Part 1 (1/2)
Spare Hours.
by John Brown.
NOTE.
The author of ”Rab and his Friends” scarcely needs an introduction to American readers. By this time many have learned to agree with a writer in the ”North British Review” that ”Rab” is, all things considered, the most perfect prose narrative since Lamb's ”Rosamond Gray.”
A new world of doctors, clergymen, shepherds, and carriers is revealed in the writings of this cheerful Edinburgh scholar, who always brings genuine human feeling, strong sense, and fine genius to the composition of his papers. Dogs he loves with an enthusiasm to be found nowhere else in canine literature. He knows intimately all a cur means when he winks his eye or wags his tail, so that the whole barking race,-terrier, mastiff, spaniel, and the rest,-finds in him an affectionate and interested friend. His genial motto seems to run thus-”I cannot understand that morality which excludes animals from human sympathy, or releases man from the debt and obligation he owes to them.”
With the author's consent we have rejected from his two series of ”Horae Subsecivae” the articles on strictly professional subjects, and have collected into this volume the rest of his admirable papers in that work. The t.i.tle, ”Spare Hours,” is also adopted with the author's sanction.
Dr. Brown is an eminent practising physician in Edinburgh, with small leisure for literary composition, but no one has stronger claims to be ranked among the purest and best writers of our day.
_BOSTON, December 1861._
PREFACE.
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 fas.h.i.+ons vary as they please,-let the long peruke succeed the G.o.dly 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 a.s.surance that he has something to say, and this a.s.surance 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 pa.s.sage; 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 d.i.c.kens, 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 b.u.t.ton-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:-