The Corner of Harley Street Part 13

_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 repet.i.tions 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 pa.s.sages 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 subst.i.tuting 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-repet.i.tion (to which most of the monthly magazines were long ago safely anch.o.r.ed) 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 b.u.mped 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 subst.i.tute 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 t.i.tle 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.

Of the books, on the other hand, that have made me read them--rare and beloved visitors--there have been fewer this year than usual, though it is I, and not the books, that must bear the chief blame for this. The two latest of these, separated by an interval of months, and both, I believe, already elderly as the lives of modern novels go, are "The Cliff End" and "Captain Margaret." The first of these delighted me from cover to cover, in spite of some exaggerations of character-drawing and dialogue; and I reverently bow my head to its author as having made himself at a bound the laureate, not only of the bath-tub, but of that peculiarly distressing variety of it that is very wide and shallow, with a dimple in it that cracks when you stand upon it, and a capacity for water that no housemaid has ever satisfied. It is perhaps too late for the nature of this vessel to change. But never more, with that rosy vision of sponging maidenhood before my eyes, shall I regard it as anything but blessed.

So it's a book for which I should like to prophesy life, though with less certainty, perhaps, than "Captain Margaret," upon the deck of his _Broken Heart_, carries the very germ of it in his delicate hands. For to his eldorado of dreams we have all of us, at one time or another, turned our eyes. And in his schooner might have sailed any Quixote of history, lucky indeed to find a Cammock for his navigator.

And yet who am I to be thus prophesying so boldly? For the third of my books has been a collection of Oscar Wilde's contributions to the "Pall Mall Gazette," full of such forecasts, and written, too, by a practised hand. Has one half of them been verified? I think not. And yet I suspect that few critics could more equably confront a reprinting of their twenty-year-old opinions. Looking through this book, I read, for example, whole pages devoted to the novel of Miss So-and-so whom one would have supposed, in the eighties, to have been an emerging George Eliot. And how desperately must the praise have fired her to further efforts. Yet what, in 1910, has become of poor Miss So-and-so; and where are those great works that were so certainly to be? There is the writer himself too, so young then, with his brilliant flippancies--his impeachment of the British Cook, for instance, with her pa.s.sion for combining pepper and gravy and calling it soup, and her inveterate habit of sending up bread poultices with pheasant--and all his promises of grace.

So, upon the whole, it's a sad book; and here, for a brisker comment upon all that I have been writing, comes a volume of American essays that has just been lent to Esther, wherein I am positively a.s.sured that the volumes of Mrs. Humphry Ward are quite dangerously immoral! While there, upon a chair, lies a novel, "Mr. Meeson's Will," that Rupert Morris has just recommended to me as being his beau-ideal of a really outstanding story. So let me lie low. I have spoken out my literary heart to you, as any man, on occasion, should have the courage to do.

But now let me lie low. For by what standards am I judging, after all, who have only spent an hour in Chicago, and never a moment east of Suez?

You will remember Morris, whom you met here during his last visit to England. And as you remember him so he is, with perhaps an added grey hair or two in his moustache, and a few more upon his temples. For the rest, he is just as lean and brown and boyish as he has always been, and with a touch of deference in his first greetings to Esther and me that has survived from the school-days, when he was a comparative nipper, and that he will carry, I suppose, since he is English of the English, until common earth shall level us all. He was looking, when he first came in, rather hesitating and ill at ease, with his t.i.tle, as it were, tucked awkwardly under his arm. Much like this I have seen him at school, on some Old Boys' Day, coming back to the pavilion after making his century, with an uncomfortable shove at his cap, and something about the bowlers having been "dead off their luck."

Finding us alone however, and not disposed to worry him, he cheered up amazingly, and was soon chattering to us briskly about his various adventures. His personal part in these would seem as a rule to have been conspicuous by its dullness; but the adventures themselves were well worth hearing about. And it was only quite accidentally, as he was leaving for Stoke, that we discovered him to be seconded for some special duties in the colonies--"imperial defence, don't you know, and all that sort of thing; rather an interesting job."

And did I tell you, by the way, that the Poles have bequeathed us their baby during their visit to Italy? Esther has just brought her in, and she is staring at me now with the solemnest eyes in creation--little pools of Siloam, but with the angels just going to be busy. I must go to them, and be healed.

Ever yrs., P. H.

XXVI

_To John Summers, M.B., c/o the Rev. W. B. La Touche, High Barn, Winchester._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _October_ 18, 1910.

MY DEAR JACK,

I have just received your letter, and also the accountant's statement as regards Dr. Singleton's books; and I have instructed the solicitors to sell out enough of your stock to buy the quarter-share of his practice upon which you and he have agreed. If you can manage to obtain with it an equal proportion of his skill, kindliness, and cheerful adequacy you may be quite sure that the advantage of the bargain will not be altogether upon his side. For though books are important of course, if the man who keeps them is sound you needn't trouble your head so very much about them. And Singleton is sound through and through--not exactly one of those brilliant men, perhaps, of whom, as operating surgeons, Sir Frederick Treves has declared himself to be so justly timid, but what is far better, one of those level-headed, big-hearted general pract.i.tioners, tender of hand and essentially careful, in whose professional history mistakes have been, and will continue to be, practically unknown.

Moreover he was never, even as a student, one of those people who have set out to purchase skill in their own profession by the sacrifice of very nearly every other human interest. _Nihil humani a me alienum puto_ has been his own as well as his hospital's motto. And you must some day get him to tell you the story of how an odd little insight into esoteric Buddhism that he was once curious enough to obtain became the means of saving the life, to say nothing of the sanity, of one of the most valuable men of our time. That late cut of his, too, is still well worth seeing; and there are not many of my friends who can go straighter to the heart of a book or a picture--that is, if the book or the picture has a heart to be got to.

He may not be able to excise a Ga.s.serian ganglion, or know very much about the researches of Calmette or von Pircquet. But he knows precisely when to call in the men who do. And he's just the sort of a.s.sistant with whom they feel safe in setting out to work. While, on the other hand, upon a hundred points--little everyday problems of medical practice, uncla.s.sified ailments that have never got into the text-books or been dignified with a Latin name, doubtful beginnings of more definite illnesses, their home-treatment, and the adequate settlement of the domestic problems that they involve--there isn't a man in Harley Street who could give a more valuable opinion. And he has performed a tracheotomy with his pocket-knife and a hair-pin, five miles from anywhere, in the heart of the Hampshire downs.

Such men are not only the pillars of our profession, but its topmost pinnacles, even if the wreaths and the knighthoods but seldom come their way. I am saying all this because I think that I can detect in your letter, and certainly in the newer generation of qualifying students, a kind of reluctance about going into general practice, as if this were in a way an admission of failure, a sort of _dernier ressort_. Whereas of course there is no point of view from which such a way of looking at it is at all justifiable. General practice is at least as difficult, if it is to be carried on well and successfully, as any special practice can be, and probably more so; for the G.P. has to live continually, as it were, with the results of his handiwork. He is always liable to meet his failures round the next corner; and his mistakes may quite easily rent the pew behind him in the parish church. The consultant, on the other hand, comes into the family life from afar, and returns again, an hour or two later, to the seclusion of his private fastness. He has brought down his little bit of extra technical skill or knowledge. He has used it for good or ill. And the results do not follow him, save indirectly, and at a very comfortable distance. But the G.P. who has taken upon himself the responsibility of calling him in must needs still bear upon his shoulders not only the anxiety that heralds ultimate success, but a large share of the possible obloquy that may follow failure.

Moreover, in all the hundred extraneous interests that are involved, his advice becomes of paramount importance. This would be the best room for the patient from the point of view of quietness and aspect. But that, on the other hand, is the room that he has been used to. His favourite books and pictures surround him there in the old accustomed order. Does the doctor think it better for him to be moved? His wife, his mother, or his sister are anxious to nurse him. Are they strong enough or skilful enough? What is the doctor's opinion on this point? Here is a telephone message from the office. A disturbing point has arisen in the conduct of a great business, and should be dealt with promptly. Are we to worry the patient with it now, or postpone the settlement, with the possibilities of greater anxieties later on? Let us wait, at any rate, until the doctor comes.

And from this household he has to drive home by a private school where lies some boy with a cheerful countenance and a suspicious red rash on his chest. It would never do to create a false alarm. But, on the other hand, it would be more than disastrous to let the origin of some sweeping epidemic go free for convenience' sake. And here is a servant-maid in the surgery with a throat that looks as diphtheritic as a throat can well be; and she comes from a dairy farm that supplies half the town with milk, under the eyes of a government inspector; while the rector's wife, nervous, and uncomfortably near forty, is expecting her first, long-looked-for baby some time this afternoon.

It may take a good man to remove successfully an adherent appendix or an obscure tumour of the brain, or to diagnose some out-of-the-way lesion of a heart valve. But such a man, after all, has spent the greater portion of his professional life in dealing with no other subjects but these. And it must surely require at least an equal equipment, after its own kind, to deal wisely and rapidly with such variously conflicting problems as I have just been describing.

You are probably becoming a little bored by these commonplace remarks of mine. But they are the sort of truism that will generally bear an occasional reconsideration. And if I have a very private opinion, to which you cannot subscribe, that the really able general pract.i.tioner is perhaps the very best man in our ranks bar none, I am quite willing to concede this extra superiority if you will grant him at least an equal eminence to that of Sir Grosvenor le Draughte, as Mr. Russell has called him in one of his recent books.

So go into your practice with a good heart. Your experience as a loc.u.m in Bristol and Shropshire will have prepared you for any little mortifications that may be in waiting during your first few months. You will be used to the disheartening fall of the countenance that greets the junior partner when his senior was expected. And you will accept with a grave countenance and an inward chuckle your knowledge of the extremely frank criticism that is likely to herald and succeed your first few visits. Even now there's a letter upon my desk from a disrespectful young lady who shall be nameless. A new curate has made his initial appearance in an Eastbourne drawing-room. "He shook hands just like a baby," she writes, "and he stopped to tea, and he sprawled all over the table, and he has quite nice eyes, but his mouth is just like cook's when she's having one of her windy spasums." And if sixteen can rise to heights like this, what about eighteen and twenty and twenty-two? Nor are curates, alas, the only legitimate prey. I wonder if there's a girls' school in your practice?

You may lament too, for a little while perhaps, the slow dawning of confidence in your new patients. But before very long you may even be rather overwhelmed (quite privately of course) by the freedom and completeness with which it is accorded you. And above all things, be just your natural self in dealing with them, forgetting, if you can, that you have ever even heard of such an attribute as a good bedside manner.

This reminds me that only last week, in a railway carriage, I overheard two young ladies discussing a very sympathetic physician well known to us both. One of them was wondering why he had always been so successful.

"Oh, that," said the other cheerfully, "is because he's so frightfully good at comforting the relatives--_afterwards_, you know."

If your news must be bad, tell it soberly and promptly. It's seldom--very seldom--wise to conceal it for some dubious temporary benefit. And if you are in doubt about any of their maladies let them know it quite frankly, explaining to them in language suited to their degree of education and intelligence exactly why this should be the case.

There's been a good deal written lately about the personal factor in treatment, the Psychology of the Physician, and the mental therapeutics at his command. And I even saw a letter in the "Lancet," a few weeks ago, urging that the practical application of Personality in the sick-room should form one of the recognised subjects of the medical curriculum. But in the first place, I'm exceedingly doubtful if the modesty of our profession is so excessively marked as to demand for its correction a course of instruction in the conscious prescribing of its own personality. And in the second, I fail to see how this latter could ever be done without, by the very act, considerably altering that uncertain quant.i.ty, at any rate so far as its victim was concerned. And what would one's _ego_ be like, I wonder, after ten years' conscientious labour? So I shouldn't worry too much about your personality if I were you. It will be a good thing, no doubt, to get all you can into it by encouraging such tentacles as it may put forth to the sun and the breeze. But what other people are to get out of it is a matter with which you may quite properly, I think, be too busy to concern yourself.

While I'm still in the pulpit, let me recommend you to husband your energies. Don't play tennis all the afternoon (even with Amaryllis) if you have been up all night. Go to sleep in the hammock, instead, over a book or a paper or a letter from Uncle Peter. And don't forget sometimes to say your prayers. For whatever may be one's private notions as to their ultimate Destination; whether one affects a belief in some beneficent Overlord, once incarnate; or regards G.o.d as the ever-growing sum of all higher human volitions; or, remembering this infinitesimal particle of earth in the greatness of the universe, considers such a conception to be inadequate; or admits only some possible Starting-point, a kind of Divine Convenience upon which to found theories; or has never thought about the matter at all--it's always a gracious and comforting act to remove one's moral hat, as it were (even if reverence goes no further) to Something at any rate bigger than most of us. While even on the very chilliest of auto-suggestion grounds there is still a word to be said for it as a vehicle wherein to despatch one's extra troubles to some handy mental cemetery. For prayer, whether we look upon it as sacred or superst.i.tious, must still, as the hymn says, be the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed. And occasional expression is about as valuable a prelude to the acquiring of knowledge as any that are going.

So I may as well tell you at once that I know nothing whatever about motor-cars, and therefore find the last half of your letter entirely unintelligible. But I gather that the one you mean to purchase combines speed, silence, and freedom from odour in a quite unusual degree. Some day, no doubt, I shall be sponging upon you for a lesson in driving it--or him--or do you call the thing her?

Yr. affect. uncle, PETER HARDING.

XXVII

_To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _November_ 7, 1910.

MY DEAR SALLY,

This is going to be a short letter because the news that it contains is probably speeding to you already--from Esther, to whom its greatness is not unmixed with tears; and from Molly, to whom its joy is of the eternal gold. Ten days ago she came back to us from Stoke, where, as she told us, she had been having a good time, but seemed now to have fulfilled her little contract. For the house-party had broken up: Horace had long ago made a late return to Cambridge; Carthew was in the Temple, and Pole in Fleet Street; Hilary and Norah were off to Spain; and the one or two extra guns, just leisurely shooting men, had betaken themselves, at any rate superficially regretful, to other people's houses. Lady Wroxton was better--very nearly her old self, and for the moment wrapped up, heart and soul, in her nephew Rupert. It had been a pleasant visit. She kissed us very tenderly. And now it was high time that she was back again among her girls at Hoxton.