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 _æqualis_ 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 formulæ, 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 ἐγκράτης
ἐμαυτοῦ 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 anæsthetic (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
ἀνάγκη, 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."