R. F. Murray

“ To plant the standard of cricket in the remoter gardens of our country, in a region devastated by golf, was our ambition, and here we had no assistance at all from the University. It was chiefly at lecture, at football on the links, and in the debating societies that we met our fellow-students; like the celebrated starling, ‘we could not get out,’ except to permitted dinners and evening parties. Consequently one could only sketch student life with a hand faltering and untrained. It was very different with Murray and his friends. ”

“ Even pleasure on the keenest appetite at last will pall.
p. 109Had I now a hundred pounds, a hundred pounds would I bestow
To enjoy the loud solatium as I did three years ago,
When the songs were less familiar, less familiar too the pies,
And I did not mind receiving orange-peel between the eyes.
Yet, in spite of disenchantment, and in spite of finding out
There are some things in the world that I am hardly sure about,
Still sufficient of illusion and inexplicable grace
Hangs about the grey old town to make it a delightful place. ”

“ Who ne’er heard of Greek Prose—
Or Greek Poetry either, as far as that goes;
For Liddell and Scott
Shall cumber them not,
Nor Sargent nor Sidgwick shall break their repose.
But I, late at night,
By the very bad light
Of very bad gas, must painfully write
Some stuff that a Greek
With his delicate cheek
Would smile at as ‘barbarous’—faith, he well might.
p. 61For when it is done,
I doubt if, for one,
I myself could explain how the meaning might run;
And as for the style—
Well, it’s hardly worth while
To talk about style, where style there is none. ”

“ If we examine the records of literary success, we find it won, in the highest fields, by what, for want of a better word, we call genius; in the lower paths, by an energy which can take pleasure in all and every exercise of pen and ink, and can communicate its pleasure to others. Now for Murray one does not venture, in face of his still not wholly developed talent, and of his checked career, to claim genius. ”

“ He could not live even in Edinburgh; he made the effort, and his health, at no time strong, seems never to have recovered from the effects of a few months spent under a roof in a large town. He hurried back to St. Andrews: her fascination was too powerful. Hence it is that, dying with his work scarcely begun, he will always be best remembered as the poet of The Scarlet Gown, the Calverley or J. K. S. of Kilrymont; endowed with their humour, their skill in parody, their love of youth, but (if I am not prejudiced) with more than the tenderness and natural magic of these regretted writers. ”

“ At this point in my reflections, on the left the Links expand,
Many a whin bush full of prickles, many a bunker full of sand.
p. 111And I see distinguished club-men, whom I only know by sight,
Old, obese, and scarlet-coated, playing golf with all their might;
As they were three years ago, when first I travelled by this train,
As they will be three years hence, if I should come this way again.
What to them is train or traveller? what to them the flight of time?
But we draw too near the station to indulge in the sublime. ”

“ Andrews student which has won the sympathy of his biographer, and may win, he hopes, the sympathy of others. In Mr. Murray I feel that I have lost that rare thing, a friend; a friend whom the chances of life threw in my way, and withdrew again ere we had time and opportunity for perfect recognition. Those who read his Letters and Remains may also feel this emotion of sympathy and regret.
He was young in years, and younger in heart, a lover of youth; and youth, if it could learn and could be warned, might win a lesson from his life. ”

“ Greek prose is a stubborn thing, and the biographer remembers being told that his was ‘the best, with the worst mistakes’; also frequently by Mr. Sellar, that it was ‘bald.’ But Greek prose is splendid practice, and no less good practice is Greek and Latin verse. These exercises, so much sneered at, are the Dwellers on the Threshold of the life of letters. They are haunting forms of fear, but they have to be wrestled with, like the Angel (to change the figure) , till they bless you, and make words become, in your hands, like the clay of the modeller. ”

“ That upon the rocks opposing dashes now the Tuscan sea.
Be thou wise, and strain thy wines, and mindful of life’s brevity
Stint thy hopes. The envious moments, even while we speak, have flown;
Trusting nothing to the future, seize the day that is our own. ”

“ A humorist, a poet, a delightful companion, he never became ‘a placed minister.’ It was the old story of an imprudence, a journey made in damp clothes, of consumption, of the end of his earthly life and love. His letters to his betrothed, his poems, his career, constantly remind one of Murray’s, who must often have joined in singing Davidson’s song, so popular with St. Andrews students, The Banks of the Yang-tse-kiang. ”

“ A divine is a student in Divinity. A waster is a man of idle and (it may be) profligate habits. A grinder, on the contrary, is one who ‘grinds’ or reads with an unusual degree of application. A bunk is the lodging or abode in St. Andrews of any student. A spree is not necessarily an entertainment of rowdy character; the most decorous Professorial dinner-party would be called a spree. A solatium is a Debating Society spree, held in December or January; a gaudeamus is a festival of the same kind, only rather more ambitious, celebrated towards the close of the session. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The buildings that remain on the site of Prior Hepburn’s foundation, or some of them, were turned into a hall, where we lived together, not scattered in bunks. The existence was mainly like that of pupils of a private tutor; seven-eighths of private tutor to one-eighth of a college in the English universities. We attended the lectures in the University, we distinguished ourselves no more than Murray would have approved of, and many of us have remained united by friendship through half a lifetime. ”

“ To him success meant earning by his pen the very modest sum which sufficed for his wants, and the leisure necessary for serious essays in poetry. Fate denied him even this, in spite of his charming natural endowment of humour, of tenderness, of delight in good letters, and in nature. He died young; he was one of those whose talent matures slowly, and he died before he came into the full possession of his intellectual kingdom. He had the ambition to excel, αίεν αριστευειν, as the Homeric motto of his University runs, and he was on the way to excellence when his health broke down. ”

“ They said ’twas Walter Tyrrel, and so it may have been,
But there’s many walk the forest when the leaves are thick and green.
There’s many walk the forest, who would gladly see the sport,
When the King goes out a-hunting with the nobles of his court,
And when the nobles scatter, and the King is left alone,
There are thickets where an English slave might string his bow unknown.
The forest laws are cruel, and the time is hard as steel
To English slaves, trod down and bruised beneath the Norman heel. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not to be able to endure crowds and towns, (a matter of physical health and constitution, as well as of temperament) was, of course, fatal to an ordinary success in journalism. On the other hand, Murray’s name is inseparably connected with the life of youth in the little old college, in the University of the Admirable Crichton and Claverhouse, of the great Montrose and of Ferguson,—the harmless Villon of Scotland,—the University of almost all the famous Covenanters, and of all the valiant poet-Cavaliers. ”

“ Andrews is the abject city’s name.’
He was fond, too fond, of long midnight walks, for in these he overtasked his strength, and he had all a young man’s contempt for maxims about not sitting in wet clothes and wet boots. Early in his letters he speaks of bad colds, and it is matter of tradition that he despised flannel. Most of us have been like him, and have found pleasure in wading Tweed, for example, when chill with snaw-bree. In brief, while reading about Murray’s youth most men must feel that they are reading, with slight differences, about their own. ”

“ Youth is often captious and keenly critical; partly because youth generally has an ideal, partly, perhaps chiefly, from mere intellectual high spirits and sense of the incongruous; occasionally the motive is jealousy or spite. Murray’s sense of fun was keen, his ideal was lofty; of envy, of an injured sense of being neglected, he does not show one trace. To make fun of their masters and pastors, tutors, professors, is the general and not necessarily unkind tendency of pupils. Murray rarely mentions any of the professors in St. Andrews except in terms of praise, which is often enthusiastic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Murray could not make the best of ordinary pen-work in this manner. Again, he was incapable of ‘transactions,’ of compromises; most honourably incapable of earning his bread by agreeing, or seeming to agree with opinions which were not his. He could not endure (here I think he was wrong) to have his pieces of light and mirthful verse touched in any way by an editor. Even where no opinions were concerned, even where an editor has (to my mind) a perfect right to alter anonymous contributions, Murray declined to be edited. ”

“ Dear Ritchie, I am waiting.
The sea is at its bluest, and the Spring is new creating
The woods and dens we know of, and the fields rejoicing lie,
And the air is soft as summer, and the hedge-birds all are mating. ”

“ Andrews, had he chosen to work hard in certain branches of study, he might probably have gained an exhibition, gone to Oxford or elsewhere, and, by winning a fellowship, secured the leisure which was necessary for the development of his powers. I confess to believing in strenuous work at the classics, as offering, apart from all material reward, the best and most solid basis, especially where there is no exuberant original genius, for the career of a man of letters. ”

“ 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. ”