Part 13

He was too active in his movements, mental as well as bodily, to be profound; he had not sufficient pause. Expediency with him did not go against the grain. In matters of religion he was fully aware that, though the thumb-screw, rack, and faggot had fallen into disuse, their office was exercised by public feeling as their successor, through which men stood in terror, not of their lives, but of their living. On these grounds only Donaldson quoted Scripture against Perowne in his controversy with him. This served his purpose, as he had no other moral philosophy to quote. But he did not give the slightest adhesion, really, to any kind of dogma. Science alone will reveal to great and modest minds the truth that the best of men cannot credit themselves with their own goodness They might as well assume that they made themselves; but religion has to teach this to common understandings.

I can assert of Donaldson that what he says in his “Reply” is most strictly true of himself—

“Doubtless it is the duty of Christians to be patient under injuries. But our Saviour has expressly said (Luke xvii. 3), ‘If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him.’ On this rule I shall always endeavour to act. I bear no malice against any man in this world. And those who are acquainted with my life, know that, when I have been wronged, I have always been willing to welcome the first advances towards reconciliation.”

I said to Donaldson once, “Why in your laborious efforts do you refute the fallacies of our Church by learned quotation, when they are so obvious to the simplest reason?” His reply was, “You forget that I am a Doctor of Divinity.”

Verily the divines are the most potent of metaphysicians. What beautiful systems have come down to them from the ages that produced a Pythagoras and an Epicurus! They now anticipate all things, interpolating Nature at every point with dogma, to satisfy the desires of the millions in every new generation!

One cannot but admit that metaphysicians are clever, but they have not the active industry of the experimental classes, who realize that there is nothing for them beyond the actual phenomena, although it demands the most effective operation of their intellects to arrange these in the order of their succession.

The why and the wherefore of the universe, and of Nature as its conductor, is, for a very simple reason, quite impenetrable; so completely so that the uneducated peasant will always know as much about it as the president of any learned society.

For the benefit of those who do not quite see this, and who think that things may be one day cleared up, on this one spot, it cannot be too definitively stated what a human intellect is at the utmost, and within what limits its activity lies.

This intellect is a mere organic tool. It can only operate on efficient causes, which here mean the moving functions of a universal machine in full activity already. It can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch; it can set the results of sensation in order, and observe them as a whole, and choose a line of action coincident with them. It is a mere instrument for effecting these ends.

This is the whole story of Nature. She reveals herself as a function, acting continuously before senses which are mirrors; and here lies the absolute limit. She reveals her Efficient Causes without affording the remotest glimpse of her Predisposing Causes.

L.

All know how tired the patrician gets of perpetual country life; and in that one respect I was a patrician. I had seen the things most worth seeing in the leading towns of Europe in my early days; and had a longing to witness how forty or fifty millions of people got on in the new country of Canada and the United States. I had a fancy to see Quebec. I had a grandfather who was on the staff of General Wolfe, and who saw him die. I had a great-grandfather, also a British officer, father of the above, one David Gordon, of Park, who was on duty at Halifax and there met his death and burial. Not that I would cross the waves on these accounts; I simply wanted change, so sought it in New-idea-land, U.S. I went to Philadelphia, thence to Columbus and Galena; from Galena round about, crossing the Mississippi on foot over its admirable winter pavement when boats change places with sledges. Then I went to Boston, thence to Quebec; from Quebec to New York, not to mention all the stoppages at intervening places; from New York, after not a few circumgyrations, I found my way back to London again.

I saw a large portion of the New World; it proved to be exactly what a hundred people had described already, and I do not care to add my account, only to make up a hundred and one American nights entertainments.

My ghost of travel not being yet laid, I took to the waves again and sojourned for a while at Jersey, where I had relatives and friends. At length I settled down in Grosvenor Street, Park Lane; when I was invited to take charge of the Earl of Ripon’s health at his villa on Putney Heath. After a lapse of time, I took a small house in Spring Gardens; later on, I built myself a villa on three acres of park land at Roehampton; then, still later on, I lived for some years at Parson’s Green, Fulham; and after some more movements, in separate years, now to Florence, now to German-Saxony, now to Venice and Rome, which last visit was eighteen years ago, I am settled, perhaps for good, in St. John’s Wood, where I am within an easy distance of Highgate Cemetery; so I hope a one-horse coach will end my journeys.

On looking for the moss I have gathered I find its quantity very small.

At my leisure I hope to fill up the gaps left between the skeleton outlines of my map of life—what remains to be said, extending over the nett balance of my years, of which I seem to have more to say than can reasonably be expected of a man past his eighty-third birthday. But I have been asked to write a memoir, first by one, then by another; by one who has long been, and who continues to be, the greatest master of heart-finding fiction in our time. One comes to me and asks how I get on with it. One reads a portion and calls it interesting; so, in a way, I am urged on with my task.

At Boston I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence; he formerly filled the United States Embassy at our Court. He was gentleman enough to have been an English duke. He had nothing to say about the old country that was not good and admiring, and told me many anecdotes of his own country people while in London.

Remarking on the strict etiquette observed by us, in never addressing a man you are not introduced to, he observed that he sat opposite to another every morning at breakfast in the Athenæum Club, for two years, without their exchanging a word, when, one day a carriage called to take him to a country house, and he found his silent companion already seated in it. In this way they became known to each other and entered into conversation. To give effect to his own story, a countryman of his own, he said, came to England and travelled all over it without introductions, and calling on him he said that he had not been able to speak to any one for months, and being one day on the chain pier at Brighton, he could bear it no longer, and observed to a gentleman there: “It’s a fine day, sir!”

But Mr. Lawrence, instead of condoling with him in his trials, replied: “I wonder at your impudence!”

Mrs. Lawrence did not appear to have been at all Anglicized; she rather looked for perfection in the English undergoing the process of Americanization. Sir Charles Lyell had been a good republican when in the new country, she said, and had greatly improved through his visits, but not so fully as she should have liked; and this she emphasized in good Yankee brogue. I was acquainted with Sir Charles; it was on his introduction that I came to know the Lawrence family; and I never saw a sign in him of such improvement. I was among his friends in Boston; on his introductions I saw Mr. Prescott, but he did not impress me.

My experience of Americans is that they are less advanced in the art of humbug, and therefore more earnest and sincere than the British. They, therefore, perform the duties of friendship with great thoroughness.

An interesting feature of immorality has often struck me: it consists in the never-failing breach of promise made in all the apparent sincerity felt by men who do not fail to keep their word. Such men—I could give the names of many for recognition—are very peculiarly framed. They are contented with the thanks one feels on a kindly proposition being made by them while they are with you; not caring to gather the gratitude attendant on the completion of a promise. I know men who play this skeleton part every day of their lives, and I class them with swindlers.

As one advances in life one gets to know the sowers of this harvest of tares, and to separate them from those of the wheat crops, without fouling one’s barn with the results of their labour; the effect of it being merely amusing at last. What cruelty it can inflict is practised on children and young people. They are born with implicit confidence: to them it acts educationally. It affords them a most thorough teaching of mistrust, which, more than any other branch of education, makes a bad citizen.

Some evils in life are unavoidable, but the training that comes from behind the falsehood habitually worn by an amateur friend is not one of these.

These moral ornaments of the social system have a game of their own to play; they know no other, and they play it with all the _finesse_ exercised over a game of whist.

This recalls Mr. Stillman to my mind, almost the only one of Rossetti’s set whom in this sense I can refer to with unmixed pleasure—Stillman, an American gentleman of high culture, and his faultless lady, a Greek by birth! He is now the _Times_ correspondent in Rome. I have met him and lost sight of him often, and when I meet him after an interval of years, he is always the same kind, attentive friend, though we have no interests in common beyond each other.

It having been made known at Boston that I had certain scientific tendencies, I was invited to deliver a lecture there. It was not the season for such a purpose, but the influence of the Lawrences sufficed to get an audience together of about fifteen hundred. I gave a choice of some subjects, as “The Correlation of Forces, Physical and Vital,” “The Cyclical Phenomena of the Universe,” and “Sleep, Dreams, Somnambulism, Sleep-talking, and the Mesmeric State.” The last subject was selected, and the lecture was received with great politeness by an attentive audience.

I had intercourse with several leading medical gentlemen at Boston, and was treated by them with much hospitality. They have a method of maintaining hospitals peculiarly their own, much of the money being subscribed out of their own pockets—all for the good of their science.

Dr. Warren was at that time the most noted physician in Boston. He gave me some brochures of his writing, one alluding to the reflex actions of the great sympathetic nerve. I found it very suggestive. He had taken the trouble to collect all that had been written on the sea-serpent, and to sift the statements of travellers by sea, with a resulting belief in its individuality.

It was at New York that I made the valued and intimate acquaintance of Mr. Bancroft, the historian, and his lady, a truly noble pair. Mr. Bancroft was a man of universal knowledge. This he showed conspicuously in a lecture, the title of which I have forgotten, but not the contents. Its purpose was to show the rapid and far-reaching advance that science had made up to that day.

I met again at New York that gifted artist, Mr. Lawrence, whom I had known in England. He preceded Richmond, and was his equal in drawing likenesses in chalks—works which are much prized—among them those of Thackeray, Tennyson, and other celebrities.

I visited Quebec, and at Lord Elgin’s, the governor-general’s, had the pleasure of meeting the present Lord Albemarle, then a youth. At the same party I became acquainted with Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, who, later, becoming a writer, I may as well depict the impression he made on me. He was a little man, his manner very gentle and sympathetic, with such amiability of countenance as to leave little room for intellectual expression, though no doubt his abilities fell little short of his good intentions.

I must mention the kindness shown me at New York by the eminent house of Middleton and Co., whose friendship in financial matters I have availed myself of to this day. The family belong to the West Indian islands and are British.

I pass over my explorations in the south and west; they were the same as other people’s, now well known to book-life; but I do not forget that I once walked across the Mississippi, a mile wide, on the ice, from Wisconsin into Minnesota. There is another thing ever to be remembered: while at Philadelphia I was treated with a dish of _terrapine_, a small sort of turtle, surpassing the gigantic species in flavour to such a degree as to wholly eclipse its merits. Why is it not imported? The very taste of it would raise the feeblest palate from the dead!

It is nearly forty years since I saw the United States: I have had plenty of time to think over what I thought of them then. The enthusiastic admirers of America are men who, being a little eminent before going, receive an ovation on their arrival. These men adore the worthy republicans, write about them, mention their names in print in the order in which they bestowed their attentions on them. If these men who, being a little eminent, went to ever-glorious France and received an ovation, which they don’t, their enthusiasm would alike tingle at the roots of their hair.

The Americans are nearly as good as older states, perhaps better than some. As three hundred years of civilization is, say, to six hundred, in that proportion they are as good as Europeans.

But the greatness of America has to come. Time will be when America, perhaps with Australian lands, will be arbiter of the civilized world—if it likes.

With some exceptions, if we take any one of the United States, it will be found to be monotonous; there is as much variety in an English county as in any one of these.

I compare the United States to a book: it is a new and cheap edition of England in one volume; price, one almighty dollar.

Altogether, there is no difference of moment between the best English and the best Americans, or the worst English and worst Americans.

Lawrence and Bancroft would have made good dukes!

I remember dining with a great merchant at Philadelphia, who told me that after receiving a classical education at the University of Dublin, he emigrated and became a clerk in an American house, and that after a time he saw his way to establish a business for himself, and had realized a large fortune. He told me this that he might add the singular assurance that he never once, in his almost lifelong residence in America, had an opportunity of showing how good his education had been, or of using a single Latin word.

LI.

It was after the good Lord Ripon’s death, which happened only too soon, that I went to Spring Gardens to live, purposing to resume my medical connection with the public, and to continue my duties as physician at the West London Hospital, to which I was attached. It then had not long been instituted, but it is now an extensive and flourishing establishment in a populous suburb, where it is much needed.

Mr. Cowell, a good and chivalrous benefactor of the sick poor, now senior surgeon of the Westminster Hospital, was resident surgeon of the West London at that time; and Mr. Bird, who, in conjunction with his father, was its founder, was one of the surgical staff.

The Countess Dowager of Ripon spent the season at Carlton Gardens, in the family mansion; and, continuing my professional engagement, after the earl’s death, to her, I had the pleasure of visiting her daily.

Lady Ripon was a woman who deserved to be remembered as long as the lives of the good and great have an interest for mankind, and let us hope that may be as long as the human race endures. Her belief was as implicit in a happy future, as it was in the morrow of every day; and she regulated her actions accordingly, as inseparable from the duties devolving on her responsible position.

There are many such women in every class who, if they changed places, would remain the same; but they have not an equal opportunity of making it manifest how true they are. The countess felt her position as the daughter and the wife of an earl; it made her feel the more for those whom circumstances made dependent on her. She had been a great heiress, born to the inheritance of Nocton and other estates, in Lincolnshire; and she firmly regarded herself as appointed by Heaven, or rather entrusted, to administer the large means that belonged to her for the good of those who had a claim on her for support.

When at Stutgard in 1833, during a wide continental tour, not so commonly made in those days as now, I became acquainted with Sir Edward Disbrowe, the British minister, and the other members of the embassy. These were Mr. Wellesley, the eldest son of Lord Cowley, and Mr. Gordon, the eldest son of Gordon, of Ellon Castle. At that house I met Count Pozzo di Borgo, and a young Buonaparte, who was a guest of the King of Wurtemburg.

Mr. Wellesley was quite a young man and very sociable; Mr. Gordon was yet younger, and of very engaging ways. Count Pozzo di Borgo was getting on in life, but very upright, and, with his orders on, made a brilliant show. He was perfectly free in his conversation, and spoke on political matters without any reserve. He remarked pretty plainly, but with a playful _naïveté_, to the young Prince Buonaparte, who was present, that if his advice had been followed in the days of Elba, the battle of Waterloo would not have been fought.

Some say how small the world is: certainly, in its fortuitous concourse of live atoms. There is not so much room but that many meet after long intervals again. So, after a lapse of some thirty years, the youthful Gordon, whom I knew so well as Sir Edward Disbrowe’s _attaché_, then as much boy as man, turns up again on a visit to Lady Ripon, with a grisly beard, and a face that showed no marks of having once been young. But this is not all: on a similar visit appeared two young ladies of fashion as daughters of Sir Edward Disbrowe. They were either babes or not born at the time when I knew their father so well.

The Gordons were cousins of Lady Ripon. A Colonel Gordon, the brother of Gordon who was soon to be Gordon of Ellon, was my particular friend as long as he lived. He had retired from active service on returning finally from India, but his desire was to die in the army, though, by not selling out, he was the loser by several thousand pounds.

I would mention one lady in particular, who consulted me while I was in Spring Gardens, because she was the Queen of Beauty at Lord Eglinton’s tournament, besides being the grand-daughter of Sheridan, and the wife of the Duke of Somerset. A beautiful youth, Lord Edward St. Maur, one afternoon drove up to my house and asked me if I would go with him to the Admiralty and see his mother, the duchess. It was on a slight matter affecting her daughter, and she afterwards asked me to see her son, Lord St. Maur. All this was easy work, but I was pleased at seeing another grandchild of Sheridan, for I had known Mrs. Norton over a quarter of a century before.

But the young man, Lord Edward, for him a sad fate was in waiting; more sad than that which later befel his elder brother.

The sons of great houses have few means of distinction, however ambitious, except in politics, which many of them abhor. They are shut out from the nobler professions. Lord Edward, a young man of courage, sought excitement in the jungles of India, and this ended in his being torn to pieces by a tiger.

Having an acute mind, which at all times lay parallel with truth, I was a good diagnostic of disease (agnostics were then in their infancy), and I was able to weigh a good many experiences under one in the same balance. I made this remarkably evident during the last illness of Lord Ripon, which was a very costly one, for all the celebrities in Physic were in attendance at Putney. Perhaps I took an unfair advantage, for I was so absolutely independent in my position that I could give an unbiassed opinion, while the physicians and surgeons, under the influence of expediency, agreed on a still favourable view of the case. That such could happen is the fault of the patient’s friends. If the physicians abandon hope while there is life, others are uselessly called in. After they left, with the assurance that the patient was all right, Lord Goderich and Sir Charles Douglas, who was a friend of the family, asked me to take a turn with them in the grounds, wishing to hear my opinion, which I frankly gave, to the effect that in a fortnight the earl would no longer be living.

But I was wrong, too, in my way, for he lived just seventeen days from that time.

LII.

While in Spring Gardens—this was in 1860—I got together my researches on “The Bones in Scrofula,” which Dr. Baly presented to the Medico-Chirurgical Society, before which it was read, and a very full abstract of it was published in their “Proceedings,” and in all the medical journals of the day.

Lord Goderich, a young man of great promise, then member for one of the Yorkshire Ridings, succeeded his father in the House of Lords, very unwillingly, as he liked the Commons better, and he humorously declared himself disfranchised. Three months later his uncle, Earl de Grey, died, whose title he took, and he then became sole owner of Studley Royal, which before him belonged to the two brothers.

Lord Goderich was married to a young lady who, to save time, I may say was possessed of every charm—animation, beauty, simplicity, humour, a hearty ringing laugh—and these shaped themselves into countless groups, all equally pleasing.

Now that I am unable to visit her, I have her promise of seeing her yet again, from time to time, and this alone is enough to keep me alive.

The present earl, now Marquis of Ripon, soon became a useful public servant under Lord Palmerston, as an under-secretary, first of the Local Government Board, then of the India Office, and rose ultimately to be Viceroy of India, by the Queen’s express wish, her Majesty having known him when he was a child, and the playmate of the Prince of Wales. He has always been in sympathy with the classes beneath him, and his strictly conscientious character affords the clue to every action of his life.

He is a descendant both of Hampden and Cromwell. The head representative of the Cromwell family was Mr. Field, in my time the apothecary to Christ’s Hospital; the next is the Count of Palavicini, of Genoa; and then comes the Marquis of Ripon.

The Fields, I believe, are the same as those of Ozokerit fame.

In London I frequented the laboratory of my old friend, Dr. Marcet, at the Westminster Hospital, where he was the chemical professor; and I attended the meetings of the Chemical Society, which I belonged to, and there met again Dr. Faraday, whose lectures I had followed in early life. I had met him, too, at Brighton, at a scientific meeting. He was then asked to say something by way of an address, which he did, but told us that he was so accustomed to speak with apparatus in his hands, that he found it difficult to say anything without it. At that time I met Mr. Davies Gilbert. Seated by him and talking with him on the advanced state of knowledge, he remarked that all that was known of the sciences in his early days was contained in Boyle’s Dictionary. This was at a dinner given to the great geologist, Gideon Mantell.