CHAPTER II
HIS COLLEGE LIFE.
Prolonged Probation of Scotch
Ministers.-Boy-Students.-Independence.-Hard Training.-Journeys on
Foot. —Early Reading.-Distinctions in Society.-Patrons and
Associates. —Carlyle's Description of Irving. —Early Labors. AT
thirteen Irving began his studies at the Edinburgh University:
such was, and is still, to a great extent, the custom of Scotch
Universities-a habit which, like every other educational habit in
Scotland, promotes the diffusion of a little learning, and all the
practical uses of knowledge, but makes the profounder depths of
scholarship almost impossible. It was nearly universal in those
clays, and no doubt partly originated in the very long course of
study demanded by the Church (always so influential in Scotland,
and acting upon the habits even of those who are not devoted to
her service) from applicants for the ministry. This lengthened
process of education can not be better described than in the words
used by Irving himself at a much later period of his life, and
used with natural pride, as setting forth what his beloved Church
required of her neophytes. "In respect to the ministers," he says,
" this is required of them —that they should have studied for four
years in a University all the branches of a classical and
philosophical education, and either taken the rank in literature
of a Master of Arts, or come out from the University with
certificates of their proficiency in the classics, in mathematics,
in logic, and in natural and moral philosophy. They are then, and
not till then, permitted to enter upon the study of theology, of
which the professors are ordained ministers of the Church, chosen
to their office. Under separate professors, they study theology,
Hebrew, and ecclesiastical history for four years, attending from
four to six months in each year. Thus eight years are consumed in
study." This is, perhaps, the only excuse which can be made for
sending boys, still little more than children, into what ought to
be the higher labors of a University. Even beginning at such an
age, the full course of study exacted from a youth in training for
the Church could not be completed till he had reached his
twenty-first year, when all the repeated "trials" of the
Presbytery had still to follow before he could enter upon his
vocation; an apparent and comprehensible reason, if not excuse,
for a custom which, according to the bitter complaints of its
victims, turns the University into a kind of superior
grammar-school. At thirteen, accordingly, Edward, accompanied by
his elder brother John, who was destined for the medical
profession, came to Edinburgh, under the charge of some relatives
of their Annan schoolfellow, Hugh Clapperton; and the two lads
were deposited in a lofty chamber in the old town, near the
college, to pursue their studies with such diligence as was in
them. Even to such youthful sons the Edinburgh University has no
personal shelter to offer: then, as now, the Alma Mater was a mere
abstract mass of class-rooms, museums, and libraries, and the
youths or boys who sought instruction there were left in absolute
freedom to their own devices. Perhaps the youths thus launched
upon the world were too young to take much harm; or perhaps that
early necessity of self-regulation, imposed under different and
harder circumstances than those which have brought the English
public schools into such fresh repute and popularity, bore all the
fruit which it is now hoped and believed to produce. But, whatever
may be the virtues of self-government, it is impossible to
contemplate without a singular interest and amaze the spectacle of
these two boys, one thirteen, the other probably about fifteen,
placed alone in their little lodging in the picturesque but noisy
old town of Edinburgh, for six long months at a stretch, to manage
themselves and their education, without tutors, without home care,
without any stimulus but that to be received in the emulation of
the class-room, or from their books and their own ambition. These
circumstances, however, were by no means remarkable or out of the
common course of thigns; and the surprise with which we look back
to so strange a picture of boyish life would not have been shared
by the contemporary spectators who saw the south-country boys
coming and going to college without perceiving any thing out of
the way in it. The manner in which the little establishment was
kept up is wonderfully primitive to hear of at so short a distance
from our sophisticated times. Now and then the lads received a box
from home, sent by the carrier or by some " private opportunity,"
full of oatmeal, cheese, and other homely necessities, and
doubtless not without lighter embellishments, to prove the
mother's care for her boys. Probably their linen was conveyed back
and forward to the home-laundry by the same means; so that the
money expense of the tiny establishment, with its porridge thus
provided, and its home relishes of ham and cheese, making the
schoolboy board festive, must have been of the most limited
amount. Altogether it is a quaint little picture of the
patriarchal life, now departed forever. No private opportunities
nowadays carry such boxes; and those very railways, which make the
merest village next neighbor to all the world, have made an end of
those direct primitive communications from the family table to its
absent members. Nor is it easy to believe that boys of thirteen,
living in lonely independence in Edinburgh, where the very streets
are seducing and full of fascinations, and where every gleam of
sunshine on the hills, and flash of reflection from the visible
firth, must draw youthful thoughts away from the steep gradus of a
learning not hitherto found particularly attractive, could live
within those strait and narrow limits, and bear such a probation.
But times were harder and simpler in the first twenty years of the
century. Scotland was a hundred times more Scotch, more
individual, more separate from its wealthier yoke-fellow than now.
No greater contrast to the life of undergraduates in an ancient
English University could be imagined than that presented by those
boy-students in their lofty chamber, detached from all collegiate
associations, living in the midst of a working-day population,
utterly unimpressed by the neighborhood of a University, and
interpolating the homely youthful idyll of their existence into
the noisy, bustling, scolding, not over-savory life of that old
town of Edinburgh. Even such a vestige of academical dress as is
to be found in the quaint red gown of Glasgow is unknown to the
rigid Protestantism of the Scotch metropolis. The boys came and
went, undistinguished, in their country caps and jackets, through
streets which, full of character as they are, suggest nothing so
little as the presence of a college, and returned to their studies
in their little room, with neither tutor nor assistant to help
them through their difficulties, and lived a life of unconscious
austerity, in which they themselves did not perceive either the
poverty or the hardship; which, indeed, it is probable they
themselves, and all belonging to them, would have been equally
amazed and indignant to have heard either hardship or poverty
attributed to. Crowds of other lads, from all parts of Scotland,
lived a similar, life; the homely fare and'spare accommodation,
the unassisted studies; and in most cases, as soon as that was
practicable, personal exertions as teachers or otherwise, to help
in the expense of their own education, looked almost a natural and
inevitable beginning to the life they were to lead. By such
methods of instruction few men are trained to pursue and love
learning for learning's sake; but only by such a Spartan method of
training the young soldiers of the future could the Annan tanner,
with eight children to provide for, have given all his sons an
education qualifying them for professional life and future
advancement. The Edinburgh " Session" lasts only from November
till May, leaving the whole summer free for the recreation, or,
more probably, the labors of the self-supporting students. Indeed,
the whole system seems based upon the necessity of allowing time
for the intervening work which is to provide means for the studies
that follow. When the happy time of release arrived, our Annan
boys sent off their boxes with the carrier, and, all joyful and
vigorous, set out walking' upon the homeward road. In after years
Irving delighted in pedestrian journeys; and it was most probably
in those early walks that he learned, what was his habitual
practice afterward, to rest in the wayside cottages, and share the
potato or the porridge to be found there. The habit of universal
friendliness thus engendered did him good service afterward; for a
man accustomed to such kindly relations with the poorest of his
neighbors does not need any other training to that frank
uncondescending courtesy which is so dear to the poor. "Edward
walked as the crow flies," says one of his surviving relatives who
has accompanied those walks when time was. Such an eccentric,
joyful, straightforward progress must have been specially
refreshing to the schoolboy students, hastening to all the
delights of home and country freedom. Whether Irving's progress
during this period was beyond that of his contemporaries there is
no evidence; but he succeeded sufficiently well to take his degree
in April, 1809, when he was just seventeen, and to attract the
friendly regard of Professor Christison, and of the distinguished
and eccentric Sir John Leslie, then Mathematical Professor in the
Edinburgh University, both of whom interested themselves in his
behalf as soon as he began his own independent career. So far as
the library records go, he does not seem to have been an
extraordinary diligent student. There is a story told, which I
have not been able to trace to any authentic source, of his having
found in a farm-house in the neighborhood of Annan a copy of
Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, which is said to have powerfully
attracted him, and given an impulse to his thoughts. He is also
said to have expended almost the whole sum which he had received
for the expenses of a journey in the purchase of Hooker's works,
"together with some odd folios of the fathers, Homer, and Newton,"
and to have trudged forward afoot with the additional load upon
his stalwart shoulders, in great delight with his acquisition.
There can be no doubt, at least, of his own reference to " the
venerable companion of my early days -Richard. Hooker." In
opposition to this serious reading stand the Arabian Nights, and
sundry books with forgotten but suspicious titles, which appear
against his name in those early times in the college library
books-most natural and laudable reading for a boy, but curiously
inappropriate as drawn from the library of his college. " He used
to carry continually in his waistcoat pocket," says one of his few
surviving college companions, the Rev. Dr. Grierson, of Errol, "a
miniature copy of Ossian, passages from which he read or recited
in his walks in the country, or delivered with sonorous elocution
and vehement gesticulationi" for the benefit of his companions.
This is the first indication I can find of his oratorical gifts,
and that natural magniloquence of style which belonged equally to
his mind and person. I Society in Edinburgh was at this period in
its culmination. Those were the "Edinburgh Review" days, when
the,,brilliant groups whose reputation is more entirely identified
with Edinburgh than that of generations still more exclusively her
own, were in full possession of the field. Looking back, the town
seems so occupied and filled by that brotherhood, that it is hard
to imagine the strains of life all unconscious of its existence,
and scarcely influenced, even unconsciously, by its vicinity,
which went serenely on within the same limited boundaries; and it
is still harder to fancy a youth of genius pursuing his youthful
way into the secrets of literature in Edinburgh without the
slightest link of connection with the brilliant lettered society
which gave tone and character to the place. But the Antipodes are
not farther off from us than were the lights of Edinburgh society
from the rustic student laboring through his classes. As distinct
as if they had belonged to different countries or different
centuries were the young lawyers, not much richer, but standing on
the threshold of public life, with all its possibilities, and the
young clerical students, looking, as the highest hope of their
ambition, to the pulpit of a parish church, with a stipend
attached of two or three hundred a year at the utmost. In actual
means the one might not be much in advance of the other, but in
hopes, prospects, and surroundings, how widely different! Beneath
that firmament, flashing with light and splendor, the common day
went on unconscious, concealing its other half-dawned lights.
Among all the fellow-students of Edward Irving, there are no names
which have attained more local celebrity except that of Thomas
Carlyle, whose fame has overtopped and outlasted that of his early
friend; and Carlyle did not share the studies of the four first
years of his college life. He stands alone among men who subsided
into parishes, and chaplaincies, and educational chairs, but who
were his equals, or more than his equals, in those days-without
any connection with, or means of approach to, that splendid circle
which, one would imagine, concentrated within so limited a sphere
as that of Edinburgh, must have found out by magnetic attraction
every light of genius within its bounds. But the ecclesiastical
flats in which the youth stood, together with his humble origin,
more than counteracted that magnetism. If the Church every where
never fails to be reminded that her kingdom is not of this world,
that reminder is specially thrust upon her in Scotland, where it
is a principle of the creed of both ministers and people to
believe that even the payment in kind of applause and honor, which
is gained in every other profession, is a: sinful indulgence to a
preacher, and where demands are made upon his time and patience
far too engrossing to admit the claims of society. Irving went on
in his early career far down in the shade of common life, out of
reach of those lights which, to the next generation, illuminate
the entire sphere, and grew from a boy to a young man, and took
his boyish share in the college debating societies, and made his
way among other nameless youths with no great mark of difference,
so far as it appears. Dr. Christison, the Humanity professor,
noted him with a friendly eye; and odd, clumsy, kindly Leslie
observed the fervor of the tall lad, and took him for a future
prop of science. A younger fellow-student records simply how
Irving, being more advanced than he, helped him on with his
studies, according to that instinct of his nature which never
forsook him. And he read Ossian, and argued in defunct Philomathic
societies, where he and other people fancied he met equal
opponents, till it became necessary for him, seventeen years old
and a graduate of Edinburgh University, to begin to help himself
onward during the tedious intervals of his professional training.
He did this, as all Scotch clerical students do, by teaching. A
new school, called the Mathematical School by some strange
caprice-since it seems to have been exactly like other schoolshad
just been established in Haddington, and by the recommendation of
Sir John Leslie and of Professor Christison, Irving got the
appointment. It was in the spring of 1810, after one session, as
it is called, in the " Divinity Hall," and at the age of eighteen,
that he entered upon this situation. To somewhere about the same
period must belong the description given of him in Carlyle's
wonderful "EEloge." "The first time I saw Irving was in his native
town of Annan. He was fresh from Edinburgh, with college prizes,
high character and promise: he had come to see our schoolmaster,
who had also been his. We heard of famed professors, of high
matters classical, mathematical, a whole wonderland of knowledge;
nothing but joy, health, hopefulness without end looked out from
the blooming young man." Another spectator of more prosaic vision
declares him to have been "rather a showy young man," a tendency
always held in abhorrence by the sober Scotch imagination, which
above all things admires the gift of reticence; or even, in
default of better, that pride which takes the place of modesty.
Irving, utterly ingenuous and open, always seeking love, and the
approbation of love, and doubting no man, did not possess this
quality. " The blooming young man" went back to the school in
which he was,once kept in and punished with candid, joyful
self-demonstration, captivating the eyes which could see, and
amusing those which had not that faculty. It was his farewell to
his boyish, happy, dependent life. And it was also the conclusion
of his University education, so far as reality went. For four or
five years thereafter he was what is called a partial student of
divinity, matriculating regularly, and making his appearance at
college to go through the necessary examinations, and deliver the
prescribed discourses, but carrying on his intermediate studies by
himself, according to a license permitted by the' Church. His
Haddington appointment removed him definitely from home and its
homely provisions, and gave him an early outset for himself into
the business and labors of independent life. So far from being a
hardship, or matter to be lamented, it was the best thing his
friends could have wished for him.
|