MEMOIRS OF ARTHUR HAMILTON-f
Tins interesting, though unsatisfactory, volume belongs to an exceedingly small class of books ; so small, that we can remember only two works cast in an exactly similar mould,— The Life of a Man, by the Rev. George Gilfillan, and The Pelican Papers, by Mr. J. Ashcroft Noble. In spite of names and dates and a number of very ingenious devices which give to the narrative an air of life-likeness and fact, it will be clear to all careful readers that "Arthur Hamilton, B.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge," is an imaginary person, and that the elaborate biographical machinery—the anecdotes of his child- hood, the extracts from his letters and diaries, and the reminis- cences of his conversation—is simply a vehicle for the setting- forth and discussion of certain views of life and of what may be called the art of living. A work written on such a plan has certain obvious advantages. "A tale may reach him who a sermon flies," and the slightest framework of narra- tive will attract readers who would be repelled by, or, at any rate, not strongly drawn to, a volume of formal disquisition. Man is always so supremely interesting to man, that any in- tellectual statement gains vividness and force for most people when it has a personality behind it,—when we can say not merely, "This is a thought," but, "This was the thought of A or B." Then, too, every thoughtful person has a store of embryonic ideas, seed-thoughts, which he feels might be fertile if they could only find their right nidus, though as yet they are only seeds which, if prematurely developed by being worked up
into an elaborated essay, may lose all their vitality, but which, if given to the world as fragments from letters or talk, may
• In Dorothy Worilsworth's Grasmere Journal the following °emirs :—April 21th, 18C2 —" We walked in the evening to 14(181. Coleridge and I lingered behind. We all stood to look at Glow-worm Rock—a primrose that grew therp. and just looked out ou the ro id from its own sheltered bow.r." The Primrose had disappeared when the Fenwiek note was dictated. and the Glow. worms have almost deserte I the district ; but the Bock is unmistakable, and is one of the most interesting of the spots connected with Wordsworth in the Like District —RD.
• Memoirs ty Arthur Hamilton. B.A. By his Friend, Christopher Carr. London : Regan Paul, Troieh, and Co.
have a chance of germinating. For these and other Aasons, the vehicle of fictitious biography is useful and attractive; but it has its defects. The life of an imaginary man, howsoever skilful and interesting the creation may be, can never do for us the same service that can be done by the life of the homeliest and most ordinary real man. A memoir of some actual Smith or joins, which tells us how the subject of it encountered some of the greater or lesser pro- blems of life, and what solution of them he found moat satisfac- tory, is really helpful, because what has been done once by one man may be done again by us ; but a memoir of some imaginary "Arthur Hamilton," whose difficulties, questionings, victories, and defeats are things which—in the special form given in the narrative—may never have entered into any real life at all, can- not possibly be helpful in the same way. Such a book may be full of stimulating thought, but it is not thought which has undergone the test of translation into actual life,—only into the artificial life of a puppet, whose strings may be pulled at will by the unseen operator; and, therefore, we have thrown upon us the entire task of testing it for ourselves.
These disadvantages will show themselves most distinctly in the book with the most ambitious aims ; And the aims of the
present writer—whom we shall call Mr. Carr, though we sus- pect it to be a pen-name—are very ambitions indeed. His book may be best described as a plea for the life of reflection as con- trasted with the life of action, combined with the sub-purl lose of advocating a certain theory of determinism which is never very clearly defined. The latter object is, however, subsidiary ; the former gives to the book its real significance. After noting in his preface the obvious fact that the first question asked by the world concerning a man is,—" What has he done F" and ex- pressing the opinion that this is an unsatisfactory test of greatness, Mr. Carr goes on to say :—
"There is a temperament called the Reflective, which works slowly and with little apparent result. The very gift of expression is a practical gift : with the gift of expression the reflective man becomes a writer, a poet, an artist ; without it, he is unknown. The reflective temperament, existing without any particular gift of expression, wants an exponent in these times. Reflection is lost sight of ; philanthropy is all the rage. I assert that for a man to devote himself to a reflective life, that is, in the eyes of the world, an indolent one, is often a great sacrifice, and even on that account, if not essentially, valuable. Philanthropy is generally distressing, often offensive, some- times disastrous. Nothing, in this predetermined world, fails of its effect, as nothing is without its cause. There is a call to reflection which a man must follow, and his life then becomes an integral link in the chain of circumstance. Any intentional life affects the world : it is only the vague drifting existences that pass it by."
There is in these sentences something that is true, something that is half-true, something that is false. That a man must follow a call to reflection is a half-truth, or rather it is true in certain circumstances and false in others ; that a life is essentially valuable simply because it is a life of sacrifice is wholly false, for sacrifice demands a justifying object. But we are less concerned with the passage in itself than with its bearing upon Mr. Carr's work, which may be described as an expansion of this argument in a concrete form. To decline deliberately participation in the great life of the world for the sake of nurturing the reflective powers may or may not be a mistake, but we do not think that even Mr. Carr would deny that the man who makes this "great refusal" undertakes an immense responsibility. "Arthur Hamilton" did undertake it, and though Mr. Carr has been able to pull the strings of his puppet at will, we cannot think that his presentation of his hero's career vindicates the undertaking. We are not judging by the vulgar canons of criticism which Mr. Carr repudiates,—perhaps a little too unguardedly. We do not say that "Arthur Hamilton's" life was a failure because he did not write a great book, or invent a machine, or even found a prosperous business ; but because, even considered as a self- contained life, it seems to lack harmony, proportion, completeness.
When we have got through more than two-thirds of the volume, and reached a time when something of stable serenity and assured self-command should certainly have been attained, or, at any rate, descried clearly as attainable conditions, we have a letter in which he confesses that he had deliberately resolved upon suicide. He has for years carried about with him a little flask containing a small inner vial of prussic acid, the contents of which he determines to swallow on a certain morning; but on touching the secret spring which opens the flask, he finds that the little vial has been broken and that the poison has evaporated. Then follows this carious comment upon the situation :—
"I saw at once that God intended it not to be at my tinte—tiiii was very clear ; and after considerable reflection and a wakeful night, I came to the conclusion that my divine Impulse did not lead me to adopt a coarse of action, but only to avoid a course—the fact which I developed in my letter fo you. And then came the resolve, tardy and weak at first, but gaining ground, warning me that per- haps (!) it was an inglorious flight ; though I knew it was pardon- able, I felt as if God might meet me with, 'Not wrong, but if you are really bent on the highest, you must do better than this.' I might, I felt, be losing a great opportunity—the opportunity of facing a hope- less situation, a thing I had never done."
The note of exclamation in parenthesis is, of course, ours. A dubitating word like " perhaps " applied to the question whether suicide be or be not " inglorious " would be extraordinary in any circumstances, but in "Arthur Hamilton's" circumstances it is simply outrageous, for he is represented as having just undertaken a charge which fettered him to life by the most strongly forged chain of imperative duty. But we will not stay to discuss the question of suicide. The thought in our mind, when we made the quotation, was the obvious difficulty of accepting the character here pourtrayed as an embodiment of the ideal of the reflective life hinted at in our previous quotation from the preface. This is certainly not what we expect to find in a life which is presented to us as an "intentional life," a life which is explicitly contrasted with the "vague drifting exist- ences" which are sterile and resultless. What word but " drift- ing " can we use to describe the action of a man who, having come to a deliberate and final conclusion concerning the fitness of so solemn an action as suicide, suffers the tide of determina- tion to be turned by a miserable trifle like the breaking of a bottle ? It seems to us drifting of the most contemptible kind, —not one whit the less contemptible because the tide happened to turn in the right direction.
This leads us to the feature of the book which we spoke of as subsidiary to its main purpose,—its advocacy or exposition of a vague something, which the author calls "Determinism," but which, if we understand it aright, we should be more in- clined to call "Opportunism." It does not seem to be quite identical either with a Godless fatalism, or with that belief of the simple-minded Christian in a special Providence which makes every incident of life an act of direct Divine volition, but a curious mixture of both. It certainly differs from the former in admitting, not with mere assent, but with active enthusiasm, the idea of duty.; but all the promptings of duty seem to come from the outside, not from within,—from the sugges- tions of divinely appointed circumstance, not from those of a law firmly established in the mind. True, Arthur Hamilton speaks of having an inward monitor, something apparently like the demon of Socrates; but it is a monitor who only decides on the situation of the moment, and who even then never says, "Do this !" but only, "Avoid that!" and his life may most truthfully be described as a life of deliberate waiting upon events with the intention of being determined by them. It is hardly worth while seri- ously to discuss the question whether for any man such a life is a sane, or wholesome, or human one ; indeed, it seems to answer itself so explicitly, that we find ourselves wondering again and again whether we have gone off on the wrong track, and entirely misapprehended Mr. Carr's meaning. Once or twice it has occurred to us that the book may possibly be a covert satire, instead of a eulogistic celebration ; but this is all but impossible, for the sympathetic touch is unmistakeable. Still, it is certain that, so far as the main drift of the volume goes, it is an ethical puzzle, and that is the very thing which such a volume ought not to be.
If, however, we leave the main drift alone, and turn to isolated passages, we find much in the way of fine, elevated thinking and of beautiful writing which does something to relieve the weariness of a toilsome and fruitless quest. We must not quote, though the temptation is very strong, but we refer readers to some passages on music in the second chapter, especially a fine description of the effect of mere sound (p. lb), to the record of a remarkable experience in the fifth chapter, and to various sentences or paragraphs of ethical and other
speculation scattered up and down the book. For reasons that we have given, we do not think that the Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton can be considered a satisfactory work ; but it is interesting, thoughtful, and well written, and is therefore worth reading.
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