Professor Calderwood is passionately fond of music, as those who visit at his house know. He is of opinion that there is a great deal of moral philosophy in "The Dead March in Saul." Once he said something to that effect in his class, adding enthusiastically that he could excuse the absence of a student who had been away hearing "The Dead March in Saul." After that he received a good many letters from students, worded in this way: "Mr. McNaughton (bench 7) presents his compliments to Professor Calderwood, and begs to state that his absence from the class yesterday was owing to his being elsewhere, hearing 'The Dead March in Saul.'" "Dear Professor Calderwood: I regret my absence from the lecture to-day, but hope you will overlook it, as I was unavoidably detained at home, practising 'The Dead March in Saul.' Yours truly, Peter Webster." "Professor Calderwood: Dear Sir, As I was coming to the lecture to-day, I heard 'The Dead March in Saul' being played in the street. You will, I am sure, make allowance for my non-attendance at the class, as I was too much affected to come. It is indeed a grand march. Yours faithfully, John Robbie." "The students whose names are subjoined thank the professor of moral philosophy most cordially for his remarks on the elevating power of music. They have been encouraged thereby to start a class for the proper study of the impressive and solemn march to which he called special attention, and hope he will excuse them, should their practisings occasionally prevent their attendance at the Friday lectures." Professor Calderwood does not lecture on "The Dead March in Saul" now.
The class of moral philosophy is not for the few, but the many. Some professors do not mind what becomes of the nine students, so long as they can force on every tenth. Calderwood, however, considers it his duty to carry the whole class along with him; and it is, as a consequence, almost impossible to fall behind. The lectures are not delivered, in the ordinary sense, but dictated. Having explained the subject of the day with the lucidity that is this professor's peculiar gift, he condenses his remarks into a proposition. It is as if a minister ended his sermon with the text. Thus: "Proposition 34: Man is born into the world (You have got that? See that you have all got it.) Man is born into the world with a capacity with a capacity " (Anxious student: "If you please, professor, where did you say man was born into?") "Into the world, with a capacity to distinguish " ("With a what, sir?") "with a capacity to distinguish
" (Student: "Who is born into the world?") "Perhaps I have been reading too quickly. Man is born into the world, with a capacity to distinguish between distinguish between " (student shuts his book, thinking that completes the proposition) "distinguish between right and wrong right and wrong. You have all got Proposition 34, gentlemen?"
Once Calderwood was questioning a student about a proposition, to see that he thoroughly understood it. "Give an illustration," suggested the professor. The student took the case of a murderer. "Very good," said the professor. "Now give me another illustration." The student pondered for a little. "Well," he said at length, "take the case of another murderer."
Professor Calderwood has such an exceptional interest in his students that he asks every one of them to his house. This is but one of many things that makes him generally popular; he also invites his ladies' class to meet them. The lady whom you take down to supper suggests Proposition 41 as a nice thing to talk about, and asks what you think of the metaphysics of ethics. Professor Calderwood sees the ladies into the cabs himself. It is the only thing I ever heard against him.
V. PROFESSOR TAIT
When Tait was at Cambridge, it was flung in the face of the mathematicians that they never stood high in Scriptural knowledge. Tait and another were the two of whom one must be first wrangler, and they agreed privately to wipe this stigma from mathematics. They did it by taking year about the prize which was said to hang out of their reach. It is always interesting to know of professors who have done well in Biblical knowledge. All Scottish students at the English universities are not so successful. I knew a Snell man who was sent back from the Oxford entrance exam., and he always held himself that the Biblical questions had done it.
Turner is said by medicals to be the finest lecturer in the university. He will never be that so long as Tait is in the natural philosophy chair. Never, I think, can there have been a more superb demonstrator. I have his burly figure before me. The small twinkling eyes had a fascinating gleam in them; he could concentrate them until they held the object looked at; when they flashed round the room he seemed to have drawn a rapier. I have seen a man fall back in alarm under Tait's eyes, though there were a dozen benches between them. These eyes could be merry as a boy's, though, as when he turned a tube of water on students who would insist on crowding too near an experiment, for Tait's was the humor of high spirits. I could conceive him at marbles still, and feeling annoyed at defeat. He could not fancy anything much funnier than a man missing his chair. Outside his own subject he is not, one feels, a six-footer. When Mr. R. L. Stevenson's memoir of the late Mr. Fleeming Jenkin was published, Tait said at great length that he did not like it; he would have had the sketch by a scientific man. But though scientists may be the only men nowadays who have anything to say, they are also the only men who can't say it. Scientific men out of their sphere know for a fact that novels are not true. So they draw back from novelists who write biography. Professor Tait and Mr. Stevenson are both men of note, who walk different ways, and when they meet neither likes to take the curbstone. If they were tied together for life in a three-legged race, which would suffer the more?