A man cannot bear all knowledge about in his head. Our little brain-attics have not got such very elastic walls, and there comes a time when, for everything fresh we learn, there is a chance of our forgetting something which we knew before. The new ideas elbow out the old ones. It becomes of the highest importance therefore that we should take nothing unnecessary into our brains and that we should docket and arrange all that we have so as to be able to use it to the best advantage at a moment’s notice. In the first place there is a man’s own profession or speciality. He should always study to have the latest and most accurate information upon that point, and no fact bearing upon it is too trivial to be remembered. Then there is his hobby. No human being should be complete without a hobby. It is to a man’s real business as his shadow is to his person – always present and never obtrusive.95 Be it literature or painting or gardening or pottery or music or whatever other of the endless varieties of hobbies, a man should be well up in it while keeping it strictly subordinate to the main business of his life. Then on other subjects, although a man cannot be expected to be equally well informed upon all, he should at least retain the keys of knowledge in his possession. He should know who are the authorities upon each point and what are the books which should be consulted. Thus an ordinary citizen is hardly expected to know much about Persian poetry and to have Hafiz, Firdousi and Ferideddin Attar at their fingers’ ends, but he ought to know that Sir William Jones and the Baron von Hammer-Purgstall are great authorities upon the subject, and knowing that he can repair to his library and turn on the Persian tap at a moment’s notice.96 Similarly a man may be excused for not knowing very much about Buddhism – in spite of the fact that in its pure form it is infinitely the finest religion which the world has ever seen – but he really ought to know that St Hilaire97 and Edwin Arnold are two writers who are always at hand to supply the deficiencies of his own knowledge. He does not wish to carry his property about wherever he goes. The grand thing is to be able to lay his hands upon it when he has a use for it.
Heigh ho! If my readers are as weary of the day as I am, they must be tired indeed. Oh for a stretch of the legs and a breath of fresh air, if there can be said to be any fresh air in this great asphyxiated city. The blind is down over the way and the easel stands out hard and clear against the lamp light like the fifth proposition of Euclid carved in wood.98 The work is over for the day. Up above I hear the veteran stumbling about and dragging heavy objects about the floor. I have heard that from time to time he amuses himself by packing up his great campaigning trunk, as if there were some prospect of his being ordered away upon immediate foreign service. I can imagine his earnest grizzled face as he buckles and straps and fastens, stopping from time to time to decide as to whether this or that article will be wanted in the approaching campaign. Down below Herr Lehmann has ended his day’s work and I hear the great piano closed down. Three white figures look in at my door and little treble voices wish me goodnight. ‘Goodnight, my dears, goodnight.’ The whole sleepy, blinking world is turning to rest, and so shall I.
CHAPTER 4
THE GOUT is leaving me. I feel it clearing slowly away like the mist from a mountain top. Fresh warm healthy blood is tingling in every vein. It is worth being ill to feel the glow of returning health. I am still weak and languid though – bad cess to the ailment which brought me so low. In the name of the great army of the gouty – of all the innumerable bulbous-toed battalions – I anathematise it with the great curse of the Bishop Ernulphus which embraces all curses which ever have been or which ever shall be.99 Even the kind heart of my Uncle Toby could hardly object to my employing this tremendous weapon upon such an object.100
I was in such high spirits this morning that I set to work fixing up a little jeu d’esprit for Dr Julep. We had had one or two chats over the very different views taken of the British Pharmacopeia by various medical authorities, so I epitomised the fact in a quatrain:
Doctors agree that with potions and pills
You may readily cure the whole of life’s ills
But each one, alas, has his different notions
As to what sort of pills and what sort of potions101
‘When a man begins to chaff his medical attendant in doggerel verse,’ remarked Dr Julep, ‘it’s a pretty sure sign of his convalescence.’
‘I’ll tell you what it is, Doctor,’ said I reproachfully, ‘I think you treated me in a very scurvy fashion in not coming to see me yesterday.’
‘My dear sir,’ he answered earnestly. ‘It was my hospital day and I knew that you were going on all right.’
‘It’s not your prescription but your company I wanted,’ said I frankly, ‘so I shall insist upon having a double allowance of it today. I had a dreadfully lonely day yesterday. Your patients will be none the worse if you are ten minutes later in seeing them. Undo your coat, light a Manila, and try that armchair.’
‘Thank you,’ said he, smiling all over his little rosy face – as clear and as healthy as a Ribston pippin102– ‘I won’t smoke, but I will break my journey here with all the pleasure imaginable.’
‘I’ve got a problem for you this morning,’ I remarked as he settled down in his chair. ‘My sleep is not very good while I am confined to the house and I think of some strange things during the night. This is something in your line, so I thought I would submit it to you.’
‘Let us have it,’ he said in the half-amused, condescending voice which medicos usually adopt towards laymen when they find them in an inquisitive humour.
‘You will agree,’ said I, ‘that the majority of deaths in this world are from maladies which have been contracted by infection, or from exposure to the weather or from unhealthy living, or from some hereditary taint in the constitution.’
‘I can hardly imagine any death except from violence or from old age which does not come from one or other of these causes,’ he answered.
‘Very well. Then death from old age really means, I suppose, that there comes a time when the sum total of all the worries and cares and duties and pleasures of life is too much for our bodily machinery, and wears it out.’
‘Quite so.’
‘Now supposing a mortal who had no possible hereditary weakness – who came from a perfectly sound stock – was placed in such circumstances that he could neither catch infection or incur disease in any possible manner, what would happen then?’
‘Why, if such immunity was possible, and if you could protect a man against every noxious influence,’ said Dr Julep, stroking his chin meditatively, ‘I suppose he would have to die of old age.’
‘But if you were also able to remove all trouble from his life,’ I persisted, ‘if you were to manage that he should have no care, no anxiety, no emotion – that all should be smooth and easy for him – how long would it be before old age would overtake him?’
‘I don’t quite see how you are going to do all this,’ said Dr Julep.
‘But I do. I have thought it out to the smallest details. The first point in the experiment is to select a perfectly healthy subject. I should choose a young country lad whose grandfathers and grandmothers on each side were still hearty. I should shut this lad up in a building specially adapted for his residence, and erected in some eminently healthy locality. In this building there should be several large airy rooms for his use and a long corridor for active exercise. All air passing into the house, however, would be strained through antiseptic air filters – I believe there are such contrivances’ – the Doctor nodded – ‘so that there should be no possibility of any noxious germ contaminating the atmosphere. In this way he would be absolutely fenced in from all infection. His water and food should be purified in a similar fashion, and his diet should be most carefully regulated and attention paid to the time occupied at his meals, and the thorough mastication of his food. He should have certain hours allotted for work, for exercise, for amusement and for sleep – with occasional modifications to prevent the routine from becoming intolerably monotonous. The atmosphere
of the whole house should by an arrangement of hot water pipes be kept at a constant temperature, and the drainage should be most carefully looked after. Now I want to know how long that man is going to live, and what is going to kill him.’
‘Why, he would get along very nicely for seventy years or so,’ said my companion, ‘and then his machinery would run down and he would come to a stop.’
‘Would it, though?’ I argued. ‘The man has had no emotions or troubles or necessity for struggling for his living or pleasures, which take it out of our vitality more even than work does. I believe he would live for twice seventy years and be a hale man at the end of it.’
‘And I believe the chances are that he would go melancholy mad, or that you would find the hall door of your model dwelling open some fine morning and that your prisoner had wandered off to breathe some less restrained, if more poisonous, atmosphere.’
‘It’s a very pretty little problem all the same,’ said I stoutly. ‘You put it into my head by your remarks the other day about the coming millennium when all disease is to be abolished by inoculation.’
‘That I firmly believe in,’ the Doctor answered, ‘that is, if the type of disease remains the same. You know that the type of disease is a thing which is continually changing. Ailments which were common a few centuries ago are never heard of now, and others which are only too familiar now would, in the natural course of things, be extinct before very long even if Science did not give them a “coup-de-grâce.” In this stage of the world’s development we don’t get the plague, or the sweating sickness, or the black death, any more than a middle-aged man usually gets the thrush or mumps or the whooping-cough. The race has had it and is fortified against a second attack. Where do the new diseases come from? Ah, we can’t answer that question. They are new emanations from the foul ocean of morbid possibilities.’
‘Perhaps you think that the type of disease alters with some subtle modification of the human type?’
‘That is very possible,’ he remarked. ‘The human race has certainly not reached the zenith of its development. In a myriad years it will probably have so altered that to compare a body of that day with a body of this would be like comparing an educated Englishman with a chimpanzee. Even during the few thousands of years of which we have any knowledge there has been a change in our outside husks, which, though small compared to the change in our minds, is still sufficiently well marked. Old man had more bone in his skull and less brain, better marked ridges above his eyebrows, better hair, a black complexion and prominent canine teeth.’
‘And what do you think is the direction of future change?’ I asked.
‘Why, Darwin – peace be with him! – says that our descendants are to be hairless and toothless. You can’t count the number of dentists’ brass plates in an eligible thoroughfare, or look down from the circle onto the heads of the young men in the stalls, without seeing that both these appendages of ours are in a very bad way indeed. I’m sometimes inclined to think that there are two types in process of formation – the man with the big brain and no muscle, and the man with the great muscle and no brain. The fact is that our individual lives are so very short compared with the great periods over which these changes extend, that we can form very little conception of what is coming. A few seconds are a longer fraction of a day than a life of eighty years is of the time during which we know that this world has been in existence. If a man lived for only a few seconds of daylight, and his son the same, and his for a hundred generations, what would their collective experience tell them of the phenomenon which we call night? So all our history and knowledge is no guarantee that our world is not destined in the future for experiences of which we can form no conception. It is not safe for us to be dogmatic upon such a matter. If man, as we know him, is a lineal descendant of the sea-urchins, who shall say what may be at the other end of the chain.’
‘An echinus at one end and a demigod at the other,’ I suggested. ‘The great series starts from pure matter and works its way upwards, shedding off a little of its grossness at every stage until it develops into unalloyed spirituality. But while I can understand that we are working up towards some glorious destination, I am still in doubt as to what function is assigned to the individual soul, and what becomes of it after its separation from the body – if indeed it is capable of having any existence apart from the body.’
‘It is a means to an end,’ remarked my companion. ‘What becomes of the little grey seed when the stem has sprouted and the flower unfolded?’
‘You mean,’ said I, ‘that what we call our souls are of no value of themselves, but are only the index which shows how far we have got in spiritual development.’
‘Quite so,’ said the Doctor complacently. ‘At any time of the world’s history you might take an average of people’s souls which would show you the level attained at that date by the human family in spirituality, refinement and virtue. This average soul has on the whole, with a few short relapses, gone on steadily rising from generation to generation, and will, I believe, continue to do so until it arrives at absolute perfection. Good is rising and evil is sinking, just as you see oil and water mixed in a bottle clearing off and forming a layer the one over the other. What will happen when the race becomes all-good – whether it will then be taken into partnership by the great source of all things, as an apprentice who has worked his way industriously is occasionally admitted into the Firm, or whether good and God may prove to be synonymous, are problems which there is no prospect of our being able to answer. You remember Seneca’s fine saying: “The good man differs from God in nothing but duration.”’
‘If I wasn’t a cripple I’d get up to shake hands with you, Doctor,’ said I. ‘You’ve expressed my own ideas, with a few variations, far more clearly than I could have done myself. I feel that we do not take a broad enough or hopeful enough view of creation and the creator. The insanity of the idea that a man will be judged upon his own individual merits or demerits, when not only his tendency to evil but also the weakness of mind which forbids him to combat that tendency are as much hereditary and part of his nature as the colour of his hair, has always seemed to me to be past all description. No, I do firmly believe that we are all making for a common goal, and that we will reach it, every man of us, at some appointed time. The higher natures will get there quickest, but sooner or later not one of us shall fail to be there.’
The Narrative of John Smith Page 9