A BELOVED TEACHER

Otago Witness, Issue 4039, 11 August 1931, Page 8

A BELOVED TEACHER

By

W. H.

A friend has given me a sonnet entitled “ A Beloved Teacher.” It was written, so I am told, by one who from her infancy knew the beloved teacher intimately. It is full of great reverence and warm affection for him, and a simple trust. One of the recognised purposes of a sonnet, I believe, is to express deep personal feeling. Wordsworth, who was one of the greatest writers of sonnets in our language, uses it in this way. He wrote a sonnet in which he warns the critic not to be scornful of it, and not to be forgetful of its use by great men. With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound; A thousand times this, pipe did Tasso sound ; Camoens soothed with it an exile’s grief. Dante used it, so did Spenser, so did Milton. In his hand The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew Soul-animating strains—alas, too few ! The writer of the sonnet on “ The Beloved Teacher ” has for years been shut in by pain and weakness, during which her life has been like a li"ht shining in a dark place. I do not know, but I can well believe that her memories and musings, and her effort to express them, have often helped to pass the interminable, innumerable hours of the night. Tennyson found that poetic effort made pain more bearable. He says: But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise. Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. Wordsworth, too, so I remember as I write, has a sonnet on sleep. A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by, One after one; the sound of rain, and bees Murmuring: the fall of rivers, winds, and seas. Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky. By turns have all been thought of, yet I lie sleepless. Perhaps lie composed the sonnet on a sleepless night. If so, I wish he had had more wakeful nights. In Ross Chape], Knox College, there is a brass tablet, erected by students and friends to the memory of “ a revered teacher, an eager student all his days.’’ He is the same man as the beloved teacher of the sonnet; he is Dr William Salmond, the first professor of theology in the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, and thereafter for 27 years the professor of mental and moral philosophy in the University of Otago. Dr Salmond’s students will be glad to have their memories of some of the characteristic features of their old teacher revived by the sonnet; and many who never knew him may be glad to know what manner of man he was, who for nearly 40 years powerfully influenced the student mind of Otago. There are scores of teachers and clergymen in the Dominion, and a few lawyers.

who had their' eyes opened to things of the mind and spirit in Dr Salmond’s class room. Three of the professors of mental and moral philosophy in our University Colleges were students of his; his successor in Otago University, his son in Canterbury College, and the vice-chan-cellor of the University of New Zealand, in Wellington. I am not sure, but I think it probable that the professor of economics in Wellington was a student of Dr Salmond’s, as was also the newlyappointed professor in the Theological Hall, Knox College. Here is the sonnet: A BELOVED TEACHER. Philosopher and poet friend and seer! What depths of wisdom in those calm grey eyes; Grave, tender-hearted, quick to sympathise ; From suffering, patient; dauntless, without fear: How kindly were his judgments; but, severe On all things false, shams, smug hypoHe sought the truth, quick-piercing each disguise With logic’s rapier thrust, and vision clear. With faith in God’s Inscrutable decrees, He dwelt with Nature, for the peace she brings; Loved burbling brooks, tho glens, the hills, the trees: Contentment finding in sweet homely things. Heard, soul attuned the words of Socrates, As strains of music throbb’d from viol strings. The only physical feature of Dr Salmond referred to is “ those calm grey eyes.” All his friends remember those eyes, with a light in them, that shone through the spectacles he always wore; they did not shift, they rested on the one w’ith whom he spoke. He was a little man physically, slight and fraillooking, who walked very slowly, but was aways in time. When he.was young, his w’hite face was thrown into strong relief by hair that was as black as a raven’s wing. This gave him a look of delicacy. In Zion Chapel, on the common’s edge, there was a fat old woman, who purred with pleasure, as she listened to the preacher. And thumb round thumb went twirling faster, While she to his periods keeping measure. Maternally devoured the pastor. In his first congregation Dr Salmond had a sister of this good woman. She had a motherly, solicitous heart and an infelicitous tongue. One day she looked affectionately at her young minister and said to him: “ Puir young man, you’ve nae lang for this world.” He lived till he was over 80, and worked until he was nearly that age. He used to laugh, as he talked of his predicted early departure, and tell how some of his acquaintances in Dunedin, “ buirdly chiels,” used to chaff him good naturedly about his physique. He would add drily, “I have seen them all pass on in front, the last a few years ago.” Philosophy, I think, must be conducive to longevity. Dr Salmond was an octogenarian. So was Plato, and so was Immanuel Kant, both; philosophical friends of Dr Salmond. I know Plato’s appearance only from Raphael’s picture of him, but Kant, according to Hutchison Stirling, was a “ small, thin man scarcely five feet high, and a bundle of

bones; as the Scotch say, an auld-farrant little body.” I have sometimes thought that Dr Salmond’s long life and power of work were due to his vitality, his regular walking exercise, and his abstemious diet. I don’t know exactly what vitality means, but I am sure it means something. He took his daily walk in all. weathers, about the same time and distance. So did Kant; the villagers used to set their clocks by him. Plato, I believe, was the teacher of a peripatetic philosopher who walked as he talked. The doctors are all agreed that we eat too much; they say that we dig our graves with our teeth, and that brain workers would do better on two meals a day. Dr Salmond took one meal a day, which he divided into three small portions. Kant’s case, however, does not support the theory of the doctors and dietitians, . for he was fond of a good table, and liked a good sociable meal. Then there iy Bismarck; he also is against the doctors. He lived to be over 83, and he was not a two-meal-a-day man. His biographer tells us that, when Bismarck was once complaining much of a disordered digestion and loss of appetite, he partook freely of the following dishes one after the other: — Soup, eels, cold prawns, lobster, smoked meat, raw ham, roast meat, and pudding. The truth is that a man cannot go by the doctors and the dietitians; facts are so often against them. Whether it was philosophy, or vitality, or diet, or exercise, any., or all, or none of them, the fact remains that a man whose early demise was predicted, and who was never robust, lived till his eighty-second year, and worked without abatement of his efficiency till he was 78. He was “an eager student all his days ”; reading, thinking, writing and re-writing to‘ the very end. The food he gave his students was not “cauld kail het again”; it was freshly grown; beautifully prepared and served. He cultivated his style with as much care as his thought, and to the end he strove to present apples of gold in caskets of silver. Therefore he was “ a revered,” “ a beloved teacher.’’ It is an interesting fact that, when Dr Salmond had doffed the gown of the philosopher, and the still evening and twilight grey came steadily on, he turned again with zest to read theology, the subject of his youth and maturer manhood. In the sonnet Dr Salmond is addressed as philosopher and poet; it is said he attuned his ear to Plato. Plato, as everybody knows, was a philosopher, but Dr Jowett, his famous translator, says he was also a poet. “He is the poet or maker of ideas . . . he is no dreamer, but a great philosophical genius.” The two types of mind arer generally regarded as distinct, and as existing separately. The philosopher is a man with a quest and a question; the poet, a man with a vision and an answer. The one man argues and concludes; the other sees and says; the one man expresses himself in abstract terms, sometimes in jargon, the other in pictures and in music.

One of the first things I heard of Dr Salmond was that he was a careful student of Tennyson. That was in the clays before it was regarded as a sign of mental weakness to read' Tennyson, the days when Jowett, of Oxford, and Sidgwick, of Cambridge, read him and reverenced him. The last author I heard Dr Salmond speak of was Mrs Browning, whose poems—whose love sonnets especially—are said to stand in the front rank of our lyrical poetry. In his old age and retirement the little professor was reading with great enjoyment the poems of this woman, frail of body and made “ of spirit, fire, and dew.” Ido not know if Dr Salmond wrote verses, but I used to think, as I listened to him talk, that he had the poet’s gift of figurative pictorial speech. His reading of poetry would be one of the secrets of his <dyle, concerning which his friend and colleague, Dr Gilray, said to me that he did not know a man in New Zealand that wrote better —a style clearer, simpler, and more beautiful.

Dr Salmond’s special subject, of course, was philosophy— a subject of quest and questioning. The philosopher is a man who is engaged on the bases of things, the foundations of knowledge, of human nature, and the world. Indeed, by some people he is regarded as . undermining them; he denies the very existence of the external world, and questions the existence of his own self. Philosophy is often regarded as religiously unsettling. A fellow-student of mine, a member of the Roman Catholic Church, a man for whom I had great respect, uked to say that he thought philosophy should be studied only under the guidance of the Church. Bishop Moorhouse, a strong man, had some misgivings about setting up a chair of philoeophy« in the University of Melbourne. Dr Denney, principal of the Theological College, Glasgow, wrote of Sir Henry Jones: “He is far the most influential university teacher in Scotland; all our students are strongly impressed by him, and a good many who ought to be our students are diverted from the Church — and as I am convinced from the Gospel—by his influence.’’ I would say that Dr Salmond’s influence as a teacher had an exactly opposite effect. He had his own intellectual difficulties, however, as every thoughtful man has. In some verses 1 have seen concerning him, it is said: “ He battled with grim doubt on bended knees.” Some men do not fight their doubts and refuse to make their judgment blind; they give them an opiate and put them to sleep, or they bury them beneath busy days and years of practical work. Charles Kingsley engrossed himself in this way. An old friend and contemporary of Dr Salmond’s, occasionally a guest of mine, did the same thing; he took to administrative work, which reduces the mind to a machine, and destroys , its influence as a stimulus. I remember my guest coming back to us once, after a long afternoon with the friend of his youth. He was an amusing spectacle. He looked like‘a woman who has been assaulted by a strong wind from all points of the compass; her bonnet is awry and gives her a rakish look; her well-ordered hair has escaped and is over her eyes; her mantle is so blown and twisted that one cannot tell by looking at her which-way she is going, backwards or forwards. My venerable guest had been mentally buffeted. . In closing his account of the conversation, he said to me in broad Doric: “He’s a clever cratur that Salmond; his mind moves as actively as

it did when he was young, and he busiee himself with questions that I put aside long ago.” Probably, when the shadows were falling thick about his path, and he was waiting in pain and weakness for the breaking of the day, his mind was still wistful, as he looked out with those calm grey eyes upon the future. Kingsley once said: “God forgive me if I am wrong, but I look forward to death with a great and reverent curiosity.” Socrates was a teache r to whose words Dr Salmond listened with soul attuned, but he never used the Socratic method in his own teaching. The Socratic method is a method of question and answer, with another question arising out of the answer and so on indefinitely, until the idea that has been conceived, and lies generating in th"e_ mind, has been brought to the birth. Socrates was an obstetrical philosopher,.. and the learned call his method maieutic, the method of tjje midwife. Dr Salmond’s methods of teaching were those of impression and expression. Every week he required from his students a short paper on some question he propounded. The correction of these exercises must have been a very laborious task, but he regarded it as the most useful work that he did. His outstanding characteristics as a lecturer were lucidity and in terestingness. A woman student said to me that he could make the rough parts of the road plain. He knew how to rest his students. When I remarked that he had a natural gift of exposition, developed by years of preaching to a popular audience, she said, with a sigh: “ Oh, that all those professors had been preachers ”! A professor, however learned, who cannot teach is like a shopman whose shelves are filled with good things that he cannot sell. He’s a dud, and should be put on the shelf -with hie goods. Dr Salmond loved his daily walk in Leith Valley or on the Pine Hill road, because it brought him into fellowship with Nature and with man by the wayside.

He dwelt with Nature,; 1 for the peace sne brings ; Loved burbling brooks, the glens, the hills, the trees : Contentment finding in sweet homely things. I have heard him say that Leith Valley in its season was as beautiful as many a valley in Switzerland. In his walks he often fell into conversation with other men. He had many good and apposite stories, not anecdotes culled from newspapers, but hie own gleanings as he wandered along the way of life. He enjoyed his own stories and told them to an accompaniment of a light stream of high pitched laughter, like sounds high up in a steeple. There is scarcely room in a sonnet, with its 14 lines and its rigid form, for a full-length portrait, and nothing is said of Dr Salmond’s humour. He had a keen sense of the ridiculous, and laughed at himself as well as at, and with, others. All of us, even the most solemn and portentious, are absurd creatures. Dr Salmond felt ” the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world,” but fellowship with Nature brought him peace; and fellowship with man sometimes supplied him with the relief and laughter of the comedy of life. He used to tell a story of a man who joined him on one of his-walks. The man had been refreshing himself at a fountain that used to be near the foot of the hill, and in the course of tlie walk, becoming confidential, he said to the former Presbyterian professor that he was glad that he was an Anglican like himself and not one of they d Presbyterians. It is not likely that the little professor corrected his companion’s fact nor improved his adjective; he would probably simmer and chuckle as he walked on alone.

The sonnet speaks of his “ faith in God’s inscrutable decrees.” I heard the last sermon that Dr Salmond preached. 1 remember as-1 walked home with him from the college chapel how he enjoyed the quiet of the Sunday morning; a birght, windless, winter day. His text had been “ Have faith in God," the words of the Master to perplexed men. The day, the season, the venerable little man now grown frail, the text, and the sermon were all in perfect' harmony. I have no doubt that the sermon was autobiographic, as all good sermons are, and that it had beer, the struggle and aspiration of his life, in this baffling world, to obey the Master’s words, “ Have faith in God.”