[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.
Of Merridew's I can only speak of course as an outsider. His father, 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.