Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge Part 8

"Shrill and angry came the sound of the great horn over earth, her woods and valleys; and terrible was the sound of wailing and lamentation. They prayed to the mountains to fall upon them, and the sea to swallow them up; for they said, 'The secrets of the heart must now be spoken. The Lord and our brethren will hear them. And who can bear the shame? Oh, that we had not turned away!'

"But the winds of the earth, and the voices of the morning, and the waves of the moaning sea drove them shrieking into the judgment hall, and Loki began his accusation.

"And so foul a tale it was, that the men and women folk prayed and cried no longer, but sank down in dull silence for fear. And the stars that listened overhead shrank out of the sky, and the sea stilled his waves to hear, and the very G.o.ds turned pale and red where they sat, to think that vileness and oppression had thriven so upon the earth, and that deeds of shame had fallen so thick, and that they had in no wise hindered it, but rather increased the sum of sin.

"At last the words of Loki were over, and left a burning silence in the hall; and the sun and moon bowed their heads in witness, and Night and Day said 'Yea,' and 'Truth, he has told truth.'

"Then there was a silence, and all looked at Odin as he sat, sunk down and silent, in his chair, staring at the shrinking crowd with eyes of shame, and majesty, and anger.

"And at the last he rose, and he was clad in grey mists from head to foot, with a cloud of gleaming gold upon his head, like the sunlight on white cliffs seen over the sea through the haze of a summer morning.

"But ere he opened his lips to speak, one who sat among the folk arose and came up the hall, walking strongly and briskly like a king, and looking about him with a resolute and cheerful face to left and right.

"And all held their breath to see him pa.s.s, wondering what this thing might be.

"But the man, when he had reached the middle of the hall, cried with a loud voice, 'Hold.'

"And Odin's face gleamed white with rage through the fringes of the mist, and he said between his teeth, 'Who art thou?'

"And at his voice Freya started and blanched, and wrapped herself in her robe.

"And the man said, in a clear loud voice, not defiant, but with a certain royalty about it-

"'Lord Odin, I am he of whom thou spokest but now; he of whom the ancient oracles have spoken, whom thou knowest, and yet knowest not.'

"And Odin said, 'I know thee not; stand aside therefore, that I may judge thee and thy fellows.'

"And there was a hideous silence for a moment while you might count a score, and the twain stared upon each other.

"Then the man said, in the same voice that shook not nor quivered, 'When the G.o.ds shall sit in order to judge the earth, then shall one come out of the midst of created things, through the earth, and walking upon it; and at his coming the pillars of Valhalla shall be snapped, and the everlasting halls shall fall.' And he added other words, which the G.o.ds knew, but not the men or women folk. And when he ceased speaking there blew as it were a whirlwind out of Valhalla, and the high G.o.ds pa.s.sed away, as it were in skeins and fringes of hanging mist. Then there were lightnings and thunders, and the earth shook; and terrible voices were heard in heaven, pa.s.sing to and fro.

And one said, 'Hence, ye that corrupt justice;' and another said, 'The brood of the eagle is come home to roost;' and another, 'The roof is down.' And then there were yells and groans; and among mankind there was weeping and laughter, many smiles and tears, and they cried to the stranger, 'Judge us, thou king of G.o.ds and men.'

But he, turning, said, 'Nay, but ye are judged already.' Then was there peace on earth."

There are, besides these, several unfinished studies, and two or three note-books full of jotted conversations and thoughts of all kinds-a curious mixture.

He carefully left all the publishers' letters which he received in answer to his application. They are twenty-two in number, and are all refusals. They are tied carefully up, and are labeled, "My Literary Career."

All these compositions are the work of about seven years, except some of the poems which were written at Cambridge. The novel was begun and finished in about six weeks, in 1878. It is a poor plot, and mawkish in character, though not without merits of style.

During all this time his interest in writing never flagged. He felt that he had one or two ideas, on which he had a firm grasp, to communicate to the world, and he worked at them incessantly in new and ever-varying forms.

The issue would seem to show that he was not destined to communicate them directly to others-at least, in his own lifetime; and, indeed, no one was quicker at interpreting events than himself. He gave the enterprise a long and severe trial, but the resolute front with which he was met, showed him clearly that it was not to be. It may be that the record of his life, little as he ever imagined it would come before the world, may effect a part of what he himself prepared to do.

Occasionally, for he was of quick sensibilities, throughout this period he felt the bitterness of constant rebuff. The following letter he wrote me shows it:

"I am beginning to feel as if publishers had a code of signals or private marks like freemasonry, which they scribble sometimes, like the concealed marks on bank-notes, on the first page of a ma.n.u.script, so as to spare their brother publishers the trouble of looking through a ma.n.u.script which is below market value. I have never had a ma.n.u.script accepted which has been once refused; and I now eagerly scan the first page, to see if I can discover a wriggling mark in the margin or among the lines which is to tell Smith and Co. that Brown and Son has a very poor opinion of the book now under his consideration."

And again, quite as forcible is a little anecdote with which he begins an unfinished paper on "Genius." The story is, I now believe, his own; though, at the time, I fancied it was adopted:

"There was once a king who sat to listen to the sermon of a great preacher. From minute to minute the great words flowed on, consoling, wounding, helping, condemning, dividing the marrow from the bones; and the king wept and smiled.

"And at the end he sent for the preacher, and said, 'Sir, Christ is the only king; yet let me look at the book from which you made your discourse. The written words, though half despoiled of their grace, may perhaps strike an echo in my soul, which rings yet.'

"And for some time the preacher was unwilling, and parleyed with the king; but at the last he drew out a little pale book with faded characters traced in ink; and he opened it at a well-worn page, and held it out before the king.

"And the king looked, and saw nothing except the crabbed printed lines.

"So he said, 'Not your text-book, sir, but the book from which your arguments are rehea.r.s.ed.'

"'Sire,' said the preacher, 'look but once more upon the book.' And he showed him that four of the words upon the page had a thin line drawn in ink below them. 'That was the writing of my discourse,' he said."

Neither, it must be remembered, was Arthur a first-rate conversationalist. He did not steer a conversation; he could keep the ball going creditably when it was once started; but he never communicated to the circle in which he was that indefinable interest which is so intangible and yet so unmistakable.

The two points that I spoke of that he is always trying to work out in his books are:

(1) the strength of temperament, and the difficulty, almost impossibility, of altering it. "The most we can do is to register change," are the first words of his novel. In this book, the situation of which is not a very unusual one, the hero falls in love with one of two sisters, of rare personal beauty and attractiveness, but no particular intellect. He soon wearies of her, being of that fantastic, weak, discontented spirit which Arthur invariably portrayed in his heroes-drawing it I can not conceive whence-and then falls in love with the other, as he ought to have done all along, being, as she is, fully his match in intellect, and far above him in heart and strength of character. The wife at the crisis of this other love, is killed in a street accident, and remorse ensues.

But the book is a weary one; it bears upon its face the burden of sorrow. "How could this have been otherwise?" is the keynote of the story.

Along with this, and indeed as a development of this central principle, is the tendency to treat and write of "sin" so called, wrong-doing, failure of ideal, as variations of spiritual health, as diseases, the ravages of which it is possible for the skilful hand to palliate, but not to cure; to think of and treat sin as a hideous contagion, which has power for a season, perhaps inherently, to drag souls within its grasp, involve and overwhelm them; and consequently to regard the sinner with the deepest sympathy and pity, but with hardly any anger: in fact, I have known him very seriously offend the company he has been in, I have even heard him stigmatized as of loose principles, from his readiness, even anxiety, to condone a sensual offence in a man of high intellect and brilliant gifts.

"He went wrong," he said very sternly, "through having too much pa.s.sion; and that we can judge him, proves that we have not enough.

Well, we shall both of us have to become different: he to be brought down to the harmonious mean, we to be screwed up to it. It is easy to see which will be the most painful process: as soon as _he_ gets an idea of whither he is being led, how thankful he will be for every pang that teaches him restraint, and purifies; while we-we shall suffer blind wrench after wrench, _stung_ into feeling at any cost, and not till we painfully overtop the barrier shall we guess whither we are going."

I do not mean from this that he thought lightly of sin-far from it. I have seen him give all the physical signs of shrinking and repulsion, at the mention or sight of it. He loathed it with all the agonized disgust of a high, pure, fastidious nature. Its phenomena were without the lurid interest for him which it often possesses even for the sternest moralist.

This loathing had its physical ant.i.type in his horror of the sight or description of bodily disease. I have seen him several times go off into a dead faint at even the bare description of bodily suffering. I went with him once, at his own request, to a seaman's hospital, where there was a poor fellow who had fallen from a mast and been terribly smashed. His legs had both been amputated, and he lay looking terribly white and emaciated with a cradle over the stumps.

He gave us, with great eagerness, an account of the accident, as people in the lower cla.s.ses always will. In the middle, Arthur stepped suddenly to the door and went out. I was not aware at the time of this failing of his, and the move was executed with such deliberate directness that I thought he must have forgotten something. When I went out to the open air I found Arthur, deadly pale, sitting on the gra.s.sy paving-stones of the little yard. He insisted, as soon as he was restored, in going in to wish good-bye to the man, which he accomplished with great difficulty.

But I have already digressed too far, and must return to the main issue.

I am not aware that he ever attempted any theoretical explanation of the intrusion of sin and disorder into the world. He certainly regarded them as emanating practically, in some way that he did not comprehend, from G.o.d.

"I can not for a moment believe that these apparent disorders, physical suffering, and the deeper diseases of the will are the manifestation of some inimical power, and not under G.o.d's direct control. I have had so much experience of even the immediate blessing of suffering, that I am content to take the rest on trust. If I thought there was some ghastly enemy at work all the time, I should go mad. The power displayed is so calm, so far-reaching, and so divine, that I should feel that even if some of us were finally emanc.i.p.ated from it by the working of some superior power, the contest would be so long and terrible and the issues so dire, that the limited human mind could not possibly contemplate it, that hope would be practically eliminated by despair."

In the same connection, he wrote a letter to a friend whose wild and wayward life had injured his health, and wrote in the greatest agony of mind:

"Words are such wretched things, my dear friend, in crises like this.

I can only beg of you, with all my heart, to resolutely set your face against thinking what might have been. Try to feel, I will not say happy, but stronger in the thought that your punishment is atoning for your past every hour. Throw remorse and fear down, if you can; they are only keeping you from G.o.d. Many, too many souls are in a far worse case. Some have more to reproach themselves with. On some it has come with what appears to be fearful injustice. Accept your present condition; brace yourself to bear it. I know how much can be borne. Give your sufferings to G.o.d n.o.bly. Your patience is none the less n.o.ble because you have brought this on yourself; nay, it makes it even n.o.bler....

"Don't say that many worse sinners go unpunished. How can you tell?

How do you know they are not suffering? There are only, I suppose, two men in the world, besides yourself, who know that you are suffering now, and why. G.o.d visited me with suffering once; He has brought me through, and I have never ceased to thank Him for it; and He will bring you through, too, dear friend, I know. 'Pro jucundis aptissima quaeque dabunt di; carior est illis h.o.m.o quam sibi.'

That thought has left me patient, if not glad, in many a bitter hour.... You are never out of my thoughts."

And this letter leads me naturally to the second great principle that pervaded all his writings-"the education of individuals."

"One is inclined to believe that there is a great deal of hopeless irremediable suffering in the world-suffering of a kind that seems wantonly inflicted, purposeless anguish.... That 'regret must hurt and may not heal' is a terrible thought, which, when we get our first glimpse of human anguish, seems almost sickeningly true. But I have seen a great deal lately of such suffering, and it amazes me to discover how _extraordinarily_ rare it is to find the victim taking this view of his case. Either it seems to be a due reward for past action-that 'invita religio' which wells up in the blackest heart, or the sufferer gains a kind of onlook into sweet plains beyond, into which the troubled pa.s.sage is taking him, and which can only thus be reached....