The Narrative of John Smith, Page 2

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘GOUT OR RHEUMATISM, Doctor?’ I asked.1

  ‘A little of both, Mr Smith,’ said he.

  ‘And pray, sir, what is the exact difference between them?’ I continued, under a natural impulse to gain a little knowledge in exchange for the red-hot skewer which was transfixing my right foot.

  ‘Why,’ said my good physician, tapping his tortoise-shell snuff box,2 ‘the one is a punishment and the other is a misfortune – one is in the hands of Providence and the other in your own. You can’t command the weather which governs your rheumatism, but you can command your appetites which govern your gout.’

  ‘And so,’ said I, ‘this diabolical pain in my foot is the hybrid form of torture known as rheumatic gout which unites the disadvantages of both diseases to a dash of malignancy all its own.’

  ‘You are certainly suffering from rheumatic gout,’ observed Dr Turner.

  ‘And can only be cured by colchicum?’3

  ‘And alkalis,’ cried the doctor.

  ‘And flannel?’

  ‘And poppyheads,’ cried the doctor.4

  ‘And abstinence?’

  ‘And a week’s complete rest.’

  ‘A week!’ I roared, partly from emotion and, frankly, in response to a twinge which shot through my foot. ‘Do you seriously imagine, Doctor, that I am going to lie upon this sofa for a week?’5

  ‘Not a doubt of it,’ he said composedly. It is astonishing how calm and free from all human weakness these doctors can be, until their own turn comes round to be patients and then they raise up their voices and bellow with the best of us. ‘A week’s rest is essential to your cure.’

  ‘It’s very hard,’ I grumbled. ‘I am an open-air man, and have not spent a day indoors for five years.6 Surely if I get well enough to walk without pain I may go out?’

  ‘My dear Mr Smith,’ said Dr Turner, screwing up his stethoscope and picking up his very shiny broad-brimmed hat. ‘If you wish to run the risk of pericarditus, endo-carditus, embolism, thrombosis and metastatic abscess, you will go out. If not, you will stay where you are.’

  As an argument it was a ‘clincher.’ I felt that nothing short of a conflagration or an earthquake would move me off the sofa. The very names sent a pringling and a tingling through my system. ‘Not another word, Doctor,’ said I. ‘I take my complaints one at a time. I am not a selfish man. Why should I have all these when there are so many poor folk who have not an ache to their backs? But for goodness sake, what am I to do with myself? I shall die of ennui.’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ he answered cheerily, with his hand upon the handle of the door. ‘What is it the poet says? “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.”7 You must muster your books round you and have a literary gorge to atone for bodily abstinence. Or better still, get pen, ink and paper, and grind out something of your own. It has been said that every human being has within him the possibility of producing one good book. It is obviously untrue but all the same there may be some “mute inglorious Miltons”8 about, who might have blossomed into poets or novelists had they been planted in proper soils.’

  ‘Depend upon it,’ said I, sententiously, ‘if man has a talent it will find its way out of him. The frost of poverty will never nip it entirely.’9

  The Doctor let go of the handle and took a step back into the room, for he was a dogmatic little fellow, and as a natural consequence very intolerant of the dogmatism of others.

  ‘No, but that of wealth will,’ said he. ‘The want of money is the sun which shines on the needy genius and warms his latent powers into life. I consider the possession of a competence to be one of the greatest curses which can befall a young man of talent.’ He was so carried away by his subject that he took another step forward and plumped down into my easy chair. ‘How many a promising lad I have known in my student days, who had it in him to rise to the highest honours of his profession. Yet the possession of a miserable hundred or two hundred a year has removed the chief incentive to work and caused him to dawdle along in an ignoble dolce far niente, while penniless youths with half his brains, driven by the sharp spur of necessity, passed over his head and soon bade fair to have a yearly income which equalled his capital. If it applies to medicine it does so even more to all that I know of literature. The best and most successful writers seem to find the undertaking of a new work to be a painful effort. Carlyle talks of returning to his writing “not like a warrior going to the battlefield, but like a slave lashed back to his task.” If that is the feeling of an eminently successful man, how heavy and weary is the drudgery of the tyro who has no memories of former triumphs to bear him up. I tell you if a man is not forced to do it, he won’t do it, unless indeed he is some lusus naturae like Macaulay,10 who played with pens when he was in the nursery and preferred an ink pot to a Noah’s ark. A man with brains and a competence may fail, but a man with brains and poverty must succeed.’

  ‘So they said to Lord Southampton apropos of his son,’ I observed. ‘Do you remember his Lordship’s reply? “If Providence,” he said, “will find him the brains, I’ll answer for the poverty.”’11

  Dr Turner had a good hearty laugh which was as invigorating as his most tonic prescription. ‘He should have had the brains too with so witty a father,’ he remarked. ‘But I must positively hurry on. Look at this!’ He showed a long column of names. ‘They have all to be seen before I get home. Goodbye! Hope to find you better tomorrow. A little Irish whisky or a dry hock if you must have stimulants.’ He closed the door behind him and was gone.

  Now there’s a man, thought I, as I listened to the dying rumble of his carriage wheels, who does an infinite amount of good in the world. Let me reduce it to figures. Supposing him to see forty patients a day – which is a moderate computation enough for a man in good practice – that would come to 14,600 a year.12 And supposing him to be in active practice for thirty-five years, which again is a fair average, the total number of his visits and consultations would come to 511,000. Of these half million people the great majority, we will charitably suppose, have received benefits from his advice and prescriptions. What a colossal amount of good then will this one cheery unassuming mortal achieve before he finishes his career. Will his Grace of Canterbury do as much – or his Highness in the Vatican? ’Pon my word that square-edged professional hat should excite as much reverence as mitre or tiara, could we but look past the forms of things, and get at the things themselves.

  There is the true function of the seer which St Thomas of Chelsea13 preached so long and so earnestly. Blessings on his rugged shade, say I, wherever he may be! If ever a man realised the grand old type by walking straight and speaking fearlessly and practising himself what he preached to others it was surely the son of the stone mason of Ecclefechan. Of all sad literary episodes the attacks upon the great man’s memory when the earth was still brown upon his grave were to my mind the most distressing. The jackals were silent enough while the old lion lived, but when he lay powerless and speechless there was none too small to have a snap or a pinch at him.

  Oh these blow-flies of literature! What innate love of carrion is it which causes them ever to swarm upon the least healthy aspect of a great mind! Let a man have fifty of the noblest virtues and a single petty vice, straightaway the blow-fly critic comes along and settles upon that one failing and breeds such a spawn of pamphlets and articles that the casual reader can see no aspect of the man’s character save the one least favourable one. Addison was a tenderhearted estimable man – ‘but a drunkard’ buzzes the blow-fly. Burns was generous and noble-minded – ‘but a profligate!’ buzzes the blow-fly. Coleridge has left us words which breathe the very spirit of virtue. ‘Opium! Opium!’ drones the blow-fly. Carlyle was a latter-day prophet. ‘But look at his temper!’ cry innumerable swarms of blow-flies.

  His temper indeed! ‘Anger is one of the sinews of the mind, and he who hath it not has a maimed soul,’ says old Fuller.14 Who ever did any good in the worl
d without having some capabilities for righteous wrath within him? Do you suppose the Man from Nazareth was in the sweetest of tempers when he scourged the money lenders, or that his eyes did not flash and his colour heighten when he thundered out his Philippic against the Pharisees? Let us condone a little asperity in Carlyle then. A strong mind in a domestic circle is too often as overpowering as a loud instrument in a small chamber. It is not the instrument which is at fault but its environment. Who can read the exquisitely tender letters which passed between him and ‘his little life partner,’ when both were grey-headed, without feeling that their differences during forty years must have been small indeed to leave their love so fresh?

  ‘One way or another all the light and energy and order and genuine Thatkraft or available virtue we have does come out of us and goes very infallibly into God’s treasury, living and working through eternities there. We are not lost, not a solitary atom of us – of one of us.’ There, my blow-fly, when you can evolve a sentence like that you may show a little temper too!15

  A week upon a sofa! When we see in the morning paper that some tramp has been condemned to seven days’ hard labour for having no visible means of subsistence, or to fourteen for abstracting the said means from a baker’s counter, it seems a small enough matter to us. How about the tramp, however! Seven nights of plank bed, seven dinners of skilly,16 seven days of treadmill – the judge’s sentence offers to him a long perspective of misery. Looking forward from this melancholy Monday morning, my week of seclusion stretches to formidable proportions. No doubt it will seem small indeed to look back upon. ‘To those that enter,’ says Plutarch, ‘life seems infinite. To those that depart, nothing.’ Looking back after an aeon or two to our mortal existence what an infinitesimal speck of a thing it will appear!

  Yet I should be able to put in a week with a tolerable degree of comfort. As I pull myself up upon my sofa and take a good look round me I can find little fault with my surroundings. I have always, during a wandering, thriftless life, had an idea that I should like to find myself afloat in some snug little den in which I might duly enshrine my weather-beaten Lares and Penates. I had formed theories too of furnishing and of ornamentation which I have only now been able to put into practice. The choice of inanimate companions is to my mind only second to that of animate ones. Show me a man’s chambers and I’ll give you a pretty fair estimate of his intellect and capacity.17 What the eye rests upon, the mind will dwell upon. It is easier to think daintily in a parlour than in an attic.

  My sitting room is sixteen feet square – small enough for comfort and large enough for ample breathing space. Carpet, amber and black – none of your wishy-washy yellows, but a deep glowing lustrous amber, so that the two tiger skins upon it show up a shade or two lighter. Curtains to the broad bow window are of the same rich tint, and hang – not from a brazen abomination a foot or so deep – but from a thin square-edged gilt rod running round the whole apartment and serving to support the pictures as well. The walls are painted – not papered – the lightest seagreen, and the pictures in broad plain frames of dead gold lie flat against them, and not suspended at strange angles under the mistaken impression that they are rendered more visible thereby. The mantel-border corresponds in shade with the carpet and the white marble fireplace is paved with encaustic tiles which, though colourless themselves, will reflect a ruddy glow from the winter’s fire. So much for the inside lining of my sanctum. Then, in furniture, I am still true to my amber and black.

  Three straight-backed chairs in ebony frameworks and plush cushions are enough with two good deep armchairs of the same. A man, to get the full benefit of an armchair, should not sit on it but should rest upon his lower dorsal vertebrae. One broad comfortable sofa to which I am now confined. A sexagonal ebony table somewhere near the centre. Two smaller circular ones with amber plush tops which you may move about at will and litter with books and papers – or colchicum and liniments. No antimacassars! One homely wicker-work chair, with padded seat and back, gives an air of easy comfort and at the same time shows up the rest of the furniture as a patch sets off a woman’s complexion.

  As to pottery, now that artistic vases are so cheap and so beautiful there is no excuse for not having plenty of them. There is one sound rule! In selecting them I eschew Dresden China Shepherdesses or any other representation of animate beings. They all smack of vulgarity. Pure symmetrical or geometrical designs are more satisfying to the eye than any representation of natural objects can be. Every variety of spheroid body, curving handle and tapering neck is admissible, from the strictly classical to the borders of the grotesque. I am not afraid of having too many rich colours. Dame Nature mixes them all up on her great palette, whether in the evening sky or in the summer meadows, and yet no one has ever accused the good old lady of want of taste.

  In the matter of pictures, one is enough for each side of the room, but it should be a good one. The worst engraving of a first-class composition is infinitely superior to a second-class original. The subjects should be such as will inspire thought. Wilkie’s ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ or ‘Village Holiday’ are pictures full of life and vigour, but what earthly good is any man going to attain by a perpetual contemplation of them? Here are two etchings by Doré, a print of a dreamy allegorical picture of Noel Paton’s, a study by William Blake, and a fiery little engraving all bustle and life from one of De Neuville’s battle pieces.18 They are all good of their sort and all suggestive. Then I have a flat ebony mirror above the mantelpiece. When a room is pretty, one need not fear to have it doubled.

  And then the knick-knacks! Those are the things which give the individuality to a room – the flotsam and jetsam which a man picks up carelessly at first, but which soon drift into his heart. If it conduces to comfort to have these little keepsakes of the past before one’s eyes, then what matter how inelegant they may chance to be! When elegance and comfort clash, elegance must go to the wall. Mr Boffin’s philosophy was superior to that of his spouse.19 Elegance is simply comfort in its highest degree of development. The instant that it ceases to be comfortable it loses its whole raison d’être.

  All these things which are littered about or stacked in corners have a meaning in my eyes.20 When the old leaky ship comes lurching into port after her long voyage she bears with her whole colonies of barnacles which have attached themselves to her bottom. These things are the barnacles which cling on to me as a visible sign of my wanderings. That is a Roman amphora dredged up in the Bay of Baiae. Some gay old yachting party tumbled it overboard at a time when the Roman quidnuncs21 were gossiping over Julius Caesar’s descent upon the tin islands, and the men of science were adding the village of Londinium to their maps of the world. Here is an old blood-clotted scaling knife with which I have removed a good many of the sealskin jackets which Nature, the good old furrier, has provided for her Arctic children. Here is the head too of a bear that I shot, and the ear-bone of a whale that I helped to catch, and a necklace of cowrie shells that I purchased from the young lady who wore it somewhere up the ill-omened Bight of Benin. Here too are my Sierra Leone calabashes, and my old boxing gloves with the horsehair all sticking out. As I look at them a scene of thirty years ago stands out sharp and clear in my memory. In a dim dusty room stands a square little man facing a long thin one, like a flask of Hollands opposite a hock bottle.22 Each is drawing on a pair of boxing gloves, for the little man is lightweight champion of Scotland and the other is a raw-boned, loose-jointed student who is desirous of studying under so renowned a professor.23 Says the long man to himself, ‘Now, I am heavier and longer in the reach than this little fellow, and if I rush upon him hitting with both hands I can hardly fail to bear him down.’ It was an enterprising thought and the last one that the novice had for some little time, beyond a general impression that he had got entangled in the machinery of an ocean liner which whirled him here and whirled him there until a thousand horse-power piston came smack between his eyes and he learned that it was a vulgar error that stars cannot be seen in t
he daytime. ‘That’s what we calls the postman’s knock, sir,’ said the champion blandly. ‘You must try and not forget it.’24 I never have. I find that it does not require much effort of memory.

  By the way, all this digression upon furnishing and furniture is entirely involuntary and simply comes from my desire to make it clear that my week’s imprisonment was less arduous than it might have been. The room was bright and its contents after my own heart. My income is moderate but I have made economy one of the exact sciences and I think that I extract the greatest possible amount of comfort from the money, and yet may have a few pounds over at the year’s end to help any poor devil who is less lucky than myself. I confess to one little extravagance – and only one. You see those four squat oak cases, their well-stocked shelves lined with rich brown leather stamped with gold. Those books are the collection of a lifetime. Run your eye over them. Petrarch, Ruskin, Boswell, Goethe, Tourguenieff, Richter, Emerson, Heine, Darwin, Winwood Reade, Tertullian, Balzac – truly an august and cosmopolitan company.25

  There should be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Books. I hate to see the poor patient things knocked about and disfigured. A book is a mummified soul embalmed in morocco leather and printer’s ink instead of cerecloths and unguents. It is the concentrated essence of a man. Poor Horatius Flaccus26 has turned to an impalpable powder by this time, but there is his very spirit stuck like a fly in amber, in that brown-backed volume in the corner. A line of books should make a man subdued and reverent. If he cannot learn to treat them with becoming decency he should be forced.