In that delightful and provoking book, "THE DOCTOR, &c.," Southey says:
"'Prefaces,' said Charles Blount, Gent., 'Prefaces,' according to this
flippant, ill-opinioned, and unhappy man, 'ever were, and still are, but
of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please,--let the
long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff;
presbytery, popery; and popery, presbytery again,--yet still the author
keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning
of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting
himself to his readers' mercy whether he shall be hanged or no, or else,
in a huffing manner, he appears with the halter in his hand, and
threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This,
with the excitement of friends to his undertaking, and some few
apologies for the want of time, books, and the like, are the constant
and usual shams of all scribblers, ancient and modern.' This was not
true then," says Southey, "nor is it now." I differ from Southey, in
thinking there is some truth in both ways of wearing the halter. For
though it be neither manly nor honest to affect a voluntary humility
(which is after all, a sneaking vanity, and would soon show itself if
taken at its word), any more than it is well-bred, or seemly to put on
(for it generally is put on) the "huffing manner," both such being truly
"shams,"--there is general truth in Mr. Blount's flippancies.
Every man should know and lament (to himself) his own
shortcomings--should mourn over and mend, as he best can, the
"confusions of his wasted youth;" he should feel how ill he has put out
to usury the talent given him by the Great Taskmaster--how far he is
from being "a good and faithful servant;" and he should make this rather
understood than expressed by his manner as a writer; while at the same
time, every man should deny himself the luxury of taking his hat off to
the public, unless he has something to say, and has done his best to say
it aright; and every man should pay not less attention to the dress in
which his thoughts present themselves, than he would to that of his
person on going into company.
Bishop Butler, in his "Preface to his Sermons," in which there is
perhaps more solid living sense than in the same number of words
anywhere else after making the distinction between "obscurity" and
"perplexity and confusion of thought,"--the first being in the subject,
the others in its expression, says,--"confusion and perplexity are, in
writing, indeed without excuse, because any one may, if he pleases, know
whether he understands or sees through what he is about, and it is
unpardonable in a man to lay his thoughts before others, when he is
conscious that he himself does not know whereabouts he is, or how the
matter before him stands. _It is coming abroad in disorder, which he
ought to be dissatisfied to find himself in at home._"
There should therefore be in his Preface, as in the writer himself, two
elements. A writer should have some assurance that he has something to
say, and this assurance should, in the true sense, not the Milesian, be
modest.
* * * * *
I have to apologize for bringing in "Rab and his Friends." I did so,
remembering well the good I got then, as a man and as a doctor. It let
me see down into the depths of our common nature, and feel the strong
and gentle touch that we all need, and never forget, which makes the
world kin; and it gave me an opportunity of introducing, in a way which
he cannot dislike, for he knows it is simply true, my old master and
friend, Professor Syme, whose indenture I am thankful I possess, and
whose first wheels I delight in thinking my apprentice-fee purchased,
thirty years ago. I remember as if it were yesterday, his giving me the
first drive across the west shoulder of Corstorphine Hill. On starting,
he said, "John, we'll do one thing at a time, and there will be no
talk." I sat silent and rejoicing, and can remember the very complexion
and clouds of that day and that matchless view: _Damyat_ and _Benledi_
resting couchant at the gate of the Highlands, with the huge Grampians,
_immane pecus_, crowding down into the plain.
This short and simple story shows, that here, as everywhere else,
personally, professionally, and publicly, reality is his aim and his
attainment. He is one of the men--they are all too few--who desire to be
on the side of truth more than to have truth on their side; and whose
personal and private worth are always better understood than expressed.
It has been happily said of him, that he never wastes a word, or a drop
of ink, or a drop of blood; and his is the strongest, exactest, truest,
immediatest, safest intellect, dedicated by its possessor to the
surgical cure of mankind, I have ever yet met with. He will, I firmly
believe, leave an inheritance of good done, and mischief destroyed, of
truth in theory and in practice established, and of error in the same
exposed and ended, such as no one since John Hunter has been gifted to
bequeath to his fellow-men. As an instrument for discovering truth, I
have never seen his perspicacity equalled; his mental eye is
_achromatic_, and admits into the judging mind a pure white light, and
records an undisturbed, uncolored image, undiminished and unenlarged in
its passage; and he has the moral power, courage, and conscience, to use
and devote such an inestimable instrument aright. I need hardly add,
that the story of "Rab and his Friends" is in all essentials strictly
matter of fact.
There is an odd sort of point, if it can be called a point, on which I
would fain say something--and that is an occasional outbreak of sudden,
and it may be felt, untimely humorousness. I plead guilty to this,
sensible of the tendency in me of the merely ludicrous to intrude, and
to insist on being attended to, and expressed: it is perhaps too much
the way with all of us now-a-days, to be forever joking. _Mr. Punch_, to
whom we take off our hats, grateful for his innocent and honest fun,
especially in his Leech, leads the way; and our two great novelists,
Thackeray and Dickens, the first especially, are, in the deepest and
highest sense, essentially humorists,--the best, nay, indeed the almost
only good thing in the latter, being his broad and wild fun; Swiveller,
and the Dodger, and Sam Weller, and Miggs, are more impressive far to my
taste than the melo-dramatic, utterly unreal Dombey, or his strumous and
hysterical son, or than all the later dreary trash of "Bleak House," &c.
My excuse is, that these papers are really what they profess to be, done
at bye-hours. _Dulce est desipere_, when in its fit place and time.
Moreover, let me tell my young doctor friends, that a cheerful face, and
step, and neckcloth, and button-hole, and an occasional hearty and
kindly joke, a power of executing and setting agoing a good laugh, are
stock in our trade not to be despised. The merry heart does good like a
medicine. Your pompous man, and your selfish man, don't laugh much, or
care for laughter; it discomposes the fixed grandeur of the one, and has
little room in the heart of the other, who is literally self-contained.
My Edinburgh readers will recall many excellent jokes of their
doctors--"Lang Sandie Wood," Dr. Henry Davidson our _Guy Patin_ and
better, &c.
I may give an instance, when a joke was more and better than itself. A
comely young wife, the "cynosure" of her circle, was in bed, apparently
dying from swelling and inflammation of the throat, an inaccessible
abscess stopping the way; she could swallow nothing; everything had been
tried. Her friends were standing round her bed in misery and
helplessness. "_Try her wi' a compliment_," said her husband, in a not
uncomic despair. She had genuine humor, as well as he; and as
physiologists know, there is a sort of mental tickling which is beyond
and above control, being under the reflex system, and instinctive as
well as sighing. She laughed with her whole body and soul, and burst the
abscess, and was well.
Humor, if genuine (and if not, it is not humor), is the very flavor of
the spirit, its rich and fragrant _ozmazome_--having in its aroma
something of everything in the man, his expressed juice; wit is but the
laughing flower of the intellect or the turn of speech, and is often
what we call a "gum-flower," and looks well when dry. Humor is, in a
certain sense, involuntary in its origin in one man, and in its effect
upon another; it is systemic, and not local.
Sydney Smith, in his delightful and valuable _Sketches of Lectures on
Moral Philosophy_, to which I have referred, makes a touching and
impressive confession of the evil to the rest of a man's nature from the
predominant power and cultivation of the ludicrous. I believe Charles
Lamb could have told a like, and as true, but sadder story. He started
on life with all the endowments of a great, ample, and serious nature,
and he ended in being little else than the incomparable joker and
humorist, and was in the true sense, "of large discourse."[1]
[1] Many good and fine things have been said of this wonderful
and unique genius, but I know none better or finer than
these lines by my friend John Hunter of Craigcrook. They are
too little known, and no one will be anything but pleased to
read them, except their author. The third line might have
been Elia's own:--
"... Humor, wild wit,
Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,--with clear sweet thought profound;--
_And stinging jests, with honey for the wound_,"--
The subtlest lines of ALL fine powers, split
To their last films, then marvellously spun
In magic web, whose million hues are ONE!"
I knew one man who was almost altogether and absolutely
comic, and yet a man of sense, fidelity, courage, and worth,
but over his entire nature the comic ruled supreme--the late
Sir Adam Ferguson, whose very face was a breach of
solemnity; I dare say, even in sleep he looked a wag. This
was the way in which everything appeared to him first, and
often last too, with a serious enough middle saw him not
long before his death, when he was of great age and knew he
was dying; there was no levity in his manner, or
thoughtlessness about his state; he was kind, and shrewd as
ever; but how he flashed out with utter merriment when he
got hold of a joke, or rather when it got hold of him, and
shook him, not an inch of his body was free of its power--it
possessed him, not he it. The first attack was on showing me
a calotype of himself by the late Adamson (of Hill and
Adamson; the Vandyke and Raeburn of photography), in the
corner of which he had written, with a hand trembling with
age and fun, "Adam's-sun _fecit_"--it came back upon him and
tore him without mercy.
Then, his blood being up, he told me a story of his uncle,
the great Dr. Black the chemist; no one will grudge the
reading of it in my imperfect record, though it is to the
reality what reading music is to hearing it.
Dr. Black, when Professor of Chemistry in Edinburgh
University, had a gruff old man as his porter, a James
Alston. James was one of the old school of chemistry, and
held by phlogiston, but for no better reason than the
endless trouble the new-fangled discoveries brought upon him
in the way of apparatus.
The Professor was lecturing on Hydrogen Gas, and had made
arrangements for showing its lightness, what our preceptor,
Dr. Charles Hope, called, in his lofty way, its "principle
of absolute levity." He was greatly excited, the good old
man of genius. James was standing behind his chair, ready
and sulky. His master told his young friends that the
bladder he had filled with the gas must, on principle,
ascend; but that they would see practically if it did, and
he cut the string. Up it rushed, amid the shouts and
upturned faces of the boys, and the quiet joy of their
master; James regarding it with a glum curiosity.
Young Adam Ferguson was there, and left at the end of the
hour with the rest, but finding he had forgotten his stick,
went back; in the empty room, he found James perched upon a
lofty and shaky ladder, trying, amid much perspiration, and
blasphemy, and want of breath, to hit down his enemy, who
rose at each stroke--the old battling with the new. Sir
Adam's reproduction of this scene, his voice and screams of
rapture, I shall never forget.
Let me give another pleasant story of Dr. Black and Sir
Adam, which our Principal (Dr. Lee) delights to tell; it is
merely its bones. The doctor sent him to the bank for
L5--four in notes, and one in silver; then told him that he
must be paid for his trouble with a shilling, and next
proceeded to give him good advice about the management of
money, particularly recommending a careful record of every
penny spent, holding the shilling up before him all the
time. During this address, Sir Adam was turning over in his
mind all the trash he would be able to purchase with the
shilling, and his feeling may be imagined when the doctor
finally returned it to his own pocket.
It only remains now for me to thank my cousin and life-long friend, John
Taylor Brown, the author of the tract on "St. Paul's Thorn in the
Flesh." I am sure my readers will thank me not less heartily than I now
do him. The theory that the thorn of the great apostle was an affection
of the eyes is not new; it will be found in "Hannah More's Life," and in
"Conybeare and Howson;" but his argument and his whole treatment, I have
reason to believe, from my father and other competent judges, is
thoroughly original; it is an exquisite monograph, and to me most
instructive and striking. Every one will ask why such a man has not
written more--a question my fastidious friend will find is easier asked
than answered.
* * * * *
This Preface was written, and I had a proof ready for his pencil, when I
was summoned to the death of him to whom I owe my life. He had been
dying for months, but he and I hoped to have got and to have given into
his hands a copy of these _Horae_, the correction of which had often
whiled away his long hours of languor and pain. God thought otherwise. I
shall miss his great knowledge, his loving and keen eye--his _ne quid
nimis_--his sympathy--himself. Let me be thankful that it was given to
me _assidere valetudini, fovere deficientem, satiari vultu, complexu_.
_Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum
corpore extinguuntur magnae animae; placide quiescas!_
Or, in more sacred and hopeful words, which, put there at my father's
request, may be found at the close of the paper on young Hallam: "O man
greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end; for thou shalt rest, and
stand in thy lot at the end of the days."
It is not for a son to speak what he thinks of his father so soon after
his death. I leave him now with a portrait of his spiritual lineaments,
by Dr. Cairns,--which is to them what a painting by Velasquez and Da
Vinci combined would have been to his bodily presence.
"As he was of the Pauline type of mind, his
Christianity ran into the same mould. A strong,
intense, and vehement nature, with masculine
intellect and unyielding will, he accepted the Bible
in its literal simplicity as an absolute revelation,
and then showed the strength of his character in
subjugating his whole being to this decisive
influence, and in projecting the same convictions
into other minds. He was a believer in the sense of
the old Puritans, and, amid the doubt and skepticism
of the nineteenth century, held as firmly as any of
them by the doctrines of atonement and grace. He had
most of the idiosyncrasy of Baxter, though not
without the contemplation of Howe. The doctrines of
Calvinism, mitigated but not renounced, and received
simply as dictates of Heaven, without any effort or
hope to bridge over their inscrutable depths by
philosophical theories, he translated into a
fervent, humble, and resolutely active life.
"There was a fountain of tenderness in his nature as
well as a sweep of impetuous indignation; and the
one drawn out, and the other controlled by his
Christian faith, made him at once a philanthropist
and a reformer, and both in the highest departments
of human interest. The union of these ardent
elements, and of a highly devotional temperament,
not untouched with melancholy, with the patience of
the scholar, and the sobriety of the critic, formed
the singularity and almost the anomaly of his
personal character. These contrasts were tempered by
the discipline of experience; and his life, both as
a man and a Christian, seemed to become more rich,
genial, and harmonious as it approached its
close."--_Scotsman_, October 20th.