the guild. There was a time, I confess, and it is within the memory of
some of us, when, like Falstaff, he was given to "taverns and sack and
wine and metheglins, and to drinkings and swearings and starings,
pribbles and prabbles"; but all that has changed with the curriculum,
and the "Meds" now roar you as gently as the "Theologs." On account of
the peculiar character of the subject-matter of your studies, what I
have said upon the general life and mental attitude of the student
applies with tenfold force to you. Man, with all his mental and bodily
anomalies and diseases--the machine in order, the machine in disorder,
and the business yours to put it to rights. Through all the phases of
its career this most complicated mechanism of this wonderful world will
be the subject of our study and of your care--the naked, new-born
infant, the artless child, the lad and the lassie just aware of the tree
of knowledge overhead, the strong man in the pride of life, the woman
with the benediction of maternity on her brow, and the aged, peaceful in
the contemplation of the past. Almost everything has been renewed in the
science and in the art of medicine, but all through the long centuries
there has been no variableness or shadow of change in the essential
features of the life which is our contemplation and our care. The sick
love-child of Israel's sweet singer, the plague-stricken hopes of the
great Athenian statesman, Elpenor, bereft of his beloved Artemidora, and
"Tully's daughter mourned so tenderly," are not of any age or any
race--they are here with us to-day, with the Hamlets, the Ophelias, and
the Lears. Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow and suffering our work is
laid, and this eternal note of sadness would be insupportable if the
daily tragedies were not relieved by the spectacle of the heroism and
devotion displayed by the actors. Nothing will sustain you more potently
than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may
be thought, the true poetry of life--the poetry of the commonplace, of
the ordinary man, of the plain, toilworn woman, with their loves and
their joys, their sorrows and their griefs. The comedy, too, of life
will be spread before you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor
at the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bottoms among his
patients. The humorous side is really almost as frequently turned
towards him as the tragic. Lift up one hand to heaven and thank your
stars if they have given you the proper sense to enable you to
appreciate the inconceivably droll situations in which we catch our
fellow creatures. Unhappily, this is one of the free gifts of the gods,
unevenly distributed, not bestowed on all, or on all in equal portions.
In undue measure it is not without risk, and in any case in the doctor
it is better appreciated by the eye than expressed on the tongue.
Hilarity and good humor, a breezy cheerfulness, a nature "sloping toward
the southern side," as Lowell has it, help enormously both in the study
and in the practice of medicine. To many of a somber and sour
disposition it is hard to maintain good spirits amid the trials and
tribulations of the day, and yet it is an unpardonable mistake to go
about among patients with a long face.
Divide your attentions equally between books and men. The strength of
the student of books is to sit still--two or three hours at a
stretch--eating the heart out of a subject with pencil and notebook in
hand, determined to master the details and intricacies, focussing all
your energies on its difficulties. Get accustomed to test all sorts of
book problems and statements for yourself, and take as little as
possible on trust. The Hunterian "Do not think, but try" attitude of
mind is the important one to cultivate. The question came up one day,
when discussing the grooves left on the nails after fever, how long it
took for the nail to grow out, from root to edge. A majority of the
class had no further interest; a few looked it up in books; two men
marked their nails at the root with nitrate of silver, and a few months
later had positive knowledge on the subject. They showed the proper
spirit. The little points that come up in your reading try to test for
yourselves. With one fundamental difficulty many of you will have to
contend from the outset--a lack of proper preparation for really hard
study. No one can have watched successive groups of young men pass
through the special schools without profoundly regretting the haphazard,
fragmentary character of their preliminary education. It does seem too
bad that we cannot have a student in his eighteenth year sufficiently
grounded in the humanities and in the sciences preliminary to
medicine--but this is an educational problem upon which only a Milton or
a Locke could discourse with profit. With pertinacity you can overcome
the preliminary defects and once thoroughly interested, the work in
books becomes a pastime. A serious drawback in the student life is the
self-consciousness, bred of too close devotion to books. A man gets shy,
"dysopic," as old Timothy Bright calls it, and shuns the looks of men,
and blushes like a girl.
The strength of a student of men is to travel--to study men, their
habits, character, mode of life, their behavior under varied conditions,
their vices, virtues, and peculiarities. Begin with a careful
observation of your fellow students and of your teachers; then, every
patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he
suffers. Mix as much as you possibly can with the outside world, and
learn its ways. Cultivated systematically, the student societies, the
students' union, the gymnasium, and the outside social circle will
enable you to conquer the diffidence so apt to go with bookishness and
which may prove a very serious drawback in after-life. I cannot too
strongly impress upon the earnest and attentive men among you the
necessity of overcoming this unfortunate failing in your student days.
It is not easy for every one to reach a happy medium, and the
distinction between a proper self-confidence and "cheek," particularly
in junior students, is not always to be made. The latter is met with
chiefly among the student pilgrims who, in traveling down the Delectable
Mountains, have gone astray and have passed to the left hand, where
lieth the country of Conceit, the country in which you remember the
brisk lad Ignorance met Christian.
I wish we could encourage on this continent among our best students the
habit of wandering. I do not know that we are quite prepared for it, as
there is still great diversity in the curricula, even among the leading
schools, but it is undoubtedly a great advantage to study under
different teachers, as the mental horizon is widened and the sympathies
enlarged. The practice would do much to lessen that narrow "I am of Paul
and I am of Apollos" spirit which is hostile to the best interests of
the profession.
There is much that I would like to say on the question of work, but I
can spare only a few moments for a word or two. Who will venture to
settle upon so simple a matter as the best time for work? One will tell
us there is no best time; all are equally good; and truly, all times are
the same to a man whose soul is absorbed in some great problem. The
other day I asked Edward Martin, the well-known story-writer, what time
he found best for work. "Not in the evening, and never between meals!"
was his answer, which may appeal to some of my hearers. One works best
at night; another, in the morning; a majority of the students of the
past favor the latter. Erasmus, the great exemplar, says, "Never work at
night; it dulls the brain and hurts the health." One day, going with
George Ross through Bedlam, Dr. Savage, at that time the physician in
charge, remarked upon two great groups of patients--those who were
depressed in the morning and those who were cheerful, and he suggested
that the spirits rose and fell with the bodily temperature--those with
very low morning temperatures were depressed, and vice versa. This, I
believe, expresses a truth which may explain the extraordinary
difference in the habits of students in this matter of the time at which
the best work can be done. Outside of the asylum there are also the two
great types, the student-lark who loves to see the sun rise, who comes
to breakfast with a cheerful morning face, never so "fit" as at 6 A. M.
We all know the type. What a contrast to the student-owl with his
saturnine morning face, thoroughly unhappy, cheated by the wretched
breakfast bell of the two best hours of the day for sleep, no appetite,
and permeated with an unspeakable hostility to his vis-à-vis, whose
morning garrulity and good humor are equally offensive. Only gradually,
as the day wears on and his temperature rises, does he become endurable
to himself and to others. But see him really awake at 10 P. M. while our
blithe lark is in hopeless coma over his books, from which it is hard to
rouse him sufficiently to get his boots off for bed, our lean
owl-friend, Saturn no longer in the ascendant, with bright eyes and
cheery face, is ready for four hours of anything you wish--deep study,
or
Heart affluence in discoursive talk,
and by 2 A. M. he will undertake to unsphere the spirit of Plato. In
neither a virtue, in neither a fault we must recognize these two types
of students, differently constituted, owing possibly--though I have but
little evidence for the belief--to thermal peculiarities.
THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA
_By_ STEPHEN LEACOCK
Nineteen hundred and ten was an important year. Halley's comet came
along, and some predicted the End of the World. And Stephen
Leacock's first _humorous_ book--_Literary Lapses_--was published.
First humorous book, I said, for Mr. Leacock--who is professor of
political economy at McGill University, Montreal--had published his
_Elements of Political Science_ in 1906.
It seems to me that I have heard that _Literary Lapses_ was
obscurely or privately published in Canada before 1910; that Mr.
John Lane, the famous London publisher, was given a copy by some
one as he got on a steamer to go home to England; that he read it
on the voyage and cabled an offer for it as soon as he landed. This
is very vague in my mind, but it sounds probable. At any rate,
since that time Professor Leacock's humorous volumes have appeared
with gratifying regularity--_Nonsense Novels, Behind the Beyond_,
etc.; and some more serious books too, such as Essays and _Literary
Studies_ and The _Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice_. One of the
unsolved riddles of social injustice is, why should Professor
Leacock be so much more amusing than most people?
We usually think of him as a Canadian, but he was born in England
in 1869.
Coming up home the other night in my car (the Guy Street car), I heard a
man who was hanging onto a strap say: "The drama is just turning into a
bunch of talk." This set me thinking; and I was glad that it did,
because I am being paid by this paper to think once a week, and it is
wearing. Some days I never think from morning till night.
This decline of the drama is a thing on which I feel deeply and
bitterly; for I am, or I have been, something of an actor myself. I
have only been in amateur work, I admit, but still I have played some
mighty interesting parts. I have acted in Shakespeare as a citizen, I
have been a fairy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and I was once one end
(choice of ends) of a camel in a pantomime. I have had other parts too,
such as "A Voice Speaks From Within," or "A Noise Is Heard Without," or
a "Bell Rings From Behind," and a lot of things like that. I played as A
Noise for seven nights, before crowded houses where people were being
turned away from the door; and I have been a Groan and a Sigh and a
Tumult, and once I was a "Vision Passes Before the Sleeper."
So when I talk of acting and of the spirit of the Drama, I speak of what
I know.
Naturally, too, I was brought into contact, very often into quite
intimate personal contact, with some of the greatest actors of the day.
I don't say it in any way of boasting, but merely because to those of us
who love the stage all dramatic souvenirs are interesting. I remember,
for example, that when Wilson Barrett played "The Bat" and had to wear
the queer suit with the scales, it was I who put the glue on him.
And I recall a conversation with Sir Henry Irving one night when he said
to me, "Fetch me a glass of water, will you?" and I said, "Sir Henry, it
is not only a pleasure to get it but it is to me, as a humble devotee
of the art that you have ennobled, a high privilege. I will go
further--" "Do," he said. Henry was like that, quick, sympathetic, what
we call in French "vibrant."
Forbes Robertson I shall never forget: he owes me 50 cents. And as for
Martin Harvey--I simply cannot call him Sir John, we are such dear old
friends--he never comes to this town without at once calling in my
services to lend a hand in his production. No doubt everybody knows that
splendid play in which he appears, called "The Breed of the Treshams."
There is a torture scene in it, a most gruesome thing. Harvey, as the
hero, has to be tortured, not on the stage itself, but off the stage in
a little room at the side. You can hear him howling as he is tortured.
Well, it was I who was torturing him. We are so used to working together
that Harvey didn't want to let anybody do it but me.
So naturally I am a keen friend and student of the Drama: and I hate to
think of it going all to pieces.
The trouble with it is that it is becoming a mere mass of conversation
and reflection: nothing happens in it; the action is all going out of it
and there is nothing left but thought. When actors begin to think, it is
time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Now in my day--I mean when I was at the apogee of my reputation (I think
that is the word--it may be apologee--I forget)--things were very
different. What we wanted was action--striking, climatic, catastrophic
action, in which things not only happened, but happened suddenly and all
in a lump.
And we always took care that the action happened in some place that was
worth while, not simply in an ordinary room with ordinary furniture, the
way it is in the new drama. The scene was laid in a lighthouse (top
story), or in a mad house (at midnight), or in a power house, or a dog
house, or a bath house, in short, in some place with a distinct local
color and atmosphere.
I remember in the case of the first play I ever wrote (I write plays,
too) the manager to whom I submitted it asked me at once, the moment he
glanced at it, "Where is the action of this laid?" "It is laid," I
answered, "in the main sewer of a great city." "Good, good," he said;
"keep it there."
In the case of another play the manager said to me, "What are you doing
for atmosphere?" "The opening act," I said, "is in a steam laundry."
"Very good," he answered as he turned over the pages, "and have you
brought in a condemned cell?" I told him that I had not. "That's rather
unfortunate," he said, "because we are especially anxious to bring in a
condemned cell. Three of the big theaters have got them this season, and
I think we ought to have it in. Can you do it?" "Yes," I said, "I can,
if it's wanted. I'll look through the cast, and no doubt I can find one
at least of them that ought to be put to death." "Yes, yes," said the
manager enthusiastically, "I am sure you can."
But I think of all the settings that we used, the lighthouse plays were
the best. There is something about a lighthouse that you don't get in a
modern drawing room. What it is, I don't know; but there's a difference.
I always have liked a lighthouse play, and never have enjoyed acting so
much, have never thrown myself into acting so deeply, as in a play of
that sort.
There is something about a lighthouse--the way you see it in the earlier
scenes--with the lantern shining out over the black waters that suggests
security, fidelity, faithfulness, to a trust. The stage used generally
to be dim in the first part of a lighthouse play, and you could see the
huddled figures of the fishermen and their wives on the foreshore
pointing out to the sea (the back of the stage).
"See," one cried with his arm extended, "there is lightning in yon sky."
(I was the lightning and that my cue for it): "God help all the poor
souls at sea to-night!" Then a woman cried, "Look! Look! a boat upon the
reef!" And as she said it I had to rush round and work the boat to make
it go up and down properly. Then there was more lightning, and some one
screamed out, "Look! See! there's a woman in the boat!"
There wasn't really; it was me; but in the darkness it was all the same,
and of course the heroine herself couldn't be there yet because she had
to be downstairs getting dressed to be drowned. Then they all cried out,
"Poor soul! she's doomed," and all the fishermen ran up and down making
a noise.
Fishermen in those plays used to get fearfully excited; and what with
the excitement and the darkness and the bright beams of the lighthouse
falling on the wet oilskins, and the thundering of the sea upon the
reef--ah! me, those were plays! That was acting! And to think that there
isn't a single streak of lightning in any play on the boards this year!
And then the kind of climax that a play like this used to have! The
scene shifted right at the moment of the excitement, and lo! we are in
the tower, the top story of the lighthouse, interior scene. All is still
and quiet within, with the bright light of the reflectors flooding the
little room, and the roar of the storm heard like muffled thunder
outside.
The lighthouse keeper trims his lamps. How firm and quiet and rugged he
looks. The snows of sixty winters are on his head, but his eye is clear
and his grip strong. Hear the howl of the wind as he opens the door and
steps forth upon the iron balcony, eighty feet above the water, and
peers out upon the storm.
"God pity all the poor souls at sea!" he says. (They all say that. If
you get used to it, and get to like it, you want to hear it said, no
matter how often they say it.) The waves rage beneath him. (I threw it
at him, really, but the effect was wonderful.)
And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still room, the climax
breaks. A man staggers into the room in oilskins, drenched, wet,
breathless. (They all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama
they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea.
"A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it."
And the lighthouse keeper knows that it is his only daughter--the only
one that he has--who is being cast to death upon the reef. Then comes
the dilemma. They want him for the lifeboat; no one can take it through
the surf but him. You know that because the other man says so himself.
But if he goes in the boat then the great light will go out. Untended it
cannot live in the storm. And if it goes out--ah! if it goes out--ask of
the angry waves and the resounding rocks of what to-night's long toll of
death must be without the light!
I wish you could have seen it--you who only see the drawing-room plays
of to-day--the scene when the lighthouse man draws himself up, calm and
resolute, and says: "My place is here. God's will be done." And you know
that as he says it and turns quietly to his lamps again, the boat is
drifting, at that very moment, to the rocks.
"How did they save her?" My dear sir, if you can ask that question you
little understand the drama as it was. Save her? No, of course they
didn't save her. What we wanted in the Old Drama was reality and force,
no matter how wild and tragic it might be. They did not save her. They
found her the next day, in the concluding scene--all that was left of
her when she was dashed upon the rocks. Her ribs were broken. Her bottom
boards had been smashed in, her gunwale was gone--in short, she was a
wreck.
The girl? Oh, yes, certainly they saved the girl. That kind of thing was
always taken care of. You see just as the lighthouse man said "God's
will be done," his eye fell on a long coil of rope, hanging there.
Providential, wasn't it? But then we were not ashamed to use Providence
in the Old Drama. So he made a noose in it and threw it over the balcony
and hauled the girl up on it. I used to hook her on to it every night.
A rotten play? Oh, I am sure it must have been. But, somehow, those of
us who were brought up on that sort of thing, still sigh for it.
AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION
_By_ HARRY MORGAN AYRES
This admirable summary of Anglo-American history first appeared
(February, 1920) as an editorial in the _Weekly Review_. It seemed
to me then, and still does, as a model in that form of writing,
perfect in lucidity, temperance and good sense. Mr. Ayres is a
member of the faculty of Columbia University (Department of
English) and also one of the editors of the _Weekly Review_.
Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Seneca seem to be his favorite
hobbies.
To sum up the gist of Anglo-American relations in half a dozen
pages, as Mr. Ayres does here, is surely a remarkable achievement.
The recently established chair in the history, literature, and
institutions of the United States which is to be shared among the
several universities of Great Britain, is quite different from the
exchange professorships of sometimes unhappy memory. It is not at all
the idea to carry over one of our professors each year and indoctrinate
him with the true culture at its source. The occupant of the chair will
be, if the announced intention is carried out, quite as often British as
American, and quite as likely a public man as a professor. The chief
object is to bring to England a better knowledge of the United States,
and a purpose more laudable can scarcely be imagined. Peace and
prosperity will endure in the world in some very precise relation to
the extent to which England succeeds in understanding us.
It is not an illusion to suppose that our understanding of the British
is on the whole better than theirs of us. The British Empire is a large
and comparatively simple fact, now conspicuously before the world for a
long time. The United States was, in British eyes, until recently, a
comparatively insignificant fact, yet vastly more complicated than they
imagined. Each, of course, perfectly knew the faults of the other,
assessed with an unerring cousinly eye. The American bragged in a nasal
whine, the Briton patronized in a throaty burble. Whoever among the
struggling nations of the world might win, England saw to it that she
never lost; your Yankee was content with the more ignoble triumphs of
merchandising, willing to cheapen life if he could only add to his
dollars. But the excellence of English political institutions and
methods, the charm of English life, the tremendous power of the Empire
for promoting freedom and civilization in the world, these are things
which Americans have long recognized and in a way understood. Anything
like an equivalent British appreciation of America in the large seems
confined to a very few honorable exceptions among them. Admiration for
Niagara, which is half British anyway, or enthusiasm for the "Wild
West"--your better-class Englishman always thrills to the frontier--is
no step at all toward rightly appreciating America.
To no inconsiderable extent this is America's own fault. She does not
present to the world a record that is easily read. It is obvious, for
instance--and so obvious that it is not often enough stated--that
America has and will continue to have a fundamentally English
civilization. English law is the basis of her law. English speech is her
speech, and if with a difference, it is a difference that the
philologist, all things considered, finds amazingly small. English
literature is her literature--Chaucer and Shakespeare hers because her
blood then coursed indistinguishably through the English heart they knew
so well; Milton, Dryden, and the Queen Anne men hers, because she was
still a part of England; the later men hers by virtue of affectionate
acquaintanceship and a generous and not inconsiderable rivalry. English
history, in short, is her history. The struggles of the thirteenth
century through which law and parliament came into being, the struggles
of the seventeenth century through which law and parliament came to
rule, are America's struggles upon which she can look back with the
satisfaction that some things that have been done in the world need
never be undone or done over again, whatever the room for improvement
may still be. Americans, no less than British, recognize that
independence was largely an accidental result of a war which sprang out
of a false theory of economics, but whose conclusion carried with it a
lesson in the management of empire which subsequent history shows the
British to have learned thoroughly and for the benefit of all concerned.
American independence, however, once established, pointed a way to
democratic freedom which England hastened to follow. This we know. And
yet--
And yet we allow these obvious and fundamental considerations to become
marvelously obscured. We allow England's failure to solve an insoluble
Irish problem to arouse in us an attitude of mind possibly excusable in
some Irishmen, but wholly inexcusable in any American. We allow a
sentimental regard for some immigrant from Eastern Europe, who comes to
us with a philosophy born of conditions that in English-speaking lands
ceased to be centuries ago, to make us pretend to see in him the true
expression of America's traditional ideals. We allow ourselves to be far
too easy with the phrase, "He is not pro-German, he is merely
anti-British." Why are they anti-British? Why should they be permitted
to make it falsely appear that recognition of the English basis of
America involves approval of everything that England in her history may
or may not have done? Why should they be allowed to pretend that
disapproval of some particular act of England justifies repudiation of
most of the things by virtue of which we are what we are? America from
the first has been part of the great English experiment--great because
it is capable of learning from experience.