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 ([Greek:  pantokrator], 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.