The Corner of Harley Street / Being Some Familiar Correspondence of Peter Harding, M.D.

by Sir H. H. Bashford

"Only semi-detached," I ventured, "with a half-educated brother next door."

I fancy that I can see you lying snugly aft upon the "Nautilus" at anchor—a bronzing cynic, smiling gently over this ingenuous little duel. And perhaps you have already made up your mind to transfer this incomplete disciple of yours to some other department, or even (according to a fundamental Franciscan tradition) to dispense with his services altogether. For if he cannot bring himself to demolish one prehistoric physician, what can he do? And I shall be sorry if he is put to any real inconvenience. But on the other hand I shall rejoice openly to see him save his soul alive. For though I didn't tell him so, and though I am convinced that at the core—the germ-plasm, if you like—the race is still happily sound enough, yet if there is a rot, a temporary epidemic of nervous instability, it is largely confined to those who draw their mental nourishment from Franciscan House, and whose twitterings you are now proposing to exploit.

Autres temps, autres mœurs, for while there was a time when our more ignorant forefathers were wont to scoff (mistakenly, no doubt, but on balance with a tonic effect) at the possessors of "weak nerves," now that we have learned just enough to talk about them in bad Greek "neurasthenia" is an affection of which no man need be ashamed. "Poor chap," we say, and begin to wonder if we are not sufferers ourselves.

You will have observed that my reference is masculine, although the older historians have regarded the complaint as being chiefly confined to women. But you are not to deduct from this, as I can see you trying to do, that the neurasthenia of to-day is therefore a new variety, whose exhibition in your halfpenny daily paper is justifiable on public grounds. For if it attacked mainly a certain class of our great-grandmothers and their maternal ancestors, this was less, I think, on account of their sex than of their circumstances—the predisposing combination in some of them of slender academic endowment with unexercised mental activity.

Times have changed, but even then it was not the woman of affairs, whose education, ample or the reverse, had been salted by the winds of action—it was not the queens and the stateswomen at the one pole, or the workers in the fields at the other, but the secluded gentlewomen between them, who fainted daily, and agonised over beetles and mice. Requiescant in pace, for their day is no more, and their busier daughters have no longer time to write pathetic little self-revelations in unventilated boudoirs, or collapse at a knock upon the door. Instead, they will vault nimbly over the window-sill; while as for the beetles, they will kill them for you mercifully, and explain their pedigree in Latin.

But the class that they have thus vacated has not, alas, been suffered to die out, and is now perhaps even fuller than ever. Gone, it is true, with the conditions that produced them, are the vaporous women of Richardson and Fielding. But here in their stead, and in a very similar soil, is the twopenny clerk of to-day. And it is typically in his Harringay villa that one must search for the modern neurasthenic. A little cheap education, a long period of physical security, a comfortable, if inexpensive, assurance of at any rate the more primal necessities, and the demand of ever coalescing industries for an innumerable army of semi-automatic dependents—all these have been at work. And they have built up for us a hundred airless mental chambers, whose inhabitants, desperately aware of their gentility, and sufficiently educated for a little self-probing, have nothing more demanded from them than to copy out stereotyped letters or manipulate a Morse key. To obtain their chance of doing these things they had to acquire a small amount of knowledge—since seldom added to; and to do them automatically a few months of mental apprenticeship became necessary. No more was asked of them. And after a little while, and in the great majority of cases, they have ceased to ask more of themselves. And I have seen men crying in my consulting-room over some trivial, unexpected appeal that has been too much for their paralysed initiative.

You may think that my analogy is far-fetched, and superficially I'll admit that it is. But probe a little deeper, and you'll find how exactly the related conditions have produced corresponding types. Look at my sequestered lady busy with her eternal crochet, but in reality not busy at all. And then behold my little clerk occupied with his letters and his envelope-licking, but with a brain as really unemployed as my lady's. Read out to me the writings of my sequestered lady or the records of her conversations. How little she had read or seen or studied, and yet with what confident persistence she uttered her superlatives. And now talk to my little clerk, who likewise has climbed no mountains of comparison, and his tiniest headache is "shocking," his least calamity "terrible." Why, only this afternoon I was asked for a tonic by such an one (your halfpenny illustrated was peeping out of his pocket) on the ground that yesterday he had seen a small child cut its forehead, and held it till the doctor came. Listen to my sequestered lady, innocence herself, and her talk, with titters, is of my lord's liaisons, my lady's cure, and what the neighbours think. And listen to my little clerk, and what are his topics but these?

God forbid that I should hold either of them up for ridicule (it's you that I'm ultimately to annihilate), for such generalities as these are never more than half true. My lady was only waiting for the marching years to become a Florence Nightingale and a Madame Curie. She was only waiting to be shown, and admitted into, the great worlds outside her boudoir to prove a right of way that has long since ceased to be questioned. And who shall say what shining destiny awaits my little clerk? For it is not, as we are so often told, the mere rush of our modern industrialism that is at the root of so much neurasthenia—it is its blank automatism, with its endless opportunities for self-pity. And one can only suppose that as we advance in knowledge much of this human drudgery will be delegated to other instruments. But the time is not yet, alas, and meanwhile all that is best of him has to struggle with circumstances only too sorrowfully adapted to morbid mental imaginings. "The result of all this free education," you will be told by a certain type of elderly raisonneur. But of course he is wrong. It's not less education that we want, but more. For even in the good old days, as I have said, it was not the Marie Stuarts and the Queen Elizabeths, delivering their Latin orations and translating their "Mirrors of the Sinful Soul" at thirteen and fourteen years old, it was not the full-tide women of the Renaissance, who were afterwards conspicuous for nervous debility. And nor is it the really well-educated clerk of to-day. For while a little education is chiefly dangerous in so far as it increases a man's self-consciousness without showing him where it is gently to be laughed at, a little more will generally remedy this defect, to the lasting benefit of his sanity. No, it's in his awful self-seriousness that lurks the subtlest enemy of the half-educated man. If you can make a man laugh at himself, you can make him laugh at his nerves—which is better than a hecatomb of bromides.

Well then, there's my analogy; and here's where it breaks down. My lady's prison walls were concrete as well as abstract; my clerk's are chiefly abstract. She was in the world but not of it. He is both in it and of it. She could scarcely touch upon its treasures if she would. For him they are waiting—the real ones—if he will only take them. Long ago we have recognised the merely physical dangers of his daily enforced imprisonment. And we have framed a hundred sanitary laws to provide him with his oxygen unsullied. But what about his half-developed mind? You will tell me that good lectures are abundant, and that classics may be bought for a shilling. Yet what are these, at the best, but occasional winds of thought, too often resented as a draught? And who is it but you, creeping under his door for a halfpenny, that creates his mental atmosphere? You may tell me that you only reproduce it, with its constituents very faithfully proportioned—a nebulous sermonette once a week, an inch to the scientific progress of both the hemispheres, and three columns to the personal appearance of the Camden murderer. And you may justify yourself on the same grounds for covering your nakedness, as you did last week (I'm glad that you yourself were away), with an appeal in big letters that he should buy your orange-coloured weekly, wherein—with delicious exclusiveness—he might find, in all its details, the life-history of this same criminal's flimsy little paramour, written (God forgive you—and him) by her own father; and the nadir, one can only pray, of your efforts for forty per cent. But you cannot at the same time lay a finger on your paragraph of Health Hints, and boast complacently about the influence of the Press. Nor do you, I suppose, with any real conviction; and I may have exaggerated, perhaps, in crediting you with the creation of anybody's atmosphere. For the true brain-worker passes you by, and the manual labourer has his antidote at hand; while the little clerk is not, in a modern and abominable phrase, "a person who matters." But then he is. And in the battle for mental vigour that, under present conditions, he must consciously fight or die, you might so easily be playing the biggest rather than the least worthy part. For our help still cometh from the hills. And surely it's of the hill-top men, the men who are climbing, the men with a view, that you should be telling him, morning and evening, as he sits in his London cellule. Whereas instead, with his birthright ever broadening about him, you still drearily drag him after you to Bow Street, where you photograph him in his pitiful queue for to-morrow's illustration. Dear me, I'm afraid that I'm tub-thumping; and you'll think that I've forgotten your farm and your balloon-house and your daily reports upon the cuckoo and the corn-crake. But I haven't; and what's more, I'm quite ready to believe that if Bow Street went out of fashion you'd be the first to appreciate the fact. We should soon be hearing indeed that you had led the movement. And that's why you don't really stem the onward march of sanity, though there are casualties en route of which it would be difficult to acquit you. While as for your National Neurosis, one foreign battery on Primrose Hill would bury it for two generations.