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.
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 had hoped that whatever they engaged in my sons would say, 'If this is worth doing, it is worth doing well.' I did not want them to say, 'I mean to work in order to be first in this or that, to beat other people, to court success'—I do not suspect you of that—but to say, 'I mean to do my best, and if I am rewarded with honours to accept them gratefully, as a sign that my endeavours have been blest.' I fear that in your case you have done what pleased yourself—sucked the honey of the work, or tried to; that always ends in bitterness. You were capable of taking the higher ground; it seems to me that you have taken neither—and indecision in such matters is the one thing that does not succeed either in this world or the next; the one thing which the children of this world unanimously agree with the children of light in despising and censuring.