Spare Hours. Brown John
Spare Hours
AUTHOR’S 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 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
It only remains now for me to thank my cousin and life-long friend,
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: —
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
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 £5 – 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.