Produced by Andrew Sly
Etext preparer's note: This text was first published anonymously in 1886.
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."