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 anaemic 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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.
XXV
_To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_October_ 3, 1910.
MY DEAR HUGH,
When you write and ask me to tell you what books I read during my
illness I can see an ancient accusation of yours peering at me behind
the question--as though you had visibly added that, except when
indisposed, I never read books at all. And if it weren't that I too find
other people's reading so interesting, though less informing perhaps
than their pictures, I might possibly stand upon my dignity, and decline
to supply you with an answer. And in any case, now that I come to
reflect a little, this will be rather a difficult thing to do. For
having got me at a disadvantage, you see, I could no longer pick and
choose, as is my wont when the health within me is rude and exacting. I
could no longer demand haughtily of a book that it must make me read it,
or remain within its covers for ever unread. My defences were down, and
I had perforce to roll over, hands up, for anything in the shape of book
with which Accident and Mudie had happened to endow my house. And as a
result I read half a dozen novels that, as the Americans say, left me
cold, although I must needs give them the credit of having whiled away
the time. Moreover, before dismissing them thus unkindly, I must
remember that they were each the work of somebody's hand and brain, and
the hard work too--at any rate so far as the hand was concerned--as
anyone who has tried to put eighty thousand words of even unimaginative
English upon paper would surely bear witness. Some of it too, one could
see, was the rather tired work of minds that should really have been
(perhaps only too willingly) lying fallow of production. And I think
that I noticed this particularly in an altogether unimportant little
volume called "Daisy's Aunt" by Mr. E. F. Benson, that may well stand
for a sorrowful example. It's true that it was merely a two-shilling
story; but even so, it was surely an unworthy one. And yet, I suppose,
there _is_ a public that likes to devour these descriptions of very
ordinary London drawing-rooms and very usual Thames-side bungalows--that
would fain listen to even the weariest repetitions of the somewhat
annoying slang of the "oh you heavenly person" type that for the moment
is being affected by Mr. Benson's "quite nice people." And having thus
found, or created, such a public, and designed the precise bait that it
requires, I suppose that one is justified in hooking, as often as may
be, one's share of their two-shilling pieces. But alas for the artist in
Mr. Benson, in whose books there have been passages good enough of their
kind to have made, perhaps, three or four pieces of real literature that
few, I suppose, would have bought, but that some, at any rate, would
have liked to keep upon their shelves. And yet again, who is to say that
Mr. Benson (as representing not a few) has not after all chosen his
better way? For if his popularity has been costly, it is at any rate of
a clean and healthy sort, and one that may well, perhaps, be
substituting itself for vogues unworthier and less wholesome.
They form an interesting study, these three brothers, not merely in
heredity of talent, but because, as it seems to me, they stand very high
in that small but growing band of really able writers, who possess also
the knack of a popular appeal. The sons of a religious, scholarly, and
discreet father, who himself had the power of attracting both attention
and success, these qualities, with no suspicion of a more wayward
genius, have descended upon them in very generous measure. The social
sense, the faculty of choosing the right friends, and a gift for getting
them on paper; the high purpose, clerically moulded; the gentle inward
warring of trained intellect and instinctive orthodoxy; to each has
fallen a share of his father's mantle, wherewith to make himself a
garment. And the mental pabulum that they provide is just what is wanted
by a large number of active, intelligent men and women to whom genius is
at all times unsympathetic; and by the yet greater company--including
most of us, I suppose--to whom its strongest appeal is a matter of mood
and place. Every generation seems to provide itself with such writers,
and as a rule rewards them well; and while, no doubt, it is genius alone
that survives, with a light that can never remain hidden, the others, by
their more instant and transient appeal, do yeoman work, and are
gathered honourably to their fathers. For we may not always be tuned to
the tang of Stevenson or the burr of Dr. John Brown. But we are seldom
incapable of sitting with enjoyment at some College Window, or allowing
the lesser voices to prepare us for those that are mightier than they.
And never, perhaps, has a generation possessed so many of these. Never
certainly has their level of eloquence been so high. Hichens and Locke
and Anthony Hope, Phillpotts, Marriott, Munro, and Wells, with Hewlett
and de Morgan a little nearer, perhaps, to the stars, and a score of
others close upon their heels--how sound and various is their artistry,
and how consistent, as a whole, is the quality of their output. For
this, one thinks, must be the besetting danger of all these skilled
professionals--to avoid, on the one hand, the Scylla of over-repetition
(to which most of the monthly magazines were long ago safely anchored)
and on the other, the more dangerous Charybdis of a too venturesome
novelty. Upon the first (and still confining oneself to the more
considerable writers) Mr. Benson, the essayist, for example, would seem,
more nearly than many, to be in danger of foundering. While upon the
second I can think of Conan Doyle as having bumped as badly as most
writers of an equal eminence. For while there is no man who can spin a
better yarn for a dull journey (even if he has never given us a
Brushwood Boy), his particular talent is about as at home among the
delicate domesticities of his "Duet with an Occasional Chorus" as would
be some genial pugilist with the "Pot-pourri of a Surrey Garden." And
yet, while one could pile up examples of sad wreckage upon both these
rocks, the wonder, after all, is that there is really so little of it.
Mr. Benson, no doubt, will put up his helm in time; and Sir Arthur has
been wise enough, as far as I know, to avoid any further emulation of
Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Mitford. But it is, perhaps, to Mrs. Humphry Ward
that one naturally seems to turn for a demonstration of the completely
median course--so rigidly median indeed, in its lofty mediocrity, that I
am sometimes at a loss to account for her very great popularity even
among (as the critics have called it) the circulating-library public.
For though she has a gift, and a very considerable one, for bringing
together the materials--a little machine-made, perhaps--of dramatic
incident, one may search her books in vain for a single thrill that they
have produced; while of humour they contain not a semblance. Indeed they
form, as it seems to me, a long series of admirably well-laid fires, for
which only the matches are wanting. As Dr. Brown would have said, she is
the Maker, not the Mother, of her books. And I think hers must be the
twentieth-century triumph of the college-bred lady inspector.
It's strange how increasingly one misses, when it is absent, this
underlying sense of humour; so much so indeed that one perceives it more
and more to be a _sine qua non_ of all towering and durable achievement.
Given Meredith's humour, how Hardy, with his first-hand observation, his
extraordinary detachment, and the beautiful lucidity of his English,
would have loomed above the creator of Sir Willoughby. With humour for
its lightning, how Tess would have stricken us to the heart. And how
poor a substitute for it is irony, howsoever its subjects may deserve
it. To withstand the years it must, no doubt, surround itself with the
stronger qualities--depth and simplicity and desire--or Barrie, least of
the Immortals, would be among their giants; and Jacobs would be knocking
at their door. But that Olympus demands it let all testify who have
tried to love Sordello, or watched Jude fade ever deeper into his
obscurity, or read again, a generation later, the rhapsodies of
Inglesant and Elsmere. There are a few exceptions of course, chiefly, I
think, in the sphere of the short story, the mere _conte_, and among the
poets, of whom perhaps Wordsworth is the one that springs most readily
to the mind. By the way, I saw a discussion (a rather unkindly one) in
one of the magazines, a year or two ago, as to the worst line in
reputable poetry, and I am rather afraid that last Sunday I discovered
it, and that Wordsworth must be regarded as its sponsor. Here it is, and
one grain of humour would surely have made it impossible.
Spade! with which Wilkinson has tilled his land.
And yet he has written a sonnet or two, and at least one ode, that are
as immortal, I suppose, as anything in letters.
But I don't seem to have told you very much about my bedside books. And
the truth of it is that "Daisy's Aunt" is the only title that I can
remember, though it may conveniently be stretched, perhaps, to embrace
them all. For it concluded, if I remember rightly, with the matrimony of
four persons; and the others also are now a blur to me of ultimate
marriages--marriages between pathological pianists and high-born,
introspective damsels; and marriages between athletic young gentlemen,
good at puncture-mending, and the distressed maidens whose tyres had
become deflated.