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Dawn of his Literary Fame—Writes his
Autobiography—Casual Interview with his Future Wife— Appointed
Accountant in a Commercial Bank—His Marriage—Continues his Literary
Labours—Enters the Arena of Church Controversy—Letter to Lord
Brougham—Appointed Editor of the Witness—His Independence and Success.
The Itinerant critic, whose name was Walch,
in in addition to being hissed and hooted by the Cromarty men—whom one
loves for their chivalrous defence of one of themselves—narrowly escaped
being b2aten into a jelly by a stalwart Highland cousin of Hugh Miller,
who deemed that a gross and public attack upon the literary reputation
of his kinsman could only be avenged by a sound thrashing. Hugh,
however, found means to persuade his Celtic cousin to keep his
honourable hands off the lecturer, and by-and-by there come balm for the
wounds of the bard in a generous and highly laudatory critique, written
by Dr. Brown, the author of a "History of the Highlands and the Highland
Clans;" the praise and friendship of Principal Baird, a warm-hearted
liberal-minded .gentleman, who was the frank patron of true merit,
whether it was found beneath the garb of the day-labourer, or that of
the polished gentleman and scholar; the esteem of Miss Dunbar, of Boath,
a lady of refined literary taste and considerable literary power; the
respect of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder; and, in short, of a great many
Scotchmen of mark of that period. The rosy dawn of a brilliant future
had at length broken, and was visible to the mind's eye of this
stone-cutter, but it did not turn his head. The prophet, as we have
said, was honoured in his own country; and already had the ripples,
caused by the few literary pebbles he had thrown into the waters of
public opinion, spread much further than his native neighbourhood. They
were palpable so far south as the metropolis, and great men solicited
his company at their houses, and to their tables; but, by God's
blessing, he contrived to escape that great curse and hindrance to a
working man with a literary turn of mind—a patron. Although he shaped
great and good thoughts out of the raw material of the mind, he
continued still to labour conscientiously at the shaping and chiselling
of tablets and tombstones, and accepted few of those flattering
invitations which rich kindness or curiosity extended to him to come and
be lionised! Hear what he says upon this point, thou struggling genius,
thou "mute inglorious Milton," whoever thou art, toiling at the anvil,
the plough, or the spade, and preserve thy dignity!
"I had already seen several poor wrecked
mechanics, who, believing themselves to be poets, and regarding the
manual occupation by which they could live in independence as beneath
them, had become in consequence little better than mendicants—too good
to work for their bread, but not too good, virtually, to beg it; and,
looking upon them as beacons of warning, I determined that, with God's
help, I should give the error a wide offing, and never associate the
idea of meanness with an honest calling, or deem myself too good to be
independent."
At the suggestion of Principal Baird, he
wrote an autobiographic sketch of his life, which extended till the year
1825. About the same period, he wrote his "Scenes and Legends of the
North," a most fascinating book, which he dedicated to Sir Thomas Dick
Lauder. We find him, too, taking part in a local church controversy,
writing petitions, paragraphs, letters, articles, and pamphlets
respecting it with characteristic zeal; and from time to time
prosecuting more profitable studies in the field of geological science.
Still the stone-cutting was persevered in; and one evening, while hewing
in a part of his uncle's garden, he was visited by a lady friend, who
brought a stranger lady along with her to see an old dial-stone which he
had dug out of the earth some time previously. While Hugh Miller and his
visitors were standing beside that old time-marker, taking no note of
time, a third lady came tripping down the garden walk, and, addressing
the other two in a great flurry, said, "O come, come away; I have been
seeking you ever so long." "Is this you L-," was the staid reply; "why,
what now? you have run yourself out of breath." This third lady was
nineteen years of age, was of light and small figure, had a waxen
clearness of complexion, and was, in short, as pretty a little vision as
one would wish to meet in a summer evening. Her visit to Hugh Miller's
working-place was purely accidental—perhaps she had heard something of
his fame—perhaps she wished to see the man of whom so many had so much
that was excellent to say. Be that as it may, the meeting, so accidental
and certainly so momentary, was pregnant with great results for both.
The young lady—Lydia Mackenzie Fraser—in due time became Mrs. Miller.
Time passed on, and Hugh, still a working mason, had serious thoughts of
going out to America to push his fortune, when he was offered the
accountantship in the Cromarty branch of the Commercial Bank of
Scotland, by Mr. Ross, the agent. After due consideration he accepted
the appointment, and was sent to the Linlithgow branch to be initiated
into the mysteries of banking. He was so stupid at first that the worthy
agent in Linlithgow expressed his conviction to the manager in Edinburgh
that it would be in vain to think of making "yon man" an accountant. He
speedily mastered the system, however, and in little more than a
fortnight—the agent being again in Edinburgh, and the regular accountant
being away on some business mission, was asked to whom he had intrusted
the bank. He had left "yon man," he said. "What, the Incompetent?" "O,
that." he replied, "is all a mistake; the Incompetent has already
mastered our system." Of his stay in Linlithgow, he says "Brief as the
days were, I had always a twilight hour to myself; and as the evenings
were fine for the season the old royal park of the place, with its
massive palace and its sweet lake still mottled by the hereditary swans,
whose progenitors had sailed over its waters in the days when James IV.
worshipped in the spectre aisle, formed a delightful place of retreat,
little frequented by the inhabitants of the town, but only all the more
my own in consequence; and in which I used to feel the fatigue of a
day's figuring and calculation drop away into the cool breezy air like
cobwebs from an unfolded banner, as I climbed among the ruins, or
sauntered along the grassy shores of the loch,"
At the end of two months' residence in
Linlithgow, he returned to Cromarty and was installed as accountant in
the local branch of the Commercial Bank.
His new position was an interesting standing
point upon which to view the world, and a school favourable to the
developement of shrewdness and common sense, and he gained much that was
valuable in after years there. Two years after the commencement of his
banking career, he was united to Lydia Mackenzie Fraser, the young lady
of his uncle's garden, and to eke out his income which did not, with the
earnings of his wife—who, after her marriage, continued to teach a few
pupils—much exceed one hundred pounds per annum, he contributed stories
for "Wilson's Border Tales," started in 1835; and, subsequently, he
established a profitable connection with the Messrs Chambers, as an
occasional contributor to their admirable Journal, the precusor of the
cheap, popular, and elevating press. During his connection with the
bank, he wrote a memoir, which was subsequently published for private
circulation, of a celebrated Cromarty man, Mr. William Forsyth. We have
never seen this production, but from the sketch given of its subject
in "Scenes and Legends," we can believe it was in every respect worthy
of a good man. We see occasional symptoms of the church controversialist
cropping out here and there in this portion of his life. The war between
the Moderates and the Evangelicals, as the two opposing parties in the
church were termed, had by this time fairly commenced. The long and
bitter voluntary controversy—in which, however, there were clearly
defined and broad principles to fight about— had done its work; and the
church, aroused out of that sweet sleep which, till awakened by the
voluntary trumpet, she had so long enjoyed, was fairly broken up into
two great contending parties. Hugh Miller, who had been nurtured in the
strong presbyterianism of his ancestor, Donald Roy, one of the "Men" of
Nigg, sympathised with the Non-Intrusion party. Events hurried on. The
admission of the quoad sacra ministers as members of the church courts,
the Veto Law which gave the people the power of rejecting a minister
without assigning reasons of objection, speedily brought the
ecclesiastical and civil tribunals into harsh collision. The Strathbogie
case, the Auchterarder case, and others of a similiar kind, made
Scotland ring with the clash of ecclesiastical arms; and on the decision
of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case becoming known in
Cromarty, Hugh Miller, after a sleepless night, penned a letter to Lord
Brougham, in which the speech of that great statesman and lawyer was
reviewed with a vigour which must have astonished him when he knew that
the daring critic was a self-taught man. The letter was seen by the
clerical heads of the Non-Intrusion party in Edinburgh; and as these had
been looking about for an editor to undertake the management of a
newspaper which had been projected for the purpose of defending the
position and advocating the principles of the party, Dr. Candlish at
once said, on seeing the letter in manuscript, "Here is the editor we
want." A meeting was arranged between Mr Miller and the leading Non-Intrusionists,
the result of which was the appointment of the former to the editorship
of the Witness. The following extract indicates the spirit in which he
undertook his new labour:—
"Save for the intense interest with which I
regarded the struggle, and the stake possessed in it, as I beleived, by
the Scottish people, no consideration whatever would have induced me to
take a step so fraught, as I thought at the time, with peril and
discomfort. For full twenty years I had never been engaged in a quarrel
on my own account: all my quarrels, either directly or indirectly, had
been ecclesiastical ones;—I had fought for my minister, or for my
brother parishioners; and fain now would I have lived at peace with all
men; but the editorship of a Non-Intrusion newspaper involved, as a
portion of its duties, war with all the world. I held, besides,—not
aware how very much the spur of necessity quickens production,—that its
twice-a-week demands would fully occupy all my time, and that I would
have to resign, in consequence, my favourite pursuit,—geology. I had
once hoped, too,—though of late years the hope had been becoming
faint,—to leave some little mark behind me in the literature of my
country; but the last remains of the expectation had now to be resigned.
The newspaper editor writes in sand when the flood is coming in. If he
but succeed in influencing opinion for the present, he must be content
to be forgotten in the future. But believing the cause to be a good one,
I prepared for a life of strife, toil, and comparative obscurity. In
counting the cost, I very considerably exagerated it; but I trust I may
say that, in all honesty, and with no sinister aim, or prospect of
worldly advantage, I did count it, and fairly undertook to make the full
sacrifice which the cause demanded."
In January, 1840, Hugh Miller presided over
the birth of the first number of the Witness. The proprietors were
fortunate in securing such a man as the editor of their paper. There
were few men living in Scotland, at that period, possessed of greater
ability, or who had a more exact knowledge of the controvorsy of which
he was henceforth to be one of the chief conductors. But more than
this—he was a thoroughly independent man, and would not, in order to
please friends or in dread of the anger of foes, take a single step
which was not sanctioned by his own judgment and conscience. From the
fact that the Witness was originated by the clerical leaders of the
Non-Intrusion party, the public were naturally suspicious of its
becoming the organ of a mere clerical clique. Hugh Miller, however,
speedily undeceived the public upon this point. He knew his duty, and he
brooked no interference with the discharge of it from whatever quarter
it came. The determination to maintain his independence, we know,
several times cost him much, for a generous nature like that which he
possessed feels pain while inflicting it in the discharge of duty upon
others; but, when the sacrifice had to be made, it was made freely. One
of the chiefs of the party proposed upon one occasion a sort of clerical
censorship upon the columns of the Witness, but the editor had the
boldness to resist a proposition which morally and commercially would
have been fatal to the journal had it been acted out. Dr. Buchanan, the
author of the "Ten Years' Conflict," almost ignores the services
rendered Non-Intrusion by the Witness; but it is an undoubted fact that
the articles of Hugh Miller in that paper were the cause of the popular
awakening to the importance of the question at issue between the
contending parties, which characterised the years 1840, 1841, and 1842.
Previous to the first of these three years—or, let us at once say, to
the appearance of the Witness—many who had any idea of the Non-Intrusion
controversy condemned it, and the great mass of the people knew and
cared nothing at all about it. So recently as 1839, Dr. George Cook
stated, without contradiction, that he could scarce enter an inn or
stage coach without finding respectable men inveighing against the utter
folly of the Non-Intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the church
courts; and remembering, as we do, the same year—and mingling, as we
then did, amongst people with whom religious controversy was almost a
necessity of life—we have frequently been struck with the manner in
which Non-Intrusion was treated by the bulk of the community. The
Witness, however, had not been many months in existence when the
movement became to a large extent popularised. The mission Hugh Miller
set before himself -was to instruct the people on this question, which,
of all others, in his estimation, concerned them most intimately; and
week after week the Witness came out with articles pregnant with
argument, with felicitous illustration, and couched in the most forcible
and appropriate language. In the first year of the Witness a petition
was sent up from Edinburgh in favour of the spiritual independence of
the church, to which 13,000 signatures were attached, a larger number by
one-half than ever had appeared at any similar petition previous to that
year. |
