



Transcribed from the 1894 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org





ROBERT F. MURRAY
(AUTHOR OF THE SCARLET GOWN)
HIS POEMS: WITH MEMOIR


BY
ANDREW LANG

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16TH STREET

1894

Edinburgh: T. AND A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty

THE VOLUME
IS DEDICATED TO
J. M. D. MEIKLEJOHN, ESQ.
MOST INDULGENT OF MASTERS
AND KINDEST OF
FRIENDS




R. F. MURRAY--1863-1893


Much is written about success and failure in the career of literature,
about the reasons which enable one man to reach the front, and another to
earn his livelihood, while a third, in appearance as likely as either of
them, fails and, perhaps, faints by the way.  Mr. R. F. Murray, the
author of _The Scarlet Gown_, was among those who do not attain success,
in spite of qualities which seem destined to ensure it, and who fall out
of the ranks.  To him, indeed, success and the rewards of this world,
money, and praise, did by no means seem things to be snatched at.  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, [Greek text], as the Homeric motto of his
University runs, and he was on the way to excellence when his health
broke down.  He lingered for two years and passed away.

It is a familiar story, the story of lettered youth; of an ambition, or
rather of an ideal; of poverty; of struggles in the 'dusty and stony
ways'; of intellectual task-work; of a true love consoling the last
months of weakness and pain.  The tale is not repeated here because it is
novel, nor even because in its hero we have to regret an 'inheritor of
unfulfilled renown.'  It is not the genius so much as the character of
this St. 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.
Many of us have trod in his path, and, by some kindness of fate, have
found from it a sunnier exit into longer days and more fortunate
conditions.  Others have followed this well-beaten road to the same early
and quiet end as his.

The life and the letters of Murray remind one strongly of Thomas
Davidson's, as published in that admirable and touching biography, _A
Scottish Probationer_.  It was my own chance to be almost in touch with
both these gentle, tuneful, and kindly humorists.  Davidson was a
Borderer, born on the skirts of'stormy Ruberslaw,' in the country of
James Thomson, of Leyden, of the old Ballad minstrels.  The son of a
Scottish peasant line of the old sort, honourable, refined, devout, he
was educated in Edinburgh for the ministry of the United Presbyterian
Church.  Some beautiful verses of his appeared in the _St. Andrews
University Magazine_ about 1863, at the time when I first'saw myself in
print' in the same periodical.  Davidson's poem delighted me: another of
his, 'Ariadne in Naxos,' appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ about the
same time.  Mr. Thackeray, who was then editor, no doubt remembered Pen's
prize poem on the same subject.  I did not succeed in learning anything
about the author, did not know that he lived within a drive of my own
home.  When next I heard of him, it was in his biography.  As a
'Probationer,' or unplaced minister, he, somehow, was not successful.  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_.
Love of the Border, love of Murray's 'dear St. Andrews Bay,' love of
letters, make one akin to both of these friends who were lost before
their friendship was won.  Why did not Murray succeed to the measure of
his most modest desire?  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 was not a Keats, a Burns, a Shelley: he was not, if one
may choose modern examples, a Kipling or a Stevenson.  On the other hand,
his was a high ideal; he believed, with Andre Chenier, that he had
'something there,' something worthy of reverence and of careful training
within him.  Consequently, as we shall see, the drudgery of the pressman
was excessively repulsive to him.  He could take no delight in making the
best of it.  We learn that Mr. Kipling's early tales were written as part
of hard daily journalistic work in India; written in torrid newspaper
offices, to fill columns.  Yet they were written with the delight of the
artist, and are masterpieces in their _genre_.  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.  I
ventured to remonstrate with him, to say _non est tanti_, but I spoke too
late, or spoke in vain.  He carried independence too far, or carried it
into the wrong field, for a piece of humorous verse, say in _Punch_, is
not an original masterpiece and immaculate work of art, but more or less
of a joint-stock product between the editor, the author, and the public.
Macaulay, and Carlyle, and Sir Walter Scott suffered editors gladly or
with indifference, and who are we that we should complain?  This extreme
sensitiveness would always have stood in Murray's way.

Once more, Murray's interest in letters was much more energetic than his
zeal in the ordinary industry of a student.  As a general rule, men of
original literary bent are not exemplary students at college.  'The
common curricoolum,' as the Scottish laird called academic studies
generally, rather repels them.  Macaulay took no honours at Cambridge;
mathematics defied him.  Scott was 'the Greek dunce,' at Edinburgh.
Thackeray, Shelley, Gibbon, did not cover themselves with college
laurels; they read what pleased them, they did not read 'for the
schools.'  In short, this behaviour at college is the rule among men who
are to be distinguished in literature, not the exception.  The honours
attained at Oxford by Mr. Swinburne, whose Greek verses are no less
poetical than his English poetry, were inconspicuous.  At St. Andrews,
Murray read only 'for human pleasure,' like Scott, Thackeray, Shelley,
and the rest, at Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge.  In this matter, I
think, he made an error, and one which affected his whole career.  He was
not a man of private fortune, like some of those whom we have mentioned.
He had not a business ready for him to step into.  He had to force his
own way in life, had to make himself'self-supporting.'  This was all the
more essential to a man of his honourable independence of character, a
man who not only would not ask a favour, but who actually shrunk back
from such chances as were offered to him, if these chances seemed to be
connected with the least discernible shadow of an obligation.  At St.
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.  The mental discipline is
invaluable, the training in accuracy is invaluable, and invaluable is the
life led in the society of the greatest minds, the noblest poets, the
most faultless artists of the world.  To descend to ordinary truths,
scholarship is, at lowest, an honourable _gagne-pain_.  But Murray, like
the majority of students endowed with literary originality, did not share
these rather old-fashioned ideas. 