‘L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure.’ I was of the opinion of the Scottish metaphysician that it is more important that a philosophy should be reasoned than that it should be true.

Plato, not the system-maker but the poet, had a profound influence on my mind. Platonism was to me not a creed but a climate of opinion, the atmosphere in which my thoughts moved. Such an atmosphere is largely the consequence of temperament, and I think I was born with the same temperament as the Platonists of the early seventeenth century, who had what Walter Pater has called ‘a sensuous love of the unseen,’ or, to put it more exactly, who combined a passion for the unseen and the eternal with a delight in the seen and the temporal. ‘Dieu ne défend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent à revenir à lui.’ If men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, then my category was certainly the first.

III

At this stage I was no politician, being interested only to a small degree in theories, and not at all in parties. In that complacent old world before the South African War, youth did not easily feel the impact of national problems. Generally speaking, I was of a conservative cast of mind, very sensible of the past, approving renovation but not innovation. Lord Falkland’s classic confession of faith might have been mine: ‘When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.’ High-flying political schemes seemed to me either dangerous or slightly ridiculous — which was Dr. Johnson’s view. ‘So, Sir,’ said Boswell, ‘you laugh at schemes of political improvement?’ ‘ Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.’ In those days my ‘social conscience’ was scarcely awake.

There was little reason why it should be. I was far too absorbed in my studies to read the newspapers, and I had no interest in the small beer of party controversy.

As for philanthropic sensibility in the face of poverty and sickness, a minister’s family had little time for such a luxury. So far my life had been spent chiefly among the poor — the fisherfolk and weavers of a Fife village, and the denizens of my father’s parish in the Gorbals of Glasgow, one of the poorest quarters in the city. We were engaged in a perpetual fight with destitution and suffering and had no leisure for theorizing.

Again, I could never feel that emotional condescension with which the âmes sensibles approach the subject. These see the pathological in any mode of existence different from their own. I lived close to working-class life and knew that it had its own humors and compensations, and that it nourished many major virtues like fortitude and charity. I respected the working classes so profoundly that, like William Morris, I did not want to see them turned into middle classes, as some of their patrons desired. My upbringing had made any kind of class feeling impossible. I was one of the poor myself without a penny behind me, compelled to make my way in the world from nearly as bare a start as the lad from the plough-tail or the loom. I had had a better education, came of better stock, and had better health than most — these were my sole advantages. But except for the first it did not seem to me that the politicians could do much about them.

My politics were largely based on my historical reading, which gave me a full crop of prejudices — prejudices of which I stood in a certain awe, as Hazlitt advised. I early discovered my heroes: Julius Cæsar, Saint Paul, Charlemagne, Henry of Navarre, Cromwell (of whom I acquired a surprisingly just appreciation), Montrose, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee. I disliked Brutus, Henry VIII, Napoleon (him intensely), most of the 1688 Whigs, all four Georges, and the whole tribe of French revolutionaries except Mirabeau. But I was a most patchy historian, and it was not until Oxford that I acquired a serious interest in historical science.

Meantime I was trying to teach myself to write. Having for years wallowed and floated in the ocean of letters, I now tried to learn to swim. My attempts were chiefly flatulent little essays and homilies and limp short stories. My models were the people who specialized in style — Walter Pater and Stevenson principally; but my uncle, my father’s youngest brother, was a great lover of French literature, and under his guidance I became an earnest student of Flaubert and Maupassant. There was also Kipling, then a rising star in the firmament, but he interested me more because of his matter than his manner. The consequence of those diverse masters was that I developed a slightly meretricious and ‘precious’ style, stiffjointed, heavily brocaded, and loaded with philosophical terms. It took me years to supple it. But those imitative exercises did me good in the long run, for they taught me to be circumspect about structure and rhythm and fastidious about words. My performance, heaven knows, was faulty enough, but the intention was sound.

I wrote copiously, but I also read widely in English and French literature. Certain blind spots I discovered which, alas, have remained blind. I had no taste for most of the minor Elizabethans or the Restoration dramatists. I thought the eighteenth-century novelists on the whole overvalued. Only a little of Shelley pleased me, and, though I revered Emily Brontë, I found it impossible to read Charlotte. While I reveled in Alexander Dumas, I could not rank him high. With Carlyle I was easily satiated. I think my chief admiration, so far as style was concerned, was for John Henry Newman and T. H. Huxley.

Stevenson at that time was a most potent influence over young men, especially Scottish university students. Here was one who, though much older than ourselves, was wonderfully young in heart. He had the same antecedents that we had, and he thrilled as we did to those antecedents — the lights and glooms of Scottish history; the mixed heritage we drew from Covenanter and Cavalier; that strange compost of contradictions, the Scottish character; the bleakness and the beauty of the Scottish landscape. He had tramped with a pack on Lowland and Highland roads, and had seen the dawn rise over the wet city streets, and had filled the midnight hours with argument, and had done all the things that we were doing. His hunger for life had not been less than ours. And then he had taught himself to write miraculously, and for those of us who were dabbling clumsily in letters his expertness was a salutary model, for it meant hard and conscientious labor. He spoke our own language as a colleague and also as a mentor, for he was a preacher at heart, as every young Scotsman is, since we all have a craving to edify our fellows. As a guide to northern youth in the nineties, Stevenson filled the bill completely. He was at once Scottish and cosmopolitan, artist and adventurer, scholar and gypsy.

Above all he was a true companion. He took us by the hand and shared in all our avocations. It was a profound and overmastering influence, and I think it was an influence wholly benign.

With me it did not last. Presently his style and manner began to mean less to me. He seemed to me too much of a looker-on, a phrasemaker in life, and I wanted robuster standards and more vital impulses. His fastidiousness came to repel me. I remember some years later reading the ‘Open Letter to Dr. Hyde’ on Father Damien, and feeling that the great apostle of the lepers would have had more in common with his vulgar assailant than with his adjectival defender. Stevenson seemed to me to have altogether too much artifice about him, and I felt a suspicion of pose behind his optimism and masculinity — the pose of an heroic invalidism. It was too selfconscious for greatness.

I have since returned to him with pleasure and revised that verdict. In my case I think the judgment of eighteen was juster than the judgment of forty. I do not think that he was a great master, but he was a master. I am convinced that in each generation he will be rediscovered by youth — ordinary youth, not clever, precocious, paradoxical young men, but the kind of youth that happily we shall always have with us, those whom Sir Walter Scott called ‘young people of bold and active dispositions.’ That is a certain passport to immortality. Sophisticated middle age has its modes and changes, but the fashion of such youth is eternal.

IV

My chief passion in those years was for the Border countryside, and my object in all my prentice writings was to reproduce its delicate charm, to catch the aroma of its gracious landscape and turbulent history and the idiom of its people. When I was absent from it I was homesick, my memory was full of it, my happiest days were associated with it, and some effluence from its ageless hills and waters laid a spell upon me which has never been broken. I found in its people what I most admired in human nature — realism colored by poetry, a stalwart independence sweetened by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom. I asked for nothing better than to spend my life by the Tweed.

But how was it to be managed? I considered sheep farming, like my mother’s brothers; but at the moment sheep were not prosperous, and in any case they needed capital. Then I thought of being a man of letters, with a home among the hills; but I remembered Sir Walter’s saying that literature was a good staff but a bad crutch, and anyhow I did not fancy the business. It should be my hobby, not my profession. Meantime my interest in scholarship was daily growing, and it seemed to me that a Scottish professorship might offer the life I wanted. It became clear that I must somehow contrive to go to Oxford. If the worst came to the worst and other trades failed, I believed that I could always make a living as a hill shepherd or a river gillie. But let me speak for a moment of my parents.

To anyone whose imagination has been caught by the life of ancient Rome one picture must keep recurring. It is the living room of a country house — farm or villa — in which, among objects for domestic use, a space was reserved for the images of the dead. I do not mean the grandiose lararium of the rich, but the modest household where there was no room to segregate the family busts. I picture those wax memorials, often rude and discolored, lit by the glow of the hearth fire when the storm howled without, catching the sun on a bright morning, and drawing the wandering eyes of the children when an elder spoke of the past and jerked a thumb upward toward some ancestor. In such a life the dead remained in the real sense within the family circle. Piety was nourished not by the memory only, but by the eye.

So among these chapters it may be permitted to allot one to the pictures which, as we grow older, acquire a sharper outline than the contemporary scene — those family recollections which are the first, and also I think the last, things in a man’s memory. When one gets to the other side of the hill, to use Sir Walter Scott’s phrase, the memory seems to be inverted, and recent events to grow dim in the same proportion as ancient happenings become clear. Today, for instance, I am a little hazy about the Great War, but very clear about the South African campaign. And I seem to live more intimately with those who died long ago than with men and women whom I see every day. Lockhart’s lines are less a precept for conduct than the recognition of a fact in human psychology: —

My father died in his early sixties, when I was in my thirty-seventh year. His strong physique was worn out by unceasing toil in a slum parish, an endless round of sermons and addresses, and visits at all hours to the sick and sorrowful. He had retired to his native Tweeddale, where he had a brief leisure among the scenes of his youth before he died peacefully in his sleep. For the last dozen years of his life I saw less of him, for my own life was spent in London or abroad. The picture in my memory belongs to my childhood, amplified a little by the reflections of adolescence.

As a young man he had bushy whiskers and must have looked very much like Matthew Arnold, but as time passed these grew sparer until they vanished altogether. He had the ruddy complexion of a countryman, and that air of gentle, wondering cheerfulness which God sometimes gives to his servants: —

When I first met Charles Gore I observed in him the same benign, surprised enjoyment of the mere fact of living.

My father had been a good classical scholar, and he remained a voracious reader. He had a notable memory for poetry and could repeat every Border ballad that was printed and many still unpublished. He had a profound knowledge of Scottish songs, both words and tunes, and I could wish I had taken down from him some of the traditional fragments. He was also an excellent field botanist. He had read much history and was an unashamed partisan. The past to him was a design in snow and ink, one long contest between villains and attempted villainy and honest men. His dividing line was oddly drawn. In the eighteenth century the Jacobites were for him the children of light; in the seventeenth, the Covenanters. For the latter, indeed, he acquired a fervent private cult, admitting no flaw in their perfection. But his children observed that his special admiration was reserved for those among the Covenanters who had something of the Cavalier romance, — Hackstoun of Rathillet, the Black MacMichael, Paton of Meadowhead, — and he would permit no criticism of Montrose.

It was odd that he should be by profession a theologian, for he was wholly lacking in philosophical interests or aptitude. But a stalwart theologian of the old school he was, rejoicing in the clamped and riveted Calvinistic logic and eager to defend it against all comers. In church politics he belonged to the extreme conservative wing, and it was his delight, when a member of Assembly, to stir up all the strife he could by indicting for heresy some popular preacher or professor. There was no ill feeling in the matter, and he might profoundly respect the heretic, but he perceived it his duty to defend the faith of our fathers against all innovations. Partly the interest was intellectual: he liked a clear pattern and a clean logic, however austere; he greatly admired the Puritan defense, and he had a special liking for Jonathan Edwards. Partly it was sentimental — a love of old ways and a fast-vanishing world. Partly it was the reaction against two things which he wholeheartedly disliked — a glib modernism and the worship of fashion. He had no belief in compromises and a facile liberalism; he never cherished the illusion that the Christian life was an easy thing, and on this score he had to testify against many false prophets. He had a complete distrust of current fashions and of the worship of the ‘voice of the people’ and the ‘spirit of the age’ and such fetishes. He believed that a majority was usually wrong, and he would have been terrified to find himself on a side which was superior in numbers. He had the same tastes as his children for things old and unpopular and shabby.

But, except as regards dogma, he had little of the conventional Calvinistic temper. He had no sympathy with the legalism of that creed, the notion of a contract between God and man drawn up by some celestial conveyancer. I could wish that he had lived to read Karl Barth, for their creeds had much in common. What he preached for forty years was a very simple and comforting gospel. His evangel had neither the hysteria nor the smugness of ordinary revivalism. He believed profoundly in the fact of ‘conversion,’ the turning of the face to a new course. But, the first step having been taken, he would insist upon the austereness of the pilgrimage as well as upon its moments of high vision and ultimate rewards. His religion was tender and humane, but it was also well girded. He had no love for those who took their ease in Zion.

My father was an instance of what I think was commoner among the Puritans than is generally supposed — a stiff dogmatic theology which in practice was mellowed by common sense and kindliness and was conjoined with a perpetual delight in the innocent pleasures of life. He was like that sixteenth-century minister who besought his flock to thank God, if for nothing else, for a good day for the lambs. He could preach a tough doctrinal sermon with anybody; but his discourses which remain in my memory were those spoken at the close of the half-yearly Communions, when he invited his hearers, very simply and solemnly, to share his own happiness.

For he was above all things a happy man. Straitened means and a laborious life did not weaken his relish for common joys. He found acute delight in the simplest things, for he savored them with a clean palate. Like the old preacher he could exclaim, ‘All this — and Heaven too.’ He had always the background of an assured faith to correct man’s sense of the fragility of his hopes. Also he had none of the little fears and frustrations which are apt to cloud enjoyment. I do not think that he was afraid of anything — except of finding himself in a majority. He was wholly without ambition. He did not know the meaning of classconsciousness; he would have stood confidently before kings, and was quite incapable of deferring to anybody except the very old and the very poor. He was not, I suppose, the conventional saint, for there was nothing introverted about him, and he was not overmuch interested in his own soul. But he was something of the apostle, and, if it be virtue to diffuse a healing grace and to lighten the load of all who cross your path, then he was the best man I have ever known.

V

My father was a true son of Mary; my mother, own daughter to Martha. Had she had his character, the household must have crashed, and if he had been like her, childhood would have been a less wonderful thing for all of us.

Not many sons and mothers can have understood each other better than she and I; indeed, in my adolescence we sometimes arrived at that point of complete comprehension known as a misunderstanding. We never quarreled, for to each of us that would have been like quarreling with oneself, but we had many arguments. Instinctively we seemed to grasp the undisclosed and hardly realized things which were at the back of the other’s mind. As I grew older, what had been a little frightening became an immense comfort, for we were aware that in seeking sympathy there was no need for elaborate explanations. We knew each other too well.

My mother was married at seventeen, and had at once to take charge of a kirk and a manse, to which was soon added a family. A Scots minister must be something of a diplomat, if he is to keep his congregation in good temper; my father had about as much diplomacy as a rhinoceros, for he was utterly regardless of popular opinion, so my mother had to be ceaselessly observant and a habitual smoother of ruffled feathers. The family income was small, and my father had no sense of homely realities. We children used to say that he might have been a great general, for it would have been impossible for an opponent to guess what he was going to do. So the management of the household fell wholly on my mother. Both tasks she willingly accepted and — against great odds — succeeded in. She brought up her family in comfort, and saw to it that they lacked no reasonable opportunities. Successive congregations were handled so adroitly that my father’s defects in tact were covered, and the charm of his personality given full play.

Having discovered her task in life, my mother became a rigid specialist. Her world was Church, or rather a little section of the Church. Her ambitions were narrowly ecclesiastical. A popular preacher, a famous theologian, seemed to her the height of human greatness — a view which was not shared by her family. My father’s lack of such ambitions was to her, I think, a sorrow. Yet in theology she had no real interest, and her religion depended little upon dogma and much on her generous human instincts. The Church to her was like a secular profession, a field for administrative talent, a mystic brotherhood. She had a passion for church services, which were to her a form of ritual; so many in the week were a proper recognition of the claims of religion. So was the reading of the requisite number of chapters from the Bible and other devotional literature. My father rarely spoke of religious matters outside the pulpit; from my mother’s conversation they were never absent; such references were in her eyes a testimony, a proper acknowledgment of man’s frailty and dependence. She would have been very happy in the Church of Rome, with its clear schedule of duties, or in any field where merit could be acquired by an infinity of small devotional acts. Her clear, practical intelligence was at ease only among things concrete and defined. She was as little of a mystic as a Scotswoman can be.

She was a possessive mother and fiercely maternal. But her passionate possessiveness was never allowed to become a vice. She had no desire to mollycoddle us. As children we were given much liberty of action, though it cost her anxious hours, and as we grew older and had to shape our careers she never tried to interfere with our decisions. She longed to keep us near her, but she did not object when we scattered over the globe. Her view seems to have been that while humanity was a frail thing, at the mercy of the devil and wholly dependent upon God, the particular specimens that belonged to her were as much to be trusted as any other, and her lack of trust, would have meant a lack of faith in the Almighty.

About the middle of her life she fell into bad health, and pernicious anæmia brought her to death’s door. For four years she was a very sick woman until she was cured by the genius of Sir Almroth Wright. This time of ill health was also a time of sorrow. In 1911 my father died, my brother William in 1912, and five years later her youngest son, Alastair, fell in the Great War. For a little it looked as if she would sink under the double burden of bereavement and sickness.

But a miracle happened. She rose above her sorrow and frailty, and the last twenty years of her life were not only, I think, the happiest, but the most active. She died in her eighty-first year, having been about her usual avocations up to the last day. She had become very small and slight, but her bodily energy put youth to shame, and it was matched by a like activity of mind. While church affairs were still her chief preoccupation, she developed a new interest in secular politics. Her preferences in human nature had once been circumscribed, except where there was a call for charity, but now they covered every sort and condition. She made intimate friends of devout Catholics, and of people with no religion at all. The old house at Peebles, above the bridge of Tweed, where she lived with my sister and brother, became a port of call for the whole shire, indeed for the whole Lowlands. Young people came to her for counsel and their elders for sympathy, and none went empty away.

Only then I began to realize how remarkable were my mother’s powers of mind as well as of heart. She had a really penetrating intelligence. In the ordinary business of life she was able to deal in moral and religious platitudes and in prudential maxims, which the Scots call ‘ourcomes’ and which flourished especially in her family. But when things became serious all this went by the board, and she judged a situation with a mathematical clarity. She had a subtlety of her own which gave her a wide prospect over human nature, and she could assess character with an acumen none the less infallible because charity was never absent. My one complaint was that in practice she was too charitable. No tramp was ever turned away from her door, and her tenderness towards bores was the despair of her family.

In these last years, as I have said, her interests broadened. Literature was no longer despised, nor politics, and she condescended to read some of my own speeches and romances. She longed to travel, and when well over seventy she was always imploring me to take her by air to Palestine. In her eightieth year she visited me in Canada and covered a large part of the Canadian East. The truth is that the World, which had once been a bugbear, was now regarded more kindly. She discovered a surprising number of unexpected ‘temples of the Holy Ghost.’ Her great moments, I think, were my tenures of the office of Lord High Commissioner in Edinburgh, where she found the Church and the World in the friendliest accord.

To the end she remained a countrywoman — a Border countrywoman. She had the country dislike of overstatement and love of pricking bubbles. She feared praise as the Greeks feared Nemesis. Mr. Baldwin once said kind things to her about a speech of mine, to which she replied that at any rate it was short! She had the robust humor of the Border glens, robust, but not without subtlety. Like most country folk, she scarcely knew the name of a bird or a plant, but she was entirely at home with nature and talked to dogs, cattle, and horses as if they were blood relations. She had the lovable country habit of never going anywhere without carrying gifts, generally some simple kind of country produce. If her beloved little ghost should walk in its familiar places I think that it would have a basket on its arm — fresh eggs, perhaps, or new-churned butter, or a picking of gooseberries.

(To be continued)