MEMOIRS OF
ARTHUR HAMILTON, B.A.
OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE


Extracted from his letters and diaries, with reminiscences of his
conversation by his friend CHRISTOPHER CARR
of the same college

By
Arthur Christopher Benson

"Pro jucundis aptissima quaeque dabunt di;
Carior est illis homo quam sibi."
Juvenal




DEDICATION

To H. L. M.


My dear Friend,

When you were kind enough to allow me to dedicate this book to
you—you, to whose frank discussion of sacred things and kindly
indifference to exaggerations of expression I owe so much—I felt
you were only adding another to the long list of delicate benefits
for which a friend can not be directly repaid.

My object has throughout been this: I have seen so much of what
may be called the dissidence of religious thought and religious
organization among those of my own generation at the Universities,
and the unhappy results of such a separation, that I felt bound to
contribute what I could to a settlement of this division, existing
so much more in word than in fact—a point which you helped me very
greatly to grasp.

I have been fortunate enough to have seen and known both sides of the
battle. I have seen men in the position of teachers, both anxious and
competent to position of teachers, both anxious and competent to
settle differences, when brought into contact with men of serious
God-seeking souls, with the nominal intention of dropping the
bandying of words and cries and of attacking principles, meet and
argue and part, almost unconscious that they have never touched the
root of the matter at all, yet dissatisfied with the efforts which
only seem to widen the breach they are intended to fill.

And why? Both sides are to blame, no doubt: the teachers, for being
more anxious to expound systems than to listen to difficulties, to
make their theories plain than to analyse the theories of their—I
will not say adversaries—but opponents; the would-be learners,
for hasty generalization; for bringing to the conflict a deliberate
prejudice against all traditional authority, a want of patience in
translating dogmas into life, a tendency to flatly deny that such a
transmutation is possible.

Fortunately, the constructive side is in no want of an exponent;
but I have tried to give a true portrait in this arrangement, or
rather selection, of realities, of what a serious and thoughtful
soul-history may in these days be: to depict the career of a
character for which no one can fail to have the profoundest sympathy,
being as it is, by the nature of its case, condemned to a sadder
sterner view of life than its uprightness justifies, and deprived of
the helpful encouragement of so many sweet natures, whose single aim
in life is to help other souls, if they only knew how.

And so, as I said before, it is with a most grateful remembrance of
certain gracious words of yours, let fall in the stately house of God
where we have worshipped together, in lecture-rooms where I have sat
to hear you, and in conversations held in quiet college rooms or
studious gardens, that I place your name at the head of these pages,
the first I have sent out to shift for themselves, or rather to pass
whither the Inspirer of all earnest endeavour may appoint.

I remain ever affectionately yours,
Christopher Carr.
Ashdon, Hants.




PREFACE


There are several forms of temperament. The kind that mostly
issues in biography is the practical temperament. Poets have the
shortest memoirs, and the most uninteresting. The politician, the
philanthropist, the general, make the best, the most graphic Lives.
The fact remains, however, that the question, "What has he done?"
though a specious, is an unsatisfactory test of greatness.

But there is a temperament called the Reflective, which works slowly,
and with little apparent result. The very gift of expression is a
practical gift: with the gift of expression the reflective man
becomes a writer, a poet, an artist; without it, he is unknown.

The reflective temperament, existing without any particular gift of
expression, wants an exponent in these times. Reflection is lost
sight of; philanthropy is all the rage. I assert that for a man to
devote himself to a reflective life, that is, in the eyes of the
world, an indolent one, is often a great sacrifice, and even on that
account, if not essentially, valuable. Philanthropy is generally
distressing, often offensive, sometimes disastrous.

Nothing, in this predetermined world, fails of its effect, as nothing
is without its cause. There is a call to reflection which a man must
follow, and his life then becomes an integral link in the chain of
circumstance. Any intentional life affects the world; it is only the
vague drifting existences that pass it by.

The subject of this memoir was, as the world counts reputation,
unknown. His only public appearance, as far as I know, besides the
announcement of his birth, is the fact that his initials stand in a
dedication on the title-page of a noble work of fiction.

Arthur Hamilton left me his manuscripts, papers, and letters; from
these, and casual conversations I have had with him in old days,
this little volume is constructed.

C.C.


CHAPTER I


He was born November 2, 1852. He was the second son of a retired
cavalry officer, who lived in Hampshire. Besides his elder brother,
there were three sisters, one of whom died. His father was a wealthy
man, and had built himself a small country house, and planted the few
acres of ground round it very skillfully. Major Hamilton was a very
religious man, of the self-sufficient, puritanical, and evangelical
type, that issues from discipline; a martinet in his regiment, a
domestic tyrant, without intending to be. He did not marry till
rather late in life; and at the time when Arthur was growing up—the
time when memory intwines itself most lingeringly with its
surroundings, the time which comes back to us at ecstatic moments
in later, sadder days—all the _entourage_ of the place was at its
loveliest. Nothing ever equalled the thrill, he has told me, of
finding the first thrush's nest in the laurels by the gate, or of
catching the first smell of the lilac bushes in spring, or the
pungent scent of the chamomile and wild celery down by the little
stream.

The boy acquired a great love for Nature, though not of the intimate
kind that poets have by instinct. "In moments of grief and despair,"
he wrote in later life, "I do not, as some do, crouch back to the
bosom of the great Mother; she has, it seems, no heart for me when I
am sorry, though she smiles with me when I am glad." But he has told
me that he is able to enjoy a simple village scene in a way that
others can not easily understand: a chestnut crowded with pink
spires, the clack of a mill-wheel, the gush of a green sluice out
of a mantled pool, a little stream surrounded by flags and water
lobelias, gave him all his life a keen satisfaction in his happy
moments. "I always gravitate to water," he writes. "I could stop
and look at a little wayside stream for hours; and a pool—I never
tire of it, though it awes me when I am alone."

The boy was afraid of trees, as many children are. If he had to go
out alone he always crossed the fields, and never went by the wood;
wandering in a wood at night was a childish nightmare of a peculiarly
horrible kind.

I quote a few childish stories about him, selecting them out of a
large number.

His mother saying to him one day that the gardener was dead, he burst
out laughing (with that curious hysteria so common in children), and
then after a little asked if they were going to bury him.

His mother, wishing to familiarize him with the idea of continued
existence after death, dwelt on the fact that it was only his body
that was going to be buried: his soul was in heaven.

The boy said presently, "If his body is in the churchyard, and his
soul in heaven, where is David?"

Upon which his mother sent him down to the farm.

He was often singularly old-fashioned in his ways. If he was kept
indoors by a childish ailment, he would draw his chair up to the
fire, by his nurse, and say, "Now that the children are gone out,
nurse, we can have a quiet talk." And he always returned first of all
his brothers and sisters, if they were playing in the garden, that he
might have the pleasure of clapping his hands from the nursery window
to summon them in. "Children, children, come in," he used to say.

A curious little dialogue is preserved by his aunt in a diary. He
laughed so immoderately at something that was said at lunch by one of
his elders, that when his father inquired what the joke was, he was
unable to answer. "It must be something very funny," said his mother
in explanation. "Arthur never laughs unless there is a joke." The
little boy became grave at once, and said severely, "There's hardly
ever anything to laugh at in what you say; but I always laugh for
fear people should be disappointed."

He was very sensitive to rebuke. "I am not so sensitive as I am
always supposed to be," he said to me once. "I am one of those people
who cry when they are spoken to, and do it again."

For instance, he told me that, being very fond of music when he was
small, he stole down one morning at six to play the piano. His
father, a very early riser, was disturbed by the gentle tinkling, and
coming out of his study, asked him rather sharply why he couldn't do
something useful—read some Shakespeare. He never played on the piano
again for months, and for years never until he had ascertained that
his father was out. "It was a mistake," he told me once, apropos of
it. "If he had said that it disturbed him, but that I might do it
later, I should have been delighted to stop. I always liked feeling
that I was obliging people."

He disliked his father, and feared him. The tall, handsome gentleman,
accustomed to be obeyed, in reality passionately fond of his
children, dismayed him. He once wrote on a piece of paper the words,
"I hate papa," and buried it in the garden.

For the rest, he was an ordinary, rather clever, secretive child,
speaking very little of his feelings, and caring, as he has told me
since, very little for anybody except his nurse. "I cared about her
in a curious way. I enjoyed the sensation of crying over imaginary
evils; and I should not like to say how often in bed at night I used
to act over in my mind an imaginary death-bed scene of my nurse, and
the pathetic remarks she was to make about Master Arthur, and the
edifying bearing I was to show. This was calculated within a given
time to produce tears, and then I was content."

He went to a private school, which he hated, and then to Winchester,
which he grew to love. The interesting earnest little boy merged into
the clumsy loose-jointed schoolboy, silent and languid. There are
hardly any records of this time.

"My younger sister died," he told me, "when I was at school. I
experienced about ten minutes of grief; my parents were overwhelmed
with anguish, and I can remember that, like a quick, rather clever
child, I soon came to comprehend the sort of remark that cheered
them, and almost overdid it in my zeal. I am overwhelmed with shame,"
he said, "whenever I look at my mother's letters about that time when
she speaks of the comfort I was to them. It was a _fraus pia_, but it
was a most downright _fraus_."

I think I may relate one other curious incident among his public
school experiences: it may seem very incredible, but I have his word
for it that it is true.

"A sixth-form boy took a fancy to me, and let me sit in his room, and
helped me in my work. The night before he left the school I was
sitting there, and just before I went away, being rather overcome
with regretful sentiments, he caught hold of me by the arm and said,
among other things, 'And now that I am going away, and shall probably
never see you again, I don't believe you care one bit.' I don't know
how I came to do it," he said, "because I was never demonstrative;
but I bent down and kissed him on the cheek, and then blushed up to
my ears. He let me go at once; he was very much astonished, and I
think not a little pleased; but it was certainly a curious incident."

During this time his intellectual development was proceeding slowly.
"I went through three phases," he said. "I began by a curious love
for pastoral and descriptive poetry. I read Thomson and Cowper,
similes from 'Paradise Lost,' and other selections of my own; I read
Tennyson, and revelled in the music of the lines and words. I
intended to be a poet.

"Then I became omnivorous, and read everything, whether I understood
it or not, especially biographies. I spent all my spare time in the
school library; one only valuable thing have I derived from that—a
capacity for taking in the sense of a page at a glance, and having a
verbal memory of a skimmed book for an hour or two superior to any
one that I ever met."

Then there came an ebb, and he read nothing, but loafed all day,
and tried to talk. He had a notion he said, that he could argue
Socratically; and he was always trying to introduce metaphors into
his conversation. But his remarks in a much later letter to a friend
on childish reading are so pertinent that I introduce them here.

"Never take a book away from a child unless it is positively vicious;
that they should learn how to read a book and read it quickly is the
great point; that they should get a habit of reading, and feel a void
without it, is what should be cultivated. Never mind if it is trash
now; their tastes will insensibly alter. I like a boy to cram himself
with novels; a day will come when he is sick of them, and rejects
them for the study of facts. What we want to give a child is
'bookmindedness,' as some one calls it. They will read a good deal
that is bad, of course; but innocence is as slippery as a duck's
back; a boy really fond of reading is generally pure-minded enough.
When you see a robust, active, out-of-door boy deeply engrossed in a
book, then you may suspect it if you like, and ask him what he has
got; it will probably have an animal bearing."

Friendships more or less ardent, butterfly-hunting, school games,
constant visits to the cathedral for service, to which he was always
keenly devoted, uneventful holidays, filled up most of his school
life. His letters at this date are very ordinary; his early precocity
seemed, rather to the delight of his parents, to have vanished.
He was not a prig, though rather exclusive; not ungenial, though
retiring. "A dreadful boy," he writes of himself, "who is as mum as
a mouse with his elders, and then makes his school friends roar with
laughter in the passage: dumb at home, a chatterbox at school."

"I had no religion at that time," he writes, "with the exception of
six months, when I got interested in it by forming a friendship
with an attractive ritualistic curate; but my confirmation made no
impression on me, and I think I had no moral feelings that I could
distinguish. I had no inherent hatred of wrong, or love for right;
but I was fastidious, and that kept me from being riotous, and
undemonstrative, which made me pure."




CHAPTER II


Arthur went up to the University, Trinity College, Cambridge, in
1870; he did not distinguish himself there, or acquire more than he
had done at Winchester: "The one thing I learnt at Winchester that
has been useful to me since, was how to tie up old letters: my
house-master taught me how to do that—it was about all he was fit
for. The thing I learnt at Cambridge was to smoke: my cousin Fred
taught me that, and he was hardly fit for that."

As it was at Cambridge that I first met him, I will give a short
description of him as far as I can remember.

He was a tall, lounging fellow, rather clumsy in his movements, but
with a kind of stateliness about him; he looked, and was, old for his
years. He was a little short-sighted and wore glasses; without them
his brow had that puzzled, slightly bothered look often seen in
weak-sighted people. His face was not unattractive, though rather
heavy; his hair was dark and curly—he let it grow somewhat long from
indolence—and he had a drooping moustache. He was one of the men
who, without the slightest idea of doing so, always managed to create
rather an impression. As he lounged along the street with his hands
in his pockets, generally alone, people used to turn and look at him.
If he had taken a line of any kind he would have been known
everywhere—but he did nothing.

The occasion on which I met him first was in the rooms of a common
friend; there was a small gathering of men. He was sitting in a low
chair, smoking intently. It was the one occupation he loved; he
hardly said anything, though the conversation was very animated;
silence was his latest phase; but as it was his first term, and he
was not very well acquainted with the party, it appeared natural; not
that being surrounded by dukes and bishops would have made the
slightest difference to him if he had been disposed to talk, but he
was not talkative, and held his tongue.

There had been some discussion about careers and their relative
merits. One rather cynical man had broken in upon the ambitious
projects that were being advanced with, "Well, we must remember that
we are after all only average men."

"Yes," said Arthur, slowly, from the depths of his chair, "no doubt;
only not quite so average."

The gentleman addressed, who was a senior man, stared for a moment at
the freshman who had ventured to correct him, to whom he had not even
been introduced; but Arthur was staring meditatively at the smoke
rising from his pipe, and did not seem inclined to move or be moved,
so he concluded not to continue the discussion.

The only other thing I heard him say that night was as follows. An
ardent enthusiast on the subject of missions was present, who,
speaking of an Indian mission lately started and apparently wholly
ineffective, said, "But we must expect discouragement at first. The
Church has always met with that."

"Yes," said Arthur; "but we must also remember, what people are very
apt to forget, that ill success is not an absolute proof that God is
on our side."

These two remarks, slight as they were, struck me; and, indeed, I
have never quite forgotten that indefinable first impression of the
man. There was a feeling about him of holding great things in
reserve, an utter absence of self-consciousness, a sensation that he
did not value the opinions of other people, that he did not regulate
his conduct by them, which is very refreshing in these social days,
when everybody's doings and sayings are ventilated and discussed so
freely. He had none of the ordinary ambitions; he did not want a
reputation, I thought, on ordinary grounds; he struck me as liking
to observe and consider, not to do or say.

I am fond of guessing at character and forming impressions; and I
very soon found out that these were not mistaken. My way that night
lay with him as far as the gate of his college. We struck up a kind
of acquaintanceship, though I felt conscious that he did not in the
least care about doing so, that he probably would not give me another
thought. It seems strange, reflecting on that evening, that I should
now come to be his biographer.

However, I was interested in the type of character he displayed, and
did not let the acquaintance drop. I invited him to my rooms. He
would not come of his own accord at first, but by-and-by he got
habituated to me, and not unfrequently strolled in.

He never let any one into the secret of his motives; he never
confessed to any plans for the future, or to taking any interest in
one line of life more than another. He was well off and did not spend
much, except on his books, which were splendid. His rooms were untidy
to the last degree, but liberally supplied with the most varied
contrivances for obtaining a comfortable posture. Deep chairs and
sofas, with devices for books and light, and for writing in any
position. "When my mind is at work," he said to me once, "I don't
like to be reminded of my body at all. I want to forget that I have
one; and so I always say my prayers lying down."

He dressed badly, or rather carelessly, for he never gave the subject
a moment's thought. If his friends told him that a suit was shabby,
he appeared in a day or two in a new one, till that was similarly
noticed; then it was discarded altogether. He always wore one suit
till he had worn it out, never varying it. But he consulted fashion
to a certain extent. "My object," he said, "is to escape notice, to
look like every one else. I think of all despicable people, the
people who try to attract attention by a marked style of dress, are
perhaps the lowest."

His life at Cambridge was very monotonous, for he enjoyed monotony;
he used to say that he liked to reflect on getting up in the morning,
that his day was going to be filled by ordinary familiar things. He
got up rather late, read his subjects for an hour or two, strolled
about to see one or two friends, lunched with them or at home,
strolled in the afternoon, often dropping in to King's for the
anthem, went back to his rooms for tea, the one time at which he
liked to see his friends, read or talked till hall, and finally
settled down to his books again at ten, reading till one or two in
the morning.

He read very desultorily and widely. Thus he would read books on
Arctic voyages for ten days and talk of nothing else, then read
novels till he sickened for facts and fact till he sickened for
fiction; biographies, elementary science, poetry, general philosophy,
particularly delighting in any ideal theories of life and discipline
in state or association, but with a unique devotion to "Hamlet"
and "As You Like It," the "Pilgrim's Progress," and Emerson's
"Representative Men." He rarely read the Bible, he told me, and then
only in great masses at a sitting; and the one thing that he disliked
with an utter hatred was theology of a settled and orthodox type,
though next to the four books I have mentioned, "The Christian Year"
and "Ecce Homo" were his constant companions.

He did not care for history; he used to lament it. "I have but a
languid interest in facts, qua facts," he said; "and I try to arrive
at history through biography. I like to disentangle the separate
strands, one at a time; the fabric is too complex for me."

He had the greatest delight in topography. "That is why," he used to
say, "I delight in a flat country. The idea of _space_ is what I want.
I like to see miles at a glance. I like to see clouds league-long
rolling up in great masses from the horizon—cloud perspective. I
rejoice in seeing the fields, hedgerow after hedgerow, farm after
farm, push into the blue distance. It makes me feel the unity and the
diversity of life; a city bewilders and confuses me, but a great
tract of placid country gives me a broad glow of satisfaction."

He went for a walking tour in the fens, and returned enchanted. "By
Ely," he said, "the line crosses a gigantic fen—Whittlesea mere in
old days—and on a clear day you can see at least fifteen miles
either way. As we crossed it a great skein of starlings rose out of
a little holt, and streamed north; the herons or quiet cattle stood
along the huge dykes. You could see the scattered figures of old
labourers in the fields, and then for miles and miles the squat
towers, at which you were making, staring over the flat, giving you
a thrill every time you sighted them, and right away west the low
hills that must have been the sandy downs that blocked the restless
plunging sea; they must have looked for centuries over rollers and
salt marsh and lagoon, felt the tread of strange herds and beasts
about them till they have become the quiet slopes of a sunny park
or the simple appendages of a remote hill farm."

But his greatest delight was in music. He knew a smattering of it
scientifically, enough to follow up subjects and to a certain extent
to recognize chords. There occurs in one of his letters to me the
following passage, which I venture to quote. He is speaking of the
delight of pure sound as apart from melody:

"I remember once," he writes, "being with a great organist in a
cathedral organ-loft, sitting upon the bench at his side. He was
playing a Mass of Schubert's, and close to the end, at the last chord
but two—he was dying to a very soft close, sliding in handles all
over the banks of stops—he nodded with his head to the rows of pedal
stops with their red labels, as though to indicate where danger
lay. 'Put your hand on the thirty-two foot,' he said. There it
was '_Double open wood 32 ft._' And just as his fingers slid on to
the last chord, 'Now,' he said.

"Ah! that was it; the great wooden pipe close to my ear began to blow
and quiver; and hark! not sound, but sensation—the great rapturous
stir of the air; a drowsy thunder in the roof of nave and choir; the
grim saints stirred and rattled ill their leaded casements, while
the melodious roar died away as softly as it had begun, sinking to
silence with many a murmurous pulsation, many a throb of sighing
sound."

Organ-playing, organ music, was the one subject on which I have heard
him wax enthusiastic. His talk and his letters always become
rhetorical when he deals with music; his musical metaphors are always
carefully worked out; he compares a man of settled purpose, in whose
life the "motive was very apparent," to "the great lazy horns, that
you can always hear in the orchestra pouring out their notes hollow
and sweet, however loud the violins shiver or the trumpets cry." He
often went up to London to hear music. The St. James's Hall Concerts
were his especial delight. I find later a description of the effect
produced on him by Wagner.

"I have just come back from the Albert Hall, from hearing the
'Meistersänger,' Wagner himself conducting. I may safely say I
think that I never experienced such absolute artistic rapture before
as at certain parts of this; for instance, in the overture, at one
place where the strings suddenly cease and there comes a peculiar
chromatic waft of wind instruments, like a ghostly voice rushing
across. I have never felt anything like it; it swept one right away,
and gave one a sense of deep ineffable satisfaction. I shall always
feel _for the future_ that there is an existent region, _into which
I have now actually penetrated_, in which that entire satisfaction
is possible, a fact which I have always hitherto doubted. It is
like an initiation.

"But I can not bear the 'Tannhäuser;' it seems to paint with a
fatal fascination the beauty of wickedness, the rightness, so to
speak, of sensuality. I feel after it as if I had been yielding to
a luscious temptation; unnerved, not inspired."

In another letter he writes, "Music is the most hopeful of the arts;
she does not hint only, like other expressions of beauty—she takes
you straight into a world of peace, a world where law and beauty are
the same, and where an ordered discord, that is discord working by
definite laws, is the origin of the keenest pleasure."

I remember, during the one London season which he subsequently went
through, his settling himself at a Richter concert next me with an
air of delight upon his face. "Now," he said, "let us try and
remember for an hour or two that we have souls."




CHAPTER III


I must here record one curious circumstance which I have never
explained even to my own satisfaction.

He had been at Cambridge about two years, when, in the common consent
of all his friends, his habits and behaviour seemed to undergo a
complete and radical change.

I have never discovered what the incident was that occasioned this
change; all I know is that suddenly, for several weeks, his geniality
of manner and speech, his hilarity, his cheerfulness, entirely
disappeared; a curious look of haunting sadness, not defined, but
vague, came over his face; and though he gradually returned to his
old ways, yet I am conscious myself, and others would support me in
this, that he was never quite the same again; he was no longer young.

The only two traces that I can discover in his journals, or letters,
or elsewhere, of the facts are these.

He always in later diaries vaguely alludes to a certain event which
changed his view of things in general; "ever since," "since that
November," "for now nearly five years I have felt." These and similar
phrases constantly occur in his diary. I will speak in a moment of
what nature I should conjecture it to have been.

A packet of letters in his desk were marked "to be burnt unopened;"
but at the same time carefully docketed with dates: these dates were
all immediately after that time, extending over ten days.

The exact day was November 8, 1872. It is engraved in a small silver
locket that hung on his watch-chain, where he was accustomed to have
important days in his life marked, such as the day he adopted his
boy, his mother's death. It is preceded by the Greek letters ΒΠ,
which from a certain entry in his diary I conceive to be
βάπτισμα πυρὸς, "the baptism of fire."

Lastly, in a diary for that year, kept with fair regularity up till
November 8, there here intervenes a long blank, the only entry being
November 9: "Salvum me fac, Dne."

I took the trouble, incidentally, to hunt up the files of a Cambridge
journal of that date, to see if I could link it on to any event, and
I found there recorded, in the course of that week, what I at first
imagined to be the explanation of the incidents, and own I was a good
deal surprised.

I found recorded some Revivalist Mission Services, which were then
held in Cambridge with great success. I at once concluded that he
underwent some remarkable spiritual experience, some religious
fright, some so-called conversion, the effects of which only
gradually disappeared. The contagion of a Revivalist meeting is a
very mysterious thing. Like a man going to a mesmerist, an individual
may go, announcing his firm intention not to be influenced in the
smallest degree by anything said or done. Nay more, he may think
himself, and have the reputation of being, a strong, unyielding
character, and yet these are the very men who are often most
hopelessly mesmerized, the very men whom the Revival most
absolutely—for the occasion—enslaves. And thus, knowing that one
could form no _prima facie_ judgments on the probabilities in such a
matter, I came to the conclusion that he had fallen, in some degree,
under the influence of these meetings.

But in revising this book, and carefully recalling my own and
studying others' impressions, I came to the conclusion that it was
impossible that this should be the case.

1. In the first place, he was more free than any man I ever saw from
the influence of contagious emotions; he dissembled his own emotions,
and contemned the public display of them in other people.

2. He had, I remember, a strange repugnance, even abhorrence, to
public meetings in the later days at Cambridge. I can now recall that
he would accompany people to the door, but never be induced to enter.
A passage which I will quote from one of his letters illustrates
this.

"The presence of a large number of people has a strange, repulsive
physical effect on me. I feel crushed and overwhelmed, not stimulated
and vivified, as is so often described. I can't listen to a concert
comfortably if there is a great throng, unless the music is so good
as to wrap one altogether away. There is undoubtedly a force abroad
among large masses of people, the force which forms the basis of the
principle of public prayer, and I am conscious of it too, only it
distresses me; moreover, the worst and most afflicting nightmare I
have is the sensation of standing sightless and motionless, but with
all the other senses alert and apprehensive, in the presence of a
vast and hostile crowd."

3. He never showed the least sign of being influenced in the
direction of spiritual or even religious life by this crisis. He
certainly spoke very little at all for some time to any one on any
subject; he was distrait and absent-minded in society—for the
alteration was much observed from its suddenness—but when he
gradually began to converse as usual, he did not, as is so often the
case in similar circumstances, do what is called "bearing witness to
the truth." His attitude toward all enthusiastic forms of religion
had been one, in old days, of good-natured, even amused tolerance. He
was now not so good-natured in his criticisms, and less sparing of
them, though his religious-mindedness, his seriousness, was
undoubtedly increased by the experience, whatever it was.

On the whole, then, I should say that the coincidence of the revival
is merely fortuitous. It remains to seek what the cause was.

We must look for it, in a character so dignified as Arthur's, in some
worthy cause, some emotional failure, some moral wound. I believe the
following to be the clew; I can not develop it without treading some
rather delicate ground.

He had formed, in his last year at school, a very devoted friendship
with a younger boy; such friendships like the εἰσπνήλας and the
ἀϊτάς of Sparta, when they are truly chivalrous and absolutely
pure, are above all other loves, noble, refining, true; passion at white
heat without taint, confidence of so intimate a kind as can not even
exist between husband and wife, trust such as can not be shadowed,
are its characteristics. I speak from my own experience, and others
will, I know, at heart confirm me, when I say that these things are
infinitely rewarding, unutterably dear.

Arthur left Winchester. A correspondence ensued between the two
friends. I have three letters of Arthur's, so passionate in
expression, that for fear of even causing uneasiness, not to speak
of suspicion, I will not quote them. I have seen, though I have
destroyed, at request, the letters of the other.

This friend, a weak, but singularly attractive boy, got into a bad
set at Winchester, and came to grief in more than one way; he came
to Cambridge in three years, and fell in with a thoroughly bad set
there. Arthur seems not to have suspected it at first, and to have
delighted in his friend's society; but such things as habits betray
themselves, and my belief is that disclosures were made on November
8, which revealed to Arthur the state of the case. What passed I
can not say. I can hardly picture to myself the agony, disgust,
and rage (his words and feelings about sensuality of any kind were
strangely keen and bitter), loyalty fighting with the sense of
repulsion, pity struggling with honour, which must have convulsed
him when he discovered that his friend was not only yielding, but
deliberately impure.

The other's was an unworthy and brutal nature, utterly corrupted at
bottom. He used to speak jestingly of the occurrence. "Oh yes!" I
have heard him say; "we were great friends once, but he cuts me now;
he had to give me up, you see, because he didn't approve of me.
Justice, mercy, and truth, and all the rest of it."