PAGE 15
My Father’s Memoir
by
In the case of the death of little Maggie–a child the very image of himself in face, lovely and pensive, and yet ready for any fun, with a keenness of affection that perilled everything on being loved, who must cling to some one and be clasped, made for a garden, for the first garden, not for the rough world, the child of his old age–this peculiar meeting of opposites was very marked. She was stricken with sudden illness, malignant sore throat; her mother was gone, and so she was to my father as a flower he had the sole keeping of: and his joy in her wild mirth, his watching her childish moods of sadness, as if a shadow came over her young heaven, were themselves something to watch. Her delicate life made no struggle with disease; it as it were declined to stay on such conditions. She therefore sunk at once and without much pain, her soul quick and unclouded, and her little forefinger playing to the last with my father’s silvery curls, her eyes trying in vain to brighten his:–
“Thou wert a dew-drop which the morn brings forth,
Not fitted to be trailed along the soiling earth;
But at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slips in a moment out of life.”
His distress, his anguish at this stroke, was not only intense, it was in its essence permanent; he went mourning and looking for her all his days; but after she was dead, that resolved will compacted him in an instant. It was on a Sabbath morning she died, and he was all day at church, not many yards from where lay her little corpse alone in the house. His colleague preached in the forenoon, and in the afternoon he took his turn, saying before beginning his discourse:–“It has pleased the Father of Lights to darken one of the lights of my dwelling–had the child lived I would have remained with her, but now I have thought it right to arise and come into the house of the Lord and worship.” Such violence to one part of his nature by that in it which was supreme, injured him: it was like pulling up on the instant an express train; the whole inner organization is minutely, though it may be invisibly hurt; its molecular constitution damaged by the cruel stress and strain. Such things are not right; they are a cruelty and injustice and injury from the soul to the body, its faithful slave, and they bring down, as in his case they too truly did, their own certain and specific retribution. A man who did not feel keenly might have preached; a man whose whole nature was torn, shattered, and astonished as his was, had in a high sense no right so to use himself; and when too late he opened his eyes to this. It was part of our old Scottish severe unsparing character–calm to coldness outside, burning to fierceness, tender to agony within.
I was saying how much my father enjoyed women’s company. He liked to look on them, and watch them, listening [13] to their keen, unconnected, and unreasoning, but not unreasonable talk. Men’s argument, or rather arguing, and above all debating, he disliked. He had no turn for it. He was not combative, much less contentious. He was, however, warlike. Anything that he could destroy, any falsehood or injustice, he made for, not to discuss, but to expose and kill. He could not fence with his mind much less with his tongue, and had no love for the exploits of a nimble dialectic. He had no readiness either in thought or word for this; his way was slowly to think out a subject, to get it well “bottomed,” as Locke would say; he was not careful as to recording the steps he took in their order, but the spirit of his mind was logical, as must be that of all minds who seek and find truth, for logic is nothing else than the arithmetic of thought; having therefore thought it out, he proceeded to put it into formal expression. This he did so as never again to undo it. His mind seemed to want the wheels by which this is done, vestigia nulla retrorsum, and having stereotyped it, he was never weary of it; it never lost its life and freshness to him, and he delivered it as emphatically thirty years after it had been cast, as the first hour of its existence.