Mungo Park and the Niger

by Joseph Thomson

EXTRACT OF MUNGO PARK’S LETTER TO HIS WIFE.

Park threw himself into his work with characteristic energy and thoroughness, and speedily won for himself a fair share of the practice of the town and country. The profits, however, were of the poorest, and the work of the hardest—so much so, indeed, that he once said to Scott he “would rather brave Africa and all its horrors than wear out his life in long and toilsome rides over cold and lonely heaths and gloomy hills, assailed by the wintry tempest, for which the remuneration was hardly enough to keep soul and body together.”

On the strength of this reported offhand remark, Ruskin, without troubling to inquire further into the history of the man, has formulated the following indictment. This “terrific” sentence, he says, “signifies, if you look into it, almost total absence of the instinct of personal duty—total absence of belief in the God who chose for him his cottage birthplace and set him his life task beside it; absolute want of interest in his profession, of sense for natural beauty, and of compassion for the noblest poor of his native land. And with these absences there is the clearest evidence of the fatalist of the vices, Avarice—in the exact form in which it was the ruin of Scott himself—the love of money for the sake of worldly position.”

Never was more sweeping accusation founded on more slender data. Practically, Park is charged with absence of a belief in God, and of a sense of duty to his fellows, because he finds his profession toilsome and uncongenial.

The argument seems to be that the man is an atheist and a sinner against society who is not content to remain in the sphere in which he was born, and in which accordingly his life task is divinely set.

Were such a position tenable, it is difficult to see how any progress, either personal or social, would be possible. From it, in the present instance, would naturally follow that Park was as little to be justified in choosing to be a doctor rather than a peasant farmer, as in preferring to be an explorer rather than either.

What Ruskin takes exception to, however, is not Park’s choosing a profession, but that the choice once made, he should seek to abandon it. But if it were permissible to him as a youth, ignorant alike of himself, the world, and the profession he was about to enter, to choose, surely it was equally permissible that as a man, with some knowledge of all three, he should withdraw in favour of the work to which he knew himself adapted. The instinct and capacities which fitted him for an explorer were as divinely implanted as his birthplace had been divinely appointed. Moreover, those “noblest poor of his native land,” to whom Ruskin so pathetically refers, were not alone dependent on Park for medical aid—a circumstance which would have lent another colour to his final resolve to forsake them. Doctors there were in plenty, alike able and willing to serve them; but there was but one Mungo Park—but one man, as far as was known, who by his special gifts and wide experience was suited for the peculiar and arduous work of African exploration. Upon him then it devolved, with all the sacrednesss of a divinely appointed mission, as indeed he deemed it, and accepted it accordingly, to the exclusion of all narrower obligations.

There still remains the charge of Avarice, based on Park’s simple statement that his “unceasing toil was hardly sufficient to keep soul and body together.” Is then the physician less entitled than say the author to a just remuneration for his services, or does Ruskin share the not uncommon popular delusion that though butchers’ and bakers’ bills demand immediate attention, the payment of the doctor’s is to be regarded as optional, or subject to the convenience of the patient. Neither supposition is to be entertained for a moment. Indeed the charge rests upon too flimsy a foundation ever to be taken seriously by any unprejudiced mind, and we can only regretfully wonder what could have induced Mr. Ruskin so far to forget the Justice and Charity he is so fond of preaching as to bring it forward.

Beyond the record of “unceasing toil” little is known of how Park spent the time he was resident in Peebles. The town itself is described as being in those days “quiet as the grave”—a reputation it still maintains, judging from the innuendo in the ironical phrase, “Peebles for pleasure!”