But a casual letter, implying friendliness, a statement of mental or moral difficulties, criticisms on an interesting book, requests involving principles, drew out immediate, full, and interesting replies, of apparently almost unnecessary urgency and affection.  A boy who wrote to him from school about a long and difficult moral case, infinitely complicated by side issues and unsatisfactory action, got back the following day an exhaustive, imperative, and yet pleading reply, indicating the proper action to take.  It is far too private to quote; but for pathos and lucidity and persuasiveness it is a wonderful document.

But this letter of his father’s he did not answer for ten days, till the last day but one before his leaving Cambridge, neither did he mention the subject.  I do not think he gave it a thought, except as one might consider an unpleasant matter of detail which required to be finished sometime.

On that day there arrived another note from his father, recapitulating what he had said, and saying that he supposed from his silence that he had not received the former letter.

To this Arthur returned the following letter: 

“Trinity College, Cambridge,
Thursday evening (early in 1874).

“My Dear Father: 

“I don’t wish you to be under any misapprehension about your former letter.  I did receive it and have been carefully considering the subject; it seemed to me that I could better say what I wished in a personal interview, and I therefore refrained from writing till I came home; but you seem to wish me to make an immediate statement, which I will briefly do.

“You must not think that what I am going to say is in the least disrespectful.  I assure you that I gave your letter, as coming from you, a consideration that I should not have thought of extending for a moment to any other man except one or two friends for whose opinion I have the highest respect; but it is a subject upon which, though I can not exactly say that my mind is made up, yet I see so distinctly which way my disposition lies and in what direction my opinions are capable of undergoing change, that I may say I have very little doubt—­it is, in short, almost a fixed conviction.

“The moment when any one finds himself in radical opposition to the traditions in which he was brought up is very painful—­I can assure you of that—­to himself, as I fear it is painful to those from whom he dissents; and nothing but a desire for absolute sincerity would induce me to enter upon it.  But knowing and trusting you as I do, with a firm and filial confidence in your loving thoughts and candid open-mindedness, I venture to say exactly what I think, believing that it would be a far more essential disrespect to endeavour to blink those opinions.

“Shortly, I do not believe that practical usefulness of a direct kind is the end of life.  I do not believe that success is either a test of greatness nor, as you suggest, an adequate aim for it, though you will perhaps excuse me if I say that the reasons you give seem to me to be only the material view skillfully veiled.