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Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge, a non-fiction book by Arthur C. Benson |
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Recapitulation |
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_ I had rather intended to say no more; to let the Life speak for itself. I had imagined that a moral destroyed, rather than enhanced, the effect of a story; that a descriptive catalogue rather interfered with one's appreciation of a picture than otherwise; but a friend to whom I showed my little collection, and to whose opinion I greatly defer, expressed surprise at the abruptness of the close. "You seem to leave the end," he said, "tangled and unravelled; one wants the threads just gathered together again." So I will try and discharge this task. The difficulty is not to arrive at a deterministic theory of life for most men. Anyone who will take things as he finds them, and fairly come to a conclusion about them, not hampered by fetters of authority or tradition, but independently arriving at his own solution, must inevitably arrive at this; there is no logical escape. But the difficulty lies in the application of this determinism to life. So many people persist in saying that it is only a logical account of the existence of the world, only an ontological solution, not a life-philosophy. The best man, who can not confute it, only says mournfully that it will not do for an ethical system; nothing good can come out of it in practice. The writer is one of those who believe that truth, however painful, is essentially practical. That truth when seen must be applied, must be worked out into life, is his cherished idea. But he, as much as anyone, has felt the usual (alas!) and bitter consequences of determinism; has seen the victim of the thought sit, as it were, with his hands tied; has seen the determinist sink into temporary fatalism, and has seen effort relaxed and ideals growing hourly dim. He was beginning to suffer in this manner himself when, at Cambridge, he met Arthur; and met in him not only an inspiring acquaintance, an encouraging friend, but a man who was far ahead of him on the same path where he had only ventured to imprint a few trembling footsteps, and then draw back appalled at the sombre prospect. Arthur was like one further up the pass, who had turned a corner, so to speak, and saw the road plain. He found a thoroughgoing determinist who was still faithful to the voice of duty, still striving upwards; he found that his theories, far from giving him a sense of gloom and hopelessness, rather bestowed on him a frank expectant habit of soul; a readiness to weigh circumstances, however small, to overlook nothing as trivial or common; and a serene trust in an invisible all-ruling Father ([Greek: pantokrator], as he used to say), who really was ordering the world in the smallest details when He seemed to be ordering it least, and who wished the best for His children--far better than they had insight to wish for themselves, and who thus could be trusted not to be inflicting any useless blow, any meaningless torment, even when things looked blackest and the world most unintelligible. I do not maintain that Arthur never flagged or swerved from this; the letter on page 164 will show it was far otherwise: but this was his deliberate habit of mind; this was the ideal that he was faithful to, with all allowances for a humanity, and a humanity sorely tried. He was an ambitious man by nature; I am sure of that: _that_ he conquered. He was indolent by nature, averse to detail, and motion, and change: _that_ he conquered by deliberate rough travel. He disliked new people: _that_ he set himself to conquer. In the prime of his life, being of a nature to which health and ordinary enjoyments of life were very delightful and precious, death was suddenly and hopelessly set before him; he loved and was disappointed; and the one charge that was given him, the education of his friend's boy, was overwhelmed and ended in a moment by a little act of boyish carelessness. Keenly sensitive to physical pain, the last years of his life were racked with it, every week, almost every day. Such are the materials of a life. Apparently self-regarding in idea, and prematurely cut short in fact, it has left results on a small circle of friends that will never die. And why? Because, in spite of every trial and every rebuff, he preserved at heart a serenity that was not thoughtlessness, a cheerfulness that was not hilarity, a humour that was not cynicism. The biographer has thought fit to give expression to his darkest hours, and they were not few; they may appear in the life to have the preponderance, but he would not cut them out. No life is inspiriting that is not occasionally weak and faulty. What would David be without his sins; Peter, without his fall? There was no depth of the despairing spirit, I say it deliberately, that Arthur had not sounded--and he had not been, as it were, lowered--deaf, blind, and unconscious--into the abysmal deeps; it was with an eye alert to mark every ledge of the dark walls, an ear quick to catch the smallest murmur from below, a sense keen to experience and record every new depth gained, every qualm of heart-sickness encountered. Naturally prone to serious contemplation of life's enigmas, there was not one that life did not bring with shocking vividness to his touch. Further, I believe that some will be found to say, "The teaching of this life is so selfish; it is all self-contemplation, miserable self-weariness, gloomy reveries bounded by the narrowest horizons. If ever he turns to others' evil case, it is with the melancholy satisfaction of the hypochondriac, who finds his own symptoms repeated with less or greater variations in others' cases." To these I could only reply, "You have totally misunderstood the life. It is not a selfish one. The deepest self-communings are necessary to one who would know human nature, because self is the only human creature that can be known with a perfect intimacy. 'No one but yourself can tell,' as Arthur once wrote to me, 'what ruled the lines in your face.'" But Arthur, above all others that I have ever known, had passed from the particular to the general. Plato's praise of love was based on the principle that the philosopher passed from the love of one fair form to the love of abstract beauty. The fault is that so many never pass the initiation. Arthur did cross the threshold; he passed from the contemplation of his own suffering to the consideration of the root of all human suffering. He found his best comfort in doing all he could (and God allowed him little latitude) to alleviate the sufferings of others. I have letters from various of his friends, dealing, with his firm and faithful touch, with crisis after crisis in their lives. No one who had trusted him with his confidence once, ever shrank from doing it again. I am forced to admit that, far more than many of his authorized brethren, he discharged the priestly office. He was self-constituted, or rather called, to be a priest of God. The great mystery of _effectiveness_ he never solved, I think, quite to his own satisfaction. His life has solved it for me ever since I was able to regard it _en masse_. It was a great puzzle to him what to make, for instance, of infants who died at or before birth. "'Saved from this wicked world' is such a horrible statement in such cases," he used to say. "If that is the best that can happen to us, what _can_ we make of life?" And so he was always very urgent about the influence of example opposed to the influence of precept. "My father," he said to me, "once spoke to me rather sharply about not attending at family prayers. He did not attend very closely himself. I was an observant boy, and I knew it. The very fact that he should have noticed me proved it. So all I felt was that prayer didn't matter really, but that, however I felt, I must behave as if I was devout; whereas, if he had prayed in rapt fervency, unconscious of anything, I should have been ashamed, I think, to wander. I should have perceived the beauty of prayer. Ah, my dear friend," he added, "never speak to a child about a thing unless you _know_ you always do it yourself, and even then with extreme and tender caution." Acting then, on this principle, he did not give us lectures and rules: but we saw how a man was meeting life, not shirking any of its problems, and beset by most of its trials. And we wondered what was the secret spring of his well-being; and when we came to examine it, we were amazed to find that it was in the strength of principles resulting from a rigid and logical classification of phenomena. So much is said nowadays about the dissidence of the spiritual and intellectual worlds. Many people, conscious of intellect, are yet strangely at sea when they are told of their _spiritual_ side. There appears to be nothing within them answering to that description. There are, indeed, certain qualities or characteristics, but those seem not to exist independent of their intellectual and physical economies, but to permeate both. They do not understand that what is meant is the faculty of emotional generalization. _That_ they could understand. Arthur arrived at his principles purely through logical methods and intellectual operations. He could not, he often confessed, separate the intellectual and the spiritual. From some expressions, however, which dropped from him in a letter, part of which is given on p. 209, I am vaguely aware that he was reconsidering that point (and it has been suggested to me that such an explanation will suit his last words); but, in any case, he was of the greatest possible comfort to us who knew him, because he was an instance (the only one) of a man who had arrived at his principles from a purely intellectual basis. And let me, finally, correct the impression, if I have by chance, in developing this latter point, given any colour to the idea that his character was hard, logical, unaffectionate, unloving. Arthur was the tenderest, most sympathetic, most loving soul I have ever met; nothing else would explain his influence. He was not demonstrative, and was often misunderstood. His tendency was to dissimulate the strongest of his feelings. Yet I have seen him turn red and pale at the sight of a letter in the handwriting of a friend he loved; I have seen him literally tremble with emotion when Edward Bruce, in his impulsive boyish way, would, with eager demonstrative affection, throw his arm round his neck, or take his hand. The tears gather in my eyes as I write, when I recall a few words of his a few days before he died, when he called me to him. It was after one of those terrible paroxysms of pain. He was very white and feeble, but smiling. He took my hand, and said, "What a wonderful thing it is that pain takes away one's power of thinking of anything except people. It hurries one away, somewhere, deep, deep down; yet one can bear to touch the bottom. But when loving anyone carries one away, one goes down deeper and deeper, and yet feels that there is a fathomless gulf beyond." [THE END] _ |
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