SOWING WILD OATS.
The acquirements of science may be termed the armour of the mind;
but that armour would be worse than useless that cost us all we
had, and left us nothing to defend.—_Lacon._
We go our ways
With something you o’erlooked, forgot, or chose to sweep
Clean out of door; our pearl picked from your rubbish-heap.
You care not for your loss; we calculate our gain.
—_Browning._
Our doctor was now given wholly to the material side of his work. Young
men are an imitative order of beings, loving smartness, and desiring to
be in the foremost rank, whether in sports or study. The men of the
hospital found there was no road to distinction at St. Bernard’s except
that of novelty. There was nothing to be done on the old lines; to stay
there was to be content with the dead level of mediocrity. This section
of the school scoffed at religion, held faith to be a mark of imperfect
development; and in proportion as they grew more in the sort of
knowledge they thought it the proper thing to acquire, learned to
despise everything which of old had served to make the world wise and
good. Elsworth, for some time, kept himself aloof from this set, but
his abilities and his rising ambition made him a man to be competed for
and flattered. Gradually he became puffed up with a sense of the
importance of the things he had acquired. So far from thinking himself,
with Newton, a child on the sea-shore picking up shells of truth, he
fancied he was doing business in the deep waters, though he was only
stumbling amongst rocks. When this state of mind is reached, the man
becomes selfish and indifferent to the condition of his fellow-men, and
as God becomes a vanishing point Self looms large. All the virtues were
to these men mere conventionalities, and it was as absurd not to live
for one’s own advancement as for a giraffe to contravene the law of his
nature pressing him to crop the highest branches he could reach with an
increasing length of neck. So they craved after the best within their
reach, regardless of the poor wretches below them who had not learned
how to put forth their powers.
A purely scientific education has a tendency in the minds of the young
to produce this selfishness, and the wisdom of our forefathers is shown
in their having made the masterpieces of ancient literature the great
_pièces de résistance_ of the mental provender which they provided for
their alumni, because Literature ennobles and subdues Self, and
inspires with great and generous thoughts as does no other human
learning.
The hospital education of the present day is mere craftsmanship, and
should only be permitted in conjunction with a liberal university
training. The man who knows medicine and surgery only, however well he
may know both, has only half learned the business of a doctor.
The old custom of serving an apprenticeship to a general practitioner
had many advantages. Hospital work is so different from that in the
outer world in which the student will have to practise, that he is only
half educated when his curriculum is finished, and his diploma
obtained. One acquires a certain wholesale business air in dealing with
patients while attending the hospitals which is particularly
objectionable to patients in general; and till a man has had
considerable contact with private patients, he is far too rough and
ready in the sick-room to be very welcome there. Our every-day
complaints, it is evident, do not particularly interest him. He has
been dealing with “cases as is cases; none of your trumpery family
doctor business,” as Podger said. He has no respect for the miserable
creature who has only bruised himself, not fractured anything; or whose
mind is disturbed by family troubles and so misses his sleep, instead
of being the subject of the vastly more interesting cerebral disease.
In the latter case there is something pretty for his ophthalmoscope; in
the former your eyes are not worth looking at. He has got hold of the
notion that there can be nothing at all the matter with you if you have
no “physical signs.” For your true scientist rejects the imagination.
He wants facts he can handle and see. At heart he is a mere mechanic;
he must open the frog’s thorax, and actually see the heart beating;
must see with his own eyes the way carbonic acid acts on the living
blood corpuscle. When completely imbued with this spirit, as the human
mind can only entertain one great idea at a time, he acquires a
sovereign contempt for the men who imagine merely, and do not see,
taste, handle, and feel.
Linda had given herself up to the Socialist propaganda, and had quite
resolved to waste no part of her life in love affairs. “It was quite
time,” she declared, “that women should begin the work of setting to
rights a world that men had so grievously muddled up.” She had often
said more unwise things than this. She was, moreover, quite sincere,
and had refused several very eligible offers for her hand. A
bright-eyed, graceful woman like Linda, with her undoubted intellectual
powers and her nice little fortune, would naturally have had offers
before she reached her twenty-eighth year; but she loved the new
gospel, and honestly thought it her duty “to war against the Jahveh
worship introduced by a tribe of wandering Semites, and to substitute
the evangel of Humanity for the code of Sinai.” There are plenty of
such people about. It is not only the followers of Christ who sacrifice
their lives and substance for their faith; His enemies do that, and do
it honestly enough in their way. Were these people enemies of Christ?
They did not think so. They maintained that the greatest Socialist who
ever lived was Jesus of Nazareth, that He would have really conquered
the world had not the Church conquered Him.
Elsworth was not in love with Linda in any true sense. He was attracted
towards her by her brilliancy, wit, and mental powers. She was not
beautiful if you analysed her form and features,—not one of the latter
would have passed muster with an artist; yet, taken altogether, with
intellect and grace beaming from her eyes, and influencing every
movement, she was just the woman a clever man would fall in love with
while in her presence. But this love would not last long. Clever men
are usually held in bondage by coarser fetters than those of intellect.
Girton or Newham are not at all the places one would go to for the
purpose of seeking a wife: they can want no very high walls at either
to keep Romeo out. As this is not a love story, we do not propose to
analyse very minutely the sentiments that drew these young people
towards each other. Perhaps it is quite enough to say that Elsworth was
attracted by the very efforts she used to demolish the principles he
had brought to his hospital career. He felt that Christianity was not
intellectual enough for Western notions, however, it might include the
highest modern ideas of philanthropy. In face of that young girl and
her brother, he lacked the courage to take upon him the offence of the
Cross. Peter denied his master at a maid-servant’s question. Linda had
vanquished our young surgeon’s faith.
The athlete glories in his strength, the boisterous health of a
well-knit frame requires an outlet; hence the periodical rowdyism which
attacks students everywhere, especially those in training for callings
that will repress their ardents spirits all too soon. With Tom Lennard
and little Murphy, Elsworth was now almost nightly engaged in some wild
frolic or other. A curious mixture was in him—half hero, half imp; at
times he was given to periods of deep meditation on the highest matters
that can interest mankind, to speculation on questions which have
agitated the minds of philosophers, with a deep under-current of poetry
running through his soul. Yet with all this there was a surface
hot-headed foolishness which he neglected to restrain, leading him, at
the suggestion of the moment, into outrageous acts of purposeless
folly, if fun could be extracted from it. He wanted one thing—
“Discrimination—nicer power man needs
To rule him than is bred of bone and thew.”
Ever some new madness was attempted, some scandal enacted. The
favourite amusement just then was disturbing music-halls and theatres,
bar-rooms, and supper places in the West. The public seemed rather to
like the students’ riots, and the proprietors condoned for money
compensation what the police were only too anxious to punish.
One proprietor of a large and popular place of amusement did not see
these disturbances in just this amiable light, and had recently caught
and punished several young medicos who had made themselves obnoxious to
him. It was determined very secretly to combine the fighting men of
several hospitals into one grand attack on this man’s property.