John Bryce

JOHN BRYCE, first incumbent

of the Bradley chair of English

literature at the University of Glasgow, has died after a short illness at the age of 91. Over four

decades he had been a memorable and revered teacher. Among colleagues he was unfailingly friendly and modest, an inexhaustible source of scholarly information and wise - often firm - counsel. Above all, in an academic climate of increasingly drastic change, he was faithful to the symbols of collegiality and fiercely protective of the idea of the Scottish University.

From Hamilton Academy, where he had been Dux, he enrolled in the Faculty of Arts, Glasgow University, in 1927. He graduated with a First in English language and literature in 1932. Awarded the Clark scholarship for four years, he chose to study for the first year at Heidelberg, then he transferred to the Sorbonne and spent the last two years at Oriel College, Oxford. There he read John Gay and did research on Spenser and medieval romance.

The urgent need for surgery on his eyes compelled him to resign from the teaching post he had taken up at Durham University in 1936. It was 1938, after some hardship, before he was able to join the English department in Glasgow underProfessor Peter Alexander. There he served for the rest of his career.

Promoted to senior lecturer in 1955, and appointed to the Bradley chair in 1965, he retired in 1979. With Peter Alexander's successor to the regius chair, Peter Butter, he established a cordial working and personal relationship.

Peter Alexander's life's-work on his famous edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare was an industry which throbbed away at the very heart of the department's life for three decades. Everyone, and not least Bryce, was to some degree a Shakespearean. Perhaps following the example of J S Smart's work on Milton, rather than that fine scholar's Shakespearean legacy, John Bryce devoted himself to Milton, while maintaining his study of Spenser. But indeed all of seventeenth-century literature was gathered into the fold of his scholarship and teaching. Yet this was not time of exclusive specialisms, and there was little in English poetry up to the twentieth century on which Bryce could not comment with informed sensitivity.

He had that unmistakable inwardness with a text that comes from listening to a voice speaking soundlessly the words on the page. One wanted so much to listen like that, to know like that the one who speaks. This did not in the least lack thorough rational support, but it was also a ''presence'' which ensured that it survived that ''solipsism without a subject'' with which the structuralisms conjured.

For Professor Andrew Skinner, as general editor of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith to enlist John Bryce as editor of Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric was the happiest of decisions, and as both testified, a partnership of ''determined energy'' and mutual respect. These students' notes of Smith's lost lectures discovered at an Aberdeenshire sale by Professor John Lothian in 1958 made an objet trouve whose preparation for publication seemed the trickiest of editorial tasks.

Volume IV, entitled Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was published in 1983. Succeeding Lothian's 1963 publication of his find, Bryce provides the definitive edition of the sole versions of the lectures Smith asked to be destroyed. His introduction is not only a model of wide and scrupulous scholarship but relates the whole concern with commu-nication to other aspects of Smith's philosophy and the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of Scotland's great century. One of the many attractions of the commentary is the curious felicity of the quotations - his use, for example, of Johnson's wry editorial complaint that ''what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always to hand''.

Everyone who encountered John Bryce marvelled at the apparent absence of any awareness of the difficulties and dangers which must have attended his defective sight. Nearly blind with cataracts at one stage, he continued to walk daily from north of the Kelvin, across Great Western Road, up to the university, and home again. He told me he had landmarks and intervals measured in paces. But he no longer actually counted. ''Oh, I just remember,'' he said - as, given the date of a journal article, he'd tell you the volume number.

It all manifestly had needed improvisation, memory, intelligence - an utterly indomitable intelligence. So it was all a set of improvisations to deal with a frightening disability. But there in the lecture room it gave a fluency to his lectures and an order which allowed him to move freely between text and commentary in a discourse uninterrupted by reference to books or notes. Those seamless disquisitions were sensitive, profound, earnest, gripping - and completely unselfconscious. One connects ''The wounded surgeon . . . The sharp compassion of the healer's art''. It is not enough. The metaphor simply comes between us and the extraordinary talent we came scarcely to notice.

John Bryce's wife, Margery, died in the early 1980s and Lynedoch Nursing Home made the last eight years of his life comfortable. He liked dining out with his friend, the journalist Jack House. Lynedoch gave John Bryce, in his own room, the quiet he still cherished. He used it for serious reading as he laboured, still with zest and purpose over the past two years, to put the case for Macbeth as ''the most satisfactory of the tragedies''. Quiz, Scrabble, literary criticism. ''The passions of men (as Wordsworth said) do immeasurably transcend their objects.'' John Bryce did not really hide that talent. He just thought no-one would notice.

John Cameron Bryce, emeritus professor of English literature at Glasgow University; born August 5, 1909, died March 7, 2001

Jack Rillie