tommy has not lasted. more than once since it became known that i was writing his life i have been asked whether there ever really was such a person, and i am afraid to inquire for his books at the library lest they are no longer there. a recent project to bring out a new edition, with introductions by some other tommy, received so little support that it fell to the ground. it must be admitted that, so far as the great public is concerned, thomas sandys is done for.
they have even forgotten the manner of his death, though probably no young writer with an eye on posterity ever had a better send-off. we really thought at the time that tommy had found a way.
the surmise at rintoul, immediately accepted by the world as a fact, was that he had been climbing the wall to obtain for grizel the flowers accidentally left in the garden, and it at once tipped the tragedy with gold. the newspapers, which were in the middle of the dull season, thanked their gods for tommy, and enthusiastically set to work on him. great minds wrote criticisms of what they called his life-work. the many persons who had been the first to discover him said so again. his friends were in demand for the most trivial reminiscences. unhappy pym cleared £ll 10s.
shall we quote? it is nearly always done at this stage of the biography, so now for the testimonials to prove that our hero was without a flaw. a few specimens will suffice if we select some that are very like many of the others. it keeps grizel waiting, but tommy, as you have seen, was always the great one; she existed only that he might show how great he was. "busy among us of late," says one, "has been the grim visitor who knocks with equal confidence at the doors of the gifted and the ungifted, the pauper and the prince, and twice in one short month has he taken from us men of an eminence greater perhaps than that of mr. sandys; but of them it could be said their work was finished, while his sun sinks tragically when it is yet day. not by what his riper years might have achieved can this pure, spirit now be judged, and to us, we confess, there is something infinitely pathetic in that thought. we would fain shut our eyes, and open them again at twenty years hence, with mr. sandys in the fulness of his powers. it is not to be. what he might have become is hidden from us; what he was we know. he was little more than a stripling when he 'burst upon the town' to be its marvel—and to die; a 'marvellous boy' indeed; yet how unlike in character and in the nobility of his short life, as in the mournful yet lovely circumstances of his death, to that other might-have-been who 'perished in his pride.' our young men of letters have travelled far since the days of chatterton. time was when a riotous life was considered part of their calling—when they shunned the domestic ties and actually held that the consummate artist is able to love nothing but the creations of his fancy. it is such men as thomas sandys who have exploded that pernicious fallacy....
"whether his name will march down the ages is not for us, his contemporaries, to determine. he had the most modest opinion of his own work, and was humbled rather than elated when he heard it praised. no one ever loved praise less; to be pointed at as a man of distinction was abhorrent to his shrinking nature; he seldom, indeed, knew that he was being pointed at, for his eyes were ever on the ground. he set no great store by the remarkable popularity of his works. 'nothing,' he has been heard to say to one of those gushing ladies who were his aversion, 'nothing will so certainly perish as the talk of the town.' it may be so, but if so, the greater the pity that he has gone from among us before he had time to put the coping-stone upon his work. there is a beautiful passage in one of his own books in which he sees the spirits of gallant youth who died too young for immortality haunting the portals of the elysian fields, and the great shades come to the portal and talk with them. we venture to say that he is at least one of these."
what was the individuality behind the work? they discussed it in leading articles and in the correspondence columns, and the man proved to be greater than his books. his distaste for admiration is again and again insisted on and illustrated by many characteristic anecdotes. he owed much to his parents, though he had the misfortune to lose them when he was but a child. "little is known of his father, but we understand that he was a retired military officer in easy circumstances. the mother was a canny scotchwoman of lowly birth, conspicuous for her devoutness even in a land where it is everyone's birthright, and on their marriage, which was a singularly happy one, they settled in london, going little into society, the world forgetting, by the world forgot, and devoting themselves to each other and to their two children. of these thomas was the elder, and as the twig was early bent so did the tree incline. from his earliest years he was noted for the modesty which those who remember his boyhood in scotland (whither the children went to an uncle on the death of their parents) still speak of with glistening eyes. in another column will be found some interesting recollections of mr. sandys by his old schoolmaster, mr. david cathro, m.a., who testifies with natural pride to the industry and amiability of his famous pupil. 'to know him,' says mr. cathro, 'was to love him.'"
according to another authority, t. sandys got his early modesty from his father, who was of a very sweet disposition, and some instances of this modesty are given. they are all things that elspeth did, but tommy is now represented as the person who had done them. "on the other hand, his strong will, singleness of purpose, and enviable capacity for knowing what he wanted to be at were a heritage from his practical and sagacious mother." "i think he was a little proud of his strength of will," writes the r.a. who painted his portrait (now in america), "for i remember his anxiety that it should be suggested in the picture." but another acquaintance (a lady) replies: "he was not proud of his strong will, but he liked to hear it spoken of, and he once told me the reason. this strength of will was not, as is generally supposed, inherited by him; he was born without it, and acquired it by a tremendous effort. i believe i am the only person to whom he confided this, for he shrank from talk about himself, looking upon it as a form of that sentimentality which his soul abhorred."
he seems often to have warned ladies against this essentially womanish tendency to the sentimental. "it is an odious onion, dear lady," he would say, holding both her hands in his. if men in his presence talked sentimentally to ladies he was so irritated that he soon found a pretext for leaving the room. "yet let it not be thought," says one who knew him well, "that because he was so sternly practical himself he was intolerant of the outpourings of the sentimental. the man, in short, reflected the views on this subject which are so admirably phrased in his books, works that seem to me to found one of their chief claims to distinction on this, that at last we have a writer who can treat intimately of human love without leaving one smear of the onion upon his pages."
on the whole, it may be noticed, comparatively few ladies contribute to the obituary reflections, "for the simple reason," says a simple man, "that he went but little into female society. he who could write so eloquently about women never seemed to know what to say to them. ordinary tittle-tattle from them disappointed him. i should say that to him there was so much of the divine in women that he was depressed when they hid their wings." this view is supported by clubman, who notes that tommy would never join in the somewhat free talk about the other sex in which many men indulge. "i remember," he says, "a man's dinner at which two of those present, both persons of eminence, started a theory that every man who is blessed or cursed with the artistic instinct has at some period of his life wanted to marry a barmaid. mr. sandys gave them such a look that they at once apologized. trivial, perhaps, but significant. on another occasion i was in a club smoking-room when the talk was of a similar kind. mr. sandys was not present. a member said, with a laugh, 'i wonder for how long men can be together without talking gamesomely of women?' before any answer could be given mr. sandys strolled in, and immediately the atmosphere cleared, as if someone had opened the windows. when he had gone the member addressed turned to him who had propounded the problem and said, 'there is your answer—as long as sandys is in the room.'"
"a fitting epitaph, this, for thomas sandys," says the paper that quotes it, "if we could not find a better. mr. sandys was from first to last a man of character, but why when others falter was he always so sure-footed? it is in the answer to this question that we find the key to the books, and to the man who was greater than the books. he was the perfect lover. as he died seeking flowers for her who had the high honour to be his wife, so he had always lived. he gave his affection to her, as our correspondent miss (or mrs.) ailie mclean shows, in his earliest boyhood, and from this, his one romance, he never swerved. to the moment of his death all his beautiful thoughts were flowers plucked for her; his books were bunches of them gathered to place at her feet. no harm now in reading between the lines of his books and culling what is the common knowledge of his friends in the north, that he had to serve a long apprenticeship before he won her. for long his attachment was unreciprocated, though she was ever his loyal friend, and the volume called 'unrequited love' belongs to the period when he thought his life must be lived alone. the circumstances of their marriage are at once too beautiful and too painful to be dwelt on here. enough to say that, should the particulars ever be given to the world, with the simple story of his life, a finer memorial will have been raised to him than anything in stone, such as we see a committee is already being formed to erect. we venture to propose as a title for his biography, 'the story of the perfect lover.'"
yes, that memorial committee was formed; but so soon do people forget the hero of yesterday's paper that only the secretary attended the first meeting, and he never called another. but here, five and twenty years later, is the biography, with the title changed. you may wonder that i had the heart to write it. i do it, i have sometimes pretended to myself, that we may all laugh at the stripling of a rogue, but that was never my reason. have i been too cunning, or have you seen through me all the time? have you discovered that i was really pitying the boy who was so fond of boyhood that he could not with years become a man, telling nothing about him that was not true, but doing it with unnecessary scorn in the hope that i might goad you into crying: "come, come, you are too hard on him!"
perhaps the manner in which he went to his death deprives him of these words. had the castle gone on fire that day while he was at tea, and he perished in the flames in a splendid attempt to save the life of his enemy (a very probable thing), then you might have felt a little liking for him. yet he would have been precisely the same person. i don't blame you, but you are a tommy.
grizel knew how he died. she found lady pippinworth's letter to him, and understood who the woman was; but it was only in hopes of obtaining the lost manuscript that she went to see her. then lady pippinworth told her all. are you sorry that grizel knew? i am not sorry—i am glad. as a child, as a girl, and as a wife, the truth had been all she wanted, and she wanted it just the same when she was a widow. we have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from god, but the right to ask that.
and to her latest breath she went on loving tommy just the same. she thought everything out calmly for herself; she saw that there is no great man on this earth except the man who conquers self, and that in some the accursed thing which is in all of us may be so strong that to battle with it and be beaten is not altogether to fail. it is foolish to demand complete success of those we want to love. we should rejoice when they rise for a moment above themselves, and sympathize with them when they fall. in their heyday young lovers think each other perfect; but a nobler love comes when they see the failings also, and this higher love is so much more worth attaining to that they need not cry out though it has to be beaten into them with rods. so they learn humanity's limitations, and that the accursed thing to me is not the accursed thing to you; but all have it, and from this comes pity for those who have sinned, and the desire to help each other springs, for knowledge is sympathy, and sympathy is love, and to learn it the son of god became a man.
and grizel also thought anxiously about herself, and how from the time when she was the smallest girl she had longed to be a good woman and feared that perhaps she never should. and as she looked back at the road she had travelled, there came along it the little girl to judge her. she came trembling, but determined to know the truth, and she looked at grizel until she saw into her soul, and then she smiled, well pleased.
grizel lived on at double dykes, helping david in the old way. she was too strong and fine a nature to succumb. even her brightness came back to her. they sometimes wondered at the serenity of her face. some still thought her a little stand-offish, for, though the pride had gone from her walk, a distinction of manner grew upon her and made her seem a finer lady than before. there was no other noticeable change, except that with the years she lost her beautiful contours and became a little angular—the old maid's figure, i believe it is sometimes called.
no one would have dared to smile at grizel become an old maid before some of the young men of thrums. they were people who would have suffered much for her, and all because she had the courage to talk to them of some things before their marriage-day came round. and for their young wives who had tidings to whisper to her about the unborn she had the pretty idea that they should live with beautiful thoughts, so that these might become part of the child.
when gavinia told this to corp, he gulped and said, "i wonder god could hae haen the heart."
"life's a queerer thing," gavinia replied, sadly enough, "than we used to think it when we was bairns in the den."
he spoke of it to grizel. she let corp speak of anything to her because he was so loyal to tommy.
"you've given away a' your bonny things, grizel," he said, "one by one, and this notion is the bonniest o' them a'. i'm thinking that when it cam' into your head you meant it for yoursel'."
grizel smiled at him.
"i mind," corp went on, "how when you was little you couldna see a bairn without rocking your arms in a waeful kind o' a way, and we could never thole the meaning o't. it just comes over me this minute as it meant that when you was a woman you would like terrible to hae bairns o' your ain, and you doubted you never should."
she raised her hand to stop him. "you see, i was not meant to have them, corp," she said. "i think that when women are too fond of other people's babies they never have any of their own."
but corp shook his head. "i dinna understand it," he told her, "but i'm sure you was meant to hae them. something's gane wrang."
she was still smiling at him, but her eyes were wet now, and she drew him on to talk of the days when tommy was a boy. it was sweet to grizel to listen while elspeth and david told her of the thousand things tommy had done for her when she was ill, but she loved best to talk with corp of the time when they were all children in the den. the days of childhood are the best.
she lived so long after tommy that she was almost a middle-aged woman when she died.
and so the painted lady's daughter has found a way of making tommy's life the story of a perfect lover, after all. the little girl she had been comes stealing back into the book and rocks her arms joyfully, and we see grizel's crooked smile for the last time.
