Part 23

We would rather have written these lines than any amount of Aurora Leighs, Festuses, or such like, with all their mighty "somethingness," as Mr. Bailey would say. For they, are they not the "native wood-notes wild" of one of nature's darlings? Here is the indescribable, inestimable, unmistakable impress of genius. Chaucer, had he been a Galloway man, might have written it, only he would have been more garrulous, and less compact and stern. It is like Tam o' Shanter, in its living union of the comic, the pathetic, and the terrible. Shrewdness, tenderness, imagination, fancy, humour, word-music, dramatic power, even wit--all are here. I have often read it aloud to children, and it is worth any one's while to do it. You will find them repeating all over the house for days such lines as take their heart and tongue.

The author of this noble ballad was William Nicholson, the Galloway poet, as he was, and is still called in his own district. He was born at Tanimaus, in the parish of Borgue, in August 1783; he died circa 1848, unseen, like a bird. Being extremely short-sighted, he was unfitted for being a shepherd or ploughman, and began life as a packman, like the hero of "the Excursion and is still remembered in that region for his humour, his music, his verse, and his ginghams; and also, alas! for his misery and his sin. After travelling the country for thirty years, he became a packless pedlar, and fell into "a way of drinking;" this led from bad to worse, and the grave closed in gloom over the ruins of a man of true genius. Mr. M'Diarmid of Dumfries prefixed a memoir of him to the Second Edition of his _Talcs in Verse and Miscellaneous Poems_. These are scarcely known out of Galloway, but they are worth the knowing: none of them have the concentration and nerve of the Brownie, but they are from the same brain and heart. "The Country Lass," a long poem, is excellent; with much of Crabbe's power and compression. This, and the greater part of the volume, is in the Scottish dialect, but there is a Fable--the Butterfly and Bee--the English and sense, the fine, delicate humour and turn of which might have been Cow-per's; and there is a bit of rugged sarcasm called "Siller," wihich Burns need not have been ashamed of. Poor Nicholson, besides his turn for verse, was an exquisite musician, and sang with a powerful and sweet voice. One may imagine the delight of a lonely town-end, when Willie the packman and the piper made his appearance, with his stories, and jokes, and ballads, his songs, and reels, and "wanton wiles."

There is one story about him which has always appeared to me quite perfect. A farmer in a remote part of Galloway, one June morning before sunrise, was awakened by music; he had been dreaming of heaven, and when he found himself awake, he still heard the strains. He looked out, and saw no one, but at the corner of a grass field he saw his cattle, and young colts and fillies, huddled together, and looking intently down into what he knew was an old quarry. He put on his clothes, and walked across the field, everything but that strange wild melody, still and silent in this "the sweet hour of prime." As he got nearer the "beasts," the sound was louder, the colts with their long manes, and the nowt with their wondering stare, took no notice of him, straining their necks forward entranced. There, in the old quarry, the young sun "glintin'" on his face, and resting on his pack, which had been his pillow, was our Wandering Willie, playing and singing like an angel--"an Orpheus; an Orpheus."

What a picture! When reproved for wasting his health and time by the prosaic farmer, the poor fellow said: "Me and this quarry are lang acquant, and I've mair pleasure in pipin' to thae daft cowts, than if the best leddies in the land were figurin' away afore me."

$HORAE SUBECIVAE.

"With BRAINS, Sir."

"Multi multa sciunt, pauci multum."

"It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another thing to wish to be on the side of truth."--Whately.

[Greek]--Thucydides.

"The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind, only staves off our ignorance a little longer; as, perhaps, the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind, serves only to discover larger portions of it."--David Hume.

|Pray, Mr. Opie, may I ask what you mix your colours with?" said a brisk dilettante student to the great painter. "With _Brains_, Sir," was the gruff reply--and the right one. It did not give much of what we call information; it did not expound the principles and rules of the art; but, if the inquirer had the commodity referred to, it would awaken him; it would set him a-going, a-thinking, and a-painting to good purpose. If he had not the wherewithal, as was likely enough, the less he had to do with colours and their mixture the better. Many other artists, when asked such a question, would have either set about detailing the mechanical composition of such and such colours, in such and such proportions, rubbed up so and so; or perhaps they would (and so much the better, but not the best) have shown him how they laid them on; but even this would leave him at the critical point. Opie preferred going to the quick and the heart of the matter: "With _Brains_, Sir."

Sir Joshua Reynolds was taken by a friend to see a picture. He was anxious to admire it, and he looked it over with a keen and careful but favourable eye. "Capital composition; correct drawing; the colour, tone, chiaroscuro excellent; but--but--it wants, hang it, it wants--_That!_" snapping his fingers; and wanting "that," though it had everything else, it was worth nothing.

Again, Etty was appointed teacher of the students of the Royal Academy, having been preceded by a clever, talkative, scientific expounder of æsthetics, who delighted to tell the young men _how_ everything was done, how to copy this and how to express that. A student came up to the new master, "How should I do this, Sir?"

"Suppose you try." Another, "What does this mean, Mr. Etty?"

"Suppose you look."

"But I have looked."

"Suppose you look again." And they did try, and they did look, and looked again; and they saw and achieved what they never could have done, had the how or the what (supposing this possible, which it is not in its full and highest meaning) been told them, or done for them; in the one case, sight and action were immediate, exact, intense, and secure; in the other, mediate, feeble, and lost as soon as gained. But what are "_Brains?_" what did Opie mean? and what is Sir Joshua's "_That?_" What is included in it? and what is the use, or the need of trying and trying, of missing often before you hit, when you can be told at once and be done with it; or of looking when you may be shown? Everything in medicine and in painting--practical arts--as means to ends, let their scientific enlargement be ever so rapid and immense, depends upon the right answers to these questions.

First of all, "brains," in the painter, are not diligence, knowledge, skill, sensibility, a strong will, or a high aim, --he may have all these, and never paint anything so truly good and effective as the rugged woodcut we must all remember, of Apollyon bestriding the whole breadth of the way, and Christian girding at him like a man, in the old sixpenny _Pilgrim's Progress_; and a young medical student may have zeal, knowledge, ingenuity, attention, a good eye and a steady hand--he may be an accomplished anatomist, stethoscopist, histologist, and analyst; and yet, with all this, and all the lectures, and all the books, and all the sayings, and all the preparations, drawings, tables, and other helps of his teachers, crowded into his memory or his notebooks, he may be beaten at treating a whitlow or a colic, by the nurse in the wards where he was clerk, or by the old country doctor who brought him into the world, and who listens with such humble wonder to his young friend's account, on his coming home after each session, of all he had seen and done,--of all the last astonishing discoveries and operations of the day. What the painter wants, in addition to, and as the complement of, the other elements, is _genius and sense_; what the doctor needs to crown and give worth and safety to his accomplishments, is _sense and genius_: in the first case, more of this, than of that; in the second, more of that, than of this. These are the "Brains" and the "That."

And what is genius? and what is sense? Genius is a peculiar native aptitude, or tendency, to any one calling or pursuit over all others. A man may have a genius for governing, for killing, or for curing the greatest number of men, and in the best possible manner: a man may have a genius for the fiddle, or his mission may be for the tight-rope, or the Jew's harp; or it may be a natural turn for seeking, and finding, and teaching truth, and for doing the greatest possible good to mankind; or it may be a turn equally natural for seeking, and finding, and teaching a lie, and doing the maximum of mischief. It was as natural, as inevitable, for Wilkie to develop himself into a painter, and such a painter as we know him to have been, as it is for an acorn when planted to grow up into an oak, a specific _Quercus robur_. But _genius_, and nothing else, is not enough, even for a painter: he must likewise have _sense_; and what is sense? _Sense_ drives, or ought to drive, the coach; sense regulates, combines, restrains, commands, all the rest--even the genius; and sense implies exactness and soundness, power and promptitude of mind.

Then for the young doctor, he must have as his main, his master faculty, SENSE--Brains--[Greek], justness of mind, because his subject-matter is one in which principle works, rather than impulse, as in painting; the understanding has first to do with it, however much it is worthy of the full exercise of the feelings and the affections. But all will not do, if GENIUS is not there,--a real turn for the profession. It may not be a liking for it--some of the best of its practitioners never really liked it, at least liked other things better; but there must be a fitness of faculty of body and mind for its full, constant, exact pursuit. This sense and this genius, such a special therapeutic gift, had Hippocrates, Sydenham, Pott, Pinel, John Hunter, Delpech, Dupuytren, Kellie, Cheyne, Baillie, and Abercrombie. We might, to pursue the subject, pick out painters who had much genius and little or no sense, and _vice versâ_; and physicians and surgeons, who had sense without genius, and genius without sense, and some perhaps who had neither, and yet were noticeable, and, in their own side-ways, useful men.

But our great object will be gained if we have given our young readers (and these remarks are addressed exclusively to students) any idea of what we mean, if we have made them think, and look inwards. The noble and sacred science you have entered on is large, difficult, and deep, beyond most others; it is every day becoming larger, deeper, and in many senses more difficult, more complicated and involved. It requires _more than the average_ intellect, energy, attention, patience, and courage, and that singular but imperial quality, at once a gift and an acquirement, _presence of mind_--[Greek], or nearness of the [Greek], as the subtle Greeks called it--than almost any other department of human thought and action, except perhaps that of ruling men. Therefore it is, that we hold it to be of paramount importance that the parents, teachers, and friends of youths intended for medicine, and above all, that those who examine them on their entering on their studies, should at least (we might safely go much further) satisfy themselves as far as they can, that they are not below _par_ in intelligence; they may be deficient and unapt _qua medici_, and yet, if taken in time, may make excellent men in other useful and honourable callings.

But suppose we have got the requisite amount and specific kind of capacity, how are we to fill it with its means; how are we to make it effectual for its end? On this point we say nothing, except that the fear now-a-days, is rather that the mind gets too much of too many things, than too little or too few. But this means of turning knowledge to action, making it what Bacon meant when he said it was power, invigorating the thinking substance --giving tone, and you may call it muscle and nerve, blood and bone, to the mind--a firm gripe, and a keen and sure eye: _that_, we think, is far too little considered or cared for at present, as if the mere act of filling in everything for ever into a poor lad's brain, would give him the ability to make anything of it, and above all, the power to appropriate the small portions of true nutriment, and reject the dregs.

One comfort we have, that in the main, and in the last resort, there is really very little that _can_ be done for any man by another. Begin with the sense and the genius--the keen appetite and the good digestion--and, amid all obstacles and hardships, the work goes on merrily and well; without these, we all know what a laborious affair, and a dismal, it is to make an incapable youth apply. Did any of you ever set yourselves to keep up artificial respiration, or to trudge about for a whole night with a narcotized victim of opium, or transfused blood (your own, perhaps) into a poor, fainting, exanimate wretch? If so, you will have some idea of the heartless attempt, and its generally vain and miserable result, to make a dull student apprehend, a debauched, interested, knowing, or active in anything beyond the base of his brain--a weak, etiolated intellect hearty, and worth anything; and yet how many such are dragged through their dreary _curricula_, and by some miraculous process of cramming, and equally miraculous power of turning their insides out, get through their examinations: and then--what then? providentially, in most cases, they find their level; the broad daylight of the world--its shrewd and keen eye, its strong instinct of what can, and what cannot serve its purpose--puts all, except the poor object himself, to rights; happy is it for him if he turns to some new and more congenial pursuit in time.

But it may be asked, how are the brains to be strengthened, the sense quickened, the genius awakened, the affections raised--the whole man turned to the best account for the cure of his fellow-men? How are you, when physics and.physiology are increasing so marvellously, and when the burden of knowledge, the quantity of transferable information, of registered facts, of current names--and such names!--is so infinite: how are you to enable a student to take all in, bear up under all, and use it as not abusing it, or being abused by it? You must invigorate the containing and sustaining mind, you must strengthen him from within, as well as fill him from without; you must discipline, nourish, edify, relieve, and refresh his entire nature; and how? We have no time to go at large into this, but we will indicate what we mean: --encourage languages, especially French and German, at the early part of their studies; encourage not merely the book knowledge, but the personal pursuit of natural history, of field botany, of geology, of zoology; give the young, fresh, unforgetting eye, exercise and free scope upon the infinite diversity and combination of natural colours, forms, substances, surfaces, weights, and sizes--everything, in a word, that will educate their eye or ear, their touch, taste, and smell, their sense of muscular resistance; encourage them by prizes, to make skeletons, preparations, and collections of any natural objects; and, above all, try and get hold of their affections, and make them put their hearts into their work. Let them, if possible, have the advantage of a regulated _tutorial_, as well as the ordinary professorial system. Let there be no excess in the number of classes and frequency of lectures. Let them be drilled in composition; by this we mean the writing and spelling of correct plain Énglish (a matter not of every-day occurrence, and not on the increase)--let them be directed to the best books of the old masters in medicine, and _examined in them_,--let them be encouraged in the use of a wholesome and manly literature. We do not mean popular or even modern literature --such as Emerson, Bulwer, or Alison, or the trash of inferior periodicals or novels--fashion, vanity, and the spirit of the age, will attract them readily enough to all these; we refer to the treasures of our elder and better authors. If our young medical student would take our advice, and for an hour or two twice a week take up a volume of Shakspere, Cervantes, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Montaigne, Addison, Defoe, Goldsmith, Fielding, Scott, Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Helps, Thackeray, etc., not to mention authors on deeper and more sacred subjects--they would have happier and healthier minds, and make none the worse doctors. If they, by good fortune--for the tide has set in strong against the _literae humaniores_--have come off with some Greek or Latin, we would supplicate for an ode of Horace, a couple of pages of Cicero or of Pliny once a month, and a page of Xenophon. French and German should be mastered either before or during the first years of study. They will never afterwards be acquired so easily or so thoroughly, and the want of them may be bitterly felt when too late.

But one main help, we are persuaded, is to be found in studying--and by this we do not mean the mere reading, but the digging into and through, the energizing upon, and mastering--such books as we have mentioned at the close of this paper. These are not, of course, the only works we would recommend to those who wish to understand thoroughly, and to make up their minds, on these great subjects as wholes; but we all know too well that our Art is long, broad, and deep,--and Time, opportunity, and our little hour, brief and uncertain, therefore, we would recommend those books as a sort of game of the mind, a mental exercise--like cricket, a gymnastic, a clearing of the eyes of their mind as with euphrasy, a strengthening their power over particulars, a getting fresh, strong views of worn out, old things, and, above all, a learning the right use of their reason, and by knowing their own ignorance and weakness, finding true knowledge and strength. Taking up a book like Arnauld, and reading a chapter of his lively, manly sense, is like throwing your manuals, and scalpels, and microscopes, and natural (most unnatural) orders out of your hand and head, and taking a game with the Grange Club, or a run to the top of Arthur Seat. Exertion quickens your pulse, expands your lungs, makes your blood warmer and redder, fills your mouth with the pure waters of relish, strengthens and supples your legs; and though on your way to the top you may encounter rocks, and baffling _dêbris_ and gusts of fierce winds rushing out upon you from behind corners, just as you will find in Arnauld, and all truly serious and honest books of the kind, difficulties and puzzles, winds of doctrine, and deceitful mists; still you are rewarded at the top by the wide view. You see, as from a tower, the end of all. You look into the perfections and relations of things. You see the clouds, the bright lights, and the everlasting hills on the far horizon. You come down the hill a happier, a better, and a hungrier man, and of a better mind. But, as we said, you must eat the book, you must crush it, and cut it with your teeth and swallow it; just as you must walk up, and not be carried up the hill, much less imagine you are there, or look upon a picture of what you would see were you up, however accurately or artistically done; no--you yourself must do both.

Philosophy--the love and the possession of wisdom--is divided into two things, science or knowledge; and a habit, or power of mind. He who has got the first is not truly wise unless his mind has reduced and assimilated it, as Dr. Prout would have said, unless he appropriates and can use it for his need.

The prime qualifications of a physician may be summed up in the words _Capax, Perspicax, Sagax, Efficax, Capax_--there must be room to receive, and arrange, and keep knowledge; _Perspicax_--senses and perceptions, keen, accurate, and immediate, to bring in materials from all sensible things; _Sagax_--a central power of knowing what is what, and what it is worth, of choosing and rejecting, of judging; and finally, _Efficax_--the will and the way--the power to turn all the other three--capacity, perspicacity, sagacity, to account, in the performance of the outer world, in a new and useful form, what you had received from it. These are the intellectual qualities which make up the physician, without any one of which he would be _mancus_, and would not deserve the name of a complete artsman, any more than proteine would be itself if any one of its four elements were amissing.

We have left ourselves no room to speak of the books we have named at the end of this paper. We recommend them all to our young readers, Arnauld's excellent and entertaining _Art of Thinking_--the once famous Port-Royal Logic--is, if only one be taken, probably the best. Thomson's little book is admirable, and is specially suited for a medical student, as its illustrations are drawn with great intelligence and exactness from chemistry and physiology. We know nothing more perfect than the analysis, at page 348, of Sir H. Davy's beautiful experiments to account for the traces of an alkali, found when decomposing water by galvanism. It is quite exquisite, the hunt after and the unearthing of "_the residual cause_." This book has the great advantage of a clear, lively, and strong style. We can only give some short extracts.

"We may define the inductive method as the process of discovering laws and rules from facts, and causes from effects: and the deductive, as the method of deriving facts from laws, and effects from their causes."

There is a valuable paragraph on anticipation and its uses--there is a power and desire of the mind to project itself from the known into the unknown, in the expectation of finding what it is in search of.

"This power of divination, this sagacity, which is the mother of all science, we may call anticipation. The intellect, with a dog-like instinct, will not hunt until it has found the scent. It must have some presage of the result before it will turn its energies to its attainment. The system of anatomy which has immortalized the name of Oken, is the consequence of a _flash of anticipation_, which glanced through his mind when he picked up, in a chance walk, the skull of a deer, bleached by the weather, and exclaimed--'_It is a vertebral column!'"

"The man of science possesses principles--the man of art, not the less nobly gifted, is possessed and carried away by them. The principles which art _involves_, science _evolves_. The truths on which the sucess of art depends lurk in the artist's mind in an undeveloped state, guiding his hand, stimulating his invention, balancing his judgment, but not appearing in regular propositions."

"An art (that of medicine for instance) will of course admit into its limits, everything (_and nothing) else_ which can conduce to the performance of _its own proper work_; it recognises no other principles of selection."