_Biographical Narrative_
It is true that, strictly speaking, all biography is narrative; but
it is also true that in much biography the best narrative is lacking.
Thus, in calling this chapter Biographical Narrative, we obviously
mean the type of biography in which the narrative, or story, element
is stressed, in which the character depicted lives in the mind of the
reader because he has been drawn as an actor upon his stage, or, in
other words, because he himself acts rather than is acted upon by the
faithful but none too vigorous pen of his biographer.
This kind of biographical narrative requires, first, a subject, who,
although not a Dr. Johnson, is at least sufficiently striking in
personality and achievement to merit one’s attention and interest,
and, second, a sense of perception and discrimination on the part of
the biographer. The three selections which are given to illustrate
biographical narrative fulfill these requirements. One records the
life and work of Dr. Trudeau, the beloved physician of Saranac;
another depicts Beau Nash, a “character” of the early eighteenth
century; a third portrays the eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope of the
Pitt house and the Pitt nose.
Even the most cursory reading of the three selections will convince
him who reads that the persons portrayed really live, and a careful
analysis will show him why and how. It is this analysis which should
give him suggestions for his own writing of this kind of narrative.
He will easily discover that the last of the models, _The Beloved
Physician_, is far longer than either of the others, that it
possesses far greater wealth of anecdote and of detail, and that
it lays greater stress upon the work of the man than upon the man
himself--or, in other words, that it reveals the physician through
his relations to his environment rather than through personal traits
and habits.
And yet when he compares it with _Beau Nash_, which is only
one-fourth as long, he will be convinced that the subject of the
latter is after all just as clearly portrayed. This debonair
gentleman of the early eighteenth century with his snuff-boxes, his
white beaver, and his two imperious fingers, lives because of the
very choice of detail with which his biographer has drawn him. Bath
lives, too, with her welcoming abbey bells and her “periwigged men of
fashion, immaculate in all but morals.” Here is no wealth of detail
at all, but here instead are a few vivid and concrete facts and
objects which paint the picture every whit as clearly.
The second selection, _Lady Hester Stanhope_, is written much after
the manner of _Beau Nash_; that is, the author, Lytton Strachey,
sketches Lady Hester’s meteoric life with a few heavily penciled
lines. His details are few, but they are wonderfully telling ones.
Moreover, he employs a kind of unifying device which unquestionably
adds to the artistic value of his narrative. That device is
Lady Hester’s nose, with which Mr. Strachey begins and ends her
sensational career.
It hardly seems necessary after even this brief comparative study of
the three selections given to suggest methods of handling this type
of narrative. The compelling motive of the writer must be to make his
subject live; but whether he will do it by presenting it from many
sides and in relation to many persons and environments, whether he
will seize upon some fault, foible, or individualizing trait, whether
he will present a series of amazing and revealing incidents,--the
choice must rest with him.
M. E. C.
BEAU NASH
LLEWELYN POWYS
Richard Nash, despot of silk stockings and most tyrannical of
beaux, was born at Swansea, 18 October, 1674. His father was a
small glass-manufacturer, and in the days of his prosperity the
incomparable dandy was wont to say, when twitted as to his reticence
concerning his origin, “I seldom mention my father in company, not
because I have any reason to be ashamed of him, but because he has
some reason to be ashamed of me.” Nash was educated at Oxford, where,
in the words of Goldsmith, he showed “that though much might be
expected from his genius, nothing could be hoped from his industry”;
indeed, it appears that he was compelled to absent himself from
the university somewhat abruptly, leaving in his hastily abandoned
chambers “some plays, a tobacco-box, and a fiddle.”
After his unceremonious departure from Oxford, Nash occupied himself
for the next few years ostensibly in reading law at the Inner Temple,
though in reality living “to the very edge of his finances” as a
man-about-town. In 1704 he betook himself by stage-coach to Bath, a
journey which at that time was performed, “if God permitted, in three
days.” Shortly after his arrival the Corporation of Bath elected
him Master of Ceremonies of that city, a position which he held with
eminent success and unequalled pomp for more than half a century.
It must not be thought that the post was in any way a sinecure. It
would be difficult to enumerate all the varied activities by which
the debonair gamester converted the humdrum West Country town into
the most fashionable centre of eighteenth-century life in England.
He superintended the improving of the roads leading to the city, had
the streets lighted, regulated the charges of the sedan-chair men,
had ballrooms and hospitals built, and contrived suitable shelters
around the famous baths. Always an expert in such matters as rank,
precedence, and urbane decorum, he transformed the city of Bath into
a modish and exquisite resort for gaming, foppery, and gallantry.
When Beau Nash first took up office his sense of the correct was
considerably exercised by a certain grossness of manners which
prevailed at that time. It seems that in those days men were not
at all ashamed to appear at polite gatherings in their jack boots
and the ladies in their aprons. As a counterstroke to such unseemly
practices, Nash composed the following satirical rhyme:
Come, trollops and slatterns,
Cockt hats and white aprons,
This best our modesty suits;
For why should not we
In dress be as free
As Hogs-Norton ’squires in boots.
Nor was this his only method of displaying his displeasure. If
Nash’s eye so much as caught a glimpse of heavy footwear in an
assembly-room, he would hurry across to the offender and with a low
bow inquire of him “if he had not forgotten his horse.” Recalcitrant
dames he would treat still more severely: on one occasion even
going so far as to remove with his own hands, from the person of the
Duchess of Queensbury, an apron of point lace which was said to be
worth 500 guineas.
It was indeed a prim and elegant life that Nash inaugurated, a
life in which periwigged men of fashion, immaculate in all but
their morals, strutted and minuetted before exquisitely patched
and powdered ladies. They met at the pump-room, where they were
diverted by the conversation of the “gay, the witty, and the
forward”; they met at Spring Gardens, where on summer mornings they
would tread a cotillion together on the smooth lawns between the
painted flower-beds; they met again as they made a tour “through the
milliners and toymen, to stop at Mr. Gill’s, the pastry-cook, to take
a jelly, a tart, or a small basin of vermicelli.” Each night they
attended a ball opened with the minuet danced by a lady and gentleman
“of the highest rank present” and followed by country dances
“wherein the ladies according to their quality stood up first.” At
an appointed hour Nash would raise two fingers as a sign that it was
time for the music to cease, and then, after a short interval for the
dancers to cool, the company would take their departure.
What a delightful picture one gets of it all, of the sedate,
pleasure-loving old town with its abbey-bells ringing out a welcome
to each fashionable arrival, with Beau Nash hurrying down the
cobbled streets, his famous white beaver hat on his head, to pay
his compliments to each newcomer. And what a gay figure he himself
must have cut in those resplendent days; indeed, we learn from Lord
Chesterfield that his attire was on one occasion so gorgeous “that as
he stood by chance in the midst of the dancers he was taken by many
to be a gilt garland.” Though Beau Nash was fond of declaring that
“Wit, flattery, and fine clothes were enough to debauch a nunnery,”
there is little evidence that he himself ever indulged in intrigues
with his fair visitors who every morning like so many lovely nymphs
stepped into the elegant health-giving waters and received from the
hands of their attendants “little floating dishes into which to lay
their handkerchiefs, little nosegays, and sweetmeats.” Judging by the
standards of the eighteenth century, it would seem that his personal
life defied criticism, for in an age “when a fellow of high humour
would drink no wine but what was strained through his mistress’s
smock,” he can scarcely be condemned for accepting the blandishments
bestowed upon him by his three successive adorers, Lady Betty Besom,
Hannah Lightfoot, and Juliana Popjoy.
An issue of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ at the end of the eighteenth
century throws a remarkable light upon the latter years of the last
of these women. “Juliana Popjoy,” it says, “died last week. For
thirty or forty years she has lived in a hollow tree. She had been
mistress to the famous Beau Nash of Bath.”
In Wesley’s journal we find a curious description of a meeting
that took place between that honest rantipole evangelist and Beau
Nash. Wesley had come to hold a conventicle at Bath, which was, of
course, the very stronghold of frivolity. Before his service opened
Nash appeared and did not hesitate to protest that his preaching
“frightened the people out of their wits.”
“Sir, did you ever hear me preach?” inquired the Puritan of the Dandy.
“No,” came the answer, “but I judge by common report.”
“Common report, Sir, is not enough. Give me leave, Sir, to ask is not
your name Nash?”
“My name is Nash.”
“Sir, I dare not judge of you by common report.” And with that, so
the story runs, the man of fashion uttered not a word more, but
walked silently away.
Are we to suppose that, as sometimes happens to simple souls, Beau
Nash experienced at that moment a new and strange misgiving as to
the import of the superficial existence which surrounded him and
which in part he himself had been responsible for calling into
existence? And is there perhaps some connection between his religious
susceptibilities on that occasion and the extraordinary conduct of
his lady in taking up her residence where patches and cosmetics were
replaced by owls’ pellets and bats’ droppings?
Alas! as the years went by the evening of the Beau’s life began
to grow cloudy. The old man grew choleric and testy: he became
egotistical and would weary the company with his oft-repeated tales.
There is something strangely pathetic about the spectacle of this
aged “glass of fashion” clinging peevishly to the last remnants
of his mock power, which with the passing of the years he had
come to consider his natural right. “Old Beau Knash makes himself
disagreeable to all who come to Bath. He is now become fit only to
read ‘Shirlock’ upon death, by which he may save his soul and gaine
more proffits than ever he could by his white hatt, suppose it was
to be dyed red,” wrote an impertinent illiterate eager to usurp the
old gentleman’s place, who, having lived and prospered in the reigns
of half a dozen sovereigns of England, was now “labouring under the
unconquerable distemper of old age.”
Sick and decrepit, the antique Macaroni drifted into poverty. At the
last, even his cherished collection of snuff-boxes had to be sold,
and he gladly accepted a pension of ten pounds to be delivered him on
the first Monday of every month.
Only after his death did something of the glamour of his ancient
renown revive. For we are told that on a certain afternoon in the
middle of February, 1761, the farm-labourers of Somerset unyoked
their oxen, the colliers ceased from mining, the weavers from
spinning, in order to witness from the stately roof-tops of Bath
the body of the celebrated old fop pass by on its way to its final
resting place in the Abbey church; there to await the ordained hour
when, in a form more glorified than it had ever been by lace or
frill, it should be called to appear before the presence of its Maker.
From _Thirteen Worthies_ by Llewelyn Powys. By
permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.,
holders of the copyright.
LADY HESTER STANHOPE
LYTTON STRACHEY
The Pitt nose has a curious history. One can watch its
transmigrations through three lives. The tremendous hook of old Lord
Chatham, under whose curve Empires came to birth, was succeeded by
the bleak upward-pointing nose of William Pitt the younger--the rigid
symbol of an indomitable _hauteur_. With Lady Hester Stanhope came
the final stage. The nose, still with an upward tilt in it, had lost
its masculinity; the hard bones of the uncle and the grandfather had
disappeared. Lady Hester’s was a nose of wild ambitions, of pride
grown fantastical, a nose that scorned the earth, shooting off, one
fancies, towards some eternally eccentric heaven. It was a nose, in
fact, altogether in the air.
Noses, of course, are aristocratic things; and Lady Hester was the
child of a great aristocracy. But, in her case, the aristocratic
impulse, which had carried her predecessors to glory, had less
fortunate results. There has always been a strong strain of
extravagance in the governing families of England; from time to time
they throw off some peculiarly ill-balanced member, who performs a
strange meteoric course. A century earlier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
was an illustrious example of this tendency: that splendid comet,
after filling half the heavens, vanished suddenly into desolation and
darkness. Lady Hester Stanhope’s spirit was still more uncommon; and
she met with a most uncommon fate.
She was born in 1776, the eldest daughter of that extraordinary Earl
Stanhope, Jacobin and inventor, who made the first steamboat and
the first calculating machine, who defended the French Revolution
in the House of Lords and erased the armorial bearings--“damned
aristocratical nonsense”--from his carriages and his plate. Her
mother, Chatham’s daughter and the favourite sister of Pitt, died
when she was four years old. The second Lady Stanhope, a frigid woman
of fashion, left her stepdaughters to the care of futile governesses,
while “Citizen Stanhope” ruled the household from his laboratory
with the violence of a tyrant. It was not until Lady Hester was
twenty-four that she escaped from the slavery of her father’s
house, by going to live with her grandmother, Lady Chatham. On Lady
Chatham’s death, three years later, Pitt offered her his protection,
and she remained with him until his death in 1806.
Her three years with Pitt, passed in the very centre of splendid
power, were brilliant and exciting. She flung herself impetuously
into the movement and the passion of that vigorous society; she ruled
her uncle’s household with high vivacity; she was liked and courted;
if not beautiful, she was fascinating--very tall, with a very fair
and clear complexion, and dark-blue eyes, and a countenance of
wonderful expressiveness. Her talk, full of the trenchant nonchalance
of those days, was both amusing and alarming: “My dear Hester, what
are you saying?” Pitt would call out to her from across the room. She
was devoted to her uncle, who warmly returned her affection. She was
devoted, too--but in a more dangerous fashion--to the intoxicating
Antinous, Lord Granville Leveson Gower. The reckless manner in
which she carried on this love-affair was the first indication of
something overstrained, something wild and unaccountable, in her
temperament. Lord Granville, after flirting with her outrageously,
declared that he could never marry her, and went off on an embassy
to St. Petersburg. Her distraction was extreme: she hinted that she
would follow him to Russia; she threatened, and perhaps attempted,
suicide; she went about telling everybody that he had jilted her.
She was taken ill, and then there were rumours of an accouchement,
which, it was said, she took care to _afficher_, by appearing without
rouge and fainting on the slightest provocation. In the midst of
these excursions and alarms there was a terrible and unexpected
catastrophe. Pitt died. And Lady Hester suddenly found herself a
dethroned princess, living in a small house in Montagu Square on a
pension of £1,200 a year.
She did not abandon society, however, and the tongue of gossip
continued to wag. Her immediate marriage with a former lover, Mr.
Hill, was announced: “il est bien bon,” said Lady Bessborough.
Then it was whispered that Canning was “le regnant”--that he was
with her “not only all day, but almost all night.” She quarreled
with Canning and became attached to Sir John Moore. Whether she
was actually engaged to marry him--as she seems to have asserted
many years later--is doubtful; his letters to her, full as they are
of respectful tenderness, hardly warrant the conclusion; but it
is certain that he died with her name on his lips. Her favourite
brother, Charles, was killed beside him; and it was natural that
under this double blow she should have retired from London. She
buried herself in Wales; but not for long. In 1810 she set sail for
Gibraltar with her brother James, who was rejoining his regiment in
the Peninsula. She never returned to England.
There can be no doubt that at the time of her departure the thought
of a lifelong exile was far from her mind. It was only gradually,
as she moved further and further eastward, that the prospect of
life in England--at last even in Europe--grew distasteful to her;
as late as 1816 she was talking of a visit to Provence. Accompanied
by two or three English fellow travellers, her English maid, Mrs.
Fry, her private physician, Dr. Meryon, and a host of servants,
she progressed, slowly and in a great state, through Malta and
Athens, to Constantinople. She was conveyed in battleships, and
lodged with governors and ambassadors. After spending many months in
Constantinople, Lady Hester discovered that she was “dying to see
Napoleon with her own eyes,” and attempted accordingly to obtain
passports to France. The project was stopped by Stratford Canning,
the English Minister, upon which she decided to visit Egypt, and,
chartering a Greek vessel, sailed for Alexandria in the winter of
1811. Off the island of Rhodes a violent storm sprang up; the whole
party were forced to abandon the ship, and to take refuge upon a
bare rock, where they remained without food or shelter for thirty
hours. Eventually, after many severe privations, Alexandria was
reached in safety; but this disastrous voyage was a turning-point in
Lady Hester’s career. At Rhodes she was forced to change her torn
and dripping raiment for the attire of a Turkish gentleman--a dress
which she never afterwards abandoned. It was the first step in her
orientalization.
She passed the next two years in a triumphal progress. Her appearance
in Cairo caused the greatest sensation, and she was received in
state by the Pasha, Mehemet Ali. Her costume on this occasion was
gorgeous: she wore a turban of cashmere, a brocaded waistcoat, a
priceless pelisse, and a vast pair of purple velvet pantaloons
embroidered all over in gold. She was ushered by chamberlains with
silver wands through the inner courts of the palace to a pavilion
in the harem, where the Pasha, rising to receive her, conversed
with her for an hour. From Cairo she turned northwards, visiting
Jaffa, Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus. Her travelling dress was of
scarlet cloth trimmed with gold, and, when on horseback, she wore
over the whole a white-hooded and tasselled burnous. Her maid,
too, was forced, protesting, into trousers, though she absolutely
refused to ride astride. Poor Mrs. Fry had gone through various and
dreadful sufferings--shipwreck and starvation, rats and blackbeetles
unspeakable--but she retained her equanimity. Whatever her Ladyship
might think fit to be, she was an Englishwoman to the last, and
Philippaki was Philip Parker and Mustapha Mr. Farr.
Outside Damascus, Lady Hester was warned that the town was the most
fanatical in Turkey, and that the scandal of a woman entering it in
man’s clothes, unveiled, would be so great as to be dangerous. She
was begged to veil herself, and to make her entry under cover of
darkness. “I must take the bull by the horns,” she replied, and rode
into the city unveiled at midday. The population were thunderstruck;
but at last their amazement gave way to enthusiasm, and the
incredible lady was hailed everywhere as Queen, crowds followed her,
coffee was poured out before her, and the whole bazaar rose as she
passed. Yet she was not satisfied with her triumphs; she would do
something still more glorious and astonishing; she would plunge into
the desert and visit the ruins of Palmyra, which only half-a-dozen of
the boldest travellers had ever seen. The Pasha of Damascus offered
her a military escort, but she preferred to throw herself upon the
hospitality of the Bedouin Arabs, who, overcome by her horsemanship,
her powers of sight, and her courage, enrolled her a member of their
tribe. After a week’s journey in their company, she reached Palmyra,
where the inhabitants met her with wild enthusiasm, and under the
Corinthian columns of Zenobia’s temple crowned her head with flowers.
This happened in March, 1813; it was the apogee of Lady Hester’s
life. Henceforward her fortunes gradually but steadily declined.
The rumour of her exploits had spread through Syria, and from the
year 1813 onwards, her reputation was enormous. She was received
everywhere as a royal, almost a supernatural personage: she
progressed from town to town amid official prostrations and popular
rejoicings. But she herself was in a state of hesitation and
discontent. Her future was uncertain; she had grown scornful of the
West--must she return to it? The East alone was sympathetic, the East
alone was tolerable--but could she cut herself off for ever from
the past? At Laodicea she was suddenly struck down by the plague,
and, after months of illness, it was borne in upon her that all
was vanity. She rented an empty monastery on the slopes of Mount
Lebanon, not far from Sayda (the ancient Sidon), and took up her
abode there. Then her mind took a new surprising turn; she dashed to
Ascalon, and, with the permission of the Sultan, began excavations in
a ruined temple with the object of discovering a hidden treasure of
three million pieces of gold. Having unearthed nothing but an antique
statue, which, in order to prove her disinterestedness, she ordered
her appalled doctor to break into little bits, she returned to her
monastery. Finally, in 1816, she moved to another house, further
up Mount Lebanon, and near the village of Djoun; and at Djoun she
remained until her death, more than twenty years later.
Thus, almost accidentally as it seems, she came to the end of her
wanderings, and the last, long, strange, mythical period of her
existence began. Certainly the situation that she had chosen was
sublime. Her house, on the top of a high bare hill among great
mountains, was a one-storied group of buildings, with many ramifying
courts and out-houses, and a garden of several acres surrounded
by a rampart wall. The garden, which she herself had planted and
tended with the utmost care, commanded a glorious prospect. On
every side but one the vast mountains towered, but to the west
there was an opening, through which, in the far distance, the deep
blue Mediterranean was revealed. From this romantic hermitage, her
singular renown spread over the world. European travellers who
had been admitted to her presence brought back stories full of
Eastern mystery; they told of a peculiar grandeur, a marvellous
prestige, an imperial power. The precise nature of Lady Hester’s
empire was, indeed, dubious; she was in fact merely the tenant of
her Djoun establishment, for which she paid a rent of £20 a year.
But her dominion was not subject to such limitations. She ruled
imaginatively, transcendentally; the solid glory of Chatham had
been transmuted into the phantasy of an Arabian Night. No doubt
she herself believed that she was something more than a chimerical
Empress. When a French traveller was murdered in the desert, she
issued orders for the punishment of the offenders; punished they
were, and Lady Hester actually received the solemn thanks of the
French Chamber. It seems probable, however, that it was the Sultan’s
orders rather than Lady Hester’s which produced the desired effect.
In her feud with her terrible neighbour, the Emir Beshyr, she
maintained an undaunted front. She kept the tyrant at bay; but
perhaps the Emir, who, so far as physical force was concerned, held
her in the hollow of his hand, might have proceeded to extremities
if he had not received a severe admonishment from Stratford Canning
at Constantinople. What is certain is that the ignorant and
superstitious populations around her feared and loved her, and that
she, reacting to her own mysterious prestige, became at last even
as they. She plunged into astrology and divination; she awaited the
moment when, in accordance with prophecy, she should enter Jerusalem
side by side with the Mahdi, the Messiah; she kept two sacred
horses, destined, by sure signs, to carry her and him to their last
triumph. The Orient had mastered her utterly. She was no longer an
Englishwoman, she declared; she loathed England; she would never go
there again; if she went anywhere it would be to Arabia, to “her own
people.”
Her expenses were immense--not only for herself but for others, for
she poured out her hospitality with a noble hand. She ran into debt,
and was swindled by the moneylenders; her steward cheated her, her
servants pilfered her; her distress was at last acute. She fell
into fits of terrible depression, bursting into dreadful tears and
savage cries. Her habits grew more and more eccentric. She lay in
bed all day, and sat up all night, talking unceasingly for hour upon
hour to Dr. Meryon, who alone of her English attendants remained
with her, Mrs. Fry having withdrawn to more congenial scenes long
since. The doctor was a poor-spirited and muddle-headed man, but he
was a good listener; and there he sat while that extraordinary talk
flowed on--talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth,
talk in which memories of an abolished past--stories of Mr. Pitt and
of George III., vituperations against Mr. Canning, mimicries of the
Duchess of Devonshire--mingled phantasmagorically with doctrines
of Fate and planetary influence, and speculations on the Arabian
origin of the Scottish clans, and lamentations over the wickedness of
servants; till the unaccountable figure, with its robes and its long
pipe, loomed through the tobacco-smoke like some vision of a Sibyl in
a dream. She might be robbed and ruined, her house might crumble over
her head; but she talked on. She grew ill and desperate; yet still
she talked. Did she feel that the time was coming when she should
talk no more?
Her melancholy deepened into a settled gloom when the news came of
her brother James’s death. She had quarrelled with all her English
friends, except Lord Hardwiche--with her eldest brother, with her
sister, whose kind letters she left unanswered; she was at daggers
drawn with the English consul at Alexandria, who worried her about
her debts. Ill and harassed, she hardly moved from her bedroom,
while her servants rifled her belongings and reduced the house to a
condition of indescribable disorder and filth. Three dozen hungry
cats ranged through the rooms, filling the courts with frightful
noises. Dr. Meryon, in the midst of it all, knew not whether to cry
or laugh. At moments the great lady regained her ancient fire; her
bells pealed tumultuously for hours together; or she leapt up, and
arraigned the whole trembling household before her, with her Arab
war-mace in her hand. Her finances grew more and more involved--grew
at length irremediable. It was in vain that the faithful Lord
Hardwiche pressed her to return to England to settle her affairs.
Return to England, indeed! To England that ungrateful, miserable
country, where, so far as she could see, they had forgotten the
very name of Mr. Pitt! The final blow fell when a letter came from
the English authorities threatening to cut off her pension for the
payment of her debts. Upon that, after dispatching a series of
furious missives to Lord Palmerston, to Queen Victoria, to the Duke
of Wellington, she renounced the world. She commanded Dr. Meryon to
return to Europe, and he--how could he have done it?--obeyed her.
Her health was broken, she was over sixty, and, save for her vile
servants, absolutely alone. She lived for nearly a year after he left
her--we know no more. She had vowed never again to pass through the
gate of her house; but did she sometimes totter to her garden--that
beautiful garden which she had created, with its roses and its
fountains, its alleys and its bowers--and look westward at the sea?
The end came in June, 1839. Her servants immediately possessed
themselves of every moveable object in the house. But Lady Hester
cared no longer: she was lying back in her bed--inexplicable, grand,
preposterous, with her nose in the air.
From _Books and Characters_ by Lytton Strachey.
Copyright 1922, by Harcourt, Brace and Company,
Inc. By permission.
THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN
AN APPRECIATION OF EDWARD LIVINGSTON TRUDEAU
STEPHEN CHALMERS
I
When Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau died the other day, many people
wondered, suddenly realizing their impression that it was long years
since he had joined the little band of heroes who have gone down
in the battle against disease. And many must have asked themselves
what manner of man this was who, sick unto death over forty years
ago, could from scantiest materials build a little laboratory in
the wilderness and exert an influence which cannot be measured by
its practical materialization into five hundred sanitaria for the
treatment of tuberculosis by fresh air, rest, and sound philosophy.
Here was a man who, from his invalid’s chair, revolutionized this
sanitation of business offices and of uncounted homes where ignorance
shrank from pure air and sunshine. If I assume the task of sketching
that indomitable character, it is only because I was privileged for
many years to be Dr. Trudeau’s friend, to whom he chose occasionally
to reveal in some degree his inner self.
It may, at the outset, be well to sketch briefly his voyage through
the world which benefited so richly from his journeying. He was born
in New York City in 1848 of French parents. His mother was a daughter
of Dr. François Eloi Berger, a Parisian practicing in New York, and
his father a descendant of a Huguenot family, which, leaving France
for Canada, later drifted down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
Near the Southern city James Trudeau, who was an intimate friend
and fellow traveler of the naturalist painter, Audubon, owned a
plantation which was confiscated by General Butler in the Civil War.
He died later as a result of wounds received while in command of a
Confederate post, Island Number Ten, on the Mississippi.
When Edward L., the youngest of his three children, was but little
over two years of age, his mother went with her father, Dr. Berger,
to Paris. Here the boy was educated at the Lycée Bonaparte. When he
was eighteen years of age Edward returned to New York, and found
himself hardly able to speak the language of his native city.
He attended the Columbia School of Mines, and after graduation
entered the United States Navy. An elder brother who had preceded
him to Annapolis was stricken with tuberculosis. Edward nursed his
brother up to the hour of the latter’s death six months later, and
thus first came into personal contact with that disease to the
extermination of which he devoted the rest of his life. He entered
the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, and in the year of
his graduation, 1871, practiced medicine in New York City. In the
same year, unconscious that he was doomed to his brother’s disease,
he married Miss Charlotte Beare, of Douglaston, Long Island, to whom
he ever attributed the inspiration of his labors through nearly half
a century. The marriage was a perfect one, although attended by many
sorrows. Three of their four children died. One son survives--Dr.
Francis B. Trudeau. The death of Dr. Edward L. Trudeau Jr., in 1906,
was a great blow to his father and a loss to the medical profession.
It was in 1873 that Dr. Trudeau left New York City with the doom of
tuberculosis pronounced upon him. He was only twenty-five; the gates
of life seemed shut in his face, for it was believed that he had less
than six months to live. Hardly able to stand alone, he was taken to
Paul Smith’s in the Adirondacks by a friend who was also a distant
relation,--Louis Livingston. Smith’s was then a hunters’ inn in the
heart of the wilderness, forty miles from the nearest railway point
at Ausable Forks. The guide who carried Dr. Trudeau upstairs and put
him to bed described his burden as “weighin’ no more’n a lamb-skin.”
And the same guide lived to see that lightweight defeat a local
champion in the backwoods ring!
A college-mate of Trudeau’s, Edward H. Harriman, was then staying at
Paul Smith’s. Harriman, Livingston, and “Uncle” Paul Smith took turns
nursing the sick doctor through nights which he was not expected,
in nature, to survive. And yet he outlived them all! He improved at
Paul Smith’s, then tried a winter at St. Paul, Minnesota. Here he
suffered a relapse and was brought back to the Adirondacks, where he
again improved. It was at about this time that, being joined by Mrs.
Trudeau and their two children, Ned and Charlotte, the family passed
through a terrible ordeal on a journey from Malone to Paul Smith’s. A
blizzard arose, and the trip, which usually occupied less than a day,
took over forty-eight hours. Paul Smith handled the team and wagon.
After plunging through miles of snowdrift in the teeth of a biting
norther, the horses fell down exhausted. The family’s baggage had
previously been abandoned at Barnum Pond. Paul Smith made the sick
man as comfortable as possible, wrapped the children in blankets,
and buried them for warmth in the snow. When the blizzard abated,
the family reached the hunter’s place, after two days of unspeakable
hardship.
Surviving this ordeal, seeming even to have thrived upon it, Dr.
Trudeau began to consider seriously the possible advantages in
pulmonary diseases of exposure to pure cold air. He proposed to spend
a winter in the Adirondacks, where the frigid season is prolonged and
the thermometer occasionally stands at forty degrees below zero. His
friends and medical advisers considered his proposition as a kind of
suicidal mania, all except Dr. Loomis and Mrs. Trudeau. Dr. Trudeau
had been impressed with the theory of Brehmer, the Silesian, and of
Dettweiler, a patient and pupil of Brehmer, that the consumptive was
not harmed by inclement weather, provided he accustomed himself to
living out of doors, at rest. With the approval of Loomis and Mrs.
Trudeau, the doctor carried out his experiment, the results of which
practically revolutionized the science of treating tuberculosis.
Trudeau so improved that presently he began to practice medicine
among the Adirondack natives. He continued to do so for several
years, often traveling forty miles in a day or night and in all sorts
of weather, to usher, perhaps, some little woodsman into the world,
or even to allay anxiety by his mere presence. It has been said that
his bedside manner did more than physic in ninety per cent of his
cases. Half of his bills were never rendered and a quarter of the
other half never paid; but tears would come into the eyes of many
a woman when she saw him in after years; and men called him “the
beloved physician.”
I have beside me as I write some old prescriptions that were found
in the ragged ledger of a general store in the wilderness of forty
years ago, when stovepipes and pills were sold over the same counter.
There are three of them that reveal as many phases of this humane
country doctor, who often came in the night, dressed in mackinaw,
pontiacs, and moccasins. Apparently, if the family pig or cow or dog
was ailing, Dr. Trudeau was summoned through the wilderness. Here
is a prescription calling for carbolic oil, tar, sulphur, and olive
oil--which, a veterinary doctor tells me, could not be improved
upon to-day as a cure for mange. “_Sig:_” writes Trudeau at the end
of the prescription; then, remembering that his patient might lack
appreciation even of dog-Latin, he dashes his pen through the word
and adds, “Rub on the dog several times!”
There was no liquor license in the woods in those days, and little
whiskey, licit or otherwise; yet there was an all-abiding thirst, and
men made their own poteen if they could get pure alcohol and some
spirits of rye. Trudeau believed that, if a man liked an occasional
drink, it was his human right to have it--in reasonable measure. But
if the man abused the doctor’s confidence, from that day on he went
parched and prescriptionless.
Again, one finds an early prescription for a common symptom of
tuberculosis. I brought this prescription to Dr. Trudeau not very
long ago and asked him what he would prescribe now--after thirty-five
years.
“That--if anything,” he said; “but probably nothing--no physic at
all. Open the window--go to bed--and keep your nerve!”
During these early years Trudeau lived the life of the people in many
ways. Being restored to health, he hunted and fished with the other
sons of the wilderness. Every year up to 1913 he brought home his
string of trout and killed his buck. His skill with the rifle was
remarkable. It was a natural gift. On one occasion he outmatched all
competitors, then, on a challenge, picked off his own empty cartridge
shells suspended from the branch of a tree on strings. And as for
boxing, it is said that one evening at Paul Smith’s a local champion
coaxed the doctor to put on the gloves.
“I promise not to hurt ye,” said the amateur bruiser.
Where the doctor acquired the gentle art no one seems to know; but
when the local champion picked himself up at the end of the bout, he
allowed that “the doctor’s the quickest thing with the mitts I ever
run up ag’in!”
In 1877 Dr. Trudeau left Paul Smith’s and moved into the adjacent
hamlet of Saranac Lake, which was then a lumber centre with six
houses and a sawmill. The railway was not constructed to that
point until 1888. But when the doctor came to the village, gradual
developments began. He was followed by a few patients who had placed
themselves in his care as a last hope of cure or prolonged life. The
town to-day is a small city, the metropolis of the Adirondacks, which
grew up around the beloved physician and his great work. It has a
remarkable sanitary system, and a health code after one portion of
which New York is said to have reformed its own.
II
It was at Saranac Lake during his first winter there that Dr.
Trudeau literally dreamed a dream. Loomis had published a paper in
the _Medical Record_, drawing attention to the climatic value of
the Adirondack air for pulmonary invalids, citing the theories of
Brehmer and Dettweiler and, no doubt, having in mind Trudeau’s own
case. Shortly after reading this paper, Dr. Trudeau fell asleep while
leaning on his gun on a fox runway on the side of Mount Pisgah,
near Saranac Lake. He dreamed that the forest around him melted
away and that the whole mountain-side was dotted with houses built
inside out, as if the inhabitants lived on the outside. As he said
many years later, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding
of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, “I dreamed a dream of a great
sanitarium that should be the everlasting foe of tuberculosis, and
lo!--the dream has come true!”
Shortly after a reception held on January 1, 1915, at which all of
the sanitarium patients came to shake hands with the founder, I
happened to remark to the doctor on the quaintness of his speech for
the occasion. He had spoken of the strange new faces before him, and
how there had been a time when he was personally acquainted with each
and every one, “his hopes, his fears, and very often the state of his
bank account”; and how the girls even told him of their love affairs
and of womanly dreams that too often were never fulfilled. The doctor
suddenly leaned forward in his invalid’s chair and said to me in a
confidential stage-whisper,----
“Would you believe it? I didn’t know what my tongue was saying. I
felt strangely aloof for the moment. I saw a younger man thirty years
before, leaning on his gun, waiting for a fox. There was not a house,
not a sign of a human being. Now----”
His face was all aglow as he spread out his hands.
But even after the dream the beginning of the fulfillment did not
occur for five or six years. He had built a house in the village.
There, in that wonderful year, 1882, when Koch announced his
discovery of the tubercle bacillus, Trudeau, who could not read
German, received, as a Christmas present from his friend, C. M.
Lea of Philadelphia, a translation of that document which the
doctor termed “the most far-reaching, in its importance to the
human race, of any original communication”--Koch’s _Etiology of
Tuberculosis_. This was young Trudeau’s immediate inspiration. He had
an “indifferent medical education,” to quote himself, “no apparatus,
and no books”; and the remoteness of his surroundings had removed him
from contact with medical men to whom he might apply for instruction.
During brief visits to New York--sometimes at the expense of his
health--he learned some of the first principles of bacteriology;--and
“I taught myself the rest as best I could.”
His laboratory was a little room in Saranac Lake, heated by a wood
stove (there was no coal). He had a home-made thermostat heated by
a kerosene lamp, and in this he succeeded in growing the tubercle
bacillus, although he had to sit up o’ nights to see that the living
organism was not destroyed by varying temperatures. To regulate this,
he invented a little shutter arrangement which could be opened or
closed. He obtained the bacillus in pure cultures, and with them
repeated all Koch’s experiments. The guinea-pigs used for immunizing
tests he had to keep in a hole underground which was heated by
another kerosene lamp. He again proved that fresh air and natural
hygiene were the deadly foes of tuberculosis, by turning loose on an
island rabbits that had been inoculated with the disease. Running
wild, they soon recovered; while others, similarly inoculated and
kept in unhygienic places, died of the disease in a very short time.
While his enthusiasm was thus running high, he built in 1884 on the
side of Pisgah--on the place of the dream--a little shack which is
still there and which is known among the great buildings now around
it as “The Little Red.” This was the nucleus of the present vast
sanitarium. He began with two patients, whom he apparently cured
by making them sit all day and sleep all night practically in the
open air, the windows being open, with the mercury courting the
thermometer bulb.
Meanwhile he himself was laboring with his cultures, his home-made
thermostat, his guinea-pigs and rabbits. During the week in 1890
when Koch announced his tuberculin as a “cure” for tuberculosis, Dr.
Trudeau published in the _Medical Record_ an article describing his
failure to obtain any appreciable degree of immunity by injections
of sterilized and filtered liquid cultures of the tubercle bacillus
(tuberculin). Later experiments with Koch’s tuberculin by thousands
of others proved similar failures.
Not long after this, while Dr. Trudeau was lying ill and depressed
in New York City, there came from Saranac Lake the news that during
the night his house, cultures, guinea-pigs--everything--had been
destroyed by fire! It was the last straw. The sick man was in
despair; but his indomitable spirit came to the rescue again, and a
letter signed by William Osler helped him to accept fresh battle.
“I am sorry, Trudeau,” wrote Dr. Osler, “to hear of your misfortune,
but take my word for it, there is nothing like a fire to make a man
do the phœnix trick!”
The phœnix rose from its ashes, with the financial help of George
C. Cooper, of New York. Near the ruins of Dr. Trudeau’s first house
was built the first and best-equipped laboratory in the United
States for the study of tuberculosis. Here Trudeau labored for
years, searching, as he often said, “in the haystack for the needle
that we know is there.” Here his followers still work at all hours
in immunizing experiments and in the testing of proposed specific
remedies for the cure of tuberculosis. Here many a “patent remedy” of
the “cure-consumption” order has met its Nemesis. Here, years before
either Friedmann or Piorkowski tried to commercialize his so-called
remedies through the press of two continents, the turtle-germ of both
was weighed in the scientific balance and discarded as useless. It
is not a breach of confidence now to reveal the fact that an article
entitled “Has Dr. Friedmann found a Cure for Tuberculosis?” which
appeared on two pages of the New York _Times_ on the very morning
when the Berlin physician landed in New York, came from the Saranac
Laboratory and was the work of several scientific brains, with Dr.
Trudeau’s as the master-mind on the subject. That article changed
overnight the opinions of many in the medical world regarding the
merits of Friedmann’s “specific.” Dr. Trudeau had examined the turtle
organism years before, and had labeled it, not only harmless, but
quite useless, as an immunizing agent in human tuberculosis.
To go back to the early days of sanitarium work, the success Trudeau
achieved by his open-air and rest methods attracted great attention.
The sanitarium grew swiftly. Other states of the Union built
institutions of somewhat similar design and for similar treatment.
To-day, as already remarked, there must be fully five hundred
sanitaria for this method of treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis
throughout the United States and Canada. The valley of the Saranac
itself, with the adjacent Adirondack region, contains several private
and state sanitaria that owe their inception, directly or indirectly,
to the influence of Trudeau.
The Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium is, and has been from the first, a
semi-charitable institution which treats patients at a sum that does
not cover the cost of their board and housing. The annual deficit
of the institution is comparatively large, as a result, and up to
the time of his death it was Trudeau’s personality that attracted
voluntary contributions for the continuance of the great work. Such
names as Harriman, Sage, Schiff, Rockefeller, Tiffany, have figured
in the contributors’ lists. E. H. Harriman was ever a friend and
admirer of Trudeau and of his altruistic labors for humanity. In the
days when ministers of money sat in Harriman’s antechamber, they were
allowed to cool their heels while a frail country doctor was ushered
in; and the railroad king let great affairs hang fire while he heard
the latest yarn about “Uncle” Paul Smith, or became enthralled by the
idealism of the practical dreamer who sat opposite him,--a great head
on an emaciated body, a voice resonant with faith’s enthusiasm, even
while it broke short in a gasp. This man was sending back to life and
usefulness twenty per cent of his patients apparently cured, fifty
per cent with the disease arrested, and the other thirty per cent
with a fighting chance. And while the restless ministers of finance
consulted their watches in the antechamber, Harriman listened--and
reached for his check-book!
As for that annual deficit, a friend who merely sought information
once wrote to me as follows:--
“What sort of a man is Trudeau? Is he what so many say he is, or just
a clever doctor who has made a fortune out of the Adirondacks?”
In a rash moment I referred this to the doctor himself. I do not know
that he was ever more upset. He promptly sent me this:--
“I am always puzzled to know why people cannot understand the spirit
of the sanitarium work. To give a patient for $7 what costs $12 or
$12.50, and to have a deficit of $27,000 on running expenses for the
year, can hardly be a business way to make a man rich! Perhaps it is
the imposing appearance of my _equipage_ which makes the world think
me a coiner of money!!”
The “equipage” to which he referred with irony was a regular
country doctor’s buggy, just large enough to accommodate himself
(and Mrs. Trudeau, at a pinch), and drawn by a shaggy mare which
the townspeople affectionately termed “the old plush horse.” In
his latter years some one presented him with a fine carriage and a
high-stepping thoroughbred. When Trudeau was called out to inspect
this equipage, he looked worried.
“I--I can’t ride in that thing!” he said. “People will think I don’t
need any money for my sanitarium!”
He agreed to accept the gift, however, when it was pointed out that
the ancient mare was on her last legs. Thereupon the “old plush
horse” was pensioned and given a comfortable stall for life. On the
first day of her long holiday Dr. Trudeau visited the stable.
“Well, Kitty,” he said, patting the old mare, “your troubles are all
over. As for me--I expect this old horse will have to keep plodding
along until his left ventricle ceases to contract.”
But the matter of that “fortune” troubled him for some time. A month
later he sent me another letter, accompanying a financial report
underscored in places.
“This,” he wrote, “is for the gentleman who sized me up as ‘a clever
business man who has made a fortune out of the Adirondacks.’ Tell him
I begged all this money personally, but not for myself, as I don’t
own a cent of it and draw no salary.”
Whatever he earned from private practice barely covered his living
expenses. He raised the money to cover that deficit by what he called
his “begging letters.” I remember he said to me one day after an
anxious silence,--
“I’ve got a young fellow up there [at the sanitarium] who is a
first-class radiographer. Then there is a bacteriologist, too. As
soon as they get to feeling well they’ll go off and leave me. They
are married, or are going to be, I’ve no doubt. If I could only
build houses for them and get their _wives_ settled--That’s it!” he
broke off. “I’ve got to raise the money for it somehow!”
He raised it, of course. Now there are two new cottages in the
sanitarium grounds, and a permanent X-ray expert and a clever
bacteriologist have been added to the colony there and to the cause.
When the doctor’s end had been achieved, he told me of his success.
“But why is every one so good?” he asked. “Why do people work for me?”
“They work for--you,” was suggested.
“No, no--I hope not,” he protested. “They work for my work.”
“Well, did you ever consider how much your own personality inspires
this work?”
“Oh, come, come!” said he, as pleasurably confused as a girl
complimented for the first time on her looks.
“What do people call my work?” he presently asked.
I had never heard it given a name. It was unique. But I ventured the
word “philanthropy.” He shook his head.
“A distrustful word these days. Still--yes--say philanthropy, plus
science. The sanitarium is the philanthropy--to cure or console; the
laboratory is the science--to find a means of further immunizing
toward ultimate, permanent cure.”
It was, as a whole, a science and philanthropy of Christ; a sort
of Christian science without intellectual sacrifice. To this
philanthropy Trudeau would never permit his name to be attached. It
was the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium--not “Trudeau.” It was the
Saranac Laboratory--not “Trudeau” Laboratory. It was usage and
the postal authorities that labeled a little branch post-office,
“Trudeau, N. Y.”
His work and worth were recognized, however, during his lifetime.
Among the honors conferred upon him were Master of Science,
Columbia University, 1889; Honorary Fellow of the Phipps Institute,
1903; LL.D., McGill University, 1904; and LL.D., University of
Pennsylvania, 1913. The last-mentioned degree he received _in
absentia_. Yale offered to confer the degree of LL.D., but the doctor
was too ill to be present at the exercises.
III
I had intended to omit anecdotes in this brief sketch of Trudeau’s
life, from the time that he was carried into Paul Smith’s “weighin’
no more’n a lambskin” up to the latter days when he lay on a final
bed of suffering. But the anecdotes would creep in; and now they may
stay just where they are, for it was characteristic of Trudeau, even
when addressing a grave body of physicians and master-surgeons, to
lighten his most serious discourses with anecdotal humor; although
the first time he ever tried to address his colleagues,--at Baltimore
in the eighties,--he fainted from illness, and, while others restored
him, Dr. Loomis read the frail doctor’s address to the gathering.
Even in his own sufferings he found a text for interesting discourse
that was flavored with the grim humor of grit. It does not seem long
ago that I stood by his bedside while he, with one poor portion of a
single lung, labored for breath. The possible benefits of artificial
pneumo-thorax had not yet been fully established, yet the doctor had
been one of the first to submit to the operation, offering himself,
it seemed, as a victim of experimentation, although he told the
operating physician that he expected no good results,--“For, after
all, my dear fellow, the age of miracles is past.” Yet it eased his
sufferings for several years, although at the time he was very ill.
He assured me that he was not going to die right away.
“No such luck!” said he in the most cheerful manner. “But,” he
continued, as connectedly as breath would allow, “what is the scheme
of this business--of life--suffering--death? I don’t understand. It
reminds me of this English ‘Cat and Mouse’ bill. They put a woman
in a cell till she’s near dead of starvation. Then they let her out
for a square meal--so she can get strength enough to suffer some
more. You’ve got to have feeling, you know, to suffer. There’s a
philosophy, by the way, for those who fear the agony of death. As you
lose the enduring powers of life, you lose also the sensibility to
suffering. It must be so. It is so. I have seen it many times.... Cat
and mouse,” he half-mused,--“life and death. Death’s the cat--comes
and paws until poor life is about dead to all feeling. Then the cat
retires into a dark corner and purrs while the mouse gets a little
life back, so as to be more sensible of suffering when the cat comes
pawing again. I don’t say there’s no reason behind it--but I can’t
see it--can you?”
I may be pardoned personal intrusion for a moment to relate when and
where I first saw this remarkable man. I had gone to Saranac Lake
in ill health. I asked why there was no statue in the community to
the great Trudeau of whom I had read in Stevenson’s Letters. Being
reminded that it was not customary to erect statues to the living,
I decided to see this (to me) resurrected person. It happened to
be about the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding
of the sanitarium. When he stood up on a platform and, in a voice
tense with emotion, told of his dream that was now materialized, I
was filled with a sudden comprehension of the amazing thing that was
happening--the celebration of that which this frail man had _lived to
achieve_! I wrote several verses and gave them to my own physician,
merely as one way of expressing what I thought about it all.
The next morning I was called on the telephone. It was Dr. Trudeau
himself; some one had pinned the verses to his pillow on the previous
night, and they had added to the happiness of the doctor at the end
of one of the proudest days of his life. He asked me to come and see
him.
“Do you know,” he said when we shook hands, “writing verses is
something beyond my comprehension. I understand poetry, but not how
one can write it. My case is like that of Zeb Robare, a guide over
at Paul’s. He was asked by some ladies he was rowing the name of a
certain mountain up here. ‘That’s Ampersand,’ said Zeb. ‘But, guide,
how do you spell it?’ ‘Ah,’ said Zeb, ‘that’s the hell of it, ma’am.
I can climb it easy enough, but I couldn’t spell it to save my life!’
That’s how I feel about poetry!”
Oddly coincident, Clayton Hamilton, a writer engaged in a book about
Stevenson, called upon Dr. Trudeau to ask about Robert Louis’s
sojourn at Saranac Lake. Mr. Hamilton later confessed in cold type,
“I had come to ask of R. L. S. and remained to admire this hero of
innumerable, unnoted battles,--this maker of a City of the Sick, who,
because of him, look more hopefully on each successive rising sun.”
Trudeau marveled at the feat of juggling English; yet this author
wrote in conclusion: “And the best of our tricky achievements in
setting words together dwindle in my mind to indistinction beside
the labors and spirit of this man.”
Stevenson, by the way, produced some of his greatest essays during
the winter of 1887-88, while he was under Dr. Trudeau’s care at
Saranac Lake. Stories of the relationship of the two men have been
told and retold. At one time I sent a version of the oft-repeated
“oil” story to the doctor for confirmation. It was to the effect
that Stevenson, after he had written “The Lantern-Bearers” for the
Scribners, went to see Trudeau’s “light” in the laboratory. Stevenson
was shown, in the effects of tuberculosis in guinea-pigs, the
ravages of the disease that kills one human being in every seven.
The sensitive author bolted out of the house, declaring that while
Trudeau’s lantern might be very bright, to him it “smelled of oil
like the devil.” Fearing that the anti-vivisectionists might make
capital of the story, I took the liberty of modifying it. Dr. Trudeau
wrote,--
“I thank you for your motive in changing the end of the oil story. I
had never thought of the anti-vivisectionists. Had I thought, I could
have told you a little more about it. Stevenson saw no mutilated
animals in my laboratory. The only things he saw were the diseased
organs in bottles, and cultures of the germs which had produced the
disease. These were the things that turned him sick. I remember he
went out just after I made this remark: ‘This little scum on the tube
is consumption, and the cause of more human suffering than anything
else in the world. We can produce tuberculosis in the guinea-pig with
it; and if we could learn to cure tuberculosis in the guinea-pig,
this great burden of human suffering might be lifted from the world.’”
It is true that Trudeau and Stevenson differed a great deal on a
great many subjects, but so far as I have been able to judge from
much that the doctor has told me, they agreed on so many of the
greater things of life that they had to disagree about trivial
matters for the sake of something to discuss. They actually got into
heated argument over the great issue as to which is superior, the
American system of _transferring baggage_, or the British method of
_handling luggage_!
Dr. Trudeau assured me, incidentally, that Stevenson had no active
symptoms of tuberculosis while at Saranac Lake, but had apparently
had the disease and may have developed active symptoms after he went
away. He did not die of tuberculosis, although this might have been a
contributing cause. Trudeau had a full report made to him regarding
the circumstances of Stevenson’s death at Samoa in 1894.
This paternal interest in ex-patients was characteristic of Trudeau.
Particularly he liked to address a word of parting advice to a young
man going back, apparently cured, to a life of continued usefulness.
Here is a typical letter of this kind:--
“Do take my advice and don’t presume upon your physical endurance.
When you have once been in the grip of the tiger you ought not to
give him a chance to get you again, for he has downed many as good a
man as you are; and you must not act on impulse, but use your head
and self-control, even if you can’t accomplish all you want to in
life. If you can’t have a whole loaf, try and be satisfied with a
half one, or else the graham bread will get burned in good earnest
and you won’t have any loaf at all!”
His attitude toward the patients, who came to him from all lands,
ranks, and conditions, was ever eloquent of the man’s human kindness
and sympathy. Many came as broken in spirit as in health, and
often with but two hopes: one, that Trudeau would perform the
great miracle; the other, that a physician of his reputation would
not charge more than this latest victim of tuberculosis could
scrape together. I know of one case in which the new patient said,
“Doctor--before you do anything--I haven’t much money. How--how much
will it cost?”
“Much depends on how much you’ve got, and how bad you are,” said
Trudeau, himself assisting to unbutton the patient’s collar. “You
see,” he went on disarmingly, “if you are not very bad, it will cost
you quite a lot, so I can use the money for those who are. If you
are a really bad case--Well--say ‘Ninety-nine,’ please, and keep on
saying it while I listen to your chest.”
The doctor’s face became grave as he noted the vibrations caused by
the reiterated “nine-nine-nine.” When the examination was over the
patient asked,--
“How bad--I mean--how much will it be, doctor?”
For reply Trudeau--and one can imagine the great sympathy that
flooded the beloved physician’s face--handed the patient a ten-dollar
bill.
“I owe you--that much--at least,” he said.
One can imagine the rest--that speech which he employed so often and
to so many:--
“Don’t take it too seriously, but just seriously enough. I am no
better off in health than you are, and both you and I, old man, will
be a great deal worse before we’re better.”
When, however, he sent some promising young man back into the battle
of life, a repaired asset to the world, he liked to refer to him
as “another young gladiator with a new blade in his sword.” The
following, which he sent to me one day, explains the simile:--
“My sympathies are naturally in the world with the vanquished. My
favorite statue is that great one of Victory carrying the dying
gladiator, his broken sword in hand. The world applauds and bows
before success and achievement; it has little thought for those who
fall by the way, sword in hand; and yet it takes most courage to
fight a losing fight!”
Speaking of this same statue, “Gloria Victis,” a fine copy of which
stood in the hall of his house, he said one day early in the great
European war: “When he created that thing, I wonder did the sculptor,
Mercié, realize that he was modeling the glory of Belgium in ruin?”
Others saw something of the doctor’s own heroic spirit in that
figure, with the broken sword in the drooping right hand, and the
left arm still held aloft as if the dying warrior challenged even
death--“_Moriturus, te saluto!_”
The last active labor of Dr. Trudeau was the writing of his
autobiography, and perhaps the last service of the writer on behalf
of the beloved physician was the proof-reading of its pages. The
doctor was seized with his mortal illness just after the last pages
were written and before he had decided upon a title for his work. The
single word, “Aquiescence,” was proposed as descriptive of the life
of a man who accepted adverse conditions and, like the master of a
ship, turned the ill wind to advantage. The word was taken from a
sentence which he had once written to me, “The conquest of Fate comes
not by rebellious struggle, but by acquiescence.”
When the title was suggested to the doctor, he was unable to speak,
but smiled and shook his head. Later, when he was a little better,
he dictated to his secretary, “If the world finds a sermon in my
life-story--good; but I don’t want any one to think I was trying to
preach one.”
Possibly the impression has been given in these pages that Trudeau
was an approachable person. He was, to some; to many he was quite
unapproachable, especially interviewers. He feared a scribe. To the
present writer he repeatedly said, “Remember--I trust you; but don’t
you ever publish what I’m telling you until after I am where I won’t
care what the world says about me.”
Even to his most intimate friends he was difficult of approach when,
after “studying the ceiling” for many long days, he was irritated
beyond human self-control by his sufferings. But even then he could
be played like a fine instrument if the player had technique. If the
doctor was in that depth of depression out of which he would chant
a “De Profundis” of blackest pessimism, all that was necessary was
to agree with him that life was “a senseless business”; whereupon he
would draw his sword of optimism and flash the text engraven upon its
bright blade: “O ye of little faith!” But if you told him he looked
well and you hoped he felt so, he would say, “I don’t. I’m utterly
miserable!” and sink back in his invalid’s chair with a smile that
seemed to add, “There’s little sport in an easy game.”
Characteristic of the man’s philosophy was his own comment on his
fits of melancholy, vouchsafed once to a fellow sufferer who had been
in depths of depression: “If you go down to the depths at times,
you have many glimpses of higher things that people of more even
temperament never get; and after all, the ideal is the beautiful in
life; the facts of life are hideous.”
He once told a visitor some tales of his experiences with the great
human tragedy--told them as if they belonged to the great human
comedy, for his humor was irrepressible. But the visitor did not
laugh; he went away a sadder and a wiser man. Possibly he thought the
doctor hardened; but I shall never forget the expression of Trudeau’s
face when I asked him directly if he had not become so accustomed to
tragedy that it no longer touched his emotions. The smile left his
face; his eyes looked out and beyond with a suddenly moist softness,
and he said slowly, “Pity, as an emotion, passes. Pity, as a motive,
remains.”
Stephen Chalmers. By kind permission of _The
Atlantic Monthly_.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE
The editors have found these additional selections very useful in
teaching biographical narrative:
Barrie, James. _Margaret Ogilvy._ Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Bradford, Gamaliel. _Portraits of Women_, particularly _Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu_ and _Mrs. Pepys_. Houghton, Mifflin Company.
Eliot, Charles W. _John Gilley, Maine Farmer and Fisherman._
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Morley, Christopher. _Silas Orrin Howes_ in _Pipefuls_. Doubleday,
Page & Company.
Strachey, Lytton. _Mr. Creevey_ in _Books and Characters_, and
_Florence Nightingale in Eminent
Victorians_. Harcourt, Brace and Company.