Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge | Page 9

of me.
Justice, mercy, and truth, and all the rest of it."

It was certainly true; their friendship ended. I find it hard to realize that Arthur would
voluntarily have abandoned him; and yet I find passages in his letters, and occasional
entries in his diaries, which seem to point to some great stress put upon him, some
enormous burden indicated, which he had not strength to attempt and adopt. "May God
forgive me for my unutterable selfishness; it is irreparable now," is one of the latest
entries on that day in his diary. I conceive, perhaps, that his outraged ideal was too strong
for his power of forgiveness. He was very fastidious, always.
How deep the blow cut will be shown by these following extracts:
"I once had my faith in human nature rudely wrecked, and it has never attempted a long
voyage again. I hug the coast and look regretfully out to sea; perhaps the day may come
when I may strike into it ... believe in it always if you can; I do not say it is vanity ... the
shock blinded me; I can not see if I would."
And again--
"Moral wounds never heal; they may be torn open by a chance word, by a fragment of
print, by a sentence from a letter; and there we have to sit with pale face and shuddering
heart, to bleed in silence and dissemble it. Then, too, there is that constant dismal feeling
which the Greeks called [Greek: upoulos]: the horrible conviction, the grim memory
lurking deep down, perhaps almost out of sight, thrust away by circumstance and action,
but always ready to rise noiselessly up and draw you to itself."
"'A good life, and therefore a happy one,' says my old aunt, writing to me this morning; it
is marvellous and yet sustaining what one can pass through, and yet those about
you--those who suppose that they have the key, if any, to your heart--be absolutely
ignorant of it. 'He looks a little tired and worn: he has been sitting up late;' 'all young men
are melancholy: leave him alone and he will be better in a year or two,' was all that was
said when I was actually meditating suicide--when I believe I was on the brink of
insanity."
All these extracts are from letters to myself at different periods. Taking them together,
and thus arranged, my case seems irresistible; still I must concede that it is all theory--all
inference: I do not wholly know the facts, and never shall.
CHAPTER IV
I found the first hint that occurs to indicate the lines of his later life, in a letter to his
father, written in his last week at Cambridge. In the Classical Tripos Arthur contrived to
secure a second; in the translations, notably Greek, we heard he did as well as anybody;
but history and other detailed subjects dragged him down: it was an extraordinarily
unequal performance.
His father, being ambitious for his sons, and knowing to a certain extent Arthur's ability,
was altogether a good deal disappointed. He had accepted Arthur's failure to get a
scholarship or exhibition, not with equanimity, but with a resolute silence, knowing that

strict scholarship was not his son's strong point, but still hoping that he would at least do
well enough in his Tripos to give him a possibility of a Fellowship.
Arthur would himself have been happier with a Fellowship than with any other position,
but the possibility did not stimulate him to work with that aim in view. He wrote:
"Existence generally is so extremely problematical, that I can not consent to throw away
three birds in the hand for one which I do not believe to be in the bush--my present life
for a doubtful future provision. I think I am ambitious after the event. Every normal
human being ought to be capable either of strong expectation or strong disappointment,
according as the character lives most in the future or in the past. Those capable of both
generally succeed and are unhappy men; but an entire want of ambition argues a low
vitality. If a man tells me loftily he has no ambition, I tell him I am very sorry for him,
and say that it is almost as common an experience as having no principles, and often
accompanying it, only that people are generally ashamed to confess the latter."
On his appearing in the second class, his father wrote him rather an indignant letter,
saying that he had suspected all along that he was misusing his time and wasting his
opportunities, but that he had refrained from saying so because he had trusted him; that
his one prayer for his children was that they might not turn out useless, dilettante, or
frivolous, selfish men. "I