Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  We went to Addington for a few weeks at Easter, and the sojourn then was, according to my mother, of the nature of a picnic. As a matter of fact there was not really anything very picnicky about it; the drawing-room, it is true, was not used, but we managed with the anteroom, the Chinese room, the schoolroom, my father’s study and her own room, by way of sitting-rooms, and perhaps part of the household remained at Lambeth. But to her vivid sense, to her delight of using all things to the utmost, this constituted a very informal way of life, for when she was running a house, everything must be, in its own scale, spick-and-span and complete. You might, for instance, dine on bread and cheese and a glass of beer, but the cheese must be the best cheese, the bread of the crispest, and the beer must be brimmed with froth. Short of completeness and perfection, whatever your scale was, you were roughing it, you were picnicking. She did not at all dislike picnicking, but It Was picnicking, and why not say so? For herself, with her passion for people (like Dr. Johnson she thought that one green field was like another green field, and would prefer a walk down Fleet Street) she would sooner have stopped in London, but my father needed this break in the six months of his busy London life. But to his volcanic energy and vitality, such a holiday was of the nature of a compulsion and a medicine rather than an enjoyment. In the long run he was refreshed by it, but the getting out of the shafts was always trying to him, and usually resulted in a fit of depression, such as I have described before. When he was very hard worked, he never suffered from this; it was when he was obliged to rest that these irritable glooms descended on him, and I particularly connect them, during these years, with the Easter holiday. All the time, as he once told me when talking of them, he would be struggling and agonizing to get his head out of those deep waters, but was unable to until the nervous reaction had spent itself, and the pendulum swung back again. By now we children had begun to understand that, and though this mood of his was a damper on mirth and generally an awful bore, we no longer feared him when he was like that but “carried on,” very sorry for him, and sincerely hoping he would be better next day. The person who felt it most was undoubtedly my mother: he was miserable and she knew it, and knew the pathos of his futile strivings to get rid of it, and her picnic was a melancholy and anxious one till that cloud lifted. Often, however, she and my father went to Florence for Easter, where they stayed with Lady Crawford at the Villa Palmieri, and of all the holiday sojournings it was that which he enjoyed most keenly. He was absolutely indefatigable where churches or sacred art were concerned, because of the cause which had inspired painter and architect. To him the achievement for which the architect builded, the sculptor chiselled, the musicians composed, and the artist painted, must be the palpable and direct service of God, and just as he would gaze in genuine rapture at a second-rate Madonna, whereas a portrait or even a Primavera would leave him cold, so, without any knowledge or appreciation of music he would listen to Handel’s Messiah, while a Wagner opera, or a symphony by Beethoven, had he ever listened or heard such, would have been meaningless to him. Of ecclesiastical architecture, again, its periods or its characteristics, he had a profound knowledge, but whether a house was Elizabethan or Georgian was a matter of much smaller interest to him. He did not truly care, to put it broadly, who built a column and when and how, or painted a picture and when and how, so long as those monuments of art were only directed towards human and æsthetic enjoyment. The natural works of God, the woods at Addington, the mountain ranges of Switzerland, he admiringly loved as being in themselves direct divine expressions, but if the work of man insinuated itself, he liked it in proportion as it was religious in its aims.

  One exception he made, and that was in favour of Greek and Roman antiquities and the language of the classics, and I am sure he enjoyed making a translation of some English poem into Virgilian hexameters or Sophoclean iambics fully as much as he enjoyed the original version. Latin and Greek, especially Greek, were to him only a little below the Pentecostal tongues: of all human achievements they were the noblest flowers. To him a classical education was the only education: he rated a boy’s abilities largely by his power to translate and to imitate classical lore, and to wander himself in these fields was his chiefest intellectual recreation. He loved to unpack, so to speak, some Greek word compounded with prepositions, and insist on the value of each, overloading the dissected members of it with meanings that never conceivably entered into the mind of its author, and his own style in weighed and deliberate composition was founded on the model of these interpretations; the sentences were overloaded with meanings beyond what the language could bear; he packed his phrases till they creaked. But highest of all in the beloved language, with a great gulf fixed below it and above the masterpieces of classical literature, came the New Testament, which he studied and interpreted to us as under a microscope. That eager reverence was like a lover’s adoration: his interpretations might be fanciful, and such as he would never have made in any other commentings, but here his search for hidden meanings in simple phrases had just that quality of tender and exquisite scrutiny. The subject of this study was his life, and the smallest of its details must be searched out, and squeezed to yield a drop more of sacred essence.... On any other topic he would have criticized the Hellenistic Greek, as falling far below classical standards, but, as it was, he accepted it as verbally inspired, and no enquiry was too minute. Rather curiously, collations of differing texts did not engage him, nor did he touch on Higher Criticism. The text of his own Greek Testament was all that concerned him, there was the whole matter, and on to it he turned the full light of his intellect and his enthusiasm, without criticism but minutely and lovingly poring over it, as it actually and traditionally was.

  From Monday morning until Saturday night these weeks at Addington, especially at Christmas, were to us a whirl of delightful activities from the moment that chapel service and Bible lesson were over in the morning, till evening service at ten o’clock at night. But Sunday was a day set so much apart from the rest that it hardly seemed to belong to Addington at all. There was early communion in the chapel, unless it was celebrated after the eleven o’clock service in church; morning service in church was succeeded by lunch, lunch by a slow family walk during which my father read George Herbert to us; the walk was succeeded by a Bible reading with him, and then came tea. After tea was evening service in church, and after Sunday supper, he read the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress aloud until we had compline in chapel. To fill up intervals we might read certain Sunday books, the more mature successors of Bishop Heber and The Rocky Island and Agathos. No shoal of relaxation emerged from the roaring devotional flood; if at meals the conversation became too secular, it was brought back into appropriate channels; there was even a set of special graces before and after meals to be used on Sunday, consisting of short versicles and responses quite bewildering to any guest staying in the house. No games of any sort or kind were played, not even those which like lawn-tennis or golf entailed no labour on the part of servants. However fair a snow covered Fir Mount, no toboggan that day made its perilous descent, and though the pond might be spread with delectable ice no skates profaned its satin on the Day of Rest. The Day of Rest in fact, owing chiefly to this prohibition on reasonable relaxation, became a day of pitiless fatigue. We hopped, like “ducks and drakes,” from one religious exercise to another, relentlessly propelled.

  To my father, I make no doubt, with his intensely devotional mind, this strenuous Sunday was a time of refreshment. It is perfectly true that he often went to sleep in church, and if on very hot Sundays, the walk was abandoned, and we read aloud in turns from some saintly chronicle, under the big cedar on the lawn, not only he, but every member of the family, except the reader (we read in turn), went to sleep too. But he dozed off to the chronicle of St. Francis and came back to it again; nothing jarred. Thus ordered, Sunday was a perfect day for one of his temperament; no work was done on it, no week-day breeze ruffled its devotional stillness, but his appreciation of it postulated that all o
f us should share to the full in its spiritual benefits. He did not believe that for himself Sunday could be spent more profitably, and so we were all swept, regardless of its private effect on us, into the tide. What he did not allow for was that on other temperaments, that which so aptly fulfilled the desires of his own produced a totally different impression. That day, for us, was one of crushing boredom and unutterable fatigue. Certain humorous gleams occasionally relieved the darkness, as when the devil entered into me on one occasion when Lives of the Saints came to me by rotation, for reading aloud. There was the serene sunlight outside the shade of the cedar, positively gilding the tennis court, there was the croquet lawn starving for the crack of balls, and there too, underneath the cedar was my somnolent family, Hugh with swoony eyes, laden with sleep, Nellie and Maggie primly and decorously listening, their eyelids closed, like Miss Matty’s, because they listened better so, and my father, for whom and by whom this treat was arranged, with head thrown back and mouth nakedly open.... And then came Satan, or at least Puck.... I read four lines of the page to which we had penetrated, then read a few sentences out of the page that had already been read. Deftly and silently, but keeping a prudent finger in the proper place, I turned over a hundred pages, and droned a paragraph about a perfectly different saint. Swiftly turning back I read some few lines out of the introduction to the whole volume, and then, sending prudence to the winds, found the end of the chapter on which we were engaged. I gave them a little more about St. Catherine of Siena, a little more from the introduction, then in case anyone happened to be awake read the concluding sentences of the chapter about St. Francis and stopped.

  The cessation of voice caused Nellie to awake, and with an astounding hypocrisy, subsequently brought home to her, she exclaimed:

  “Oh, how interesting!”

  Her voice aroused my father. There we all were sitting under the cedar, reading about St. Francis. Hugh had awoke, Maggie had awoke: it was a peaceful devotional Sunday afternoon.

  “Wonderful!” he said. “Is that the end, Fred?”

  “Yes, that’s all,” said Fred.

  Fred was also a passive actor in another Sunday humour. My father had noticed in me a certain restlessness at readings, some twitching of the limbs at a Bible lesson, or whatnot, and in order to confirm me in the right practice of the day, had looked out a book in his library about Sunday, which he recommended me to read, without having sufficiently ascertained the contents of it himself. Judge of my rapture when I found a perfectly convincing chapter, showing how the sad, joyless, unrelaxed English Sunday was purely an invention of Puritan times. My father had given me the book to convince me of the antique sanctity of the Addington use: the book told me that from the patristic times onwards, no such idea of Sunday as we religiously practised had ever entered into the heads of Christians, or had ever dawned on the world until the sourness of Puritans robbed the day of its traditional joy. It had been a day of festa, of relaxation from the tedious round of business, and all the faithful dressed themselves in their best clothes for fun, and village sports were held, and hospitality enlivened the drab week. Sure enough they went to church in the morning, and after that abandoned themselves to jollity. With suppressed giggles I flew to my mother’s room to tell her the result of this investigation, and she steered a course so wonderful that not even then could I chart it. Her sympathetic amusement I knew was all mine, but somehow she abandoned no whit of her loyalty to my father’s purpose in giving me the book. I had imagined myself (with rather timorous glee, for which I wanted her support) pronouncing sentence on his Sunday upon the very evidence which he had given me to judge it by, but some consummate stroke of tact on my mother’s part made all that to be quite out of the question. How she did it I have no idea, but surely the very test of tact lies in the fact that you don’t know how it is done. Tact explained ceases to be tact, and degenerates into reason on the one hand or futility on the other. Certainly I never confronted my father with this evidence, and Sunday went on precisely as usual. Sometimes Hugh and I played football in the top passage, but you mightn’t kick hard for fear of detected reverberations through the skylight of the central hall.

  There is a play by some Italian dramatist, which I once saw Dusé act: perhaps it is by D’Annunzio, but I cannot identify it. In the second act anyhow, the curtain went up on Dusé, alone on the stage. She wrote a letter, she put some flowers in a vase without speech, and still without speech, she opened a window at the back, and leaned out of it. She paused long with her back to the audience, and then turning round again said, half below her breath, “Aprile.” After that the action of the play proceeded but not till, in that long pause and that one word, she had given us the magic of spring.... Not otherwise, but just so, were those Addington holidays, when I was sixteen and seventeen, my April, and thus the magic of spring in those seasons of Christmas and Easter and September came to me. Bulbs and seeds buried in my ground began to spike the earth, and the soft buds and leaves to burst their woolly sheaths. It was the time for the rooting up, in that spring-gardening, of certain weeds; it was the time also of planting the seedlings which should flower later, and of grafting fresh slips on to a stem that was forming fibre in the place of soft sappy shoots. Above all it was the time of receiving more mature and indelible impressions, and there is scarcely anything which in later life I have loved or hated, or striven for or avoided that is not derivable from some sprig of delight or distaste planted during those seasons of first growth. Childhood and earlier boyhood were more of a greenhouse, where early growths were nurtured in a warmed windlessness; now they were pricked out and put in the beds, where they had to learn the robustness which would make them resist the inclemencies of a less sheltered life. Some died, scorched by the sun or battered by the rain; the rest, I suppose, had enough vitality to make sun and rain alike serve their growth. Above all it was the time of learning to enjoy, no longer in the absolutely unreflective manner of a child, but in a manner to some extent reasoned and purposed. Some kind of philosophy, some conscious digestive process began to stir below mere receptivity. I looked not only at what the experiences with which I fed the lusty appetites of life were at the moment, but at the metabolism they would undergo when I had eaten them. But of all mental habits then forming, the one for which I most bless those lovely years, was the habit of enjoyment, of looking for (and finding) in every environment some pleasure and interest. That habit, no doubt, with all our games, our collections, our scribblings had long been churned at: about now it solidified. And by far the most active and assiduous of external agencies that caused this — the dairymaid, so to speak, who was never weary of this magnificent churning — was my mother.

  CHAPTER IX. THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF

  THE dreadful “season of snows and sins” was already beginning to approach again: in other words more scholarship examinations at Oxford and Cambridge began to pile their fat clouds on the horizon. These were the snows: the sins were my own in not taking any intelligent interest in the subjects which would make them “big with blessing.” Certainly I had been sent to school to learn Latin and Greek among other things, but the other things were so vastly more interesting. I was usually about tenth in any form where I happened to be, and I remember a very serious letter from my father (after a series of consecutive tenths) saying that he had always observed that boys who were about tenth, could always do much better if they chose: boys lower in a form were those who often tried very hard, but were deficient in ability. I do not think I was so diabolically minded as to consider this a reason for doing worse, but certainly I declined from that modest eminence where boys who could do better pleasantly sunned themselves, and sank half a dozen places lower. By one of those wonderful coincidences which from time to time nourish starving optimists, it so happened that in the summer of 1884 an unusually large number of the sixth left school, and thus seventeen promotions were made out of the fifth form, the very last of which consisted of myself. With all the dignity and decoration of six
th form upon me, I had somehow justified my existence again, and the stigma of being seventeenth was swallowed up in the glory of being in the sixth. I had a study of my own, instead of being one of a herd in a classroom. I could make small boys fill my brewing kettle for me and run errands, and I could, without incurring criticism, wear my cap at the back of my head.