WILLIAM M'COMBIE.
WITH just suspicion the world scans those reputations which are local, and those records of personal greatness which have not been countersigned by its own hand. The assurance of Wordsworth that "strongest minds are often those of whom the noisy world hears least," is apt to provoke the reply that, in days of such publicity as ours, whatever is good, or strong, or noble, is known in proportion to its degree. And yet, to those that have lived a life of real kinship with their fellow-beings, there occa- sionally comes the communion of some man who, while un- known to that mass of readers which constitutes the world, is seen to tower head and shoulders above the crowd, and to be, in some of the chief elements of noble personality, at least the equal of men whom the world has lifted with acclamation into high niches of its Pantheon. Such a man died at Aberdeen last week, at the age of sixty-one, in Mr. William M'Combie, the editor of the Aberdeen Free Press. He had read much, thought much, and written much ; but the world has never given a welcome to his books. As a speculative thinker, he had toiled long and labori-
ously; but his written dissertations were not distinctive or com-
plete enough to be singled out for special remembrance ; and, outside the bouhdaries of the district in which his noble qualities had given him a modest fame, his writings were known only to a few lonely students. As a journalist, he had, in the later years of his life, written with a compass of knowledge and a philosophical elevation of thought which lifted him into an altogether different atmosphere from that breathed by the respectable scribes who minister to the acrid Liberalism of provincial Scotland ; yet even his reputation as a journalist had never travelled far beyond the limits of Northern Scotland. Hence, if measured by the public recognition of his work as a thinker, a writer, or a publicist, he might seem to merit no more than a few lines of gratitude and re- spect. Nevertheless, by those who knew the man himself, who knew what he had been, what he had become, and what store of great qualities lay in his nature, William M'Combie will be remembered as one of the most remarkable men that Scotland has produced during the present generation, and as, among her self-taught men, certainly the moat remarkable after Hugh Miller.
Scotland has been rich in men who have reached some degree of intellectual eminence without the aid of schools or of any regular teachers, and whose stimulus towards study has come from the fervency and the intellectual character of Scottish religions life. High among that class stood William M'Combie. His father held the farm of Cairnballoch, in the parish of Alford, about thirty miles from Aberdeen ; the farm had, for the most part, been re- claimed by his father from rugged moorland and stony hill-side ;
the holding was small and the soil poor ; so that the future meta- physical and theological student was brought up in an atmosphere of what English farmers would deem stern poverty. He never, we believe, went to school. Such direct teaching as he ever got he received at the fire-side, from a grand-dame, or at the road-side, from a man whose lot was to break stones for the repairing of the highway, but whose mind soared into a loftier region than that of Macadam. To Mr. M'Combie, as to many other Scotchmen, the big family Bible was the first spelling and reading-book. From his boy- hood he was charged with the duties of the farm, and, while he was still a youth, the chief share of the work fell to his hand. At an age when most lads are still at the grammar-school, he was holding.the plough ; and among the young men of the district he saw no more noble exemplar of life than that presented by the farm labourers or the farmer's sons, who, when the work of the day was done, thought of nothing but frolic or sleep. He had no intellectual com- panions, and at times he could get no more nourishing intellectual fare than the "Penny Cyclopedia," or Harvey's "Meditations among the Tombs." Nevertheless, he became an insatiable reader. In the long evenings of winter he read by the light of the kitchen fire ; and when sent to Aberdeen with the carts, he seated himself on the top of the stuff which he was bringing to Cairnballoch, and read as the horses jogged slowly home. At length there came to the young student that moment which, in one form or other, comes to all earnest men ; that moment which Christianity calls the season of conversion, and in which the moralist sees a conscious choosing of what seems to be noble and right, a deliberate rejection of what appears to be unworthy and bad. To different men the change comes in different forms ; to one, as the conviction that peace, and rest, and goodness, and the possibilities of a noble life lie in the hard embrace of a dogmatic creed ; to another, in the counter-conviction that the
rejection of all dogmatic creeds must be the initiatory rite of a pure and true existence ; to a third, in the feeling that the secret
of a good life must be found in self-denying work ; to a fourth, in the belief that the hunger of the soul can be satisfied only by some mighty act of self-sacrifice, whose consequences shall be as illimit- able as life itself. In the case of William M'Combie the change, almost of necessity, took a theological form. Among that Scottish people which has not forgotten the traditions of the Covenant, and which is slowly but surely vanishing, religious thought and theology hold such a place as they occupy among the correspond- ing class of no other country. Among them the Bible still keeps a position of almost Hebrew supremacy. It is emphatically the Book of Books; morning and night it is read with such eagerness and such thoroughness as can be matched only in the studies of the commentator ; and the precedents of Moses and of Joshua would still be applied to the affairs of modern political life with an intrepidity which might recall the deliverances of those cuirassed theologians who studied the Books of Kings by the light of the camp fire after Marston Moor and Naseby fight.
The household of Cairnballoch emphatically presented that hard and Hebrew, but still noble type of religious life. Mr. M'Combie's father had been reared in one of those smaller religions sects to whom even the austerities of the Scottish Kirk seem only so many base compromises with the world, and to whom the cardinal precept of the New Testament is, "Come out from among them, and be ye separate." Thus the son was taught to regard the acceptance or the rejection of certain dogmas as the first duty of life, and; in the season of choice between good and evil, he was brought face to face with questions respecting the providence of God, the efficacy of prayer, free-will and predestination, the mystery of election, the possibility and limits of a revelation, the character and office of the Church, the nature and scope of her sacraments, the limits within which she might command the world to accept her decrees. Long brooding on these problems gave Mr. M'Combie a higher education, in the true sense of the word, than that which the mass of men receive from the discipline of a scholastic course. The training made him an independent, original, and vigorous thinker. Moreover, it so quickened his intellect that, while still a young man, and still oppressed by hard daily toil, he employed the scanty leisure of his evenings in writing a book. The stone window-sill of a little opening in his father's cottage he used as a writing-desk, and, for the want of a convenient seat, he had to kneel on a large chest. The book, which he called" Hours of Thought," was a collection of moral and religious essays, stamped by such reflection as might come to a lonely student, and written with a dignity and sobriety of style which are seldom exhibited in the first efforts even of the rhetorical schools. Dr. Chalmers, we believe, thought so highly of the volume that he recommended it to his students. After the publi- cation of that book, Mr. M'Combie wrote much and welL In time, as modest wealth came to his family, and he was no longer beset by the old necessities of daily toil, he was able to give himself more and more to thought and study. How independently he thought he showed by a book on "Moral Agency," in which he combated the Calvinistic theology of his country. How eagerly he entered into the controversies respecting the duties and the future of the Church was seen from a book on "Heresy and Schism," —the Inost rhetorical and least satisfactory of his writings. How keen a critical faculty he had devoloped in the sphere of literature was displayed by his biography of Alexander Bethune, one of two remarkable brothers who, like himself, had been wholly self-taught, and had plucked literary achievements of no common order from the hard necessities of manual toil.
A more remarkable exhibition of intellectual energy it would have been difficult to find throughout Scotland than that presented in the household of Cairnballoch. The last thing which a stranger would have expected to hear discussed on visiting the quiet farm-house would have been the abstrusest problems of speculative philosophy ; the last person for whom he would have looked would have been a speculative thinker and writer. And the expectation would cer- tainly not have been changed by the discovery that Mr. M'Combie was a thorough farmer. On the breeding of polled Aberdeenshire cattle he could talk with much of the profound knowledge, and some measure of the infallible judgment, which belongs to his neighbour and cousin, Mr. M'Combie of Tillyfour, now the Member of Parlia- ment for West Aberdeenshire. Alike in the theory and the practice of agriculture, he might have won the highest rank had be devoted all his energies to the task. And when, three orfonr years ago, he removed from Cairnballoch to Milton of Kemnay, Aber- deenshire, he rapidly made his fine farm a model both for the com- pleteness of its arrangements and the quality of its stock. Neverthe- less, it was to books, and the strife of politics, and the din of eccleaias- tical polemics, and the debateable ground of speculative philosophy
that his mind most eagerly turned. He read everything, from the debates in the General Assembly of the Free Church, to such books as Juffroy's review of the Scottish philosophy, Sir William Hamilton's "Lectures on Metaphysics," Mamas Bampton Lectures on "The Limits of Religious Thought," and John Stuart Mill's "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy." His library was, for that of a farmer, very large, and was filled with treatises of revolting dryness on the controversies of the Christian sects. To the lonely farm-house came a crowd of news- papers, monthlies, and quarterly reviews ; the latest poem, or novel, or history ; the political, theological, or philosophical work of which the world was speaking. And, meanwhile, Mr. M'Combie himself wrote books full of thought, quarterly-review articles, newspaper articles, essays, lectures, sermons. As a Lecturer, he was eagerly welcomed both in town and country by those typical Scotch audiences who covet depth of thought, .earnestness of manner, and grave dignity of style. The religious aect to which he belonged accept the pulpit ministrations of laymen ; and those who have heard Mr. M'Combie preaching in his later days, as, with accents of profound solemnity and reined-in passion, he read discourses full of cloister-thought and living experience, find the remembrance uueffaced by the aubsequent recollections even of great pulpit orators. But it was in conversation that his powers were most vividly seen. As he walked through his fields with a friend, or sat talking by the fireside, he would quietly turn from root-crops, or the points of cattle, or the economics of drainage, to a comparison between the respective literary merits of Archer Butler's and John Henry Newman's sermons ; the intellectual stimulus given by John Foster's " Essays " ; the theology of Mr. Maurice; the theological Fosition of the Spectator ; the ethical creed of the Saturday Review ; the utilitarian theory of Morals ; Neander's subtle analysis of the fashion in which Christianity had transformed the thought and institutions of Paganism ; the question whether the human mind could have an apprehension of the Infinite, and whether Sir William Hamilton had not forged the most potent of weapons for a destructive scepticism in his 'famous criticism of the rival Philosophies of the Unconditioned taught by Cousin, Schalling, and Kant ; the question whether Manse's application of the Hamiltonian philosophy to theology would not, if it were tenable, be fatal alike to theism and morality; the question whether Mr. Mill had not utterly misunderstood Sir William's philosophy of the Absolute, and whether the author of the "Logic" and the " Political Economy" was not incapable of working in the highest region of speculative thought. Such were the topics of discourse that came easily and naturally to this Scottish farmer. The town-bred student, fresh from college class- iroom and communion with the highest culture, found that much -of the beat thinking of Europe had floated to a bleak hill-aide, and that, from an unassuming farmer, it elicited comments atamped by a rare vigour of intellect and a still rarer personality.
Mr. M'Combie was a keen politician, and a decided Liberal. He detested the petty tyranny of the Scottish lairds as heartily as die despised their Toryism, which is perhaps the most bigoted, the most stupid, and the most contemptible creed that ever found its way into a substitute for a human mind. Being the most -courteous of men, he wrote and spoke with a certain decorous anoderation against the feeble misdoing& even of these aristocratic .animalculm ; but, more than any other man, he contributed to tree Aberdeenshire from their influence, and to send two Liberals to Parliament as its representatives. For many sears he had strongly felt the need of a local newspaper, which should be at once decidedly Liberal and earnestly Christian. The need was the more imperative, because the Aberdeen Herald was then edited by a very clever and reckless man, who constantly poured ridicule on all religious earnestness, and whose writing was made formidable by its broad humour and its force of style. To represent the religious earnestness, as well 43 the advanced Liberalism of the county, Mr. M'Combie and some of his friends founded the Aberdeen Free Press, of which, after a time, he became the editor, and which he conducted until he was stricken down by mortal sickness. Untrained in the ways of journalism, and despising some of its traditions, he tended for 4 time to write over the heads of his readers. The leading articles which he penned in the seclusion of Cairnballoch, or in the quiet .study of his town house, too often bore traces of the metaphysical atmosphere in which they had been conceived. Readers who pined for the personality and the hard-hitting which distinguish the provincial press were often dragged against their will through a thicket of ethical and philosophical principles. Like most snen with a decided tarn and aptitude for metaphysical thought, Mr. M'Combie found it difficult to discuss any subject without a reference to first principles. He con- stantly sought an ethical or a philosophical basis on which to rear the slightest superstructure of Imperial or Ecclesiastical policy. Some idea of the estimation in which he held the duties of a provincial editor may be gathered from the fact, that a few years ago he wrote a series of articles on Christianity in relation to Civilization, in which he discussed such themes as Buckle's theory of historical progress, Mill's defence of the inductive school of ethics, and Comte's attempt to found a religion on the enthusiasm of a few devout atheists and without the assumption of a God. If Mr. M'Combie thus limited the number of his readers, he gave a new moral dignity and a new tone of intellect to the journalism of Northern Scotland by the subjects which he chose for discussion, by his philosophical habit of treatment, and by the noble morality of his creed. Latterly, moreover, his political writing became much more practical. To qualify himself for the treatment of the Irish Laud Question he paid a visit to Ireland, and looked at the country with the eye of an experienced farmer. The result was the publication of a pamphlet, which the Spectator criticized at the time of its appearance, awl which ranks with the ablest discussions of the subject.
Self-taught men seldom acquire fineness of taste, and they usually display a yearning for the louder notes of rhetoric ; but this self- taught farmer and journalist had risen far above that infirmity of his class. His taste was so fine as to verge on the fastidious. He did injustice to the poetical genius of Byron, for example, not merely because he viewed the character of that gifted voluptuary with all the scorn and contempt which befits a noble nature, but because he fancied that the colouring even of Byron's least offensive work bore the touch of a loud and glaring vulgarity. On the other haud, he displayed the keenest appreciation of all that is fine in literature, as well as of all that is strong and pure. Milton has had few more appreciate students; on Wordsworth he would pour forth the ,subtle comments of a mind that had lived a lifetime in the atmosphere of the "Excursion ;" and those passages of the "Two Voices" and of "In Memoriam," in which Tennyson gives melodious utterance to the floating doubts and yearnings of an age that is ill at ease, he would recite with a strange unearthly fervour, which was none the less impressive because its elocution defied the most cherished canons of the schools. Mr. Matthew Arnold, who doubtless fancies that "sweetness and light" cannot flourish in the remote seclusion of a Scottish farm- house, would have stared to find the subtlest of his own criticisms delicately weighed by a farmer who, immediately after discussing Mr. Arnold's essay on Spinoza, would quietly go out of doors to see what progress had been made with the ploughing or the threshing.
After all, however, it is not on account of his intellect, his acquirements, or his culture that Mr. M'Combie will live in the memory of his friends, but on account of his rare and lofty person- ality. He had been endowed with that gift which we vaguely describe by the the words personality, individuality, character ; a gift which, when ennobled by intellect and sanctified by religious earnestness, ranks with the most precious and the rarest boons that can be lavished upon man. Mere intellectual cleverness is as worthless as it is common. In this age of negative criticism, the power of dexterously wielding what Mr. Carlyle calls "attorney logic," and of spying flaws in any philosophic arraign- ment or defence, belongs to nine educated men out of ten. But we soar into an altogether different atmosphere when
we hold communion with a lofty nature. Archbishop Whately pointed out the difference between the two types of manhood when, speaking of his Oxford life, he said that his own judgment was trusted only so far as it was supported by a logical statement of its grounds ; whereas, he added, the words of Newman carried weight, because they were Newman's words. The Tractarian leader possessed the gift of personal influence because he was seen to be, not a mere reasoning or acquiring machine, but a great and subtly-organized nature, who saw farther into the Pro- mised Land than other pilgrims, and who, therefore, spoke with a Joshua-like authority. Such, in smaller measure, was the case with the man of whom we are speaking. He lived apart, in almost austere solitude, from all that was common-place and mean. His thoughts were lifted above the accidents of his station andhia time into a region of 1Vordsworthian purity. The religion of his country had so transformed his nature that he seemed to be a Covenanter born out of due time. That religion, while it gave a tone of sternness to his ethical verdicts, also gave to !signature an element of womanly gentleness, which found solemn voice in the suppli- cations of family prayer, and which blossomed into deeds.of bosati-
ful friendliness. An altogether nobler soul it is the privilege of few to meet. The present writer, who knew William M'Combie as few men can know each other, and who has had sufficient means of measuring him by a metropolitan standard, has met with men of far more brilliant faculty, and with minds of far keener dialectical edge, but with no man through whose nature there rings so distinctly the note of personal greatness. The dead farmer, journalist, and thinker was one of those pure and lofty souls that keep the life of a nation green.
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