Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge, Arthur Christopher Benson [the little red hen ebook txt] 📗

flunkeys would have despised.

"But I have let my pen run on to an unconscionable length. It reminds me of the remark with which he dismissed the subject of poor old Sir Charles W—— who was staying there. We had been discussing him, and asked Mr. Hamilton what he thought of him. 'A talking jackass,' was his only reply, in his most chilling tones.

"I fear I am open to the same imputation.

"Very truly yours,
"Laura F——.

"I should like to know what you want this for; however, happily, I have put it in a form you can't make much use of."

I was much amused at the way in which he treated gossip about himself.

I told him some stories about him that I had picked up. They related to a certain absent-mindedness which he was supposed to possess.

"I am afraid they are not true," he said first. "I should welcome any hint of absence of mind in myself as a sign that the abstract could exclude the concrete, which is unfortunately not the case with me." Then, in a moment, he said, "People have no business to tell such stories. I should not mind their not being true, if they were only characteristic."

"By which you mean," said a gentleman who was sitting next him, "that you don't care about veracity, only you can't stand dullness."

"Not at all," said Arthur, quickly. "Veracity is not the question in gossip at all. It is all hearsay. You have not to judge of the actual truth of a scandalous story, but you have to judge of the probable truth of it, and if it is obviously uncharacteristic it is wrong to repeat it. It becomes scandal then, and not till then."

When he was living in London, which was, for the time being, his home, he lived a regular life, combining more reading with a sociable life than many people would have thought possible. He had two rooms in a house in Russell Square. He breakfasted at half-past nine and read till four, when he went down to his club and talked, or strolled in the park. He made hardly any engagements, except for the evening; and admitted hardly anyone, except two or three friends, to see him at his rooms, and then only after one o'clock, before which hour he was absolutely invisible. He was so dreadfully angry with his landlady for showing a gentleman in once in the middle of the morning, that she literally refused ever to do it again. "He's a good regular lodger, sir, and doesn't think of money, but he said to me, 'Mrs. Laing, I _don't choose to be disturbed_ before one. If I find my orders disregarded again, I shall leave the house _that day_.' I daren't do it, sir. You wouldn't like to deprive me of my lodger, I know, sir." The last pathetic plea could not be gainsaid, so Arthur had his way.

Four evenings he devoted to going out, and the other three dining quietly at home and reading. By the time he left London his reading, always wide, had become prodigious. His own library was good, and he had a ticket for the British Museum Reading-room and belonged to two circulating libraries. He made a point of reading new books (1) if he was strongly recommended them by specialists; (2) if they reached a second edition within a month; (3) if they were republished after a period of neglect—this he held to be the best test of a book.

It was characteristic of his natural indolence that he chose the very easiest method of reading—that is to say, he always read, if he could, _in_ a translation, or if the style of the original was the object, _with_ one. This, like his posture, nearly recumbent, was deliberately adopted. "I find," he said, "that the _reflective_ part of my brain works best when I have as little either bodily or _purely_ intellectual to distract me as possible. And it is the reflective part," he says, "that I always preferred to cultivate, and that latterly I have devoted my whole attention to. It is through the reflective part that one gets the highest influence over people. Training the reflective function is the training of character, while the training of the purely physical side often, and the training of the intellectual side not uncommonly, have a distinctly deteriorative effect.

"By the reflective part, I mean all that deals with the _connection_ of things, the discovery of principles, the laws that regulate emotion and influence, the motives of human nature, the basis of existence, the solution of the problem of life and being—that vast class of subjects which lie just below, and animate concrete facts, and which are the only things worthy of the devotion of a philosopher, though no knowledge is unworthy of his _attention_.

"I am not quite clear what position I intend to take up in the world at large. This only is certain, that if I am going to teach, and I have a vague sense that I am destined for that, it is necessary first to know something, to be _sure_ of something."

All his days were alike, except that on Sunday he used to frequent city churches in the afternoon, or go to Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's. His father was a friend of a canon at the former place, and Arthur was generally certain of a stall; and I used often to see his tall form there, with his eyes "indwelling wistfully," "reputans secum," as Virgil says, lost in speculations and wonders, and a whole host of melancholy broodings over life and death to which he rarely gave voice, but which formed a perpetual background to his thoughts. He varied this by visits to his father in Hampshire, and occasional trips to the country, not unfrequently alone, the object and occupation of which he never told me, except to say once that he had explored, he thought, every considerable "solitude" in England.

There is one thing that I must not forget to mention—his dreams. He never slept, he told me, without innumerable dreams, and he not unfrequently told me of them. They always struck me as curiously vivid. I subjoin the following from one of his diaries. They are often given at full length. This is one of the most interesting I can find.

"_January_ 8.—Slept badly; toward morning dreamed that I was walking with two or three friends, and accompanied by a tall man whom I did not know, wrapped in a cloak, through a very dark wood. I seemed to be in a very heavy mood. We came upon a building brightly lighted, and, entering, found a hall with many people dining. There was much wine and talk, and a great deal of laughing and merriment. We appeared to be invisible.

"I began to moralize aloud. I said, 'Yes, and this is the way in which lives pass: a little laughter and a few jests and a song or two; forgetful, all the time, that the lights must be extinguished and the wine spilled, and that night laps them round,'—catching, as I said this, a glimpse of the dark trees swaying outside.

"But the man in the cloak took me up. 'This shows,' he said, 'how superficial your view is—how little you look below the surface of things. This laughter and light talk are but the signs and symbols of qualities of which your bitter character knows nothing—goodfellowship, kindliness, brave hopefulness, and many things beside.'

"Then he turned to me impressively, and said, 'What you want is _deepening_.'

"I woke with the word ringing in my ears."

Besides this, there was a curious little peculiarity in him that I have never heard of in anyone else: a capacity for seeing little waking visions with strange distinctness.

His description of this is as follows:

"I have the power, or rather something in me is able (for I can not resist it), of suddenly producing a picture on the retina, of such vividness as to blot out everything around me. I have it generally when I am a little tired with exercise or brain-work or people: it is prefaced by seeing a bright blue spot, which moves, or rather rushes, across my field of vision, and is immediately succeeded by the picture.

"A crumbling sandstone temple, among fields of blue flowers—an obelisk carved with figures, in a wood—a gray indistinct marsh, with mist rising from it, and by the edge a white bird, egret or something similar, of dazzling whiteness—a green lane, with cows in it. I could go on for ever enumerating them. They pass in a fraction of a second, three or four succeeding one another. My eyes are not shut, nor do I look different. I have always seen them. I was alarmed about them once, and went to a doctor; but he said he could not explain it—it was probably a nervous idiosyncrasy: and I felt all the better for my habit having a name."

One more thing I must mention about him, which I have discovered since his death. I must add _that I never had the least suspicion of it in his life_.

He was the victim during this time of a depression of mind; not constant, but from which he never felt secure. I subjoin a few entries from his diaries.

"Very troubled and gloomy: a strange heart-sinking—a blank misgiving without any adequate cause upon me all day. One can not help feeling during such times—and, alas! they are becoming very familiar to me—that some mysterious warfare may be being fought out somewhere over one's only half-conscious soul: that some strange decision may be pending." And again: "For the last week, my mind—though I have reiterated again and again to myself that it is purely physical—has steadily refused to take any view of life, to have any outlook, except the most dismal. I am a little better to-day—well enough to see the humour of it, though God knows it is black enough while it lasts."

In one letter he wrote to me, I find the following words: it never occurred to me at the time that they were the gradual fruits of his own experience on the subject:

"Physical and mental depression is a most fearful enemy. Other things give you trouble at intervals—toothache, headache, etc., are all spasmodic afflictions, and, moreover, can be much mitigated by circumstances. But with depression it is not so: it poisons any cup—it turns all the cheerful little daily duties of life into miseries, unutterable burdens; death is the only future event which you can contemplate with satisfaction. It admits of no comfort: the whispered suggestion of the mind, 'You will be better soon,' falls on deaf ears. No physical suffering that I have ever felt, and I have not been without my share, is in the least comparable to it; the agony of foreboding remorse and gloom with which it involves past, present, and future—there is nothing like it. It is the valley of the Shadow of Death.

"But when one first realizes how purely physical it is, it is an era. I endured it for two years first: now I am prepared. I may even say that though all sense of enjoyment dies under it, my friends, the company I am in, generally suspect nothing."

This was literally the case. I knew his spirits were never very high; but he seemed to me to maintain, what is far more valuable, a genial equable flow of cheerfulness, such as one would give much to possess.

Among his occasional diversions at this time, I must place visiting some of the worst houses in