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 moeurs_, 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.
XXIII
_To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset._
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.
XXIV
_To the Rev. Bruce Harding, S. Peter's College, Morecambe Bay._
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.