Chapter 8

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_ CHAPTER VIII

Arthur Hamilton as an author

I must give a chapter to this subject, because it entered very largely into Arthur's life, although he was singularly unsuccessful as an author, considering the high level of his mental powers.

He lacked somehow, not exactly the gift of expression--his letters testify to that--but the gift of proportion and combination.

His essays are disjointed--discursive and eloquent in parts, and bare and meagre in others. Connections are omitted, passages of real and rare beauty jostling with long passages of the most common-place rhetoric. His platitudes, however, to myself who knew him, have a genuine ring about them; he never admitted a truism into his writing till it had become his own by vivid realization. As he himself says:

"I always find a peculiar interest in the solemn enunciation of a platitude by a dull person who does not naturally aim at effect. You feel sure it is the condensation of life and experience. Such an utterance often brings a platitude home to me as no amount of rhetorical writing can."

Still, the reading public will not stand this, and Arthur never found a market.

He wrote voluminously.

I have in my bureau several pigeon-holes crammed with manuscripts in his curious sprawling hand. He wrote, when he was in the mood, very quickly, with hardly an erasure. Among them is:

1. A collection of poems (128 in all).

2. A complete novel, called "The Unencumbered Man."

3. Three incomplete novels, called "Physiognomy," "Helena," "From Hall to Hall."

4. Essays on historical and literary subjects, such as "Coleridge," "Bunyan," "The Earl of Surrey," "Lucian," etc. These, as far as I can make out, are very poor.

5. A collection of semi-mystical writings and short stories. There is a great fertility of imagination about these, and they are composed in a very finished style. It is not improbable that I shall re-edit these, as they seem to me to be distinctly first-rate work. I give a short specimen of his mystical writing--a style of which he was very fond. It is called:

"The Great Assize.

"Now, it came to pass that on a certain day the Gods were weary. Odin sat upon his throne, and rested his chin upon his hand. And Thor came in, and threw his hammer upon the earth, and said, 'I am weary of walking up and down in the earth, of smiting and slaying; and I know not how to bind or heal up, and I am too old to learn.' And Freya said, 'I am weary of Valhalla and the birds and trees, the perpetual sunshine and the feasts and laughter.' So also said all the Gods.

"And Odin, when the clamour was stilled, rose from his throne, and spoke. He told them of an ancient law of the Gods, so ancient that it seemed dim even to himself, that when the Gods should be heavy and be sad at heart, they should appoint a judgment for men, should open the everlasting records, and call the world to the assize; and Loki should be the accuser, and Night and Day the witnesses, and Odin should deliver sentence, with the Gods for assessors.

"So Thor stepped out upon the bar of heaven, and blew the steel trumpet that is chained to the door-post of the hall.

"Shrill and angry came the sound of the great horn over earth, her woods and valleys; and terrible was the sound of wailing and lamentation. They prayed to the mountains to fall upon them, and the sea to swallow them up; for they said, 'The secrets of the heart must now be spoken. The Lord and our brethren will hear them. And who can bear the shame? Oh, that we had not turned away!'

"But the winds of the earth, and the voices of the morning, and the waves of the moaning sea drove them shrieking into the judgment hall, and Loki began his accusation.

"And so foul a tale it was, that the men and women folk prayed and cried no longer, but sank down in dull silence for fear. And the stars that listened overhead shrank out of the sky, and the sea stilled his waves to hear, and the very Gods turned pale and red where they sat, to think that vileness and oppression had thriven so upon the earth, and that deeds of shame had fallen so thick, and that they had in no wise hindered it, but rather increased the sum of sin.

"At last the words of Loki were over, and left a burning silence in the hall; and the sun and moon bowed their heads in witness, and Night and Day said 'Yea,' and 'Truth, he has told truth.'

"Then there was a silence, and all looked at Odin as he sat, sunk down and silent, in his chair, staring at the shrinking crowd with eyes of shame, and majesty, and anger.

"And at the last he rose, and he was clad in grey mists from head to foot, with a cloud of gleaming gold upon his head, like the sunlight on white cliffs seen over the sea through the haze of a summer morning.

"But ere he opened his lips to speak, one who sat among the folk arose and came up the hall, walking strongly and briskly like a king, and looking about him with a resolute and cheerful face to left and right.

"And all held their breath to see him pass, wondering what this thing might be.

"But the man, when he had reached the middle of the hall, cried with a loud voice, 'Hold.'

"And Odin's face gleamed white with rage through the fringes of the mist, and he said between his teeth, 'Who art thou?'

"And at his voice Freya started and blanched, and wrapped herself in her robe.

"And the man said, in a clear loud voice, not defiant, but with a certain royalty about it--

"'Lord Odin, I am he of whom thou spokest but now; he of whom the ancient oracles have spoken, whom thou knowest, and yet knowest not.'

"And Odin said, 'I know thee not; stand aside therefore, that I may judge thee and thy fellows.'

"And there was a hideous silence for a moment while you might count a score, and the twain stared upon each other.

"Then the man said, in the same voice that shook not nor quivered, 'When the Gods shall sit in order to judge the earth, then shall one come out of the midst of created things, through the earth, and walking upon it; and at his coming the pillars of Valhalla shall be snapped, and the everlasting halls shall fall.' And he added other words, which the Gods knew, but not the men or women folk. And when he ceased speaking there blew as it were a whirlwind out of Valhalla, and the high Gods passed away, as it were in skeins and fringes of hanging mist. Then there were lightnings and thunders, and the earth shook; and terrible voices were heard in heaven, passing to and fro. And one said, 'Hence, ye that corrupt justice;' and another said, 'The brood of the eagle is come home to roost;' and another, 'The roof is down.' And then there were yells and groans; and among mankind there was weeping and laughter, many smiles and tears, and they cried to the stranger, 'Judge us, thou king of Gods and men.' But he, turning, said, 'Nay, but ye are judged already.' Then was there peace on earth."

There are, besides these, several unfinished studies, and two or three note-books full of jotted conversations and thoughts of all kinds--a curious mixture.

He carefully left all the publishers' letters which he received in answer to his application. They are twenty-two in number, and are all refusals. They are tied carefully up, and are labeled, "My Literary Career."

All these compositions are the work of about seven years, except some of the poems which were written at Cambridge. The novel was begun and finished in about six weeks, in 1878. It is a poor plot, and mawkish in character, though not without merits of style.

During all this time his interest in writing never flagged. He felt that he had one or two ideas, on which he had a firm grasp, to communicate to the world, and he worked at them incessantly in new and ever-varying forms.

The issue would seem to show that he was not destined to communicate them directly to others--at least, in his own lifetime; and, indeed, no one was quicker at interpreting events than himself. He gave the enterprise a long and severe trial, but the resolute front with which he was met, showed him clearly that it was not to be. It may be that the record of his life, little as he ever imagined it would come before the world, may effect a part of what he himself prepared to do.

Occasionally, for he was of quick sensibilities, throughout this period he felt the bitterness of constant rebuff. The following letter he wrote me shows it:

"I am beginning to feel as if publishers had a code of signals or private marks like freemasonry, which they scribble sometimes, like the concealed marks on bank-notes, on the first page of a manuscript, so as to spare their brother publishers the trouble of looking through a manuscript which is below market value. I have never had a manuscript accepted which has been once refused; and I now eagerly scan the first page, to see if I can discover a wriggling mark in the margin or among the lines which is to tell Smith and Co. that Brown and Son has a very poor opinion of the book now under his consideration."

And again, quite as forcible is a little anecdote with which he begins an unfinished paper on "Genius." The story is, I now believe, his own; though, at the time, I fancied it was adopted:

"There was once a king who sat to listen to the sermon of a great preacher. From minute to minute the great words flowed on, consoling, wounding, helping, condemning, dividing the marrow from the bones; and the king wept and smiled.

"And at the end he sent for the preacher, and said, 'Sir, Christ is the only king; yet let me look at the book from which you made your discourse. The written words, though half despoiled of their grace, may perhaps strike an echo in my soul, which rings yet.'

"And for some time the preacher was unwilling, and parleyed with the king; but at the last he drew out a little pale book with faded characters traced in ink; and he opened it at a well-worn page, and held it out before the king.

"And the king looked, and saw nothing except the crabbed printed lines.

"So he said, 'Not your text-book, sir, but the book from which your arguments are rehearsed.'

"'Sire,' said the preacher, 'look but once more upon the book.' And he showed him that four of the words upon the page had a thin line drawn in ink below them. 'That was the writing of my discourse,' he said."

Neither, it must be remembered, was Arthur a first-rate conversationalist. He did not steer a conversation; he could keep the ball going creditably when it was once started; but he never communicated to the circle in which he was that indefinable interest which is so intangible and yet so unmistakable.

The two points that I spoke of that he is always trying to work out in his books are:

(1) the strength of temperament, and the difficulty, almost impossibility, of altering it. "The most we can do is to register change," are the first words of his novel. In this book, the situation of which is not a very unusual one, the hero falls in love with one of two sisters, of rare personal beauty and attractiveness, but no particular intellect. He soon wearies of her, being of that fantastic, weak, discontented spirit which Arthur invariably portrayed in his heroes--drawing it I can not conceive whence--and then falls in love with the other, as he ought to have done all along, being, as she is, fully his match in intellect, and far above him in heart and strength of character. The wife at the crisis of this other love, is killed in a street accident, and remorse ensues. But the book is a weary one; it bears upon its face the burden of sorrow. "How could this have been otherwise?" is the keynote of the story.

Along with this, and indeed as a development of this central principle, is the tendency to treat and write of "sin" so called, wrong-doing, failure of ideal, as variations of spiritual health, as diseases, the ravages of which it is possible for the skilful hand to palliate, but not to cure; to think of and treat sin as a hideous contagion, which has power for a season, perhaps inherently, to drag souls within its grasp, involve and overwhelm them; and consequently to regard the sinner with the deepest sympathy and pity, but with hardly any anger: in fact, I have known him very seriously offend the company he has been in, I have even heard him stigmatized as of loose principles, from his readiness, even anxiety, to condone a sensual offence in a man of high intellect and brilliant gifts.

"He went wrong," he said very sternly, "through having too much passion; and that we can judge him, proves that we have not enough. Well, we shall both of us have to become different: he to be brought down to the harmonious mean, we to be screwed up to it. It is easy to see which will be the most painful process: as soon as _he_ gets an idea of whither he is being led, how thankful he will be for every pang that teaches him restraint, and purifies; while we--we shall suffer blind wrench after wrench, _stung_ into feeling at any cost, and not till we painfully overtop the barrier shall we guess whither we are going."

I do not mean from this that he thought lightly of sin--far from it. I have seen him give all the physical signs of shrinking and repulsion, at the mention or sight of it. He loathed it with all the agonized disgust of a high, pure, fastidious nature. Its phenomena were without the lurid interest for him which it often possesses even for the sternest moralist.

This loathing had its physical antitype in his horror of the sight or description of bodily disease. I have seen him several times go off into a dead faint at even the bare description of bodily suffering. I went with him once, at his own request, to a seaman's hospital, where there was a poor fellow who had fallen from a mast and been terribly smashed. His legs had both been amputated, and he lay looking terribly white and emaciated with a cradle over the stumps.

He gave us, with great eagerness, an account of the accident, as people in the lower classes always will. In the middle, Arthur stepped suddenly to the door and went out. I was not aware at the time of this failing of his, and the move was executed with such deliberate directness that I thought he must have forgotten something. When I went out to the open air I found Arthur, deadly pale, sitting on the grassy paving-stones of the little yard. He insisted, as soon as he was restored, in going in to wish good-bye to the man, which he accomplished with great difficulty.

But I have already digressed too far, and must return to the main issue.

I am not aware that he ever attempted any theoretical explanation of the intrusion of sin and disorder into the world. He certainly regarded them as emanating practically, in some way that he did not comprehend, from God.

"I can not for a moment believe that these apparent disorders, physical suffering, and the deeper diseases of the will are the manifestation of some inimical power, and not under God's direct control. I have had so much experience of even the immediate blessing of suffering, that I am content to take the rest on trust. If I thought there was some ghastly enemy at work all the time, I should go mad. The power displayed is so calm, so far-reaching, and so divine, that I should feel that even if some of us were finally emancipated from it by the working of some superior power, the contest would be so long and terrible and the issues so dire, that the limited human mind could not possibly contemplate it, that hope would be practically eliminated by despair."

In the same connection, he wrote a letter to a friend whose wild and wayward life had injured his health, and wrote in the greatest agony of mind:

"Words are such wretched things, my dear friend, in crises like this. I can only beg of you, with all my heart, to resolutely set your face against thinking what might have been. Try to feel, I will not say happy, but stronger in the thought that your punishment is atoning for your past every hour. Throw remorse and fear down, if you can; they are only keeping you from God. Many, too many souls are in a far worse case. Some have more to reproach themselves with. On some it has come with what appears to be fearful injustice. Accept your present condition; brace yourself to bear it. I know how much can be borne. Give your sufferings to God nobly. Your patience is none the less noble because you have brought this on yourself; nay, it makes it even nobler....

"Don't say that many worse sinners go unpunished. How can you tell? How do you know they are not suffering? There are only, I suppose, two men in the world, besides yourself, who know that you are suffering now, and why. God visited me with suffering once; He has brought me through, and I have never ceased to thank Him for it; and He will bring you through, too, dear friend, I know. 'Pro jucundis aptissima quaeque dabunt di; carior est illis homo quam sibi.' That thought has left me patient, if not glad, in many a bitter hour.... You are never out of my thoughts."

And this letter leads me naturally to the second great principle that pervaded all his writings--"the education of individuals."

"One is inclined to believe that there is a great deal of hopeless irremediable suffering in the world--suffering of a kind that seems wantonly inflicted, purposeless anguish.... That 'regret must hurt and may not heal' is a terrible thought, which, when we get our first glimpse of human anguish, seems almost sickeningly true. But I have seen a great deal lately of such suffering, and it amazes me to discover how _extraordinarily_ rare it is to find the victim taking this view of his case. Either it seems to be a due reward for past action--that 'invita religio' which wells up in the blackest heart, or the sufferer gains a kind of onlook into sweet plains beyond, into which the troubled passage is taking him, and which can only thus be reached....

"Of animal suffering, unconscious tortures, it is harder to speak--of the innocent, for so they are, victims of lust and brutality in Babylon here, whose sense of suffering is almost gone, and is succeeded by nothing but the desire for rest; all this seems so meaningless, so futile....

"It is one of the problems I take up and let drop--take up and let drop a thousand times; but all sacrifice seems essentially good, and I do not throw the enigma aside in anger; I will wait for it to be explained to me.

"Ah, death, death, if we are enlightened enough by that time, what a storehouse of secrets, dear secrets you will have to tell us! I thrill all through, in moments like these, to think of it."

"Of course," he said to me once, "there are times when we can only wait and hope; changing our posture, like a sick man, from time to time, to win a little ease; but when we reach a fresh standpoint, a fresh basis--which, thank God, one does from month to month--we are inclined to say with Albert Durer, 'It could not be better done.'"

He was very fond of the doctrine of Special Providences.

"Every now and then I have--I suppose it is common--what may be called a run of luck in ordinary things; I get out of scrapes in a way I don't deserve; I find letters I have mislaid; annoyances are mysteriously shunted aside; money flows in; days of extraordinary happiness succeed one another; little events save vast complications of trouble, so that I long to turn round and grasp by the hand or kiss the cheek of the sweet friend who stands at my elbow, suggesting, ordering, providing day and night, smiling on me as I sleep, hovering around me as I work, without a word of praise. Guardian angels! no fable. God gives you a sudden and particular thought, and while you are independent of circumstances you master them as well."

But such portraiture as the above is apt to get very vague and insipid unless one is able to convey a vivid picture of the man as he walked, and spoke, and lived. The _sic sedebat_ in Trinity College (Cambridge) chapel has given more people a thrill at the thought of Bacon than ever gained one from his books. Personality, personal characteristics, how one craves for them! To take a late instance, how far more impressive General Gordon's little cane is, which he twirled in his hand as he stormed redoubts and directed an action, than a thousand pages of rhetoric about his philosophy or his views of life.

He was now, as ever, for strangers meeting him for the first time, an impressive but rather disappointing man. He had shaved his beard, keeping only his usual moustache; his face was very spare, with a pallor that was not unhealthy. His hair, which was dark and lay in masses, he wore generally rather long. He had got into the way, when without his glasses, of half closing his eyes, because, as he said, it did him so little good to keep them open, as it only served to remind him of people's presence without giving him any more definite idea of them. He could not, for instance, unassisted, see the play of features on a face, and, for this reason, in all important interviews he wore his glasses, giving three reasons.

1. Utilitarian--that he could see by his opponent's face what he was driving at, and what effect his own remarks had on him.

2. Impressional--it gave a man an "adventitious consequence."

3. Precautional--"I show emotion quickest by the eye, and so, generally speaking, do most people; some change colour very quick; some reveal it in the mouth; but the sudden dilatation and contraction of the eye, the expression it is capable of, make it on the whole the safest guide.

"I trust the eye on the whole," he said; "guilelessness and an unstained conscience are not really manifested either in feature or deportment, but the eye will almost always tell you true."

His conversation, when he was in form, was, without exactly being very brilliant, very inspiring. He had great freshness of expression, and told very few stories, and those only in illustration, never on their own merits. He was very [Greek: mnemonikos], or retentive--the first requisite, says Plato, of a philosopher--and was consequently well supplied with quotations and allusions, not slavishly repeated, but worked naturally in. I do not mean that he passed for a good talker by skilful plagiarizing, but I found that the wider my range of reading became the more I appreciated his talk--drawn, as it was, from all kinds of sources, and bringing with it that aroma of a far-reaching mind, the _fascination_ that culture can bestow, the feeling that, after all, everything is interesting, and that no knowledge is unworthy of the attention of the philosopher.

He hardly ever discussed current politics, though he would argue on political principles with the greatest keenness: neither had he accurate historical knowledge, or antiquarian; but he enjoyed listening to such talk. For the principles, the poetic aspect, of science he had a devoted interest. In literary matters I seldom heard his equal. Many and many is the book which I have been induced to read solely by hearing him sketch the purport in little sentences of extraordinary felicity. "The birth and fatal effects of Impulse in a prosaic soul," was a sketch he gave of a celebrated novel. On one subject he was always dumb--Economics. "It is the one subject on which I have never hazarded a remark successfully," he said to me once. "I can never appreciate the value of an economic statement; I hardly know whether it is interesting."

As he never talked for talking's sake, he was always ready to give his whole attention to the person he was talking to, or none at all; and consequently he never had a middle reputation--some praising his courtesy, as an old lady with whose querulous complaints about ingratitude and rheumatism he had borne and sympathized; others, his abrupt atrocious manner--"Turned his back on me with a scowl, and didn't say another word," as a sporting fast married lady said to me, who had attempted to tell him an improper story. "I didn't mean to offend him; young men generally like it. I hate a young man to be a prude and a Puritan. Why, he isn't even going into the church, I understand!"

One of his colleagues in the school where he was a master, told me that Arthur had once given him a most delicate and pointed rebuke on the practice into which he had fallen, of appealing to a boy's home feelings before the class.

"Some things ought to be said to people when they are alone; besides, we must not _seethe the kid in his mother's milk_."

The same man told me that he heard him give a little address to the boys in his class, on the two main virtues of a schoolboy--purity and honesty--on the words, "And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords; and he said unto them, It is enough."

Those are the only two anecdotes I have heard of his professional life, both illustrating that extraordinary gift of apt quotation and seeing unexpected connections, which, to my mind, is as adequate an external symbol of genius as can be found, though sometimes illusory.

He took the greatest delight in the society of children. He writes--

"What wonderful lines those are of Tennyson's"--they had just come out,--"'Who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness Which often lured her from herself!' There is nothing more absolutely refreshing when one is overdone or anxious, or oppressed by the vague anxieties of the world, than the conversation and the society of children, the unconscious ignoring of all grave possibilities, yet often accompanied by that curious tact which divines that all is not well with their older friend, and prompts them to employ all their resources to beguile it. I have been thanked by worldly mothers, in country houses, with something like a touch of nature, for being so good to their boys--'I am so afraid they must have been troublesome to you,'--when they have not only saved me from vapid hard gabble and slanderous gossip, but let in a little breath of paradise as well. I often accept an invitation with reference to the children I shall see. 'To meet Lord and Lady D----, and Mrs. G----, such an amusing woman--tells _such_ stories, they make you _scream!_' the invitation runs; and I accept it, to see Johnny and Charlie, to play at Red Indians in the wilderness, and to dig up the tin box of date-stones and cartridge-cases that we buried in the bed of the stream."

If I seem to have given rather a priggish picture of Arthur, it is a totally erroneous one. He was far too casual and too retiring to be that; he had no appearance of self-importance, though an invincible reserve of self-respect. The prig wears chain armor outside, and runs at you with his lance when he catches a glimpse of you. Arthur wore his chain armor under his shirt, and it was not till you closed with him that you felt how sharp his dagger was.

I give a perfectly disinterested sketch of him, which a lady, who met him several times, wrote out at my request. It is hard for me to help speaking from inside knowledge.

Dear Mr. Carr,

"You ask me to give you my impression of Mr. Hamilton, in writing. What your motive is I can't conceive, as he was not a person I took much interest in, though I know that some people do. Unless, perhaps, you mean to put him into a book.

"I met him at a country house in Shropshire. He came down rather late for breakfast, and when he was asked how he was, he quoted something about 'being apt to be rather fatigued with his night's rest.' I remember it very clearly, because it struck me as being so pointless at the time. He went out shooting most of the day, and I think, as far as I can remember, he was a good shot. He smoked a fearful amount, 'all the time,' in fact; they were always attacking him for that. When he came in he used to have some tea in the nursery. We found that out the last day--the children were sent for, and Mr. Hamilton came down with them, looking rather sheepish, and saying that he had tried sitting on at one side of the table, with the nursery maid at the other, after the children had gone, but that it didn't do. I remember we were very much amused at the idea; the picture was such a ridiculous one.

"The children certainly seemed to like him extraordinarily--they would talk to no one else: and I can't think why, because children are so impressionable, and he had quite the gravest face I ever saw--almost forbidding. However, so it was.

"He used to disappear to his room, to read and write, before dinner. At dinner he was often very good fun. I have heard him tell some very funny stories, not very racy perhaps, but amusing; and these, coming from that grave face, were very ridiculous. He always made friends with the younger ladies. He never seemed to flirt, and yet he used to say things to them in public that even I felt inclined to pull him up for. And then he used to ask them to go out walks with him, and, what's more, he went out with certainly two, alone; and you know that is rather a marked thing.

"He looked about forty, but he always gravitated toward the young people; made great friends with boys, and in a curious way, too. Generally, if men make friends with schoolboys in a country house it is at the loss of their dignity--they run the risk of having to swallow all sorts of practical jokes, such as getting water thrown on their head and salt put into their tea; but he never compromised himself, and they always behaved to him with respect, but were quite impatient if he wouldn't come with them everywhere. I overheard him talking to a boy once, and I didn't so much wonder; he spoke in such an affectionate way, and boys like to feel that grown-up people take the trouble to like them.

"He was very friendly with the governess, and would try to include her in the conversation. I can't say he succeeded, for we were down on that. I don't myself consider it good form to encourage your governess to have opinions.

"Everybody was always very deferential to him. He always made a sensation if he came into the room. No one could help looking at him. He wasn't one of those tame sneaking creatures that are to be met in country houses, of whom no one takes the least notice; he was much more inclined to take no notice of any one else; but it was impossible to forget he was in the room. And the servants were invariably respectful to him, quite as if he was a real swell; and yet he didn't dress well and hadn't a servant of his own. He was just the sort of man you would have thought flunkeys would have despised.

"But I have let my pen run on to an unconscionable length. It reminds me of the remark with which he dismissed the subject of poor old Sir Charles W---- who was staying there. We had been discussing him, and asked Mr. Hamilton what he thought of him. 'A talking jackass,' was his only reply, in his most chilling tones.

"I fear I am open to the same imputation.

"Very truly yours,
"Laura F----.

"I should like to know what you want this for; however, happily, I have put it in a form you can't make much use of."

I was much amused at the way in which he treated gossip about himself.

I told him some stories about him that I had picked up. They related to a certain absent-mindedness which he was supposed to possess.

"I am afraid they are not true," he said first. "I should welcome any hint of absence of mind in myself as a sign that the abstract could exclude the concrete, which is unfortunately not the case with me." Then, in a moment, he said, "People have no business to tell such stories. I should not mind their not being true, if they were only characteristic."

"By which you mean," said a gentleman who was sitting next him, "that you don't care about veracity, only you can't stand dullness."

"Not at all," said Arthur, quickly. "Veracity is not the question in gossip at all. It is all hearsay. You have not to judge of the actual truth of a scandalous story, but you have to judge of the probable truth of it, and if it is obviously uncharacteristic it is wrong to repeat it. It becomes scandal then, and not till then."

When he was living in London, which was, for the time being, his home, he lived a regular life, combining more reading with a sociable life than many people would have thought possible. He had two rooms in a house in Russell Square. He breakfasted at half-past nine and read till four, when he went down to his club and talked, or strolled in the park. He made hardly any engagements, except for the evening; and admitted hardly anyone, except two or three friends, to see him at his rooms, and then only after one o'clock, before which hour he was absolutely invisible. He was so dreadfully angry with his landlady for showing a gentleman in once in the middle of the morning, that she literally refused ever to do it again. "He's a good regular lodger, sir, and doesn't think of money, but he said to me, 'Mrs. Laing, I _don't choose to be disturbed_ before one. If I find my orders disregarded again, I shall leave the house _that day_.' I daren't do it, sir. You wouldn't like to deprive me of my lodger, I know, sir." The last pathetic plea could not be gainsaid, so Arthur had his way.

Four evenings he devoted to going out, and the other three dining quietly at home and reading. By the time he left London his reading, always wide, had become prodigious. His own library was good, and he had a ticket for the British Museum Reading-room and belonged to two circulating libraries. He made a point of reading new books (1) if he was strongly recommended them by specialists; (2) if they reached a second edition within a month; (3) if they were republished after a period of neglect--this he held to be the best test of a book.

It was characteristic of his natural indolence that he chose the very easiest method of reading--that is to say, he always read, if he could, _in_ a translation, or if the style of the original was the object, _with_ one. This, like his posture, nearly recumbent, was deliberately adopted. "I find," he said, "that the _reflective_ part of my brain works best when I have as little either bodily or _purely_ intellectual to distract me as possible. And it is the reflective part," he says, "that I always preferred to cultivate, and that latterly I have devoted my whole attention to. It is through the reflective part that one gets the highest influence over people. Training the reflective function is the training of character, while the training of the purely physical side often, and the training of the intellectual side not uncommonly, have a distinctly deteriorative effect.

"By the reflective part, I mean all that deals with the _connection_ of things, the discovery of principles, the laws that regulate emotion and influence, the motives of human nature, the basis of existence, the solution of the problem of life and being--that vast class of subjects which lie just below, and animate concrete facts, and which are the only things worthy of the devotion of a philosopher, though no knowledge is unworthy of his _attention_.

"I am not quite clear what position I intend to take up in the world at large. This only is certain, that if I am going to teach, and I have a vague sense that I am destined for that, it is necessary first to know something, to be _sure_ of something."

All his days were alike, except that on Sunday he used to frequent city churches in the afternoon, or go to Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's. His father was a friend of a canon at the former place, and Arthur was generally certain of a stall; and I used often to see his tall form there, with his eyes "indwelling wistfully," "reputans secum," as Virgil says, lost in speculations and wonders, and a whole host of melancholy broodings over life and death to which he rarely gave voice, but which formed a perpetual background to his thoughts. He varied this by visits to his father in Hampshire, and occasional trips to the country, not unfrequently alone, the object and occupation of which he never told me, except to say once that he had explored, he thought, every considerable "solitude" in England.

There is one thing that I must not forget to mention--his dreams. He never slept, he told me, without innumerable dreams, and he not unfrequently told me of them. They always struck me as curiously vivid. I subjoin the following from one of his diaries. They are often given at full length. This is one of the most interesting I can find.

"_January_ 8.--Slept badly; toward morning dreamed that I was walking with two or three friends, and accompanied by a tall man whom I did not know, wrapped in a cloak, through a very dark wood. I seemed to be in a very heavy mood. We came upon a building brightly lighted, and, entering, found a hall with many people dining. There was much wine and talk, and a great deal of laughing and merriment. We appeared to be invisible.

"I began to moralize aloud. I said, 'Yes, and this is the way in which lives pass: a little laughter and a few jests and a song or two; forgetful, all the time, that the lights must be extinguished and the wine spilled, and that night laps them round,'--catching, as I said this, a glimpse of the dark trees swaying outside.

"But the man in the cloak took me up. 'This shows,' he said, 'how superficial your view is--how little you look below the surface of things. This laughter and light talk are but the signs and symbols of qualities of which your bitter character knows nothing--goodfellowship, kindliness, brave hopefulness, and many things beside.'

"Then he turned to me impressively, and said, 'What you want is _deepening_.'

"I woke with the word ringing in my ears."

Besides this, there was a curious little peculiarity in him that I have never heard of in anyone else: a capacity for seeing little waking visions with strange distinctness.

His description of this is as follows:

"I have the power, or rather something in me is able (for I can not resist it), of suddenly producing a picture on the retina, of such vividness as to blot out everything around me. I have it generally when I am a little tired with exercise or brain-work or people: it is prefaced by seeing a bright blue spot, which moves, or rather rushes, across my field of vision, and is immediately succeeded by the picture.

"A crumbling sandstone temple, among fields of blue flowers--an obelisk carved with figures, in a wood--a gray indistinct marsh, with mist rising from it, and by the edge a white bird, egret or something similar, of dazzling whiteness--a green lane, with cows in it. I could go on for ever enumerating them. They pass in a fraction of a second, three or four succeeding one another. My eyes are not shut, nor do I look different. I have always seen them. I was alarmed about them once, and went to a doctor; but he said he could not explain it--it was probably a nervous idiosyncrasy: and I felt all the better for my habit having a name."

One more thing I must mention about him, which I have discovered since his death. I must add _that I never had the least suspicion of it in his life_.

He was the victim during this time of a depression of mind; not constant, but from which he never felt secure. I subjoin a few entries from his diaries.

"Very troubled and gloomy: a strange heart-sinking--a blank misgiving without any adequate cause upon me all day. One can not help feeling during such times--and, alas! they are becoming very familiar to me--that some mysterious warfare may be being fought out somewhere over one's only half-conscious soul: that some strange decision may be pending." And again: "For the last week, my mind--though I have reiterated again and again to myself that it is purely physical--has steadily refused to take any view of life, to have any outlook, except the most dismal. I am a little better to-day--well enough to see the humour of it, though God knows it is black enough while it lasts."

In one letter he wrote to me, I find the following words: it never occurred to me at the time that they were the gradual fruits of his own experience on the subject:

"Physical and mental depression is a most fearful enemy. Other things give you trouble at intervals--toothache, headache, etc., are all spasmodic afflictions, and, moreover, can be much mitigated by circumstances. But with depression it is not so: it poisons any cup--it turns all the cheerful little daily duties of life into miseries, unutterable burdens; death is the only future event which you can contemplate with satisfaction. It admits of no comfort: the whispered suggestion of the mind, 'You will be better soon,' falls on deaf ears. No physical suffering that I have ever felt, and I have not been without my share, is in the least comparable to it; the agony of foreboding remorse and gloom with which it involves past, present, and future--there is nothing like it. It is the valley of the Shadow of Death.

"But when one first realizes how purely physical it is, it is an era. I endured it for two years first: now I am prepared. I may even say that though all sense of enjoyment dies under it, my friends, the company I am in, generally suspect nothing."

This was literally the case. I knew his spirits were never very high; but he seemed to me to maintain, what is far more valuable, a genial equable flow of cheerfulness, such as one would give much to possess.

Among his occasional diversions at this time, I must place visiting some of the worst houses in one of the worst quarters in London.

It was not then a fashionable habit, and he never spoke of it or made capital out of his experience; but he went to have an acquaintance that should be _teres et rotundus_ with all phases of life. He never attempted to relieve misery by indiscriminate charity; his principles were strongly against it.

"I don't profess to understand the economical condemnation of indiscriminate charity. I don't see why one set of people should not spend in necessaries what another set would only spend in luxuries.

"But I do understand this: that it does infinite harm, by accustoming the poor to think that all the help they will get from the upper classes till they rise up themselves and lay hands upon it, will be indiscriminate half-sovereigns. The clergy are beginning to disabuse them of this idea. It is a fact which does appeal to them when they see a man that they recognize belongs by right to the 'high life' and could drive in his carriage, or at any rate in somebody else's, and have meat four times a day--when they see such a man coming and staying among them, certainly not for pleasure or money, or even, for a long time, at least, love, it impresses them far more than the Non-conformists or Revivalists who attempt the same kind of thing.

"And that's the sort of help I want them to look for--intelligent sympathy and interest in them. To most of them no amount of relief or education could do any good now; it would only produce a rank foliage of vice, which is slightly restrained by hard labour and hard food. Sensualism is a taint in their blood now.

"They want elevating and refining in some way, and you can only do it with brutes through their affections."

His manner with poor people was very good--direct, asking straightforward questions and not making his opinions palatable, and yet behaving to them with perfect courtesy, as to equals.

We were staying in a house together in the country once, and heard that a certain farmer was in trouble of some kind--we were not exactly told what.

Arthur had struck up a friendship with this man on a previous visit, and so he determined to go over and see him. He asked me to ride with him, and I agreed. I will describe the episode precisely as I can remember it:

We rode along, talking of various things, over the fresh Sussex downs, and at last turned into a lane, overhung on both sides with twisted tree-roots of fantastic shape, writhing and sprawling out of the crumbling bank of yellow sand. Presently we came to a gap in the bank, and found we were close to the farm. It lay down to the right, in a little hollow, and was approached by a short drive inclosed by stone walls overgrown by stonecrop and pennywort, and fringed with daffodils and snap-dragons: to the left, the wall was overtopped by the elders of a copse; to the right, it formed one side of a fruit garden.

The drive ended in a flagged yard, upon which our horse's hoofs made a sudden clatter, scaring a dozen ducks into pools and other coigns of vantage, and rousing the house-dog, who, with ringing chain and surly grumbles, came out blinking, to indulge in several painful barks, waiting, as dogs will, with eyes shut and nose strained in the air, for the effect of each bark, and consciously enjoying the tuneful echo. A stern-featured, middle-aged woman came out quickly, almost as if annoyed at the interruption, but on seeing who it was she dropped a quick courtsey, and spoke sharply to the dog.

Arthur went forward, holding out his hand.

"We were so sorry to hear at the house," he said, "that there was trouble here. I did not learn quite clearly what it was, but I thought I would ride over to see if there was anything I could do."

Arthur knew quite enough of the poor to be sure that it was always best to plunge straight into the subject in hand, be it never so grim or painful. Life has no veneering for them; they look hard realities in the face and meet them as they can. They are the true philosophers, and their straightforwardness about grief and disease is not callousness; it is directness, and generally means as much, if not more, feeling than the hysterical wailings of more cultivated emotion, more organized nerves.

"Yes, sir," she said to me, with that strange dignity of language that trouble gives to the poor, just raising her apron to her eyes, "it's my master, sir--Mr. Keighley, sir. The doctor has given him up, and he's only waiting to die. It don't give him much pain, his complaint; and it leaves his head terrible clear. But he's fearful afraid to die, sir; and that's where it is.

"Not that he's not lived a good life; been to church and paid his rent and tithe reg'lar, been sober and industrious and good to his people; but I think, sir," she said, "that there's one kind of trembling and fearfulness that we can't get over: he keeps saying that he's afraid to meet his God. He won't say as he's got anything on his mind; and, truthfully, I don't think he has. But he can't go easy, sir; and I think a sight of your face, if I may make so bold, would do him, maybe, a deal of good."

"I shall be very glad to see him, if he cares to see me," said Arthur. "Has Mr. Spencer" (the clergyman) "been here?"

"Yes, sir," said the woman; "but he don't seem to do George no good. He's prayed with him--the Church prayers out of his blue prayer-book; but, after that, all he could say was, 'you must prepare to meet your God; are you at peace with Him? Remember the judgment;' when I can't help thinking that God would be much more pleased if George could forget it. He can't like to see us crawling to meet Him, and cryin' for fear, like as Watch does if his master has beat him for stealin'. But I dare not say so to him, sir--we never know, and I have no right to set myself up over the parson's head."

I confess that I felt frightfully helpless as we followed her into the house. There was a bright fire burning; a table spread in a troubled untidy manner, with some unfinished food, hardly tasted, upon it.

She said apologetically, "You see, sir, it's hard work to keep things in order, with George lying ill like this. I have to be always with him."

"Of course," said Arthur, gently. "I know how hard it is to keep up heart at all; still it is worth trying: we often do better than we expect."

His sweet voice and sympathetic face made the poor woman almost break down; she pushed hastily on, and, saying something incoherently about leading the way, ushered us through a kitchen and up a short flight of stairs. I would have given a great deal to have been allowed to stay behind. But Arthur walked simply on behind the woman.

"I won't tell him you're here," she said; "he'd say he wasn't fit to see you. But it won't harm him; maybe it'll even cheer him up a bit." She pushed the door open just above; I could distinguish the sound of hard breathing, with every now and then a kind of catch in the breath, and a moan; then we found ourselves inside the room.

The sick man was lying propped up on pillows, with a curious wistful and troubled look on his face, which altered very quickly as we came in. Much of his suffering was nervous, so-called; and a distraction, any new impression which diverted his mind, was very helpful to him.

"George," said the woman, "here is Mr. Hamilton and his friend come over from the Squire's to see you."

He gave a grateful murmur, and pointed to a chair.

"I am so sorry," said Arthur, simply, "to see you in such suffering, Mr. Keighley. We heard you were in trouble, so we thought we would ride over and see if we could do anything for you."

"Thank you, sir, kindly," said the sick man, feebly. "But I'm past doin' anything for now. Doctor's giv'n me up; he gives me a week. But thank you all the same."

He closed his eyes for a moment; and then, looking round quickly, fingering the counterpane, he said, "Ah, sir, this isn't a place for you to be in; but I take it very kindly of you. Ah! Ah! It seems as if it might have been made a bit easier, might dyin'. It's hard work--it's terrible hard. It's bad enough by itself, having to go out into the dark--and all alone; but it's full of worse terrors than even that. The air's full of them. When I am lyin' here still, with my eyes shut, prayin' for it all to be over, I seem to hear them buzzin' and whisperin' in the air. Then it comes, all on a sudden, on me--here"--putting his hand to his heart. "It makes me sick and trembling--with fear and horror--I can't bear it. It's comin' now. Ah! Ah! Ah!"

I remember feeling inexpressibly shocked and horrified. I was not used to such scenes. The room seemed to swim; I could hardly stand or see. To settle myself, I spoke to the woman about wines and medicines; but I seemed to hear my own voice hollow and from a distance, and started at the sound of it.

But Arthur knelt simply down by the bedside and said, "I think it will make it easier if you can only fix your thoughts on one thing. I know the effort is hard; but think that there's a loving hand waiting to take yours; there's One that loves you, better than you have ever loved anyone yourself, waiting the other side of the darkness. Oh, only think of that, and it will not be hard! Dear friend," he said--"for I may call you that--we have all of us the same passage before us, but we have all the same hope: and He hears the words you speak to Him. He has been here, He is here now, to listen to your very thoughts. He has seen your trouble, and wished He could help you--why He can not I am not able to tell you; but it will all be well.

"Let me say one prayer with you." And he began in his low quiet voice. The woman knelt down beside him, shaken with sobbing. Till, at the words "Suffer us not, for any pains of death, to fall from thee," poor George put out his old withered hand and took Arthur's, and smiled through his pain--"the first time he ever smiled since his illness began," his wife told us after his death, "and he smiled many times after that."

He did not speak to us again; the effort had been too great. The woman accompanied us down-stairs, showing, in her troubled officious hurry to anticipate Arthur's wishes, and the way in which she hung about the gate as we rode out, what it had been to her.

We rode home almost in silence. Arthur, as we got near to the lodge, turned to me, and said, half apologetically, "We must speak to simple people in the language that they can understand. Fortunately, there is one language we can all understand." _

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