As we got further down the line the morning cleared, and we had many fellow-passengers; but my young friend, as I might almost call him by this time, stuck to me, and seemed to get some relief by talking of his past doings and future prospect. I found that he had been at Würzburg for a short time before going to Heidelberg, so had had a student’s experience of two of the most celebrated German Universities. My own ideas of those seats of learning, being for the most part derived from the writings of Mr. Matthew Arnold, received, I am bound to own, rather severe shocks from the evidently truthful experience of one medical student.
He had simply paid his necessary florins (about £1 worth) for his matriculation fee, and double that sum for two sets of lectures for which he entered. He had passed no matriculation examination, or indeed any other; had attended lectures or not, just he pleased—about one in three he put as his average—but there was no roll-call or register, and no one that he knew of seemed to care the least whether he was there or not. However, he seemed to think that but for his unlucky little difficulty he could easily at this rate have passed the examination for the degree of doctor of medicines. The doctor’s degree was a mighty fine thing, and much sought after, but didn’t amount to much professionally, at least not in Germany, where the doctor has a State examination to pass after he has got his degree. But in America, or anywhere else, he believed they could just practise on a German M.D. degree, and he knew of one Herr Doctor out West who was about as fit to take hold of any sick fellow as he was himself. Oh, Matthew, Matthew, my mentor! When I got home I had to take down thy volume on Universities in Germany, and restore my failing faith by a glance at the Appendix, giving a list of the courses of lectures by Professors, Privabdocenten, and readers of the University of Berlin during one winter, in which the Medical Faculty’s subjects occupy seven pages; and to remind myself, that the characteristics of the German Universities are “Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit,” “Liberty for the teacher, and liberty for the learner”; also that “the French University has no liberty, and the English Universities have no sciences; the German Universities have both.” Too much liberty of one kind this student at any rate bore witness to, and in one of his serious moments was eloquent on the danger and mischief of the system, so far as his outlook had gone.
By the time our roads diverged, the young runaway had quite won me over to forget his escapades, by his frank disclosures of all that was passing in his mind of regret and tenderness, hopefulness and audacity; and I sorrowed for a few moments on the platform as the sealskin cap disappeared at the window of the Liverpool carriage, from which he waved a cheery adieu.
As I walked towards the carriage to go on my own way, I found myself regretting that I should see his ruddy face no more, and wishing him all success “in that new world which is the old,” for which he was bound, with no possessions but his hand-bag and self-reliance to make his way with. I might have sat alone for thrice as long with an English youngster, in like case, without knowing a word of his history; but then, such history could never have happened to an Englishman, for he never would have run his bail, and would have gone to prison and served his time as a matter of course.
How much each nation has to learn of the other! But I trust that by this time my young friend has seen to it that the good-natured Herr Doctor who went bail for him hasn’t “slipped up anyway.”
Southport, 22nd March.
I wonder if you will care to take a seaside letter, at this busiest time of the year? Folk have no business to be “on the loaf” before Easter, I readily admit. Still, there is much force and good-sense, I have always held, in that tough, old regicide Major-General Ludlow’s action, when he found England under Cromwell too narrow to hold him. He migrated to Switzerland, and characteristically changed his family motto to “Ubi libertas, ibi patria” (“Where I can have my own way, there is my country”) or (if I may be allowed a free rendering to fit the occasion), “Whenever man can loaf, then is long vacation.”
But my motive for writing is really of another kind. In these later years, a large and growing minority of my personal friends and acquaintances seem to be afflicted with that demon called Neuralgia,—some kind of painful affection connected with the nerves of the head and face, which makes the burden of life indefinitely heavier to carry than it has any right to be. To all such I feel bound to say, Give this place a trial in your first leisure. In one case, at any rate, and that an apparently chronic one, in which every east wind, and almost every sudden change of temperature, brought with it acute suffering, I have seen with my own eyes a complete cure effected by a few days in this air. The experiment was tried three months since, and from that time the demon seems to have been exorcised, and has been quite unable to return, though we have had a full average in these parts of sudden changes of temperature,—east winds, cold rains, and the other amenities of early spring in England.