In Arcus when the grass is high
And all the swathes in order lie,
And there's the bailiff standing by
A-gathering of the tithe.
So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke in the valley, and
from some of them rose a little fragrant smoke, and men began to be
seen.
I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the awakening of the
village, when I saw coming up to my field a man whom I had known in
older times, before I had left the Valley.
He was of that dark silent race upon which all the learned quarrel, but
which, by whatever meaningless name it may be called--Iberian, or
Celtic, or what you will--is the permanent root of all England, and
makes England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except perhaps in the
Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Everywhere else you will find it active
and strong. These people are intensive; their thoughts and their labors
turn inward. It is on account of their presence in these islands that
our gardens are the richest in the world. They also love low rooms and
ample fires and great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I believe, an
older acquaintance with the English air than any other of all the
strains that make up England. They hunted in the Weald with stones, and
camped in the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the oaks of the
upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up, up the straight paved road
from the sea. They helped the few pirates to destroy the towns, and
mixed with those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman villas, and
were glad to see the captains and the priests destroyed. They remain;
and no admixture of the Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin
and Norman conquerors, has very much affected their cunning eyes.
To this race, I say, belonged the man who now approached me. And he said
to me, "Mowing?" And I answered, "Ar." Then he also said "Ar," as in
duty bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of the Downs.
Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand;
and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, "kindly." For it is a good
custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a courteous
pastime; and though what he was after was money, and what I wanted was
his labor at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were
free men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting it. For the
dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the
Valley; and we cover them up with a pretty body of fiction and
observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not
begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom
with lesser men; but tradition makes them do business in this fashion:--
First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees him in his own
steading, and, looking at the pig with admiration, the buyer will say
that rain may or may not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder,
according to the time of the year. Then the seller, looking critically
at the pig, will agree that the weather is as his friend maintains.
There is no haste at all; great leisure marks the dignity of their
exchange. And the next step is, that the buyer says: "That's a fine pig
you have there, Mr. ----" (giving the seller's name). "Ar, powerful fine
pig." Then the seller, saying also "Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in
one cradle give each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I
say, admits, as though with reluctance, the strength and beauty of the
pig, and falls into deep thought. Then the buyer says, as though moved
by a great desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig, naming
half the proper price, or a little less. Then the seller remains in
silence for some moments; and at last begins to shake his head slowly,
till he says: "I don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He will
also add that a party only Wednesday offered him so much for the
pig--and he names about double the proper price. Thus all ritual is duly
accomplished; and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and in a
spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this phrase: "I'll tell you
what I _will_ do," and offers within half a crown of the pig's value,
the seller replies that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a
crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig is sold, and in
the quiet soul of each runs the peace of something accomplished.
Thus do we buy a pig or land or labor or malt or lime, always with
elaboration and set forms; and many a London man has paid double and
more for his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous
higgling. As happened with the land at Underwaltham, which the
mortgagees had begged and implored the estate to take at twelve hundred
and had privately offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a
sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a man in a
motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words, bought for two
thousand three hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they might
take his offer or leave it; and all because he did not begin by praising
the land.
Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me, and he went to get
his scythe. But I went into this house and brought out a gallon jar of
small ale for him and for me; for the sun was now very warm, and small
ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk some of this ale in mugs
called "I see you," we took each a swathe, he a little behind me because
he was the better mower; and so for many hours we swung, one before the
other, mowing and mowing at the tall grass of the field. And the sun
rose to noon and we were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only
for a little while, and we took again to our mowing. And at last there
was nothing left but a small square of grass, standing like a square of
linesmen who keep their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead
lying around them when the battle is over and done.
Then for some little time I rested after all those hours; and the man
and I talked together, and a long way off we heard in another field the
musical sharpening of a scythe.
The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the breadth of the valley;
for day was nearing its end. I went to fetch rakes from the steading;
and when I had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and all the
field lay flat and smooth, with the very green short grass in lanes
between the dead and yellow swathes.
These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them from the dew against our
return at daybreak; and we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could,
for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier also to
spread them after the sun has risen. Then we raked up every straggling
blade, till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding and the
carrying of the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was but a little
over two acres; for that is all the pasture on my little tiny farm.
When we had done all this, there fell upon us the beneficent and
deliberate evening; so that as we sat a little while together near the
rakes, we saw the valley more solemn and dim around us, and all the
trees and hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence. Then I
paid my companion his wage, and bade him a good night, till we should
meet in the same place before sunrise.
He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all our peasants do,
making their walking a part of the easy but continual labor of their
lives. But I sat on, watching the light creep around towards the north
and change, and the waning moon coming up as though by stealth behind
the woods of No Man's Land.
THE STUDENT LIFE
By WILLIAM OSLER
Sir William Osler, one of the best-loved and most influential
teachers of his time, was born in Canada in 1849. He began his
education in Toronto and at McGill University, Montreal, where he
served as professor of medicine, 1874-84. Wherever he worked his
gifted and unique personality was a center of inspiration--at the
University of Pennsylvania, 1884-89; at Johns Hopkins, 1889-1904.
In 1904 he went to Oxford as Regius Professor of Medicine; he died
in England in 1919.
Only our medical friends have a right to speak of the great
doctor's place in their own world; but one would like to see his
honorable place as a man of letters more generally understood. His
generous wisdom and infectious enthusiasm are delightfully
expressed in his collected writings. No lover of the essay can
afford to overlook _Æquanimitas and Other Addresses, An Alabama
Student and Other Biographical Essays, Science and Immortality and
Counsels and Ideals_, this last an anthology collected from his
professional papers by one of his pupils. He stands in the
honorable line of those great masters who have found their highest
usefulness as kindly counselors of the young. His lucid and
exquisite prose, with its extraordinary wealth of quotation from
the literature of all ages, and his unfailing humor and tenderness,
put him in the first rank of didactic essayists. One could get a
liberal education in literature merely by following up all his
quotations and references. He was more deeply versed in the
classics than many professors of Greek and Latin; the whole music
of English poetry seemed to be current in his blood. His essay on
Keats, taken with Kipling's wonderful story _Via Wireless_, tells
the student more about that poet than many a volume of biography.
When was biography more delightfully written than in his volume _An
Alabama Student?_
Walt Whitman said, when Dr. Osler attended him years ago, "Osler
believes in the gospel of encouragement--of putting the best
construction on things--the best foot forward. He's a fine fellow
and a wise one, I guess." The great doctor's gospel of
encouragement is indeed a happy companion for the midnight reader.
Rich in every gentle quality that makes life endeared, his books
are the most sagacious and helpful of modern writings for the young
student. As one who has found them an unfailing delight, I venture
to hope that our medical confrères may not be the only readers to
enjoy their vivacity and charm.
EXCEPT it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study
than a student. Shakespeare might have made him a fourth in his immortal
group. The lunatic with his fixed idea, the poet with his fine frenzy,
the lover with his frantic idolatry, and the student aflame with the
desire for knowledge are of "imagination all compact." To an absorbing
passion, a whole-souled devotion, must be joined an enduring energy, if
the student is to become a devotee of the gray-eyed goddess to whose law
his services are bound. Like the quest of the Holy Grail, the quest of
Minerva is not for all. For the one, the pure life; for the other, what
Milton calls "a strong propensity of nature." Here again the student
often resembles the poet--he is born, not made. While the resultant of
two molding forces, the accidental, external conditions, and the hidden
germinal energies, which produce in each one of us national, family, and
individual traits, the true student possesses in some measure a divine
spark which sets at naught their laws. Like the Snark, he defies
definition, but there are three unmistakable signs by which you may
recognize the genuine article from a Boojum--an absorbing desire to know
the truth, an unswerving steadfastness in its pursuit, and an open,
honest heart, free from suspicion, guile, and jealousy.
At the outset do not be worried about this big question--Truth. It is a
very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as
much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be
content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the
thirst--a thirst that from the soul must rise!--the fervent longing, are
the be-all and the end-all. What is the student but a lover courting a
fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp? In this very elusiveness is
brought out his second great characteristic--steadfastness of purpose.
Unless from the start the limitations incident to our frail human
faculties are frankly accepted, nothing but disappointment awaits you.
The truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor, the best that
the best men accept--with this you must learn to be satisfied, retaining
at the same time with due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger
portion. Only by keeping the mind plastic and receptive does the student
escape perdition. It is not, as Charles Lamb remarks, that some people
do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, but the
tragic fate is to reach, after years of patient search, a condition of
mind-blindness in which the truth is not recognized, though it stares
you in the face. This can never happen to a man who has followed step by
step the growth of a truth, and who knows the painful phases of its
evolution. It is one of the great tragedies of life that every truth has
to struggle to acceptance against honest but mind-blind students. Harvey
knew his contemporaries well, and for twelve successive years
demonstrated the circulation of the blood before daring to publish the
facts on which the truth was based.[D]
Only steadfastness of purpose and humility enable the student to shift
his position to meet the new conditions in which new truths are born, or
old ones modified beyond recognition. And, thirdly, the honest heart
will keep him in touch with his fellow students, and furnish that sense
of comradeship without which he travels an arid waste alone. I say
advisedly an honest heart--the honest head is prone to be cold and
stern, given to judgment, not mercy, and not always able to entertain
that true charity which, while it thinketh no evil, is anxious to put
the best possible interpretation upon the motives of a fellow worker. It
will foster, too, an attitude of generous, friendly rivalry untinged by
the green peril, jealousy, that is the best preventive of the growth of
a bastard scientific spirit, loving seclusion and working in a
lock-and-key laboratory, as timorous of light as is a thief.
You have all become brothers in a great society, not apprentices, since
that implies a master, and nothing should be further from the attitude
of the teacher than much that is meant in that word, used though it be
in another sense, particularly by our French brethren in a most
delightful way, signifying a bond of intellectual filiation. A fraternal
attitude is not easy to cultivate--the chasm between the chair and the
bench is difficult to bridge. Two things have helped to put up a
cantilever across the gulf. The successful teacher is no longer on a
height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles. The
new methods have changed all this. He is no longer Sir Oracle, perhaps
unconsciously by his very manner antagonizing minds to whose level he
cannot possibly descend, but he is a senior student anxious to help his
juniors. When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there is no
appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught--both are in the
same class, the one a little more advanced than the other. So animated,
the student feels that he has joined a family whose honor is his honor,
whose welfare is his own, and whose interests should be his first
consideration.
The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the
education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a
medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years
under teachers is but a preparation. Whether you will falter and fail in
the race or whether you will be faithful to the end depends on the
training before the start, and on your staying powers, points upon which
I need not enlarge. You can all become good students, a few may become
great students, and now and again one of you will be found who does
easily and well what others cannot do at all, or very badly, which is
John Ferriar's excellent definition of a genius.
In the hurry and bustle of a business world, which is the life of this
continent, it is not easy to train first-class students. Under present
conditions it is hard to get the needful seclusion, on which account it
is that our educational market is so full of wayside fruit. I have
always been much impressed by the advice of St. Chrysostom: "Depart from
the highway and transplant thyself in some enclosed ground, for it is
hard for a tree which stands by the wayside to keep her fruit till it be
ripe." The dilettante is abroad in the land, the man who is always
venturing on tasks for which he is imperfectly equipped, a habit of mind
fostered by the multiplicity of subjects in the curriculum: and while
many things are studied, few are studied thoroughly. Men will not take
time to get to the heart of a matter. After all, concentration is the
price the modern student pays for success. Thoroughness is the most
difficult habit to acquire, but it is the pearl of great price, worth
all the worry and trouble of the search. The dilettante lives an easy,
butterfly life, knowing nothing of the toil and labor with which the
treasures of knowledge are dug out of the past, or wrung by patient
research in the laboratories. Take, for example, the early history of
this country--how easy for the student of the one type to get a
smattering, even a fairly full acquaintance with the events of the
French and Spanish settlements. Put an original document before him, and
it might as well be Arabic. What we need is the other type, the man who
knows the records, who, with a broad outlook and drilled in what may be
called the embryology of history, has yet a powerful vision for the
minutiæ of life. It is these kitchen and backstair men who are to be
encouraged, the men who know the subject in hand in all possible
relationships. Concentration has its drawbacks. It is possible to become
so absorbed in the problem of the "enclitic de," or the
structure of the flagella of the Trichomonas, or of the toes of the
prehistoric horse, that the student loses the sense of proportion in his
work, and even wastes a lifetime in researches which are valueless
because not in touch with current knowledge. You remember poor Casaubon,
in "Middlemarch," whose painful scholarship was lost on this account.
The best preventive to this is to get denationalized early. The true
student is a citizen of the world, the allegiance of whose soul, at any
rate, is too precious to be restricted to a single country. The great
minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language,
and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company
of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the
cosmopolitan standpoint. I care not in what subject he may work, the
full knowledge cannot be reached without drawing on supplies from lands
other than his own--French, English, German, American, Japanese,
Russian, Italian--there must be no discrimination by the loyal student
who should willingly draw from any and every source with an open mind
and a stern resolve to render unto all their dues. I care not on what
stream of knowledge he may embark, follow up its course, and the
rivulets that feed it flow from many lands. If the work is to be
effective he must keep in touch with scholars in other countries. How
often has it happened that years of precious time have been given to a
problem already solved or shown to be insoluble, because of the
ignorance of what had been done elsewhere. And it is not only book
knowledge and journal knowledge, but a knowledge of men that is needed.
The student will, if possible, see the men in other lands. Travel not
only widens the vision and gives certainties in place of vague surmises,
but the personal contact with foreign workers enables him to appreciate
better the failings or successes in his own line of work, perhaps to
look with more charitable eyes on the work of some brother whose
limitations and opportunities have been more restricted than his own.
Or, in contact with a mastermind, he may take fire, and the glow of the
enthusiasm may be the inspiration of his life. Concentration must then
be associated with large views on the relation of the problem, and a
knowledge of its status elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the
slough of a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth, or he
may be led to make what he believes to be important discoveries, but
which have long been current coin in other lands. It is sad to think
that the day of the great polymathic student is at an end; that we may,
perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a Humboldt--men who
took the whole field of knowledge for their domain and viewed it as from
a pinnacle. And yet a great specializing generalist may arise, who can
tell? Some twentieth-century Aristotle may be now tugging at his bottle,
as little dreaming as are his parents or his friends of a conquest of
the mind, beside which the wonderful victories of the Stagirite will
look pale. The value of a really great student to the country is equal
to half a dozen grain elevators or a new trans-continental railway. He
is a commodity singularly fickle and variable, and not to be grown to
order. So far as his advent is concerned there is no telling when or
where he may arise. The conditions seem to be present even under the
most unlikely externals. Some of the greatest students this country has
produced have come from small villages and country places. It is
impossible to predict from a study of the environment, which a "strong
propensity of nature," to quote Milton's phrase again, will easily bend
or break.
The student must be allowed full freedom in his work, undisturbed by the
utilitarian spirit of the Philistine, who cries, Cui bono? and distrusts
pure science. The present remarkable position in applied science and in
industrial trades of all sorts has been made possible by men who did
pioneer work in chemistry, in physics, in biology, and in physiology,
without a thought in their researches of any practical application. The
members of this higher group of productive students are rarely
understood by the common spirits, who appreciate as little their
unselfish devotion as their unworldly neglect of the practical side of
the problems.