Chapter 25
He stayed in Edinburgh eight years, and it was during his time here that he saw the interest of all Europe in surgical questions quickened by the Franco-German war, and had to realize how incomplete as yet was his victory over the forces of destruction. Some enterprising British and American doctors, who volunteered for field-service, came to him for advice, and he wrote a series of short instructions for their guidance; but he soon learnt how difficult it was to carry out his methods in the field, where appliances were inadequate and where wounds often got a long start before treatment could be applied. The French statistics, compiled after the war, are appalling to read: 90 out of 100 amputations proved fatal, and the total number of deaths in hospital worked out at over 10,000. The Germans were in advance of the French in the cleanliness of their methods, and some of their doctors were already beginning to accept the antiseptic theory; but it was not till 1872 that this principle can be said to have won the day. The hospitals on both sides were left with a ghastly heritage of pyaemia and other diseases, raging almost unchecked in their wards; but, in the two years after the war, two of the most famous professors in German Universities[48] had by antiseptic methods obtained such striking results among their patients that the superiority of the treatment was evident; and both of them generously gave full credit to Lister as their teacher. When he made a long tour on the Continent in 1875, finishing up with visits to the chief medical schools in Germany, these men were foremost in greeting him, and he enjoyed a conspicuous triumph also at Leipzig. Sir Rickman Godlee, commenting on the indifference of his countrymen, says that Lister's teaching was by them 'accepted as a novelty, when it came back to England, refurbished from Germany'. But this was not till after he had left Edinburgh, to carry the torch of learning to the south.
[Note 48: Professor Volkmann of Halle and Professor von Nussbaum of Munich.]
In Edinburgh his colleagues, with all their opportunities for learning at first hand, seemed strangely indifferent to Lister's presence in their midst, even when foreigners began to make pilgrimages to the central shrine of antiseptics. The real encouragement which he got came, as before, from his pupils, who thronged his lecture-room to the number of three or four hundred, with sustained enthusiasm. In some ways it is difficult to account for the popularity of his lectures. He made no elaborate preparations, but was content to devote a quiet half-hour to thinking out the subject in his arm-chair. After this he needed no notes, having his ideas and the development of his thought so firmly in his grasp that he could follow it out clearly and could hold the attention of his audience. His voice, though musical, was not of great power. He was often impeded by a slight stammer, especially at the end of a session. He was not naturally an eloquent man, and attempted no flights of rhetoric. But it seems impossible to deny the possession of special ability to a man who consistently drew such large audiences throughout a long career; and if it was the matter rather than the manner which wove the spell, surely that is just the kind of good speaking which Scotsmen and Englishmen have always preferred.
And so it needed an even greater effort than at Glasgow for Lister to strike his tent and adventure himself on new ground. It is true that London was his early home; London could give him wider fame and enable him to make a larger income by private practice; yet it is very doubtful whether these motives combined could have induced him to migrate again, now that he had reached the age of fifty. But he was a man with a mission. Some of his few converts in London held that only his presence there could shake the prevailing apathy, and he himself felt that he must make the effort in the interests of science.
The professorial chair to which he was invited in 1877 was at King's College, which was relatively a small institution; its hospital was not up to the Edinburgh standard; the classes which attended his lectures were small. Owing to an unfortunate incident he was handicapped at the start. When receiving a parting address from 700 of his Edinburgh students he made an informal speech in the course of which he compared the conditions of surgical teaching then prevailing at Edinburgh and London, in terms which were not flattering to the southern metropolis. Some comparison was natural in the circumstances; Lister was not speaking for publication and had no idea that a reporter was present. But his remarks appeared in print, with the result that might be expected. The sting of the criticism lay in its truth, and many London surgeons were only too ready to resent anything which might be said by the new professor. When he had been living some time in London, Lister succeeded in allaying the ill feeling which resulted; but at first, even in his own hospital, he was met by coldness and opposition in his attempt to introduce new methods. In fact, had he not laid down definite conditions in accepting the post, he could never have made his way; but he had stipulated for bringing with him some of the men whom he had trained, and he was accompanied by four Edinburgh surgeons, the foremost of whom were John Stewart, a Canadian, and Watson Cheyne, the famous operator of the next generation. Even so he found his orders set at naught and his work hampered by a temper which he had never known elsewhere. In some cases the sisters entrenched themselves behind the Secretary's rules and refused to comply, not only with the requests of the new staff, but even with the dictates of common sense and humanity. Another trouble arose over the system of London examinations which tempted the students to reproduce faithfully the views of others and discouraged men from giving time to independent research. Lister's method of lecturing was designed to foster the spirit of inquiry, and he would not deign to fill his lecture-room by any species of 'cramming'. Never did his patience, his hopefulness, and his interest in the cause have to submit to greater trials; but the day of victory was at hand.
The most visible sign of it was at the International Medical Congress held at Amsterdam in 1879 and attended by representatives of the great European nations. One sitting was devoted to the antiseptic system; and Lister, after delivering an address, received an ovation so marked that none of his fellow-countrymen could fail to see the esteem in which he was held abroad. Even in London many of his rivals had by now been converted. The most distinguished of them, Sir James Paget, openly expressed remorse for his reluctance to accept the antiseptic principle earlier, and compared his own record of failures with the successes attained by his colleague at St. Bartholomew's Thomas Smith, the one eminent London surgeon who had given Listerism a thorough trial. Other triumphs followed, such as the visits in 1889 to Oxford and Cambridge to receive Honorary Degrees, the offer of a baronetcy in 1883, and the conferring on him in 1885 of the Prussian 'Ordre pour le merite'.[49] But a chronicle of such external matters is wearisome in itself; and before the climax was reached, the current of opinion was, by a strange turn of fortune, already setting in another direction.
[Note 49: Restricted to thirty German and thirty foreign members.]
This was due to the introduction of the so-called aseptic theory so widely prevalent to-day, of which the chief prophet in 1885 was Professor von Bergmann of Berlin. Into the relative merits of systems, on which the learned disagree, it is absurd for laymen to enter; nor is it necessary to make such comparisons in order to appreciate the example of Lister's life. The new school believe that they have gained by the abandonment of carbolic and other antiseptics which may irritate a wound and by trusting to the agency of heat for killing all germs. But Lister himself took enormous pains to keep his antiseptic as remote as possible from the tissues to whose vitality he trusted, and went half-way to meet the aseptic doctrine. If he retained a belief in the need for carbolic and distrusted the elaborate ritual of the modern hospital, with its boiling of everybody and everything connected with an operation, it was not either from blindness or from pettiness of mind. As in the case of abandoning the spray, it was his love of simplicity which influenced him. If the detailed precautions of the complete aseptic system are found practicable and beneficial in a hospital, they are difficult to realize for a country surgeon who has to work in a humbler way, and Lister wished his procedure to be within reach of every practitioner who needed it.
One more point must be considered before pronouncing Listerism to be superseded. In time of war there are occasions when necessity dictates the treatment to be followed. Wounded men, picked up on the field of battle some hours after they were hit, are not fit subjects for a method that needs a clear field of operation. It is then too late for aseptic precautions, as the wound may already be teeming with bacteria. Only the prompt use of carbolic can stay the ravages of putrefaction; and Lister's method, so often disparaged, must have saved the lives of thousands during the late War.
In any case there is much common ground between the two schools: each can learn from the other, and those professors of asepticism who have acknowledged their debt to Lister have been wiser than those who have made contention their aim. This was never the spirit in which he approached scientific problems.
An earlier controversy, in which his name was involved, was that which raged round the practice of vivisection. Here Lister had practically the whole of his profession behind him when he boldly supported the claims of science to have benefited humanity by the experiments conducted on animals and to have done so with a minimum of suffering to the latter. And it was well that science had a champion whose reputation for gentleness and moderation was so well established. Queen Victoria herself showed a lively interest in this fiercely-debated question; and in 1871, when Lister was appealed to by Sir Henry Ponsonby, her private secretary, to satisfy her doubts on the subject, he wrote an admirable reply, calm in tone and lucid in statement, in which he showed how unfounded were the charges brought against his profession.
In 1892 his professional career was drawing to a close. In that year he received the heartiest recognition that France could give to his work, when he went there officially to represent the Royal Society at the Pasteur celebration. A great gathering of scientists and others, presided over by President Carnot, came together at the Sorbonne to honour Pasteur's seventieth birthday. It was a dramatic scene such as our neighbours love, when the two illustrious fellow workers embraced one another in public, and the audience rose to the occasion. To be acclaimed with Pasteur was to Lister a crowning honour; but a year later fortune dealt him a blow from which he never recovered. His wife, his constant companion and helper, was taken ill suddenly at Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, and died in a few days; and Lister's life was sadly changed.
He was still considerably before the public for another decade. He did much useful work for the Royal Society, of which he became Foreign Secretary in 1893 and President from 1895 to 1900. He visited Canada and South Africa, received the freedom of Edinburgh in 1898 and of London in 1907, and in 1897 he received the special honour of a peerage, the only one yet conferred on a medical man. He took an active interest in the discoveries of Koch and Metchnikoff, preserving to an advanced age the capacity for accepting new ideas. He was largely instrumental in founding the Institute of Preventive Medicine now established at Chelsea and called by his name. But his work as a surgeon was complete before death separated him from his truest helper. In 1903 his strength began to fail, and for the last nine years of his life, at London or at Walmer, he was shut off from general society and lived the life of an invalid.
In 1912 he passed away by almost imperceptible degrees, in his home by the sea, and by his own request was buried in the quiet cemetery of West Hampstead where his wife lay. A public service was held in Westminster Abbey, and a portrait medallion there preserves the memory of his features. The patient toil, the even temper, the noble purpose which inspired his life, had achieved their goal--he was a national hero as truly as any statesman or soldier of his generation; and if, according to his nature he wished his body to lie in a humble grave, he deserved full well to have his name preserved and honoured in our most sacred national shrine.
WILLIAM MORRIS
1834-96
1834. Born at Walthamstow, March 24. 1848-51. Marlborough College. 1853-5. Exeter College, Oxford. 1856. Studies architecture under Street. 1857. Red Lion Square; influence of D. G. Rossetti. 1858. _Defence of Guenevere_. 1859. Marries Miss Jane Burden. 1860-5. 'Red House', Upton, Kent. 1861. Firm of Art Decorators founded in Queen Square, Bloomsbury. (Dissolved and refounded 1875.) 1867-8. _Life and Death of Jason_. 1868-70. _Earthly Paradise_. 1870. Tenant of Kelmscott Manor House, on the Upper Thames. 1871-3. Visits to Iceland; work on Icelandic Sagas. 1876. _Sigurd the Volsung_. 1878. Tenant of Kelmscott House, Hammersmith. 1881. Works moved to Merton. 1883-4. Active member of Social Democratic Federation. 1884-90. Founder and active member of Socialist League. 1891. Kelmscott Press founded. 1892-6. Preparation and printing of Kelmscott _Chaucer_. 1896. Death at Hammersmith, October 3. 1896. Burial at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire.
WILLIAM MORRIS
CRAFTSMAN AND SOCIAL REFORMER
In general it is difficult to account for the birth of an original man at a particular place and time. As Carlyle says: 'Priceless Shakespeare was the free gift of nature, given altogether silently, received altogether silently.' Of his childhood history has almost nothing to relate, and what is true of Shakespeare is true in large measure of Burns, of Shelley, of Keats. Even in an age when records are more common, we can only discern a little and can explain less of the silent influences at work that begin to make the man. There are few things more surprising than that, in an age given up chiefly to industrial development, two prosperous middle-class homes should have given birth to John Ruskin and William Morris, so alien in temper to all that traditionally springs from such a soil. In the case of Morris there is nothing known of his ancestry to explain his rich and various gifts. From a child he seemed to have found some spring within himself which drew him instinctively to all that was beautiful in nature, in art, in books. His earliest companions were the Waverley Novels, which he began at the age of four and finished at seven; his earliest haunt was Epping Forest, where he roamed and dreamed through many of the years of his youth.
His father, who was in business in the City of London, as partner in a bill-broking firm, lived at different times at Walthamstow and at Woodford; and the hills of the forest, in some places covered with thick growth of hornbeam or of beech, in others affording a wide view over the levels of the lower Thames, impressed themselves so strongly on the boy's memory and imagination that this scenery often recurred in the setting of tales which he wrote in middle life.
There was no need of external aid to develop these tastes; and Morris was fortunate in going to a school which did no violence to them by forcing him into other less congenial pursuits. Marlborough College, at the time when he went there in 1848, had only been open a few years. The games were not organized but left to voluntary effort; and during his three or four years at school Morris never took part in cricket or football. In the latter game, at any rate, he should have proved a notable performer on unorthodox lines, impetuous, forcible, and burly as he was. But he found no reason to regret the absence of games, or to feel that time hung heavy on his hands. The country satisfied his wants, the Druidic stones at Avebury, the green water-meadows of the Kennet, the deep glades of Savernake Forest. So strong was the spell of nature, that he hardly felt the need for companionship; and, as chance had not yet thrown him into close relations with any friend of similar tastes, he lived much alone.
It was a different matter at Oxford, to which he proceeded in January 1853. Among those who matriculated at Exeter College that year was a freshman from Birmingham named Edward Burne Jones; and within a few days Morris had begun a friendship with him which lasted for his whole life and was the source of his greatest happiness. For more than forty years their names were associated, and so they will remain for generations to come in Exeter College Chapel, where may be seen the great tapestry of the Nativity designed by one and executed by the other. Burne-Jones had not yet found his vocation as a painter; he came to Oxford like Morris with the wish to take Holy Orders. He was of Welsh family with a Celtic fervour for learning, and a Celtic instinct for what was beautiful, and at King Edward's School he had made friends with several men who came up to Pembroke College about the same time. Their friendship was extended to his new acquaintance from Marlborough. Here Morris found himself in the midst of a small circle who shared his enthusiasm for literature and art, and among whom he quickly learned to express those ideas which had been stirring his heart in his solitary youth. Through the knowledge gained by close observation and a retentive memory, through his impetuosity and swift decision, Morris soon became a leader among them. Carlyle and Ruskin, Keats and Tennyson, were at this time the most potent influences among them; and when Morris was not arguing and declaiming in the circle at Pembroke, he was sitting alone with Burne-Jones at Exeter reading aloud to him for hours together French romances and other mediaeval tales. Young men of to-day, with a wealth of books on their shelves and of pictures on their walls, with popular reproductions bringing daily to their doors things old and new, can little realize the thrill of excitement with which these men discovered and enjoyed a single new poem of Tennyson or an early drawing by Millais or Rossetti. How they were quickened by ever fresh delight in the beauty and strangeness of such things, how they responded to the magic of romance and dreamed of a day when they should themselves help in the creation of such work, how they started a magazine of their own and essayed short flights in prose or verse, can best be read in the volumes which Lady Burne-Jones[50] has dedicated to the memory of her husband. This period is of capital importance in the life of William Morris, and the year 1855 especially was fraught with momentous decisions.
[Note 50: _Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones_, by G. B.-J., 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1904).]
Like Burne-Jones he had gone up to Oxford intending to take Holy Orders in the Church of England; but the last three years had taught him that his interest lay elsewhere. The spirit of faith, of reverence, of love for his fellow men still attracted him to Christianity; but he could not subscribe to a body of doctrine or accept the authority of a single Church. His ideal shifted gradually. At one time he hoped to found a brotherhood which was to combine art with religion and to train craftsmen for the service of the Church; but he was more fitted to work in the world than in the cloister, and the social aspect of this foundation prevailed over the religious. Nor was it mere self-culture to which he aspired. The arts as he understood them were one field, and a wide field, for enlarging the powers of men and increasing their happiness, for continuing all that was most precious in the heritage of the past and passing on the torch to the future; in this field there was work for many labourers and all might be serving the common good.
His own favourite study was the thirteenth century, when princes and merchants, monks and friars, poets and craftsmen had combined to exalt the Church and to beautify Western Europe; and he wished to recreate the nineteenth century in its spirit. And so while Burne-Jones discovered his true gift in the narrower field of painting, Morris began his apprenticeship in the master craft of architecture, and passed from one art to another till he had covered nearly the whole field of endeavour with ever-growing knowledge of principle and restless activity of hand and eye. His father had died in 1847; and when Morris came of age he inherited a fortune of about £900 a year and was his own master. Before the end of 1855 he imparted to his mother his decision about taking Orders. The Rubicon was crossed; but on which road he was to reach his goal was not settled for many years. Twice he had to retrace his steps from a false start and begin a fresh career. The year 1856 saw him still working at Oxford, in the office of Street, the architect. Two more years (1857-8) saw him labouring at easel pictures under the influence of Rossetti, though he also published his first volume of poetry at this time. The year 1859 found him married, and for the time absorbed in the making of a home, but still feeling his way towards the choice of a profession.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was in some ways the most original man of his generation; certainly he was the only individual whose influence was ever capable of dominating Morris and drawing him to a course of action which he would not have chosen for himself. Rossetti's tragic collapse after his wife's death, and the pictures which he painted in his later life, have obscured the true portrait of this virile and attractive character. Burne-Jones fell completely under his spell, and he tells us how for many years his chief anxiety, over each successive work of art that he finished, was 'what Gabriel would have thought of it'. So decisive was his judgement, so dominating his personality.
Morris's period of hesitation ended in 1861, when the first firm of decorators was started among the friends. Of the old Oxford set it included Burne-Jones and Faulkner; new elements were introduced by Philip Webb the architect and Madox Brown the painter. The leadership in ideas might still perhaps belong to Rossetti; but in execution William Morris proved himself at once the captain. The actual work which he contributed in the first year was more than equal to that produced by his six partners, and future years told the same tale.
In the early part of his married life Morris lived in Kent, at Upton, some twelve miles from Charing Cross, in a house built for him by his friend Webb. The house was of red brick, simple but unconventional in character, built to be the home of one who detested stucco and all other shams, and wished things to seem what they were. Its decoration was to be the work of its owner and his friends.