Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451

We had, therefore, a half-melancholy interest in seeing Laggan—a name, we felt, associated with reckless gaieties, but then they were the gaieties of genius, and well had they been moralised in the punishments which they drew down—for, as Currie remarks in 1799, these 'three merry boys' were already all of them under the turf. Our kind host, the successor of Masterton's, took us in his carriage across the Nith, through a scene of natural luxuriance and beauty not to be surpassed, and under a sun of as intense brilliancy as ever shone in these climes. Passing into a high side-valley, we soon left the glowing plains of Nithsdale behind. We passed under the farmstead of Laggan of Dunscore, and thought of Burns and Nicol coming there to seduce the worthy farmer away to partake of their festivities at Minniehive. By and by we came to Dunscore kirk, which Burns used to attend with his family while resident at Ellisland—a gloomy-looking man, the people thought him, all the time that he, with his generous, benevolent nature, was in reality groaning over the stern Calvinistic theology of the preacher. It is a tract of country which has but recently been reclaimed from a marshy and moorish state, and which still shews only partial traces of decoration and high culture. In a gloomy recess among the hills, we caught a glimpse of the situation of the old castle of Lagg, a fortalice surrounded by bogs, the ancient residence of the persecutor Grierson of Lagg, and fit scene to be connected with the history of a man who could coolly stand to see innocent women drowned at a stake in the sea for conscience' sake. The name of the place is pure Norwegian, expressing simply water, such being, no doubt, the predominating feature of the scenery in its original state—while Laggan merely gives the article en (the) in addition. Soon after passing Dunscore, we entered the valley of the Cairn, which, with its chalet-like farmhouses far up the slopes on both sides, reminded us much of Switzerland. Here, a few miles onward, we saw Maxwellton House, surrounded by those slopes so warmly spoken of in Scottish song—

Maxwellton braes are bonnie,Where early fa's the dew;Where I and Annie Laurie,Made up the promise true, &c.

Of this estate, the Laggan of William Nicol was originally a part, being sold in 1790 by Sir Robert Laurie of Maxwellton, a gentleman whom Burns has celebrated in his famous poem of 'The Whistle.' Even in this splendid summer-day, the whole vale has a rude and triste appearance, somewhat at issue with the declaration of the old song just quoted, and not likely, one would have thought, to attract the regard of such men as William Nicol and Robert Burns.

We had inquired, as we came along, as to the place of which we were in quest; and finding nobody with a very clear or ready conception of it or its whereabouts, began to feel as if it were of a half-fabulous character. At length, however, at a place called Crossford, we were told we should have to leave our carriage and the road, and ascend the side of the valley to the northward, where, about a mile and a half onward, we should find a small farm called Laggan Park. This we hoped to find to be the true place. To walk a mile and a half up hill on a roasting July day was not a task to be encountered on light grounds; however, we had resolved to make out our point if possible. Behold a couple of wayfarers, then, pursuing their way along the skirts of turnip-fields, through slight coppices, and along various clayey braes, with this unseen place of Laggan Park still keeping wonderfully ahead, long after it ought to have been reached. We wondered how the Ayrshire bard would have looked carrying a punch-bowl along our present path, after a journey of eight miles similarly loaded; and whether he would have thought any amount of the 'barley bree' during 'the lee-lang night' a fair recompense for his toils. At length, we arrived at the spot, but in a state of deliquescence and exhaustion not to be described. It is a small farm-establishment, nestling in a bosom of the hills, with some shelter and good exposure, making up for elevation of position, so that its few fields of growing grain, of potatoes, and meadow grass, have a tolerably good appearance. Some patches of ancient coppice at the base of the barish hills behind, give it even a smiling aspect. The farmer, seeing us approach, left his people in the field, and came to greet us. We entered a neat clean room, and met a kind reception from 'the Mistress,' who was as trigly dressed as if she had been expecting company. It soon became clear, from our conversation with the good couple, that our toils were crowned with success. This really had been Nicol's property; it still belonged to a member of his family. That line of gray heights seen from the door was what Burns alluded to when he facetiously dubbed his friend 'Illustrious lord of Laggan's many hills.' This cottage had been the retreat of the High School master in his hours of rustic vacation. There was a difficulty, which we discussed over a glass of most welcome spirits and water furnished by the farmer: Did this neat room form a part of the dwelling of Nicol? It appeared not. It was a modern addition. The original house, to which it adjoined upon a different level of flooring, was the merest hut, of one room, with a line of box-beds dividing the sitting-place from a small space, which, being rudely causewayed like a cow-house, had probably been employed in keeping animals of some kind. Such was the humble tuguriolum of Willie Nicol of the 'peck o' maut'—an interesting memorial of the simplicity of country life in Scotland at the close of the eighteenth century. We did not venture to indulge in any dreamings as to festive meetings between Burns and Nicol in this humble shed; for we felt that here there was no certain ground to go upon. Enough that we could be assured of Burns and Nicol having been together here; two most singular examples of the peasant class of their country, and one of them an unapproached master of his country's lyre, whose strains have floated to the ends of the earth, and promise to last through many ages.

The elements of the place, and the ideas connected with it were, after all, too simple to detain us long. We only waited to snatch a slight pencil sketch of the house and its adjuncts; and then, having taken leave of the farmer and his wife, we retraced our steps to the road. Somewhat unexpectedly, and not at all in keeping with the idea of either Maxwellton braes or Laggan's many hills, we discovered in our walk that the rough terrace-like ground over which we had passed before coming in sight of Nicol's estate, was a moraine, or mass of débris, produced and left there by a glacier. Its surface, thickly covered with loose blocks of rock different from that of the district, first fixed our attention; then looking into some openings which had been made in the earth for building materials, we readily observed that the internal constitution of the mass was precisely like that of the moraines of the existing glaciers of the Alps, and of the similar masses of drift scattered over Sweden—a confused mixture of angular, slightly-worn blocks of all sizes, bedded in clayey gravel of a brown colour. Such objects are rare in Scotland; but here is undoubtedly one, though we cannot pretend to tell from what quarter it has come. The thing most nearly resembling it in general appearance, which we have ever seen, is an undoubted ancient moraine at a place called Mosshuus, in the Valley of the Laug, in Norway.

One reflection arises at the conclusion of this trivial investigation, and it is this—If so much doubt and obscurity have already settled on circumstances which took place scarcely beyond the recollection of living people, can we wonder at that which invests the events of a more remote epoch? If editors in our enlightened time have contrived so soon to give the history of Burns a mythical character, what safety have we in trusting to such ancient narrations as those of Plutarch or Thucydides? On the other hand, where even such a biography as that of Burns is placed by sound and carefully-examined evidence upon an irrefragable basis, a service is rendered to the public beyond the merits of any immediate question that may be under discussion, in the encouragement which it gives to historical inquirers of all grades, to rest satisfied with nothing on vague assertion, but to sift everything to the bottom.

ONE-SIDEDNESS

Plantagenet. The truth appears so naked on my side,That any purblind eye may find it out.Somerset. And on my side it is so well apparelled,So clear, so shining, and so evident,That it will glimmer through a blind man's eye.First Part of Henry VI.

Having made up our mind upon a question, probably by a delightfully curt process, how pleasant and natural it is to laugh sublimely at all dissentients! Poor creatures, those nonconformists are almost to be pardoned, so much does their impenetrable dulness amuse us! How they can have scrambled to a conclusion opposite to ours, is a problem so absurd that it tickles us amazingly.

Yet the formation of opinions is vastly dependent upon circumstances. Whang-shing is born in the Celestial Empire; and the chances are that the fellow will go the length of pinning his faith to Confucius. Yonder squalid urchin, turning out of Saffron Hill or some other sweet-scented purlieus, has been cradled on the ragged lap of professional mendicancy; and there is a strong probability that he will come to a misunderstanding with the police one of these fine days. The mild-eyed priest who just passed you, was born and educated within the states of the church; and somehow or other he firmly believes in the Romanism you so hotly repudiate. The sallow-faced gentleman crossing the road, and exhibiting so wobegone an aspect, has always had a bad liver; and you will never persuade him to look on the bright side of life. While this bustling, vivacious personage, who approaches us with such a springy step, and rapid merry glance, has never known a day's illness—is indebted to hearsay for his belief in nerves—and is ready to challenge Europe to beat him at a hearty guffaw—he is perplexed by the shadow of a long face, marvels with all his might at a heavy eye, and cannot unriddle the philosophy of a bent brow. When shall we learn that the result of looking depends on the state of the eye—that the vision is modified by the position of the seer—that he who stands on one side, sees one side only? Says Wordsworth—

We safely may affirm that human lifeIs either fair or tempting, a soft scene,Grateful to sight, refreshing to the soul,Or a forbidden tract of cheerless view,Even as the same is looked at, or approached.

And the pastor of the Excursion, who is the spokesman, illustrates his doctrine by shewing that the church-yard among the mountains, in which he and his companions are standing, if approached from the sullen north, when 'in changeful April, fields are white with new-fallen snow,' and ere the sun has gained his noontide height, will appear an 'unillumined, blank, and dreary plain, with more than wintry cheerlessness and gloom saddening the heart;' whereas, if it be regarded from the quarter whence the lord of light dispenses his beams, 'then will a vernal prospect greet your eye'—

All fresh and beautiful, and green and bright,Hopeful and cheerful—vanished is the pallThat overspread and chilled the sacred turf,Vanished or hidden; and the whole domain,To some, too lightly minded, might appearA meadow carpet for the dancing hours.

The same principle of mental optics is of universal application. We cannot ignore it without fatal results when studying history, science, art, human nature, or any conceivable object of inquiry. Thus, in forming our opinion of the actions of others, there is no more mischievous absurdity, it has been remarked, than to judge them from the outside as they look to us, instead of from the inside as they look to the actors; nothing more irrational than to criticise deeds as though the doers of them had the same hopes, fears, desires, and restraints with ourselves. 'We cannot understand another's character except by abandoning our own identity, and realising to ourselves his frame of mind, his want of knowledge, his hardships, temptations, and discouragements.' If we turn to history, we are reminded of Thomas Moore's lines—

By Tory Hume's seductive page beguiled,We fancy Charles was just, and Stratford mild;And Fox himself, with party pencil drawsMonmouth a hero 'for the good old cause!'Then, rights are wrongs, and victories are defeats,As French or English pride the tale repeats.

Thus, too, Macaulay remarks, that for many years every Whig historian was anxious to prove that the old English government was all but republican—every Tory, to prove it all but despotic. 'With such feelings, both parties looked into the chronology of the middle ages. Both readily found what they sought, and obstinately refused to see anything but what they sought.' Accordingly, to see only one-half of the evidence, you would conclude that the Plantagenets were as absolute as the sultans of Turkey; to see only the other half, you would conclude that they had as little real power as the Doges of Venice: and both conclusions would be equally remote from the truth.

Carlyle justly affirms, that if that man is a benefactor to the world who causes two ears of corn to grow where only one grew before, much more is he a benefactor who causes two truths to grow up together in harmony and mutual confirmation, where before only one stood solitary, and, on that side at least, intolerant and hostile. Every genius rides a winged horse; but all are apt to ride too fast. Plotinus, says Emerson, 'believes only in philosophers; Fénélon, in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions.' If genius is liable to such one-sidedness, the greater the need of educational correctives to common-place minds. Hence the overpursuit of any one subject may be hurtful, unless duly balanced by countervailing forces. As the author of Friends in Council says, a human being, like a tree, if it is to attain to perfect symmetry, must have light and air given to it from all quarters. This may be done without making men superficial—without sanctioning the dissipation of mere desultory reading. One or two great branches of science may be systematically prosecuted, and others used in a more supplementary and illustrative form. 'A number of one-sided men,' observes the same writer, 'may make a great nation, though I much incline to doubt that; but such a nation will not contain a number of great men.' With the advance of intelligence, advances a catholicism of literature, of taste, of humanity at large. Uncultured intellect, 'cabined, cribbed, confined,' is ill at ease among the riches of variety in literary lore; it is satisfied with the little, because, as Menzel says, it knows not the great; it is content with one-sidedness, because it sees not the other sides. If critical esprit de corps has its advantages, it has its penalties also; potent within its self-imposed bounds, it is impotent outside of them. Longfellow reminds his brethren of the lyre, that whatever is best in the great poets of all countries, is not what is national in them, but what is universal: their roots are in their native soil, but their branches wave in the unpatriotic air, that speaks the same language to all men, and their leaves shine with the illimitable light that pervades all lands. 'Let us throw all the windows open; let us admit the light and air on all sides; that we may look towards the four corners of the heavens, and not always in the same direction.'

Monomania is sometimes simply the exaggerated regard to one side of many-sided truth. It is not absolute, but only relative delusion. It is in its degree true; but by affecting to be the whole truth, it becomes untrue. Philosophic reflection shews, that if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for a long time, 'the truth becomes distorted, and not itself, but falsehood;' and may be compared to the air, which is our natural element, and the breath of our nostrils; 'but if a stream of the same be directed on the body for a time, it causes cold, fever, and even death.' 'How wearisome,' exclaims Emerson, 'the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or, indeed, any possessed mortal, whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic! It is incipient insanity.' The bore of society is constituted by his one-sidedness. His ear is deficient in the sense of harmony, and he deafens and disgusts you by harping on one string. The retired nabob holds you by the button, to hear his wearisome diatribes on Indian economics; the half-pay officer is too fluent on his worn-out recollections of the Peninsular War, and becomes savage if you broach a new theme, or move to adjourn the debate; the university pedant distracts you with his theories on philology and scansion—with his amended translation of a hexameter in Persius, and his new reading of a line in Theocritus; the bagman is all for 'the shop;' the policeman is redolent of the 'lock-up house 'and 'your wertchup;' the tailor is profoundly knowing on the 'sweating system; 'the son of Crispin vows and protests there's 'nothing like leather.' All these minus signs have a tendency to cancel each other: and thus the equation of life is worked out. Society has been said to have at all times the same want—namely, of one sane man, with adequate powers of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations. 'The ambitious and mercenary bring their last new Mumbo-Jumbo—whether tariff, railway, mesmerism, or California—and by detaching the object from its relations, easily succeed in making it seen in a glare, and a multitude go mad about it; and they are not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude, who are kept from this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. But let one man have the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its right neighbourhood and bearings, and the illusion vanishes—the returning reason of the community thanks the reason of the monitor.' There is perhaps nothing which more urgently calls for such a controlling and overseeing mind, to curb eccentric excesses, and to restore equilibrium of action, than philanthropy itself. In the enthusiasm of its impulses, it thinks it can afford to sneer at political economy, and that it is right to wander at its own sweet will, benevolently defying the remonstrances of all who have a method to propound, a science to explain, a system to uphold. Though the heart be large, yet the mind—as Nathaniel Hawthorne somewhere observes—is often of such moderate dimensions, as to be exclusively filled up with one idea; and thus, when a good man has long devoted himself to a particular kind of beneficence, to one species of reform, he is apt to become narrowed into the limits of the path wherein he treads, and to fancy that there is no other good to be done on earth but that selfsame good to which he has put his hand, and in the very mode that best suits his own conceptions. 'All else is worthless; his scheme must be wrought out by the united strength of the whole world's stock of love, or the world is no longer worthy of a position in the universe. Moreover, powerful truth, being the rich grape-juice expressed from the vineyard of the ages, has an intoxicating quality when imbibed by any but a powerful intellect, and often, as it were, impels the quaffer to quarrel in his cups.' Even a saint with one idea may be a plague to his neighbourhood; and, by being canonised, may retard, not further, the progress of his church.

Let us own, however, that one-idea'd people are often amusing as well as mischievous—or rather, when not mischievous. The rapt devotion they pay to their idola specûs oscillates between the sublime and the ridiculous. We have all seen such people, and alternately admired and laughed at them. We have all witnessed or read pleasant illustrations of their doings. With one such illustration we conclude this discursive fragment. It is related by the witty author of A Defence of Ignorance, who introduces it in the course of an imaginary dialogue on one-sided university training, in which one of the speakers (at dessert) says to his companion: 'If you reach after that pear, without considering what stands against your elbows, you may empty a decanter over me. He who desires thoroughly to know one subject, should be possessed of so much intellectual geography as will enable him to see its true position in the universe of thought.' The allusion to upsetting a decanter reminds the other interlocutor of a story, which he proceeds to tell. A gentleman who carved a goose was inexpert; and thinking only of the stubborn joints that would not be unhinged, he totally forgot the gravy. Presently, the goose slipped off the dish, and escaped into his neighbour's lap. Now, to have thrown a hot goose on a lady's lap would disconcert most people, but the gentleman in question was not disconcerted. Turning round, with a bland smile, he said: 'I'll trouble you for that goose.' Here we have a sublime example of a man with one idea. This gentleman's idea was the goose; and in the absorbing interest attached to his undertaking, that he was to carve the goose, not altogether knowing how, he had shut out extraneous objects. Suddenly the goose was gone, but his eye followed it, his mind was wrapt up in his struggle with it; what did he know of that lady? 'I'll trouble you for that goose,' expressed the perfect abstraction of a mind bent on developing its one idea.

MR KIRBY THE NATURALIST

The popular fame of Mr Kirby rests upon the Introduction to Entomology, a work (partly written by him) full of interesting facts respecting the economy of the insect world. Amongst the scientific, his reputation depends on a variety of elaborate papers which he wrote for learned societies on subjects connected with natural history. For sixty years previous to the conclusion of his long life in 1850, he had devoted the leisure of a parsonage to that delightful study, and being a diligent and accurate observer, and an elegant and entertaining writer, he had attained the highest rank amongst the British naturalists of his day. It appears, from a memoir just published,2 that Mr Kirby was born in 1759, and settled in 1782 in the cure of Barham, near Ipswich, where he was ultimately rector, and which he only left for his last long-home sixty-eight years thereafter. In an age of sluggish theology, he was an earnest minister and zealous controversialist, all the time that he was cultivating a taste for natural objects. This is equally unexpected and creditable. And yet it does not appear that his personal conduct was characterised by anything like rigour, for, as an example, we find, from the journal of an entomological excursion in 1797, that it was commenced on a Sunday afternoon, and involved one other Sunday of constant travelling. A reference of the dates to an almanac enables us to establish this fact, so unlike the spirit of a zealous man in our times.

Of the sister sciences of nature, botany first attracted Mr Kirby's regards. 'This he pursued in no hasty or superficial manner, but with the greatest perseverance and research. It was not enough for him to know a plant by sight, and to ascertain its proper name, but he compared the minutest parts of inflorescence and fructification; he sought for the most trifling differences in those nearly allied, and studied with a keen but generous criticism the various theories of writers on the science, from the earliest age to the time of the immortal Linnè. Of every plant he met with, even to the daisy and primrose, the whole physiological structure was thoroughly investigated; he discovered, or rather observed, what it was which enabled some plants to endure great changes of temperature, while others perished—the formation which enabled some to live in water, while others flourished in the most dry and arid sands; he carefully marked the causes which combined to clothe even rocks with verdure, in consequence of the wonderful structure of the plants inhabiting them, enabling them to live as it were by the suction of their numerous mouths, rather than by nourishment transmitted by a root in contact with that which would refuse to yield the ordinary food of plants. And as he thus marked all these peculiar adaptations of plants to their respective situations, his mind was by a constant train of thought directed from the beauty and wondrous mechanism of the creature, to contemplate the supreme and ineffable glory of the Creator.'