E. B.,
BORN AT TEHERAN;
DIED AT CAMBRIDGE, NOV. 9, 1883.
"What I do thou knowest not now, but
thou shalt know hereafter."
Arthur had an interview with Edward's companion on the fatal occasion. I subjoin the latter's account of it. He requested me, when I wrote to him to ask him for some particulars relating to Edward Bruce, to make what use I wished of the letter.
"I can't describe the effect the accident had on me. It half drove me mad, I think. I was very much attached to Edward Bruce, as, indeed, we all were. I don't attempt to condone the fault. It was due entirely to my carelessness. I pressed him to drive faster than he was willing to do. I laughed at his scruples. I whipped the horse on myself. I never clearly knew what happened—for I was stunned myself—till I woke up and was told.
"When Mr. Hamilton came to see me, I was sitting in my room, over my breakfast, which I could not eat. His card was brought in by my gyp, and it made me faint and sick. He came in with his hand out, looking very pale, but smiling just as he used to smile, only more sadly. 'Don't reproach me,' I said; 'I can't bear it.' 'Reproach you!' he said—and I shall never forget the tone of affectionate wonder with which it came, or the relief it was to me to hear it—'Reproach you! I know how you loved him.' I broke down at that, and cried wretchedly. I found him sitting by me. He put his hand on my shoulder and stroked my hair. 'I have only one more thing to say,' he said, at last. 'You will not mind my saying it, will you? Eddy had told me all about you—he was very open with me—that you were not doing justice to your opportunities here, not fulfilling your own ideals and possibilities. All I ask of you is to let this be the impulse to rise; do not let any morbid or fantastic remorse stand in your way, and baffle you. You know that he would have been the first to have forgiven any share of the fault that may be yours. What I wish most earnestly for you—it is what he, if he had lived, would have wished most—is that you should become a nobler man—as you can, I know; as you will, I believe.' I could not speak, or answer him then; but I have tried to do what he begged me. Perhaps you do not know—I hope you do not—what a struggle an attempt to forget is. I could not have believed that a memory could hang so heavily round my neck.
"He wrote to me once after, and sent me Edward's riding-whip and flask. I never saw him again. From what Edward told me, and from the little I saw of him myself, I knew that he was the humblest and gravest of men. In his dealing with me, he showed himself the most truly loving."
I was at Tredennis for a week just after this. At the end of that time he begged me not to stay—he could bear it better alone. My impression was that he was like a man half dazed with grief. He sat very silent, and would do nothing; if he ever spoke, it was with evident effort. He did not appear to be ill, only crushed and overwhelmed. Once he broke down. He was looking over some books, and found a notebook of Edward's, of some subject they had been reading together. Edward had tired of the subject, and the last page was occupied with a pen-and-ink sketch of Arthur himself, the discovery of which, done as it had been during working hours, had been the occasion of some affectionate strictures. He shut the book up quickly, and literally moaned.
Then, after a little, his frosty silence broke up, and he wrote me several letters about his boy, very full and detailed, with numbers of little stories, and ending with a passionate burst of grief at the loss. They are too private for publication.
One very notable one, some six months after, must be given here.
"People talk and write about instantaneous momentary conversions—I never realized what was meant till a week ago. Day after day, all that time, I had been filled with gloomy, reproachful, or bitter thoughts of God and the providence which took Edward from me. It was intolerable that he should be swept away into silence, leaving me so worn and hopeless, and, worst of all, so dissatisfied and discontented with the hand that did it—my vaunted philosophy failing and giving out utterly. I knew it was right, but could not feel it.
"But last night as I sat, as I have so often done, burning and racked with recollection and regret, a kind of peace stole over me. It was quite sudden, quite abnormal; not that afterglow of hope that sometimes follows a dark plunge of despair, but a gentle firm trust that seemed, without explaining, yet to make all things plain; not ebbing and flowing, not changing with physical sensation or mental weariness, but deep, abiding, sustaining. You may think it rash of me thus, after so short an interval, to write so assuredly of it; but even if I lost the sense (and I shall not) the memory of that moment would support me; 'If I go down into hell, thou art there also,' is the only sentence that expresses it.
"But I shall not lose it; it has been with me in many moods—and my moods are many and very variable, as you know. I can't express it in words; but I feel no more doubt about Edward's well-being, no more inclination to fret or murmur, besides an all-embracing and pervading sense of satisfied content that penetrates everywhere and applies itself to everything; those are the chief manifestations.
"It is as if he had come to me himself and whispered that all was well, or, better still, as if the great Power that held both him and me and all men within His grasp, had sent His messenger to strengthen me. My friend, all the struggles and miseries of my life have paled to nothing in the light of this. If this is to be won by suffering, pray that you may suffer; though I feel, indeed, as if I had not earned or deserved a tenth part of it—it is the free gift of God. It is to this that we shall all come."
He still lived at Tredennis; spending much of his time in visiting and talking to the people round about, the cottagers and farmers. He was very weak in the mornings, and mostly read, or often was too feeble even for that; but later in the day his strength used somewhat to revive, and he would walk along the lanes with Flora, now growing older and more sedate, trotting by him. He was known and loved in the circle of the hills. "Oh, sir," as a poor woman said to me, with tears in her eyes, after he was gone, "I can't tell you how it was—he spoke very little of Him—but he seemed to remind me of the Lord Jesus, if I am not wrong to say it, more than all Mr. Robert's sermons or the pictures in the school-house. He was so kind and gentle; he seemed to bring God with him!"
But the end was not far off. He got very much weaker in the spring: he suffered from violent paroxysms of pain, depriving him of sight and power of speech, and wearing him out terribly. On the 21st of April I was telegraphed for; he wished to see me.
I came in the evening; he was conscious, and seemed glad to see me, though he was very weak. He said to me, "When I was at Cambridge, my windows overlooked a space of grass, very evenly green in the spring; but in a hot summer the lines of old foundations and buildings used to come out, burning the grass above them with the heat they retained; it is just the same," he added, "with things that I thought I had forgotten—they come out very truthfully now."
He often spoke to me of his grief that he had never seen Edward's face after he left Tredennis to go to Cambridge, for he had been fearfully disfigured, cut and bruised by the accident, and he had no picture of him; "But perhaps it is because I was too fond of his face," he said.
He had several terrible spasms while I was with him, and the doctor said that if he had such another he could not last out the night. Once, after waking from the prolonged and weary sleep of prostration which used to follow these collapses, he said to me, with a smile, "I saw him."
Once he said, "I have just dreamed of a tall man, who came to me and said, 'You will be surprised when you meet Edward; he is delighting everyone there with his conversation; he is so much wiser; and he has grown so much handsomer," adding, with a smile, "though I still think that an impossibility."
About six o'clock on the morning of the 24th he seemed very uneasy in his sleep. On waking, he said, "I should like to receive the Sacrament."
I confess that I thought that he was wandering; he had given up this religious observance for years. He repeated it, adding, "I am not wandering; I know what I am saying."
I went at once to the rectory. The rector was away, and I was directed to the curate, who lived in the village.
I went straight to him, and made my request. He refused to comply. I will do him the justice to say that he appeared to be profoundly concerned and distressed. "I can't act without my rector in this," he said. "I daren't take the responsibility. He hasn't attended the Communion for years; I know his opinions are distinctly unchristian; and in my last talk to the rector, he confessed to me that if Mr. Hamilton (speaking hypothetically) were to present himself for Communion, he should be obliged to refuse him."
I spoke very hastily, and I think unfairly. Mr. J—— tried to remonstrate, but I would not hear him.
When I came back, Arthur was asleep. As soon as he awoke, before he was quite conscious, he said, "It is like a river; it flows very smoothly, and carries me off my feet; but the sun is on it, and it is very clear."
I told him about the rencontre. He smiled faintly, and said, "Ask him to come and see me, at any rate; he can't refuse that." I sent the message at once.
At nine o'clock he had a fearful spasm; so terrible that I could not endure to see it, and left the room. While I was down-stairs, the curate arrived. He had come of his own accord, bringing the vessels with him. It had been, he pleaded, only a momentary hesitation.
In half an hour I was told that he would like to see us. The doctor was with him; as we entered, he told me, "He can not last an hour." Then, to the curate, "You may begin the service, if you like, though I doubt if he can hear you; he certainly will not be able to receive."
He was very gray about the eyes and temples, and looked fearfully exhausted. His eyes were closed. The curate began in a quiet voice, rather agitated. When he was near the end, Arthur opened his eyes fully and saw him. The curate went forward. Arthur held out his hand. "Thank you for coming," he said.
The curate grasped his hand, and said, "Can you forgive me for not coming at once?"
"You were doing your duty," said Arthur; adding, with a half-smile, "and you are doing it now," as he saw the open book.
Then he began to wander. I heard him say this: "He seems to halt. Yes! but it is only seeming."
Then for ten minutes he was very still. Then he gave an uneasy movement, and half raised himself.
"He is going," said the doctor.
Suddenly he opened his eyes. "All three," he said. They were his last words. The curate began to say a prayer; we none of us interrupted him. There was a convulsive movement, and all was over. The doctor went out. We cried like children by the bed.
RECAPITULATION
I had rather intended to say no more; to let the Life speak for itself. I had imagined that a moral destroyed, rather than enhanced, the effect of a story; that a descriptive catalogue rather interfered with one's appreciation of a picture than otherwise; but a friend to whom I showed my little collection, and to whose opinion I greatly defer, expressed surprise at the abruptness of the close. "You seem to leave the end," he said, "tangled and unravelled; one wants the threads just gathered together again." So I will try and discharge this task.
The difficulty is not to arrive at a deterministic theory of life for most men. Anyone who will take things as he finds them, and fairly come to a conclusion about them, not hampered by fetters of authority or tradition, but independently arriving at his own solution, must inevitably arrive at this; there is no logical escape. But the difficulty lies in the application of this determinism to life. So many people persist in saying that it is only a logical account of the existence of the world, only an ontological solution, not a life-philosophy. The best man, who can not confute it, only says mournfully that it will not do for an ethical system; nothing good can come out of it in practice.
The writer is one of those who believe that truth, however painful, is essentially practical. That truth when seen must be applied, must be worked out into life, is his cherished idea. But he, as much as anyone, has felt the usual (alas!) and bitter consequences of determinism; has seen the victim of the thought sit, as it were, with his hands tied; has seen the determinist sink into temporary fatalism, and has seen effort relaxed and ideals growing hourly dim.
He was beginning to suffer in this manner himself when, at Cambridge, he met Arthur; and met in him not only an inspiring acquaintance, an encouraging friend, but a man who was far ahead of him on the same path where he had only ventured to imprint a few trembling footsteps, and then draw back appalled at the sombre prospect. Arthur was like one further up the pass, who had turned a corner, so to speak, and saw the road plain.
He found a thoroughgoing determinist who was still faithful to the voice of duty, still striving upwards; he found that his theories, far from giving him a sense of gloom and hopelessness, rather bestowed on him a frank expectant habit of soul; a readiness to weigh circumstances, however small, to overlook nothing as trivial or common; and a serene trust in an invisible all-ruling Father (παντοκράτωρ, as he used to say), who really was ordering the world in the smallest details when He seemed to be ordering it least, and who wished the best for His children—far better than they had insight to wish for themselves, and who thus could be trusted not to be inflicting any useless blow, any meaningless torment, even when things looked blackest and the world most unintelligible.
I do not maintain that Arthur never flagged or swerved from this; the letter on page 164 will show it was far otherwise: but this was his deliberate habit of mind; this was the ideal that he was faithful to, with all allowances for a humanity, and a humanity sorely tried.
He was an ambitious man by nature; I am sure of that: that he conquered. He was indolent by nature, averse to detail, and motion, and change: that he conquered by deliberate rough travel. He disliked new people: that he set himself to conquer. In the prime of his life, being of a nature to which health and ordinary enjoyments of life were very delightful and precious, death was suddenly and hopelessly set before him; he loved and was disappointed; and the one charge that was given him, the education of his friend's boy, was overwhelmed and ended in a moment by a little act of boyish carelessness. Keenly sensitive to physical pain, the last years of his life were racked with it, every week, almost every day.
Such are the materials of a life. Apparently self-regarding in idea, and prematurely cut short in fact, it has left results on a small circle of friends that will never die. And why?
Because, in spite of every trial and every rebuff, he preserved at heart a serenity that was not thoughtlessness, a cheerfulness that was not hilarity, a humour that was not cynicism. The biographer has thought fit to give expression to his darkest hours, and they were not few; they may appear in the life to have the preponderance, but he would not cut them out. No life is inspiriting that is not occasionally weak and faulty. What would David be without his sins; Peter, without his fall? There was no depth of the despairing spirit, I say it deliberately, that Arthur had not sounded—and he had not been, as it were, lowered—deaf, blind, and unconscious—into the abysmal deeps; it was with an eye alert to mark every ledge of the dark walls, an ear quick to catch the smallest murmur from below, a sense keen to experience and record every new depth gained, every qualm of heart-sickness encountered. Naturally prone to serious contemplation of life's enigmas, there was not one that life did not bring with shocking vividness to his touch.
Further, I believe that some will be found to say, "The teaching of this life is so selfish; it is all self-contemplation, miserable self-weariness, gloomy reveries bounded by the narrowest horizons. If ever he turns to others' evil case, it is with the melancholy satisfaction of the hypochondriac, who finds his own symptoms repeated with less or greater variations in others' cases." To these I could only reply, "You have totally misunderstood the life. It is not a selfish one. The deepest self-communings are necessary to one who would know human nature, because self is the only human creature that can be known with a perfect intimacy. 'No one but yourself can tell,' as Arthur once wrote to me, 'what ruled the lines in your face.'" But Arthur, above all others that I have ever known, had passed from the particular to the general. Plato's praise of love was based on the principle that the philosopher passed from the love of one fair form to the love of abstract beauty. The fault is that so many never pass the initiation. Arthur did cross the threshold; he passed from the contemplation of his own suffering to the consideration of the root of all human suffering. He found his best comfort in doing all he could (and God allowed him little latitude) to alleviate the sufferings of others. I have letters from various of his friends, dealing, with his firm and faithful touch, with crisis after crisis in their lives. No one who had trusted him with his confidence once, ever shrank from doing it again. I am forced to admit that, far more than many of his authorized brethren, he discharged the priestly office. He was self-constituted, or rather called, to be a priest of God.
The great mystery of effectiveness he never solved, I think, quite to his own satisfaction. His life has solved it for me ever since I was able to regard it en masse. It was a great puzzle to him what to make, for instance, of infants who died at or before birth. "'Saved from this wicked world' is such a horrible statement in such cases," he used to say. "If that is the best that can happen to us, what can we make of life?" And so he was always very urgent about the influence of example opposed to the influence of precept. "My father," he said to me, "once spoke to me rather sharply about not attending at family prayers. He did not attend very closely himself. I was an observant boy, and I knew it. The very fact that he should have noticed me proved it. So all I felt was that prayer didn't matter really, but that, however I felt, I must behave as if I was devout; whereas, if he had prayed in rapt fervency, unconscious of anything, I should have been ashamed, I think, to wander. I should have perceived the beauty of prayer. Ah, my dear friend," he added, "never speak to a child about a thing unless you know you always do it yourself, and even then with extreme and tender caution."
Acting then, on this principle, he did not give us lectures and rules: but we saw how a man was meeting life, not shirking any of its problems, and beset by most of its trials. And we wondered what was the secret spring of his well-being; and when we came to examine it, we were amazed to find that it was in the strength of principles resulting from a rigid and logical classification of phenomena.
So much is said nowadays about the dissidence of the spiritual and intellectual worlds. Many people, conscious of intellect, are yet strangely at sea when they are told of their spiritual side. There appears to be nothing within them answering to that description. There are, indeed, certain qualities or characteristics, but those seem not to exist independent of their intellectual and physical economies, but to permeate both. They do not understand that what is meant is the faculty of emotional generalization. That they could understand. Arthur arrived at his principles purely through logical methods and intellectual operations. He could not, he often confessed, separate the intellectual and the spiritual. From some expressions, however, which dropped from him in a letter, part of which is given on p. 209, I am vaguely aware that he was reconsidering that point (and it has been suggested to me that such an explanation will suit his last words); but, in any case, he was of the greatest possible comfort to us who knew him, because he was an instance (the only one) of a man who had arrived at his principles from a purely intellectual basis.
And let me, finally, correct the impression, if I have by chance, in developing this latter point, given any colour to the idea that his character was hard, logical, unaffectionate, unloving. Arthur was the tenderest, most sympathetic, most loving soul I have ever met; nothing else would explain his influence. He was not demonstrative, and was often misunderstood. His tendency was to dissimulate the strongest of his feelings. Yet I have seen him turn red and pale at the sight of a letter in the handwriting of a friend he loved; I have seen him literally tremble with emotion when Edward Bruce, in his impulsive boyish way, would, with eager demonstrative affection, throw his arm round his neck, or take his hand. The tears gather in my eyes as I write, when I recall a few words of his a few days before he died, when he called me to him. It was after one of those terrible paroxysms of pain. He was very white and feeble, but smiling. He took my hand, and said, "What a wonderful thing it is that pain takes away one's power of thinking of anything except people. It hurries one away, somewhere, deep, deep down; yet one can bear to touch the bottom. But when loving anyone carries one away, one goes down deeper and deeper, and yet feels that there is a fathomless gulf beyond."