91b Harley Street, W.,
August 17, 1910.
My dear Horace,
So you have yielded at last. Your fine contempt for the gentlest art has begun to dissolve. And being on the very brink of one of the snuggest of sea-trout lochs you think that you must really have a cast or two upon its waters. There are people who will tell you, of course, that it's a blind man's game, or very nearly so, this loch trout fishing. But let the blue waters—crinkled, if fortune smiles, with the daintiest of ripples—be their immediate and sufficient refutation. And some day they may behold you casting one of Mrs. Richardson's artfullest duns over those senior wranglers among trout that lurk in the disillusioned depths of the Itchen.
At the same time I am not forwarding you an outfit for your birthday present, as you so delicately suggest, firstly because you tell me that Major Cameron can easily fix you up with all that is necessary; but principally because I am not quite comfortable in my mind as to your real motive for caressing the surface of Loch Bruisk. I should like to be just a little surer that it is a genuine regard for salmo trutta rather than a merely altruistic (though very praiseworthy) desire to be properly companionable to Miss Graham, who is, as you tell me, so awfully keen about it.
It is of course a very strong point in her favour, and I remember her brother quite well. He plays half for Richmond, I think, and you introduced us to one another at Queen's. And his sister—I don't remember that you have mentioned her to me before—may of course be the means to an end—an instrument chosen by a merciful Providence whereby a new channel of enjoyment is about to be revealed to you. But on the other hand, I can't help feeling that with your duty done, cheerfully and bravely, as I have no doubt will be the case—and Miss Graham away—the yearning to catch trout may conceivably leave you. So I am sending you instead my very best wishes for the happiest of birthdays, and a hope that you have many others yet in store for you.
I am glad that you have determined to go up for your second medical some time next year, and note that you have taken away volumes of anatomy and physiology in your trunk. If you will accept my paternal advice, however, you will leave them there until you have decided that your health is sufficiently recuperated to return either to Cambridge or Harley Street. I don't want you to curtail your holidays. I have far too much respect both for holidays in general and yourself in particular. For it's one of the most pathetic features about the genuine old codger (and one of his surest signs too) that his periods of recreation tend to become progressively shorter—and not always by force of circumstances. They may actually begin to bore him. He may even have to make an effort of will to prolong them for his ultimate good—to school himself into regarding them as cures. Thus, while at twenty-two a summer vacation of less than two months is too monstrous to be seriously considered, at forty-two one becomes grateful for a fortnight, could do with three weeks, but is apt to find a month just a trifle too long. Whereas at fifty-two—— So don't curtail them. And yet better is it to curtail them than to pollute. And unless you particularly need them for preserving specimens of the local flora or maintaining the creases upon your Sunday trousers, you should never, never, never pack technical books in a holiday trunk. It is to put poison—or at any rate water—into the wine that you are to pour out before the gods of mountain and moor and loch. And though they are generous they are proud. And they will surely make you repent it—not merely because it is tactless, as though you should make Miss Dolly—I think that was her name?—the staple article of your conversations with Miss Graham; and not merely because it shows your ignorance, as though you should munch ginger-nuts with that fine old port which your uncle has dug up for your especial benefit; but because—far worse—it is an evidence of double-dealing. And no god, not even the presiding deity of the tiniest mountain ash, is going to stand that. If you read your Bible, as I hope you do, you will have been warned concerning this simultaneous worship of two contrary masters, and the doom that must certainly befall it. And that's why no really wise schoolmaster ever sets his pupils a holiday task, though there are still, I'm afraid, a few foolish ones left. I hardly like to think that mine can have been among them; and yet there's no doubt that "Marmion," the "Lady of the Lake," the "Cloister and the Hearth," and several other peaks upon the literary landscape remain clouded to me for ever.
You would have thought this a sufficiently clear lesson, perhaps, upon the point that I am pressing into you. But it wasn't. And I remember consecrating a golden September in Fife to the mastery of my materia medica. There's a moor, for instance, somewhere between Dunfermline and Rumbling Bridge that will eternally be associated in my mind with the preparations of opium. I can recall in all its hideous detail some such afternoon's tramp as this:—
"By George, that's a fine piece of colouring, the sunlight on that dying heather over there, Tinct: Camph: Co: strength of opium one in two hundred and forty. There are the Ochils again, pil: plumbi cum opio, strength of opium one in eight—— Damn, I forgot to look for that big trout when I crossed the burn just now. Extractum opii, strength of opium two in one" (it sounds improbable—even theological—but if you look it up you will discover it to be correct, and I have never found the knowledge in the least important). And, as a result, that particular moor will always whisper to me unhealthily of morphia, while the preparations of opium had to be learned all over again in something less than six weeks' time.
And you will generally find it to be the case, I think, that the work which has desecrated the holiday can seldom stand either the test of an examination or the more valuable one of practical appliance. For it's the term's work, the good, solid, everyday's grind in the dissecting-room or the physiological theatre, and later in the wards and the out-patient department, that is the bone and marrow of your pre-graduate education. Without it no amount of feverish cramming will ever make you efficient, though it may occasionally perhaps save you from being deservedly ploughed. And with it no cramming should be necessary—or at most a very little. For there are still a few subjects, alas, demanded by examining boards that can be learned, I suppose, in no other way—such as the preparations of opium before mentioned, with their respective strengths and all that appertains unto them, and the ingredients of various obscure powders that you will never hear about again. In after life you will always refer to your pharmacopeia if you want information upon these subjects, and no normal mind has either the capacity or the desire to retain their details for so long as twenty-four hours after they have been required in the examination-room.
But as a general rule, and one that is happily gaining ground every year, you will find that your examiners will far prefer to discover in you the evidences of a functionally active, if somewhat lightly stored, mind than a kind of paté de foie gras, fattened up for the occasion, but too inert, as a result, to leave him quite happy about its future. And that's why it's always a good thing to take life easily during the last week before your papers have to be written. Go abroad, mix with normal men and women, to whom examinations are just episodes in the lives of other people, fearsome but remote. And remind yourself in their unruffled company that, after all, they are merely episodes. You won't forget anything really important in that time. If you do, you can never properly have known it. While as for the trimmings, you will be more than compensated for the shedding of a few of these by the sanity and freshness with which your brain will come to its ordeal—as an example of the reverse of which there occurs to me the vision of a pallid young man who addressed me about six weeks ago in the hospital lobby. He was very much frightened. I didn't know who he was. Indeed I don't think that I had ever seen him before. And the remnants of a natural modesty were evidently struggling to hold him back. But Circumstance, and the awful fact that in less than an hour's time he was due for a viva upon the Thames Embankment, forced him trembling towards me. He wiped his forehead—I was the only likely subject within range at the moment, and his train was to leave in exactly seven and a half minutes.
"I can remember the hooklets," he gasped, "but would you mind telling me, sir, which of the tapeworms it is that has four suckers?"
Poor boy—I could see that his whole future was pivoting miserably upon those forgotten suckers; and, by an excessively fortunate accident, I happened to have some notes for a lecture upon the subject in one of my pockets.
"If you'll wait a moment," I told him honestly, "I think that I can let you know. But I really couldn't tell you offhand."
He looked at me anxiously, and I could see my reputation tottering in his eyes as I searched about for my pocket-book.
"Nor could your examiners, you know," I assured him, "unless they had just primed themselves beforehand, or carried notes upon their cuffs—which they probably do."
His brow cleared amazingly at this, and I could see that the relative importance of knowing, without reference, the precise number of a tapeworm's suckers was beginning to define itself a little more clearly to his distressed understanding. So I read out my notes to him, and he dashed upon his way, relieved if not rejoicing. But you mustn't ever become like that, you know, although it's not so difficult to do so as you may think.
And lastly, if there should be a Miss Graham—I speak in the abstract, of course, and very, very tentatively—she must be allowed to share none of the homage that every respectable examination insists upon monopolising. She may still be the goddess in your car. For on the whole I think that goddesses (of the right sort) make for careful driving. But at present your eyes must be chiefly upon the reins. You must forgive me for touching upon a topic that you will probably find extremely irrelevant, but there are certain things in a Highland country house that are curiously apt to wander a little from their true perspective. I ought to have mentioned, by the way, that Churchills are sending you a gun, which I hope may arrive safely with this letter. For though I am quite open to conviction about the fishing, I feel rather more certain about the shooting. It was pre-Grahamite, you see—you haven't told me her Christian name—pre-Dollyite, pre-Berylite—and even, if I remember rightly, pre-Looite; so that I think it may safely be accepted as being integral and not merely adventitious. Anyway, there's the gun, and I hope that you'll kill many grouse with it in spite of your sister Molly and her humanitarian comrades. For grouse, like men, must die on a day, and better the quick shot in mid-flight than to crawl away, and to perish slowly in the corner as most of us, alas, will probably have to do when our sunset days come round.
I expect you will already have had letters from mother and Molly, if not from Tom and Claire, who are staying with Lady Wroxton at Stoke, and defying the Thames Conservancy in the matter of mixed bathing during most of the forbidden hours. You heard, no doubt, or saw in the papers, that Rupert Morris has had a K added to his C.B.; which means, I suppose, that his little scrap on the frontier was more important than he led us to suppose. In any case, nobody, I should think, has deserved his title more, and quite certainly no one will value it less. He is expected home, I believe, about the end of September, and you will probably meet him at Stoke, where Molly (having squared her conscience) is presently to assist in the extra housekeeping demanded by the partridges and pheasants. With much love,
Yr. affect. father,
P. H.
91b Harley Street, W.,
August 25, 1910.
My dear Aunt Josephine,
I have, of course, frequently seen many of the pictures that you mention, and have also read some of the stories of which, as you say, each illustration professes to tell one. I don't think however that I have seen the particular one of the signalman which you enclose; and it certainly seems a coincidence that he should be pressing his left hand so vehemently upon the precise spot at which your cook also is so apt to suffer pain. And it is odd too that, like her, he would appear to be so thoroughly respectable that their common affliction becomes a little difficult to understand. It is not, as you say, as if either of them gave one the least impression of being in any degree loose or rackety. At the same time, from a close examination of the signalman's anatomy, I don't think that the organs so frequently mentioned in his very eloquent account of himself are those most likely to be affected. And perhaps your cook may also be happily under a similar misapprehension. And that is why, before taking the pills that have been so markedly blessed to the signalman, I would suggest the outward application of a little friction with the open palm of someone else's hand in which have been previously placed a few drops of turpentine. It will be so far less expensive, you see; and, even if not finally successful, will at any rate do no harm. But I have great hopes.
Your affect. nephew,
Peter Harding.
91b Harley Street, W.,
August 30, 1910.
My dear Reggie,
When one of your youngest journalists from Franciscan House called upon me last night, I guessed at once that you were either away from home or that you had given the lad carte blanche to collect material for a "silly season" discussion, without adding an Olympian hint or two as to where he had best go hunting. As a matter of fact both surmises turned out to be correct; and I even seemed to detect in him a certain air of relief as he admitted the first, while he was still young enough to feel rather important with regard to the second. Unhappy youth—how should he know that he had run into the very jaws of your arch-enemy?
It was a college friendship with Horace, he informed me, that was his excuse for calling upon me, although of course he knew quite well that I was an eminent authority on the subject in hand. This was so obvious an afterthought that I couldn't help asking him what the subject might be. He told his lie so nicely, you see, and was so humbly aware of its small worth. He coloured a little.
"Are we nervous?" he said.
I pushed over the tobacco-jar, and asked him to fill his pipe.
"I hope not," I replied, and he coloured a little more.
"You don't understand," he explained. "That is to be the headline of the discussion. At least, that was what I'd thought myself. But some of the other fellows have suggested, 'Are we more nervous?' or 'Where are our National Nerves?' or 'National Neurosis; are we suffering from it?'"
I nodded.
"Yours is the shortest," I said.
"Just so," he replied, "and, I think, the most arresting."
"And who's going to write the first letter?" I asked.
"Well," he stammered, "I rather expect it will be me."
"And you'll call yourself 'A London Physician,' I suppose?"
"Something like that," he confessed. "You see, a newspaper discussion like this is all right when once it's started—that is, if it's a live one, as Mr. Pole calls it. The other letters simply pour in."
"From Balham and Holloway and Tottenham and Ilford——"
"Oh yes," he smiled, "and from Kensington and Mayfair as well."
"You think that a good many of your readers will like to tell the public all about their nerves?"
"Thousands of 'em," he said confidently.
"And you'll select a certain number of letters from each district, and fill up a couple of your daily columns for nothing?"
"That's the idea. And we shall give a lot of pleasure too."
"And the writers and the writers' friends will rush to buy copies, I suppose, and cut out their letters, and stick them in albums."
He laughed.
"I shouldn't wonder," he said. "Making personal friends for the paper—that's what Mr. Pole calls it. He says that nothing pays better."
"And presently, perhaps, you'll collect all the letters, and put them in a little booklet of which you'll sell large numbers for sixpence in a comfortable dressing-gown of advertisements."
"Possibly," he said, "if it goes really well."
I looked at him for a moment, upon the threshold of his life-work. He was a nice boy, though the shades of Franciscan House were fast closing about him.
"D'you think it's worth it?" I asked him.
"Why rather," he said. "Pays like anything."
"Forty per cent, perhaps?"
"Very likely."
"The Franciscan heaven," I admitted, and he winced a little. By which I knew, of course, that he was as yet no true Franciscan—who never winces, and whose conscience, to use a borrowed phrase, is merely his accomplice.
"Do you object to forty per cent?" he asked.
"Per se?" I answered, "not at all."
"But to the correspondence perhaps?"
"I'm not enamoured of the idea," I confessed. "Are you?"
He reached for the ash-tray, and knocked out his pipe.
"We must give 'em what they want, you know," he said.
I bowed.
"The Franciscan creed," I told him. "But perhaps they don't know yet that they do want it."
"Then we must show 'em," he replied.
"The Franciscan gospel," I sighed, for, as I have said, he was a nice boy, still trailing a wisp or two of glory.
"And besides," he went on, "people always like to talk about their weak nerves, don't they?"
He was getting in under my guard now to bleed me of copy, so I stepped aside.
"Play cricket?" I asked him.
"A bit," he confessed.
"Ever stopped a rot?"
"Sometimes," he replied warily.
"How did you do it?" I inquired.
He laughed again.
"Now you're getting at me, aren't you?" he said.
"Of course I am. Haven't you been trying to get at me?"
"Do you think you're going to score?" he asked.
"I shouldn't wonder," I told him; "because you didn't encourage those panicky fellow-batsmen of yours to talk about their nerves, did you? On the contrary, you swaggered a bit yourself, and told 'em that the bowling was poor stuff. You didn't even tell 'em to forget that growing excavation behind their belt-buckles. You were subtler. You took it for granted that they hadn't got one. You surrounded 'em with the proper atmosphere. You were more than half a nerve specialist already—the better half. You infected them with your own health. But what are you proposing to do now?"
The journalist in him died hard.
"Then you think there is a rot?" he asked.
"I didn't say so."
He put his pipe in his pocket, and picked up his hat and gloves.
"After all," he smiled, "you've only been preaching the old doctrine of responsibility, you know. And the modern journalist is a detached person." But I shook my head.
I repeat that he was a nice boy, and had borne my little pi-jaw with admirable fortitude.
"Only semi-detached," I ventured, "with a half-educated brother next door."
I fancy that I can see you lying snugly aft upon the "Nautilus" at anchor—a bronzing cynic, smiling gently over this ingenuous little duel. And perhaps you have already made up your mind to transfer this incomplete disciple of yours to some other department, or even (according to a fundamental Franciscan tradition) to dispense with his services altogether. For if he cannot bring himself to demolish one prehistoric physician, what can he do? And I shall be sorry if he is put to any real inconvenience. But on the other hand I shall rejoice openly to see him save his soul alive. For though I didn't tell him so, and though I am convinced that at the core—the germ-plasm, if you like—the race is still happily sound enough, yet if there is a rot, a temporary epidemic of nervous instability, it is largely confined to those who draw their mental nourishment from Franciscan House, and whose twitterings you are now proposing to exploit.
Autres temps, autres mœurs, for while there was a time when our more ignorant forefathers were wont to scoff (mistakenly, no doubt, but on balance with a tonic effect) at the possessors of "weak nerves," now that we have learned just enough to talk about them in bad Greek "neurasthenia" is an affection of which no man need be ashamed. "Poor chap," we say, and begin to wonder if we are not sufferers ourselves.
You will have observed that my reference is masculine, although the older historians have regarded the complaint as being chiefly confined to women. But you are not to deduct from this, as I can see you trying to do, that the neurasthenia of to-day is therefore a new variety, whose exhibition in your halfpenny daily paper is justifiable on public grounds. For if it attacked mainly a certain class of our great-grandmothers and their maternal ancestors, this was less, I think, on account of their sex than of their circumstances—the predisposing combination in some of them of slender academic endowment with unexercised mental activity.
Times have changed, but even then it was not the woman of affairs, whose education, ample or the reverse, had been salted by the winds of action—it was not the queens and the stateswomen at the one pole, or the workers in the fields at the other, but the secluded gentlewomen between them, who fainted daily, and agonised over beetles and mice. Requiescant in pace, for their day is no more, and their busier daughters have no longer time to write pathetic little self-revelations in unventilated boudoirs, or collapse at a knock upon the door. Instead, they will vault nimbly over the window-sill; while as for the beetles, they will kill them for you mercifully, and explain their pedigree in Latin.
But the class that they have thus vacated has not, alas, been suffered to die out, and is now perhaps even fuller than ever. Gone, it is true, with the conditions that produced them, are the vaporous women of Richardson and Fielding. But here in their stead, and in a very similar soil, is the twopenny clerk of to-day. And it is typically in his Harringay villa that one must search for the modern neurasthenic. A little cheap education, a long period of physical security, a comfortable, if inexpensive, assurance of at any rate the more primal necessities, and the demand of ever coalescing industries for an innumerable army of semi-automatic dependents—all these have been at work. And they have built up for us a hundred airless mental chambers, whose inhabitants, desperately aware of their gentility, and sufficiently educated for a little self-probing, have nothing more demanded from them than to copy out stereotyped letters or manipulate a Morse key. To obtain their chance of doing these things they had to acquire a small amount of knowledge—since seldom added to; and to do them automatically a few months of mental apprenticeship became necessary. No more was asked of them. And after a little while, and in the great majority of cases, they have ceased to ask more of themselves. And I have seen men crying in my consulting-room over some trivial, unexpected appeal that has been too much for their paralysed initiative.
You may think that my analogy is far-fetched, and superficially I'll admit that it is. But probe a little deeper, and you'll find how exactly the related conditions have produced corresponding types. Look at my sequestered lady busy with her eternal crochet, but in reality not busy at all. And then behold my little clerk occupied with his letters and his envelope-licking, but with a brain as really unemployed as my lady's. Read out to me the writings of my sequestered lady or the records of her conversations. How little she had read or seen or studied, and yet with what confident persistence she uttered her superlatives. And now talk to my little clerk, who likewise has climbed no mountains of comparison, and his tiniest headache is "shocking," his least calamity "terrible." Why, only this afternoon I was asked for a tonic by such an one (your halfpenny illustrated was peeping out of his pocket) on the ground that yesterday he had seen a small child cut its forehead, and held it till the doctor came. Listen to my sequestered lady, innocence herself, and her talk, with titters, is of my lord's liaisons, my lady's cure, and what the neighbours think. And listen to my little clerk, and what are his topics but these?
God forbid that I should hold either of them up for ridicule (it's you that I'm ultimately to annihilate), for such generalities as these are never more than half true. My lady was only waiting for the marching years to become a Florence Nightingale and a Madame Curie. She was only waiting to be shown, and admitted into, the great worlds outside her boudoir to prove a right of way that has long since ceased to be questioned. And who shall say what shining destiny awaits my little clerk? For it is not, as we are so often told, the mere rush of our modern industrialism that is at the root of so much neurasthenia—it is its blank automatism, with its endless opportunities for self-pity. And one can only suppose that as we advance in knowledge much of this human drudgery will be delegated to other instruments. But the time is not yet, alas, and meanwhile all that is best of him has to struggle with circumstances only too sorrowfully adapted to morbid mental imaginings. "The result of all this free education," you will be told by a certain type of elderly raisonneur. But of course he is wrong. It's not less education that we want, but more. For even in the good old days, as I have said, it was not the Marie Stuarts and the Queen Elizabeths, delivering their Latin orations and translating their "Mirrors of the Sinful Soul" at thirteen and fourteen years old, it was not the full-tide women of the Renaissance, who were afterwards conspicuous for nervous debility. And nor is it the really well-educated clerk of to-day. For while a little education is chiefly dangerous in so far as it increases a man's self-consciousness without showing him where it is gently to be laughed at, a little more will generally remedy this defect, to the lasting benefit of his sanity. No, it's in his awful self-seriousness that lurks the subtlest enemy of the half-educated man. If you can make a man laugh at himself, you can make him laugh at his nerves—which is better than a hecatomb of bromides.
Well then, there's my analogy; and here's where it breaks down. My lady's prison walls were concrete as well as abstract; my clerk's are chiefly abstract. She was in the world but not of it. He is both in it and of it. She could scarcely touch upon its treasures if she would. For him they are waiting—the real ones—if he will only take them. Long ago we have recognised the merely physical dangers of his daily enforced imprisonment. And we have framed a hundred sanitary laws to provide him with his oxygen unsullied. But what about his half-developed mind? You will tell me that good lectures are abundant, and that classics may be bought for a shilling. Yet what are these, at the best, but occasional winds of thought, too often resented as a draught? And who is it but you, creeping under his door for a halfpenny, that creates his mental atmosphere? You may tell me that you only reproduce it, with its constituents very faithfully proportioned—a nebulous sermonette once a week, an inch to the scientific progress of both the hemispheres, and three columns to the personal appearance of the Camden murderer. And you may justify yourself on the same grounds for covering your nakedness, as you did last week (I'm glad that you yourself were away), with an appeal in big letters that he should buy your orange-coloured weekly, wherein—with delicious exclusiveness—he might find, in all its details, the life-history of this same criminal's flimsy little paramour, written (God forgive you—and him) by her own father; and the nadir, one can only pray, of your efforts for forty per cent. But you cannot at the same time lay a finger on your paragraph of Health Hints, and boast complacently about the influence of the Press. Nor do you, I suppose, with any real conviction; and I may have exaggerated, perhaps, in crediting you with the creation of anybody's atmosphere. For the true brain-worker passes you by, and the manual labourer has his antidote at hand; while the little clerk is not, in a modern and abominable phrase, "a person who matters." But then he is. And in the battle for mental vigour that, under present conditions, he must consciously fight or die, you might so easily be playing the biggest rather than the least worthy part. For our help still cometh from the hills. And surely it's of the hill-top men, the men who are climbing, the men with a view, that you should be telling him, morning and evening, as he sits in his London cellule. Whereas instead, with his birthright ever broadening about him, you still drearily drag him after you to Bow Street, where you photograph him in his pitiful queue for to-morrow's illustration. Dear me, I'm afraid that I'm tub-thumping; and you'll think that I've forgotten your farm and your balloon-house and your daily reports upon the cuckoo and the corn-crake. But I haven't; and what's more, I'm quite ready to believe that if Bow Street went out of fashion you'd be the first to appreciate the fact. We should soon be hearing indeed that you had led the movement. And that's why you don't really stem the onward march of sanity, though there are casualties en route of which it would be difficult to acquit you. While as for your National Neurosis, one foreign battery on Primrose Hill would bury it for two generations.
It might also blow the roof off Franciscan House.
"But poor Reggie can't do anything by himself," says Esther.
"They all say that," I grumble.
"And haven't you been just a little bit rude?"
"I'm attacking a point of view," I explain, "and I feel rather heated."
She looks over my shoulder reproachfully.
"And you've never even mentioned our having the baby when they take the 'Nautilus' to Italy."
"No more I have."
"And it's the very thing I told you to write about."
And this is true. For we must have the baby.
Yr. sorrowful friend,
P. H.
P.S.—This letter almost makes me wonder why I like you.
91b Harley Street, W.,
September 6, 1910.
My dear Sally,
There was a young American, Stephen Crane, who wrote, a few years ago, a little volume called "Wounds in the Rain." You may have read it. It was rather a grim book, but written with a good deal of power, and a promise of more to come that the author, alas, never lived to fulfil. And not the worst part of it was its title, with its suggestion of grey suffering, the aftermath alike of victory and defeat. And yet I am not sure that "Wounds in the Sun" would not literally have stood for a far greater sum of misery. Only he would never have made us feel it.
For there's an implicit sadness in the monosyllable rain—in the very sound of it—that depends, I think, when you come to analyse it, less upon the ideas of water and wetness and possible chill that it conjures up, than upon an underlying suggestion of something falling. It's a little hard to account for it—I would commend the subject to a metaphysician if I could be certain that it hasn't already been dealt with by him—and yet it's a fact, I think, that we have invested all falling things with a certain quality of tragedy, with at any rate no single idea of cheerfulness. Think of what you will, from little Susan's tear to Lucifer, son of the Morning, and of all the more material phenomena that lie between them—cascades, avalanches, autumn leaves—and you will find that while your vision perceives in them pity, or solemnity, or terror, or even disgust, it clothes no falling thing with actual joy. And the swifter the fall the more profound are these sentiments that it engenders.
Thus the sheer waterfall, spilling itself unbroken over some brooding crag into a pit of blackness, contains just so much more gloom than the torrent, leaping down from rock to rock, as its descent is more vertical and headlong. The thistledown, sliding earthwards upon the wind, is less tragic than the rain-sodden beech-leaf by just the measure of its longer passage through the air. While the rain that drives horizontally against one's Burberry may be a good deal more penetrating, but is seldom so dismal as that which drops down undisturbed from the drab sky to earth.
I believe that there is a sermon in all this somewhere—in the universal instinct with which we find sorrow, or at least some factor of it, in all that falls; and joy, or at any rate its suggestion, in most things that rise up, and open, and turn themselves towards the heavens. But I'll spare you the preaching of it, since these reflections merely spring to my mind as the result, last Saturday, of a particularly wet tramp from Beer to Sidmouth.
I had been called down in consultation on Friday, and having spent the night in the sick man's house, decided next morning to walk the eight miles along the coast. It was one of those baffling Devonshire mornings of rain and mist with rhythmical promises, never fulfilled, of a watery sunshine to come; and both my hostess and the local doctor were fain to press motor-cars upon me. But I had made up my mind, and assured them that I was one of those many people—possibly foolish—who rather enjoyed a walk in the rain.
My host, who was by way of being a philosopher as well as an invalid, looked at me with a twinkle.
"So you really think you like it?" he asked me.
"Yes," I told him. "I really do like it."
He put a hand on my shoulder.
"No, you don't," he said. "Just think it over between here and Sidmouth."
And he was right. Before I had walked two miles I knew that he was right. I don't enjoy walking in the rain, though I often do it, and always claim to like it. I merely walk in it for the rather subtle enjoyment of getting out of it, and for the sake of plumbing a little more deeply, at my journey's end, the everyday delights of dryness, warmth, and a deep-bosomed chair. I become a Tibetan at the prayer-wheel storing up joys to come in a whetted appetite for to-morrow's blue sky. For though I must admit that there's a certain decorative effect about rain over a countryside, yet it's an effect of pure melancholy, scientifically unfounded of course—at any rate until science can explain the proposition at the beginning of this letter—heightening loneliness, exaggerating the hardship of toil, deepening the horror of death, but adding quite an extraordinary power to any gleam of even the tearfullest of sunshine that may have stumbled into some corner of the landscape. And there's always the possibility of that gleam being the herald of a sudden conquest of glory, in whose triumph your merely fair-weather pedestrian can never have a part.
Thus a memory comes back to me, for instance, of a dreary five-in-the-morning start, a hopeless breakfast, a dogged rain-soaked tramp up the steep hillside—and then the summit of Ben Lomond, a very ark above the flood, borne up, as it were, into the midmost sanctuary of heaven, with the submerging seas rolling out to the world's end, and the wind thrilling over them like an organ. Ten minutes ago, and the sun had lost itself for ever. And now it flamed there like the white throne of God, till the horizons melted before its gaze, and the great dead began majestically to rise—Ben More, Ben Lawers, the Cairngorms, and the distant peaks of Arran.
My sunshine on Saturday last however was not, I should think, more than twelve years old. She was standing rather pensively (but without agitation) near a cottage gate; and fortunately I had provided myself with some bulls'-eyes at a village called Branscombe, where a kindly old lady had assured me that there was still a great demand for them. I extracted one from the bag, and was thanked politely but by no means deferentially. There was a moment's pause during which a damp physician was being gravely relegated to his proper sphere in the natural scheme of things—an obviously humble one. Then she threw me a fact.
"Nellie arn't got one," she observed.
So I gave her one for Nellie.
"Anybody else?" I inquired.
She looked down for a minute at the plump and striped confection.
"Mother likes them things," she said—and I had seen by this time, of course, that her mother must be a very nice mother. So she accepted one for mother.
"And is that all?" I asked.
"Well," she said doubtfully, "Baby's just arf to sleep."
And this is all that I shall ever remember about the road from Beer to Sidmouth.
I am finding it harder than ever this year to get a summer holiday. And while these little glimpses of the country merely sharpen my desire for more, I find myself telling myself sternly that I must really learn to be contented with them. And at any rate I have been enabled to see more of the hospital than for some time past; and, as you know, this is to be my last year there as a visiting physician.
This afternoon, my junior being salmon-fishing in Norway, I thought that I would take the out-patients for the first time in twelve years; and the clinical assistant proving not unwilling to go and play tennis, I amused myself with seeing the lot of them. For there's no other commentary upon men and manners quite like a collection of out-patients at a large hospital. Listen therefore to a stalwart gentleman who earns twenty shillings a week, and doesn't stint himself in beer.
"Debility, doctor," he said, "that's what's the metter with me." He dropped his voice huskily. "Domestic trouble," he added.
"Dear me," I sympathised, feeling his pulse. "Serious?"
"Twins," he said gloomily; "second lot I've 'ed in eighteen months; an' I think it's run me down."
Your aff. brother,
Peter.
c/o Harry Carthew, Crome Lodge,
near Caversham, Berks,
September 14, 1910.
My dear Bruce,
I am very glad to hear that you have had such an excellent holiday in Switzerland, and brought home four or five more mountain scalps to your Cumberland wigwam. But it's rather sad that the little storm that was brewing at S. Peter's before you left should have burst in thunder and lightning during your absence. Knowing both Merridew and Rogers, I quite agree with you that it was probably inevitable, and may ultimately tend to a clearer atmosphere. Meanwhile however the little community makes war from opposite camps, and there is a great deal of unnecessary bitterness in their tactics that seems likely to increase when Rogers comes back from London. And, as you say, it's all rather sad and sordid, and only humorous because the parish is so small and the whole storm contained, as it were, in one of its afternoon teacups. But then most parishes are comparatively small, and we all have to live in one or other of them, and storms in teacups are apt to be just as devastating as any other kind of storm—even more so perhaps, because it's so much easier on these occasions to insist upon recommending one's own particular infusion of tannin, than to insert instead an unobtrusive drop or two of the calming milk of human kindness. Whereas cyclones have a habit of setting us shoulder to shoulder, by virtue of the unanimous discovery that they rather suddenly engender of the extraordinary unimportance of our differences.
So on the whole I'm with you in preferring cyclones, although at first I was rather inclined to disagree with your assertion that this little flare-up between Rogers and your new vicar was merely a somewhat exaggerated instance of the general underlying hostility that seems to exist between Medicine and the Church.
I was for pointing out to you, with some vigour, the fact that we both have friends, not a few, in the consulting-room and cloth respectively, to whom we can talk with a complete frankness, and in the assurance of a reciprocated understanding. And yet, on second thoughts, I am reluctantly sure that you are right, and that, speaking in very general terms, there does exist some such feeling as you have named—less hostility, perhaps, than a decently veiled distrust. It's a little hard to see why this should be the case. For there would appear superficially to be at least a hundred reasons why the precisely opposite should be true. Perhaps the foundation of it is historical. Centuries enough have not yet rolled away since medicine came out of the side of priestcraft; so that on the one hand there is still an occasional smarting of the old wound, and on the other a little over-insistence, perhaps, upon a complete and rather superior liberty—tradition still looming somewhat largely in the education of the young clergyman, and reverence being not, perhaps, a particularly prominent feature in the training of his medical brother. In any case, there it is; and though I think that Rogers has been wrong, or at any rate tactless, in his opposition to the extra services that Merridew wishes to hold in the cottage hospital, it seems to me that your two protagonists are very typical of all that is best (and possibly least reconcilable) on either side. For on the one hand you have Merridew, ardent, sincere, sacerdotal, and very nearly young enough to account for, though not of course to justify, Rogers's rudeness in referring to him as "the boy from Cuddesdon." And on the other, you have Rogers, equally genuine, generous, uncompromising, and almost fiercely insistent in his demand for intellectual honesty. Indeed I think his rather truculent materialism is far more an expression of this desire than an exact creed of his personal belief. And both men, it seems to me, are so obviously the logical products of their respective upbringings.
Of Merridew's I can only speak of course as an outsider. His father, whom I knew very slightly, was himself a clergyman of the old High Church type, moderately wealthy, refined to the uttermost, acutely sensitive, artistic, yet as rigid in his standards as any Cromwellian Ironside. He was happily married, and his home—and young Merridew's—was, almost necessarily, like himself. Merridew was the only child, and when his father died, while he was still at Lancing, it was only natural that he should resolve to enter the Church, and that his mother should henceforth devote herself almost entirely to his welfare and to the furtherance of these boyish resolutions. Leaving Lancing, he went up to his father's old college at Cambridge, commended to his tutors, and known to his fellow-undergraduates, from the outset, as a candidate for Holy Orders. And here—again as a perfectly accepted consequence—he took his degree in classics, and dabbled a little in history. He was not unpopular. His ardour, never awkward, procured him many friends and indeed followers among like-minded youths with a similar future in front of them; and, being adequately athletic, he was on friendly, if not intimate, terms with a good many others. At twenty-two or so he left Cambridge for Cuddesdon, and at twenty-four he obtained a curacy in Hoxton, where he overworked himself for four years. He was then, I think, an assistant priest at a fashionable church in Kensington, until he was presented by one of his uncles with the living of S. Peter's. Those are the external facts, and, as a guesser from the opposite camp, I may very likely go wrong in estimating their inner significances. But it seems to me—and in talking with Merridew I am always conscious of this—that as the inevitable result of this training he has been surrounded by a kind of protective aura, now almost impenetrable, that has interposed itself, as it were, between himself, as an anointed priest, and the great tides of actual life that go surging about him. Little by little it was created for him by his parents. The vicissitudes of school life made him cling to it only the more firmly. Cambridge, and the conspiracy of silence that, to a lesser extent, surrounds the embryo and younger clergy as certainly as it does their sisters at home, merely strengthened it fourfold; so that when he left Cuddesdon there it was complete—his lifebelt for the conflicting seas of reality—and not only about his waist, but also to a large extent encircling his intellect. For if you examine his education you will find, I think, that never in all that time was he encouraged, for himself and by himself, to discover, to classify, to co-relate, one single naked fact of real existence. Science was then, and has always been, in its inward sense, a thing unknown to him. Of the living stuff of humanity he was given not the smallest primary notion. And his observation of it since has been that of a man who has never been equipped with the first unprejudiced principles of observation at all. Of heredity and psychology he knows not a line. And of their results in actual character and conduct he can perceive, as a rule, only as much as the normal man will reveal to the present type of normal parson—while even of that he has never been given the wherewithal to judge.
Rogers, on the other hand, was the son of a small Northampton milliner. At the age of fourteen he ran away to sea, where he served for four years in all sorts of ships, in all sorts of capacities. It was on one of these that some rough and ready, but skilful, surgery, by which a young ship's doctor removed some broken bone from the brain of a comrade who had fallen from the rigging, first fired him with the desire to be a surgeon. He returned home to find his father dead and his mother in straitened circumstances. He got work in a boot factory, and studied at night schools for his preliminary examination. Having passed this, he went back to sea for a year, and then, coming up to London, he managed to attend at hospital by day, while he kept himself as dispenser, bottle-washer, and general handy man to a dispensing practitioner in his spare hours.
By this means, and with the aid of a scholarship or two, he obtained his diplomas, and started a cash surgery near Waterloo. Five years later he was a Fellow of the College of Surgeons, and in another three had become a member of his hospital staff. For a year or so he found it pretty hard to make both ends meet behind his modest plate (one of five) upon a front door in Harley Street. But then the tide began to turn. A brilliant paper or two marked him out as a coming man. A new and admirable method of performing a certain cerebral operation became associated with his name. And in ten years' time he had become perhaps the foremost brain surgeon in London. Twelve years after this he lost a hand, in consequence of a post-mortem infection, but retired a wealthy man, though at first a rather disconsolate one. For a time his love of the sea reasserted itself, and he travelled. Then, as you know, he found a retreat that suited him on the shores of Cumberland, where he has built, endowed, and kept lavishly up-to-date the little cottage hospital about which your teacup storm is raging.
You may tell me, perhaps, that both Rogers and Merridew are extreme instances. But if they are, it is in degree only and not in kind. For behind Rogers I can see a large and quickly growing army of thinking men and women, risen like him from what are called the masses, vigorous of mind and hard of muscle, men accustomed to deal with life at first hand, trained to observe, quick to deduct, unhampered, if perhaps a little too unmoved by tradition, state-makers, explorers, and men withal not impervious to, but on the contrary almost passionately eager for the truth.
And behind Merridew I can see many, if not most, of his brethren, men of fine instincts and real devotedness—narrow-minded in none but the most literal sense, and in that merely because of the school that has moulded them—men who would cheerfully give all that they possess to be able to influence in any substantial degree the great world's dreamers and doers. And behind them again I can see their Church.
Curiously enough, we have just been discussing something of all this upon Carthew's Thames-side lawn. We had crossed the river in the morning, and walked up, about a couple of miles, to a neighbouring village church. And now, as I write to you in the boat under the willows, they seem to me—the temple and its service—to have been almost tragically symbolic. The village itself, on the outskirts of Reading, consists of a rustic core, about which time and circumstance have wrapped several red-brick layers, the innermost containing workers from the various shops and factories of the neighbouring town, together with a sprinkling of day-labourers in the country round; and the outer accommodating some superior clerks and their families, a few of the more substantial Reading tradesmen, and the inevitable retired colonel.
Most of these, as we passed upon our way, were smoking over the Sunday papers in their front gardens, or preparing for a morning to be spent upon the river; and the church was far from their midst, a mile in fact beyond their extremest outskirts. Moreover the day was hot, and the road to it dusty.
The building itself was neither old nor new, and we were shown into a pew beneath a large stained-glass window that almost immediately began, in spite of myself, to monopolise my attention. The congregation consisted, of course, mainly of women. ("It will be the same in the Hereafter," my Aunt Josephine once assured me when commenting upon the same phenomenon.) But there were about thirty men present, for the most part gnarled and sunburnt sons of the field, in uncomfortable, ready-made suits—men, as I guessed, in whose veins there still ran something of the older homage once shared by parson and squire. What was this particular parson going to give them, I wondered, as mental and moral food for the week's sustenance? His delivery of the prayers and lessons was not very promising. It was not that he had any physical impediment in his speech. It was merely that he had never been taught to produce his sounds effectively, and that Oxford and his clubs had successfully schooled him into eliminating any tincture of emotion from their quality. But he might still, of course, have a message in waiting for us from the pulpit.
He preached upon the value of communicating before breakfast; and, as far as I could see, his remarks upon the subject were received, especially by the male portion of his congregation, with the same kind of curious, impassive gusto that had been noticeable in their delivery of the responses and the hymns. I remember a verse of one of these, and am quoting it exactly:
Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee
Repaid a thousandfold will be;
Then gladly will we give to Thee,
Who givest all.
Could they have known what they were singing? Had their vicar read these lines before he gave them out? Let us hope not.
But, as I said, it was the stained-glass window that dominated me, and seemed to contain in itself an epitome—yet not quite that, perhaps—of sermon and service and hymn, and the system that had made their survival possible in twentieth-century England. And yet, let me first put down that through it came light, real if distorted, and distilled, but how faintly, from the true arch of the outside heaven. And let me not forget this as I go on to remember its eight divisions, containing each a worshipping and apparently musical young woman, arrayed as no being has ever been arrayed, and regarding with upturned eyes—well, fortunately the artist had stopped short there, though merely, one fears, from want of space. I have called these maidens musical for the rather inadequate reason that in the hands of each were instruments by and through which sounds might conceivably be produced. But at the nature of these one could, alas, guess only too readily. Even in the grasp of experts one would have been justly dubious about the capabilities of those two-stringed violins, that one-keyed portable organ, those twin-trumpets with a common mouthpiece. And imagination reeled before their combined contemplation in the hands of these anæmic and self-evident amateurs. Nor could one turn from the subject, and find consolation in its colour or history. The window was not forty years old, and the colour was but a ghost of what colour might be.
The whole window indeed was but a ghost—a ghost, manufactured at the thirtieth hand, of the mediæval work of some laborious but crude designer. And what, one wondered, could be even its pretended message to the full-blooded, restless, and instructed generation of to-day? Could these sallow-cheeked saints, these obviously unhealthy, ill-nourished, incapable young women, tell anything worth the hearing upon any single plane of thought or conduct to the men and women of 1910? Could they indeed preach any other possible sermon than to cry out to all would-be healthy people to flee away from them into the outer sunshine? Were they even justified as reflections, infinitely remote, of the pale Galilean of Gautier and Swinburne? And was there in fact ever a pale Galilean, the least of Whose doctrines they could ever imaginably have embodied? Was that sturdy, sun-browned Youth, with His carpenter's wrists and His physical endurance, with His undreamed spiritual forces and His splendid sanity in their control, with the glory of His emancipating conceptions and His divine simplicity in their exposition—was He ever such as to be thus pallidly worshipped save in the twilight imageries of earlier centuries and the resentful poetry of rebellious thinkers? And I couldn't help wondering if my stained-glass window had perhaps cast its spell not only upon the aisles, but the authority of the Church that had set it up.
Only a year or two ago, for instance, I remember being assured by a youthful priest from Cambridge, who had scarcely ever stirred beyond his East End settlement, that, while he would refrain from setting a limit to God's mercy, no man could really be considered safe who had not made verbal confession of his sins to himself or one of his brothers. And only last week, upon the beach at Swanage, I heard another young clergyman, of a rather more so-called evangelical way of thinking, most positively assuring a ring of little children that the Devil was even then whispering in their ears what a good time he would like to give them. No wonder that the Carthews and the Rogers' stand aside, and wait impatiently for the coming of the New Word or of the Old one as it was. And no wonder that men and women, more really religious now, perhaps, than ever in history, look on at it all rather dubiously in a healthy hesitation, or turn frankly away to the tennis-lawn and river.
I have been watching them all the afternoon plying their oars here upon the Thames—strong and ruddy, keen-faced artisans from Reading, actresses from town, barristers, doctors, men of leisure, and men of affairs. And now, as I write, they are plying still, while across the fields comes the ineffectual call of the various ecclesiastical bells. By some they are not even heard, I suppose. They are singing choruses from "Our Miss Gibbs." To others they are just decorative in the region of river sounds, as the loose-strife and charlock in that of its colours. To a few they must even be merely sad. They might mean—they once have meant—so much to their country's seething life. And now they would seem to contain almost less significance than the gramophone in the steam-launch round the corner.
A few moments ago the Bishop, Carthew's newly-acquired brother-in-law, was leaning forward in his chair.
"If you knew," he said, "the real agony with which the Church has to face these problems."
Carthew nodded.
"Yes," he said slowly, "parturition's always painful—especially to the elderly—but the price for shirking it——"
"Is sterility," said the Bishop. "I know. But we don't want your pity. We want your help."
Carthew knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"Then first," he said, "you must get rid of those lifebelts, where the race goes past them, and teach your clergy to swim. And then you must keep 'em swimming. And you must see that they swim first. Don't stultify their efforts by askin' 'em to square impossible traditions with new truths, or mediæval ethics with essential Christianity. Don't call 'em unsound because they have inklings inside 'em that Revelation didn't cease with St. John or interpretation with the Epistle to the Hebrews. Let 'em have Visions of their own. Tell 'em to go out, and make discoveries. Let 'em dare to be simple—really simple, that is. And trust God and human kindness to do the rest."
I don't think that he was speaking lightly, but the Bishop looked at him for a moment rather closely.
"You're a believer?" he said. "You don't mind my asking?"
"Not a bit," said Carthew. "I'm a believer. And what's more, I'm a believer in an organised, visible Church, not because it's vital, but because it's expedient. Only its stained-glass windows, if they must be stained, should contain blacksmiths and boxers and wireless telegraphists, with some bank clerks and a bus driver, and of course some children." Mrs. Carthew had just brought out the twins, "for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Your affect. cousin,
Peter Harding.
P.S.—Rogers is coming to dinner with us, as you suggested, before he goes back to Cumberland.