14 January: Boreham on Albert Schweitzer

Peer of Many Realms
George Seaver regards Albert Schweitzer, whose birthday we mark today, as the most lavishly gifted genius, and one of the really Homeric figures of our time. And George Seaver knows what he is talking about. He possesses a natural instinct for the heroic and an inborn capacity for chanting its renown. It is to his skilful pen that we are indebted for the eerie stories of the men who perished with Scott amidst the Antarctic wastes and his portrait of Schweitzer represents a worthy addition to that notable gallery.

A son of the manse, Albert Schweitzer was born in Alsace in 1875. Although Alsace and Lorraine made up that tragic strip of territory with which France and Germany played their pitiless game of battledore and shuttlecock, the boy loved every stick and stone in his native land. None of the pages in his biography are more affecting than those that describe the beautiful simplicity of the young Alsatian's boyhood. The fine example of his father; the modest charm of his mother; the fragrant atmosphere of the home; and the loveliness of the picturesque countryside amidst which he was reared, profoundly influenced his most impressionable years. The low hills of the Vosges, thickly wooded with fir and beech, oak and chestnut, furnished an effective background to all his contemplation and activity. Twelve miles away, too, in the Champ de Mars at Colmar, stood a magnificent monument by Bartholdi, the sculptor who designed America's famous Statue of Liberty. At its base was a carving of an African negro. With superb artistry, Bartholdi has conveyed to the black man's countenance an expression of such appealing wistfulness that it seems to embody a representation of all that is most attractive and appealing in the coloured races of the dark continent. That statue, visited on Saturdays and holidays, captivated the boy's imagination and gave direction to his whole career.

Mental Vigour And Physical Power Combined
Although not of the type whose countenance is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," Schweitzer was naturally of a studious disposition. He learned quickly, not so much by dazzling genius as by the subordination of robust powers to an iron will. His only inherited aptitude was for music. He seemed to have listened in his cradle to the celestial symphonies. At the age of seven, he astonished his teacher by strumming tunes of his own composition; at eight, when his legs could scarcely reach the pedals, he mastered the organ; and, at nine, he frequently officiated in place of the regular organist, in the village church. He thought nothing of working all through the night at chemistry, bacteriology or psychiatry, and then, as a sheer relaxation, hurrying off to Widor, the celebrated Parisian organist, for his music lesson. Tall, broad-shouldered and of robust and powerful frame, his energy seemed inexhaustible. Feeling little necessity for sleep, his vigorous mind appeared to have attained a capacity for perpetual motion. Whilst still a youth, he became Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Music. At the age of 28 he was appointed Principal of the Theological College of St. Thomas at Strasburg University.

But by this time other voices were calling and other fingers beckoned. At this period of his career, the eyes of Europe were suddenly focused upon Africa. The atrocities committed on the Congo sent a shudder through the world. Schweitzer was profoundly moved. It seemed to him that, whilst he was living his cloistral and academic life at Strasburg, millions of his fellowmen were engulfed in the most revolting and horrible degradation. He heard a voice—perhaps a divine voice; perhaps an echo of his father's—that bade him take up the cross and follow the gleam into the impenetrable gloom. The memory of the statue at Colmar—the wistfulness and hunger of the black man—rushed back upon him. His course became clear.

From The Academy To The Jungle
Resigning his principalship, he became once more a student in the university in which he had been a tutor; obtained still another doctorate, this time a doctorate of medicine, and set off to minister, entirely at his own expense, to the needs of Africa. He married Helen Bresslau, a trained nurse, and the daughter of an eminent historian, and then, to the amazement of everybody, turned his face towards the wilds. Plunging into the interior, he erected his hospital at Lambarene and was soon effecting cures and performing operations that, to the people of the jungle, seemed the quintessence of miracle. "See him now," exclaims Seaver, "see this man who astonished philosophers by his insight into the mind of Kant, and musicians by his penetrating interpretation of the soul of Bach, and theologians by the uncanny wonder of his scholarly researches, see him now, in a shed by a riverside in Equatorial Africa, holding, with a comrade's grip, the hand of a primitive negro whom his surgical skill has just rescued from an agonising death!"

When, on one occasion, Schweitzer was leaving his home in the jungle in order to earn money for his hospital by giving organ recitals in the great European cathedrals, and lectures in the vast auditoriums of the old world, the father superior of the Roman Catholic Mission rushed down to the river steamer just as it was casting off. "You shall not leave this country," he cried, "without my thanking you for the incredible transformation you have effected here!" The good priest died shortly afterwards; but Schweitzer returned to the inner recesses of the African forest to continue the brave work to which, as a small boy in the Gunsbach Valley, the eloquent statue at Colmar had called him.

F W Boreham

Image: Albert Schweitzer