think it would be very wrong of me not to answer you fully; so I will
take 'health' to mean well-being, and not confine myself to its
paltry physiological usage.

"In the last month I have really turned a corner, and gained serenity
and patience in my outlook. I do not mean that I am either patient or
serene yet, but I have long and considerable spaces of both, when I
feel content to let God make or mar me as He will, and realise that
perhaps in His mind those two words may bear a precisely contrary
sense.

"One thing I wish to tell you, which I am afraid you will be rather
shocked to hear. I have not told you before, from a culpable
reticence; for I believe that there must be either complete
confidence between friends or none at all--

"Do you remember a very gloomy and depressed letter that I wrote to
you the other day? When I wrote it I was deliberately contemplating
an action which I have now given up: I mean a voluntary exit from
this world's disappointments--suicide, in fact.

"For many years I have carried about a quietus with me. I began the
habit at Cambridge. Men have often asked me what is the curious
little flask with a secret fastening, that stands on my
dressing-table. It is prussic acid. The morning before I wrote that
letter, the impulse was so strong upon me that I determined, if
matters should not shift a little, to take it on the following
evening. I made, in fact, most methodical arrangements. I seemed so
completely to have missed my mark. The superstitions against the
practice I did not regard, as they are merely the produce of a more
imaginative and anxious system of morality. I did not see why God,
for His own purposes--and, what is more, I believe He does--should
not remove a man by suicide, if He allows him to die by a horrible
disease or relegates him to insanity. Suicide is only a symptom of a
certain pitch of mental distress: its incidental result is death, but
so it is of many practices not immoral.

"It required considerable nerve, I confess, to make the resolution;
but once made, I did not flinch. I considered the impulse to be a
true leading, quite as true as the other intuitions which I have
before now successfully followed, so I made my arrangements all day.
It gave me a wonderful sense of calm and certainty--there was a
feeling of repose about the completion of a restless existence, as
if I was at last about to slide into quiet waters, and be taught
directly, and not by obscure and painful monitions.

"At nine o'clock I went to my room. There was a full moon, which
shone in at the open window; the garden was wonderfully still and
fragrant.

"I found myself wondering whether, when the thing was over, I should
awake to consciousness at once; whether the freed soul would have, so
to speak, a local origin, a _terminus a quo_: in plain words, whether
my spirit would pass through the house and through the quiet garden
to some mysterious home, taking in the earthly impression as it
soared past with a single complete undimmed sense--or whether I
should step, as it were, straight into a surrounding sea of sensation
and be merged at once, feeling through all space and time and matter
by the spiritual fibres of which I should make a part. Do you
understand me? I have often wondered at that.

"At last I drew out the flask, and touched the spring. It opens by
pressing a penknife into one of a number of rivets; you can then
unscrew it.

"When it was open I discovered that the little vial inside had been
broken, and that somehow or other the life-giving fluid had
evaporated unperceived. I had not opened it for a year or more.

"I saw at once that God intended it not to be at _my_ time--that
was very clear; and after considerable reflection and a wakeful
night, I came to the conclusion that my divine Impulse did not lead
me to adopt a course of action, but only to _avoid_ a course--the
fact which I developed in my letter to you. And then came the resolve,
tardy and weak at first, but gaining ground, warning me that perhaps
it was an inglorious flight; though I knew it was pardonable, I felt
as if God might meet me with 'Not wrong, but if you are really bent
on the highest, you must do better than this.' It might, I felt, be
losing a great opportunity--the opportunity of facing a hopeless
situation, a thing I had never done.

"And so I came to the conclusion to fight on, and my reward is coming
slowly; contentment seems to return, and Edward is an ever-increasing
joy; he fills my life and thoughts. Oh, if I can only make him good;
put him in the way of inward happiness! I break out into prayer and
aspirations for him in his presence when I think of the utterly
heedless way in which he regards the future, and the awful, the
momentous issues it contains. He, dear lad, thinks nothing of it,
except as a sign of my love for him. We have no misunderstandings,
and I seem somehow to love the world better, more passionately, since
he came to me.

"I send you a few flowers from our garden, and Edward sends his love,
if that is respectful enough.

"I am your affectionate friend,
"Arthur Hamilton."


CHAPTER XI


Down at Tredennis the year begun to fly with the speed of which
uneventful enjoyable monotony alone possesses the secret.

"Our days are very similar here, and I find them very agreeable.
Edward thinks the same, he assures me, though I feel it may arise
in his case from a want of breadth of view and lack of experience
to argue from.

"In the summer months we get up early, and generally bathe in the
stream, where I have contrived to get one of the pools sufficiently
enlarged; as the weather gets colder I am compelled by my doctor to
relinquish this. Then we read and write till breakfast, which we have
at eight o'clock. In winter this is the first event of the day; in
the morning we work for an hour or two and then go out, returning to
lunch; after which we sun ourselves till five o'clock, or drive; and
then, after tea, work again for three hours: the day thus concludes.

"I certainly don't coddle my boy, and I don't think I pet him, for I
have the deepest horror of that practice: nothing is so weakening
for both parties; it develops sentimentalism, and all mawkishness I
abhor!--though I am what you would call ridiculously fond of him.
However, you must come and see us, and give me your most candid
opinion, criticism, and censure on my educational methods.

"We drive into Truro once a week to market, and Edward goes in on
messages, and for some mathematical training to the clergyman there.
I should like to find some _aequalis_ to make a companion for him.
He is English enough for anything, but I am afraid of his not keeping
his appropriate boyishness if he is always hanging about with an old
and serious valetudinarian like myself. But I don't like any of the
families hereabouts, and can't get to know the ones I _do_ like well
enough to find some one to my mind. I am very fastidious about my
selection."

And again:

"Our Sundays are very peaceful days in this lazy land of the West.
We go to church--a very necessary part of an Englishman's
education--lunch immediately, and then loaf on the downs over the
creek, and I read to him till he yawns or goes to sleep; then we
both play with Flora among the heather--or botanize--and go to
church again."

This letter led me, knowing as I did how pronounced Arthur's views
were, to ask him why he took Edward to church, and the line that he
intended to take with him generally with regard to religious matters.

"I have given the question," he writes, "a great deal of thought, and
feel my way fairly clear now. Ideally, as an experiment, I should
like to tell a boy nothing about religion--teach him merely his moral
duty--till he is of age; then put the Bible into his hands. There
would be, of course, a great deal--the 'purely mythological or
Herodotean element,' as Strauss calls it--and the miraculous element
generally, that he would probably at first reject; but if he was
of an appreciative nature--and I am presupposing that, because
I don't think the theory of education is for the apathetic and
unsensitive--he would see, I believe, not only the extraordinary
sublimity of language and expression, but the unparalleled audacity
and magnificence of thought and aspiration. That he would realize the
points in which these conceptions were wild, deficient, or childish,
would not blind him, I think, to the grandeur of the other side.

"As a matter of fact, we mix up moral duty with intellectual and
spiritual so clumsily, and force it so inopportunely and immaturely
upon our children, that if in later years questionings begin to
arise, or complications in any part of life, the smash that follows
is terrific: the whole thing goes by the board.

"For instance: many a man who undergoes a moral conversion will
reject his whole intellectual growth angrily and contemptuously as
savoring of the times of vanity. In my scheme such a waste would be
impossible; the two would be on different planes and not inextricably
intertwined.

"Besides, I think that young men suffer terribly from the shock
inflicted on their affection and traditional sentiment.

"They grow up with certain stereotyped conceptions on religious
subjects, certain dogmas imperfectly understood but crudely imagined
and gradually crystallized into some uncouth shape.

"The prejudices of children, and ideas that have grown with them,
are, I think, ineradicable in many cases.

"Let us take three instances of such ordinary conceptions--'Grace,'
'the Resurrection of the Body,' 'The Holy Spirit.'

"Here are three vast conceptions. The anxious parent endeavours to
explain them to the child: who, in his turn, receives three grotesque
and whimsical ideas which represent themselves to him something in
the following shape:

"_Grace_. The quality which he detests in his schoolfellows; in
which the 'model boys' are pre-eminent; which he knows he dislikes
and loathes, and yet is rather ashamed to say so. The boy who
'rebukes' his schoolfellows for irreverent or loose conversation, the
boy who is always ready in his odious way to do a kindness, the boy
who is never late for school--these seem to him to be the kind of
figures that the clergyman is holding up in his sermon as ideal types
of character, to be imitated and reverenced, and for whom he has in
his young soul the most undisguised and wholesome loathing.

"Of course it is a misconception--but whose fault? Do you blame a
tender wayward mind for not having a philosophical grasp of the
ideal? Whereas, if you weren't ashamed to let him understand that the
young rascal who is always in mischief and behindhand with his work,
but who is yet affectionate, generous, and pure, though he is
quarrelsome and not particular in his talk, is a far finer fellow,
both in point of view of this world and the next than the smooth-faced
prig who thanks his Lord that he is not as this publican.

"_The Resurrection of the Body_. Intelligent people who are also
reverent and good, in their anxiety to be faithful to the letter of
dogma as well as to its spirit, prefer to cling to these words rather
than confess, what is quite certain, that an absolutely literal
sense was attached to these words by the framers of them; they were
scientifically ignorant of the fact that matter is disintegrated and
disseminated so rigorously that there may be component particles of
a hundred of his predecessors in one human body now existent. No
symbolical _interpretation_ of the words nowadays will account for
their being the expression of what was erroneously believed to be
a possibility; and to say, as I have heard a Church dignitary of
poetical and metaphysical mind say, that the phrase means that the
power resident in every individuality to assimilate to itself certain
particles will not desert the individuality even after death, but
will continue to assert itself in some way--possibly in a spiritual
or unmaterial manner--to say this, is to state a strong scientific
probability; but, after all, it is only a probability at best, and is
certainly not what the words as they stand in the Creed were meant
to mean by the persons who framed them and the first worshippers
who repeated them. In the case of children the effect is at once
laughable and lamentable. They are made to retain the phrase; no
explanation is offered, and, if sought for, shirked. And so it
resolves itself into a wonder, dimly conscious of profanity, as to
whether Tim Jones the carpenter with the wooden leg, will have a new
one; and whether papa will have the wart on his cheek or not, and how
he will look without it. Of course these are elementary speculations;
but they are true ones, for they were literally my own at an early
age. Such speculations are certainly better avoided; and, indeed,
all early speculation on dogmatic questions at all is better not
suggested.

"_The Holy Spirit_. When I was a child, the dogma of the Trinity caused
me the most terrible perplexity, which was all the more distressing
because it was shrouded in a kind of awful remoteness, by the
reticence, the bewildered and serious reticence, with which my elders
approached the subject; but besides the identification with and the
appearance as a dove, the term Comforter--and Paraclete, as some of
the hymn-books had it--the expression, '_proceeding from_ the
Father and the Son,' mystified me completely. The three aspects of
the central Unity--God as Creator, as the Ideal of Humanity, as
the Inspirer of it--is a very subtle and advanced idea; yet it is
maintained that symbols should be taught first, before they are
understood, so that gradually the growing mind should come to realize
and appropriate what it already knows.

"This is a very sophistical and ingenious defence. But it seems to
break down in practice. How many people reject the idea when
realized, simply, as I hold, on account of the grotesque and
fantastic conceptions that the immature and overstrained mind
collected about it--conceptions which no amount of _reason_ is later
able to overcome! And how many never grow to realize it at all!
Besides, even of those who do, it is admitted that almost all need a
reconstruction _some time_, a breaking-up of what would otherwise be
crystallized formulae, a _conversion_, in fact. Have you ever seen
a high nature grow up from boyhood to manhood in undisturbed
possession of a vital faith? I confess that I never have!

"I can not help feeling a dismal possibility, that future students of
religion, looking over a nineteenth century 'child's catechism,' will
laugh, or rather drop their hands in blind amazement--for in truth it
is no laughing matter--at the metaphysical conglomerate of dogma,
driven like a nail into the heads of careless and innocent children
(such, at least, as have had, like myself, the advantage of a
religious bringing-up), just as we turn over with regretful amusement
and pathetic wonder the doctrinal farrago of a Buddhist or a Hindu.

"And all this because people can't wait. He must have a 'dogmatic
basis,' they say, the sinew and bone of religion, when the poor
child's head can not even take in their ideas, let alone his emotion
appreciate them.

"The consequence is, that I can't bring myself to use these words
except in societies where I know I shall not be misunderstood.

"Influence, the indestructibility of matter, aspiration--those are
what Grace, the Resurrection of the Body, the Holy Spirit mean to me
now; great and living and integral parts of my creed, which I not
only glow to reflect about, but which surround and penetrate my life
daily and hourly with ever-increasing thankfulness.

"Yet, on the other hand, some people depend so much on tradition:
they never have a reconstruction of ideas; memories and associations
are all in all to them. They are the 'Bands' people of my former
classification.

"And so I want to give Edward both. I take him to church. When he
asks me questions I will answer them, but I am glad to say he does
not at present. I send him out before the sermon: that is responsible
for a good deal of harm. 'Ye shall call upon him to avoid sermons'
should be in the rubric of _my_ baptismal service.

"Then we read some of the Old Testament history as 'history of the
Jews,' and Job and Isaiah and the Psalms as poetry--and I am glad to
say he is very fond of them; and parts of the Gospels in Greek, as
the life and character of a hero. It is the greatest mistake to
impose them upon children as authoritative and divine all at once. It
at once diminishes their interest: we ought to work slowly up through
the human side.

"The Pauline Epistles I have given him to read in extracts. I believe
they are best in extracts--one can omit the controversial element.
And he has taken, as children do, to the Revelation enormously, and
gets much mysterious delight from it.

"A long and wearisome letter this, and not, I feel, satisfactory. I
haven't done justice to the side of tradition, the _jussum et
traditum_, but that is the fault of my mind. I have only been
professing to represent the other side.

"I would like to thrash the matter out further. I wish you would come
down and see us. Tredennis has a sombre beauty, even in winter--a
'season of mists' with us. The magnolia on the south wall is
blooming, though we are only two days off Christmas. Our love to you.

"Arthur Hamilton."

I subjoin another extract, on the education of the moral faculty.

"I have always held that the concentration of thought upon morality
is a very dangerous system of life. Morality should be an incidental
basis to life, not to be brooded over unless some grave disorder
should arise. We breathe, and eat, and sleep, and pay no heed to
those processes; and indeed both physiologists and moralists exclaim,
in the case of those natural processes, that the healthier we are the
more unconscious will those processes be.

"So it should be with moral things. If a grave obstruction or
contradiction befall any one; if he behaves in a way that violates
his usefulness, or his own or others' self-respect; then, if he will
not reform himself, we must warn him, or treat him as a physician
would: but to abuse a healthy nature for not considering the reasons
of things, not having a moral system, not 'preparing for death,'
when, by the very constitution of his nature, he does not require
one, is a very grave blunder. Moral anxiety is a sign of moral
_malaise_, or, far more commonly, a sign of physical disorder.

"It is an ascertained fact that those periods when morals have been
imposed on man as his sole and proper business and subject for
contemplation have been unprogressive, introspective, feeble times.

"No, leave morals out of the question directly, unless you see there
is grave cause for interference. Give one or two plain warnings, or
rather commands.

"Try to raise the _tone_ generally; try to make the young soul
generous, ardent, aspiring. If you can do that, the fouler things
will fall off like husks. Above all things, make him devoted to
you--that is generally possible with a little trouble; and let him
never see or hear you think or say a low thought, or do a sordid
thing. If he loves you he will imitate you; and while the virtuous
habit is forming, he will have the constant thought, 'Would my father
have done this? What would he say, how would he look, if he could see
me?' Imagination is sometimes a saving power."

I venture to insert a letter in which he touches delicately on the
subject of sexual sin. He would never speak of it, but this was
written in answer to a definite question of mine apropos of a common
friend of ours.

"I must confess that I do not realize the strength of this particular
temptation, but I am willing to allow for its being almost infinitely
strong. I don't know what has preserved me. It is the one thing about
which I never venture to judge a man in the least, because, from all
I hear and see, it must hurry people away in a manner of which those
who have not experienced it can not form any conception.

"You ask me what I think the probable effect that yielding to such
temptation has on a man's character. Of course, some drift into
hopeless sensualists. About those I have my own gospel, though I do
not preach it; it is a scarcely formulated hope. But of those that
recover, or are recovered, all depends upon the kind of repentance.
The morbid repentance that sometimes ensues is very disabling. All
dwelling on such falls is very fatal: all thoughts of what might have
been, all reflections about the profaned temple and the desecrated
shrine, though they can not be escaped, yet must not be indulged.
I always advise people resolutely to try and forget them in _any_
possible way--banish them, drown them, beat them down.

"But a manly repentance may temper and brace the character in a way
that no other repented fall can. It is the brooding natures which
make me tremble; in healthier natures it is the refiner's fire which
stings and consecrates: '_Sanat dum ferit_.'

"But the subject is very repugnant to me. I don't like thinking or
talking about it, because it has its other side; the thought of a
woman in connection with such things is so unutterably ghastly; it is
one of the problems about which I say most earnestly 'God knows.'"

One other letter of this period, is worth, I think, inserting here.

"Tredennis, August 29.

"I had an instructive parable thrown in my way to-day, containing an
obvious lesson for Eddy, and a further meaning for myself. Eddy came
running to me about eleven, to tell me there was a man in the garden.
I hurried to the spot he indicated; and there, in a kind of nook
formed by a fernery, his head resting in a great glowing circle of
St. John's wort, and his feet tucked up under him, lay a drunken
tramp, asleep. He was in the last stage of disease; his face was
white and fallen away, except his nose and eyes, which were red and
bloodshot; he had a horrible sore on his neck; he was unshaven and
fearfully dirty; he had on torn trousers; a flannel shirt, open at
the neck; and a swallow-tail coat, green with age, buttoned round
him. His hat, such as it was, lay on the ground at his side. Edward
regarded him with unfeigned curiosity and dismay. While we stood
watching him, he began to stir and shift uneasily in his sleep, as a
watched person will, and presently woke and rolled to his feet with
a torrent of the foulest language. He was three-parts drunk. He
watched us for a moment suspiciously, and then gave a bolt. How he
accomplished it I don't know, for he was very unsteady on his feet;
but he got to the wall, and dropped over it into the road, and was
out of sight before we could get there. He evidently had some dim
idea that he had been trespassing.

"Edward inquired what sort of a man he was.

"'An English gentleman, in all probability,' I said, 'who has got
into that state by always doing as he liked.' And I went on to point
out, as simply as I could, that everybody has two sets of desires,
and that you must make up your mind which to gratify early in life,
determining to face this kind of ending if you fix upon one set.
'Early in life,' I said, 'when this gentleman was a well-dressed
clean boy like you, one of the voices used to whisper to him at his
ear, "Eat as much as you can; that is what you really like best;"
while the other said, "If you eat rather less, you will be able to
play football, or read your book better; besides, you will be your
own master and less of a beast."

"'But he wouldn't listen; and this is the result.'

"Edward seemed to ponder it deeply. He tried to starve himself to-day
at lunch; and I refrained from pointing out to him that abstinence
from meat at lunch was not the _unum necessarium_, for fear of
confusing the ingenuous mind. I like to see people grasp the concrete
issue in one of its bearings. The principle will gradually develop
itself; from denying themselves in one point, they will or may grow
to be generally temperate; when confronted with overmastering and
baser impulses, it may be they will say, 'Let me be [Greek: egkrates
emautou] even here.'

"So much for Edward's lesson; now for my own. My first impulse was to
loathe and reject the poor object, body and soul. He was merely the
embodiment of long-continued vice. His body was a diseased framework,
breaking quickly up, conscious of no pleasure but appetite, and now
merely existing and held together by the desire of gratifying it; the
little vitality it possessed, just gathering enough volume in the
quiet intervals to satiate one of its three jaded cravings--lust,
hunger, and thirst, and feebly groping after alcoholic and other
stimulants to repair its exhaustion; the soul in her dreamy intervals
drowsily recounting or contemplating lust past and to come--a ghastly
spectacle!

"And yet I am bound to think, and do record it as my deliberate
belief, that that poor, wretched, withered, gross soul is destined
to as sure a hope of glory as any of us: ay, and may be nearer it,
too, than many of us, as it is expiating its willfulness in more
terrible and direct punishment. There is not a single spasm in that
decayed and nerveless frame, not a single horror of all the gloomy
forebodings and irrational shudderings of the sickening delirium, not
a single mile of the grim dusty roads he wearily traverses, which is
not needed to bring him to the truth. The soul may be so clouded that
it may not even be taking note of its punishment, may not be even
conscious of it, may hardly calculate how low it has fallen and how
wretched and hopeless the remainder of its earthly days are bound to
be; but I assert that it is none of it blind suffering; that not
a pang is unintentionally given, or thrown away; that I shall
hand-in-hand with that soul go some day up the golden stairs that
lead to the Father, and we shall say one to another, 'My brother, you
despised me on earth; you took for a mark of the neglect and
disfavour of God what was only a sign of His constant care; you took
for an indwelling of foul spirits what was only a testimony of my
distance from the truth.'

"And we shall speak together of new things, so marvellous that they
will banish memory for ever.

"Who would have thought that the sight of a drunken tramp in a
hedgerow would have brought one so close to a sight of God's
purposes?

"Yet so it is, my friend. God keeps showing me by the strangest of
surprises that He is all about us. This very incident, so seemingly
trivial, is yet a part of my life already, it has set its mark upon
me. All his life he has been led, from bad to worse, into drink,
and haunted by all the other devils of sin, and piloted across the
country thus, so that the lines of our lives cut at this instant
never to cut again. There are no such things as _chance_ meetings.
There is no smaller or greater in the sight of God. It is as much a
purpose of his life that he should preach this sermon to Edward and
myself to-day, as that he should be shown by God's own strokes what
happiness really is, by the strong contrast of the bitterness of
sin."

The idea of the purpose of God underlying every incident, however
apparently trivial, was much in his thoughts just then.

"We often are taught how momentous every thing and every moment is,
by the charging of some trivial incident with tremendous issues. A
man fires off his gun. He has done so thousands of times already, and
yet, like Mr. Jamieson, my neighbour, on this one January morning he
kills his own son, converting in a single instant, by a trivial
incident, the whole of the rest of his life from sweet into bitter,
by the terrible punishment which falls upon 'carelessness.' God seems
to be asking us to weigh the fact, that in a chain of events the
tiniest link is every bit as important and necessary in its place as
the largest.

"And so I begin to take more and more account of little things. The
very people we pass in the street once, it may be never to pass
again, the stream of faces that flows past us in London--has all
that no real connection with our life, except to stir a faint and
vague emotion about the size of life and our own infinitesimal share
in it? I think it must be something more. Of course, one lets drop
grain after grain of golden truth that God slips into our hands. I
keep feeling that if we could only truly yield ourselves up for a
single instant, put ourselves utterly and wholly in God's hands for a
second, the meaning of the whole would flash upon us, and our lesson
would be learnt. I think perhaps that comes in death. I remember the
only time I took an anaesthetic (when the body really momentarily
dies--that is, the functions are temporarily suspended), the great
sensation was, after a brief passage of storm and agony, the sense of
serenity and repose upon a lesson learnt, a truth grasped, so remote
and so connected with infinite ideas, that the coming back into life
was like the waking after years of experience; a phantom emotion,
I expect; but, like many phantoms, a very good copy of the real one.
That is what I expect dying to be like.

"I was going to say that I try not to let even little things--things
that are thrust in my way curiously and without apparent reason that
is--go uninterpreted. Why should I, for instance, have been
introduced by my clergyman to the friend who was staying with him
this morning, when I met them in the lane? and why should he have
come in to lunch, and talked dull and trivial talk till three
o'clock, and interrupted all our plans? There seems some design in
it all; and yet one is so impotent to grasp what it can be.

"Yet I suppose no one has failed to notice several small coincidences
in their lives, of what might almost be called a providential kind.

"I read in a book about Laennec's method, without the vaguest idea of
who Laennec was, or what his method was. The next day, I see, in
a chart in the village school-room, 'Laennec, inventor of the
stethoscope;' and, the day following, I find and read his biography
in a volume that I happen to take up to pass five minutes. And yet we
say 'by chance.'

"Or I come across an expression of which I haven't grasped the
precise meaning, 'gene,' let us say, or 'eclectic,' and the next day
I hear the rector and curate discussing them. These are real cases.

"Or I am interrupted in my writing by Edward, who takes the letters
to the post, and forces this from under my hand, as I write: not,
surely, only to spare you the receipt of a dull and immature letter.

"Arthur Hamilton."

I have only one other letter of any especial interest about this
date.

"If only a book could be written about a hermit, a man that
deliberately left the world, retiring, not to an impracticable
distance--let us say to a small farm, in a country village, with half
an acre of garden--and there let no sound from the world without
reach him, except incidentally, and lived a pure and uncontaminated
life, watching his garden, and turning over, very slowly, such
experience as he had gained in life, with the intention, if anything
came of it, of telling the world any solution that occurred to him
of the great question--'Is one bound to meet life in the ordinary
manner, by plunging into it and swimming up the stream, or does one
meet it best by abjuring it?' There is much to be said for both
views. I am not at all sure that these or similar lives are not
lived, and that the only practical bearing of them is that a man
is _not_ bound to tell his discoveries of our enigmas. I mean, I
can conceive a man, under such circumstances, reaching a very high
standpoint, arriving at very lofty knowledge of the problems of fate
and life, and at the same time finding a ban laid upon him, a tacit
[Greek: anagke], not to reveal it to others, it being hinted to
him that those who would attain to it at all must attain to it as he
has himself attained, by finding out the way themselves."




CHAPTER  XII


About this time he made the acquaintance of some neighbours whom he
approved, and found companions for Edward Bruce in the boys of the
family, who were home for the holidays. The boy brightened up so much
under the new surroundings, that Arthur determined to get a boy of
the same age to educate with Edward, and he accordingly inserted an
advertisement in the _Times_. I have it before me now, in the
fast-yellowing paper.

"A gentleman is anxious to find a companion to be educated with his
adopted son; he offers him board and teaching free, but must see,
personally, both the parent or guardian and the boy whom it is
proposed to send."

But the advertisement was withdrawn, as a friend of mine, a certain
General Ellis, not very well off, and with a large family, offered
to send a boy of his to Tredennis--an offer which Arthur accepted
provisionally. He had the boy to stay with him for a fortnight, and
at the end of the time agreed to take him.

As the boys were not to go to a public school, and as neither of them
looked forward to teaching as a career, the object of their teaching
was to make them as quick in grasp of a subject as possible, as
enthusiastic as possible, and as cultivated. Arthur favoured me with
a letter, or rather a treatise, upon their education, fragments of
which I submit to my readers.

"My aim will be to make them, generally speaking, as adequate as
possible to playing a worthy part in the world. I want them to be as
open-minded on all subjects as possible, to have no fixed prejudices
on any subject, and yet to have an adequate basis of knowledge on
important matters, enough not to leave them at the mercy of any new
book or theory on any subject which handles its facts in at all a
one-sided way--so that on reading a brilliant but narrow book on any
point, they may be able to say, 'This and that argument have weight,
they are valid; but he has suppressed this, and distorted that,
which, if seen fairly and in a good light, would go far to contradict
the other.' Then they must be without _prejudice_; they must not close
their eyes or turn their backs on any view, because it is 'dangerous'
or 'damaging' or 'subversive' or 'unpractical.' They must not be
afraid to face an idea because of its probable consequences if its
truth is proved. They must not call anything common or unclean.

"For this they must have a basis of knowledge on these points;
history, political economy, philosophy, science. The first three I am
fairly competent to give them; that is to say, I am studying these
hard myself now, and I can, at any rate, keep well ahead of them; and
I have managed to win their educational confidence, which is a great
thing. They take for granted that a thing which is dull is necessary,
and follow me with faith; while, I am thankful to say, they are keen
enough not to want driving when a thing is interesting.

"Then they must know French and German, and a modicum of Greek and
Latin. These last I teach them by a free use of translations;
rudiments of grammar first, and then we attack the books, and let
grammar be incidental. We don't compose in any of these languages;
it's a mere waste of time.

"I teach them logic and Euclid, and get them taught some mathematics.
Then as to science, by reading myself with them we get on very well
together. And I have bought a few chemicals, and we try experiments
freely, which is very satisfactory.

"Music I teach them both, and harmony. They don't much like it, but
they will be glad some day. I make them practise regularly. I don't
believe any but very exceptionally gifted boys like that; but they
are so awfully thankful when they get to my age if they have been
kept at it.

"Then as to the external [Greek: paideia], there is my difficulty. I am
not allowed to take any active exertion myself, and, indeed, it tells
on me if I do, so that I have become a kind of thermometer, hopeless
and headachy and listless the next day, if I overdo myself the very
least; so that I have merely to encourage them by precept, not by
example. They have ponies and bicycles, and scamper about all over
the country. Edward has been brought home once in a cart, but not
seriously damaged; and I like to leave them to themselves in these
things--they won't damage themselves a bit the less for fussing and
fretting over them, and they will lose ever so much independence and
go. Then I teach them to shoot, and they are very fair shots with a
pea-gun. And we also do a little carpentering, so we are well
employed. They aren't showy performers at any game, but, as they
won't be at school, that makes very little difference to them; it is
handiness in general sports that is valuable afterward.

"You would think that this was a tremendous programme, but it is not;
it is mostly reading and talking, with a certain amount of writing.
They have to analyse a chapter of a book of some kind every day;
sometimes history, sometimes philosophy. We do both history and
philosophy as much as possible by means of biographies. Lewes's book
is an excellent text-book, and not a bit too advanced if you will
talk it over with them carefully; clever boys are never really
puzzled by meanings of words. In history we get the greatest man we
can find in a period, and work out his view of all current events;
and they have to write dialogues in character, and enjoy it immensely
too. I don't press them to read for themselves very much, and I don't
make ordinary English literature their task-books, because one always
may be boring a boy, and I don't want to run the risk of boring them
with things that I want them to enjoy as much as I did.

"I read to them for an hour or so every evening--novels, plays,
anything that they seem to like. They are at liberty to choose.