Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Mise en scène, Fluff.”

  Then follows a short analysis, not so fragrantly precious, and then comes comment.

  “All the gutter-elements of Dodo are rehashed and warmed up again with no touch of novelty or improvement or chastisement.... The Lives of the Bad are interesting assuredly... but then they must be living and bad, and these pithless people are only galvanic [galvanized?] and vulgar. We do not wish to be hard on Mr. Benson. Let him give three years to investigating the distinctions between good writing and bad writing, between wit and vulgarity... and then we should not be surprised if he produced something worth finding serious fault with.”

  (2) The (late) Standard. (A column and a half.)

  “Taking the book as a whole, it is an absolute failure. As a rule, the writing is forced and uneasy, the reflections confused or lumbering. The character-drawing is crude and uncertain. It is emphatically one of those books that are sensual, earthly and unwholesome.”

  (3) Vanity Fair. (One column.)

  “Of style he has little: of wit he has no idea... of plot there is less in The Rubicon than is generally to be found in a penny novelette: of knowledge of Society (if he have any) Mr. Benson shows less here than is usually possessed by the nursery-governess; and in grammar he seems to be as little expert as he is in natural science: of which his knowledge seems to equal his smattering of the Classics... ill-named, full of faults, betraying much ignorance of manners and unknowledge [sic] of human nature: a book, indeed, compact of folly and slovenliness: guiltless of any real touch of constructive art; without form and void: a book of which I fear that I have made too much.”

  (4) Daily Chronicle. (One column.)

  “A PUZZLE FOR POSTERITY.

  What will the critical students of, say, two generations ahead, make of the fact that in the spring of 1894 the newspapers of London treated the appearance of a new novel by Mr. E. F. Benson as an event of striking importance in the world of books? The thought that death will rid us of the responsibility for that awkward explanation lends an almost welcome aspect to the grave....

  That The Rubicon is the worst-written, falsest and emptiest of the decade, it would be, perhaps, too much to say. In these days of elastic publishing standards and moneyed amateurs, many queer things are done, and Mr. Benson’s work is a shade better than the poorest of the stuff which would-be novelists pay for the privilege of seeing in print.... A certain interest attaches, no doubt, to the demonstration which it affords that a young gentleman of university training can meet the female amateurs on their own ground, and be every whit as maudlin and absurd as they know how to be. But the sisterhood have an advantage over him in the fact that they can spell.... There are a score of glaring grammatical errors, to say nothing of the clumsiness and incompetency which mark three sentences out of five throughout the book.

  Bad workmanship might be put aside as the fault of inexperience, if the young man had an actual story to tell... but there is nothing of that sort here.... The heroine is from time to time led over to as near [sic] the danger line of decency as the libraries will permit. She is made to utter several suggestive speeches, and once or twice quite skirts the frontier of the salacious...

  (5) The World. (Length unknown: I cannot find the second half of it.)

  “But, alas! Eva Hayes in The Rubicon is quite as vulgar, quite as blatant in the bad taste she is pleased to exhibit on every occasion, as her predecessor Dodo, and is dull beyond description into the bargain. From beginning to end of the two volumes there is not one spark or gleam of humour, or sign of true observation and knowledge of humanity.”

  (6) The (late) St. James’s Budget. (Six columns.)

  “ANOTHER UNBIRCHED HEROINE.

  It might have been supposed that the son of an Archbishop was hardly the sort of person to shine in this kind of literature, but Mr. Benson has taught us better than that. Yet our thanks are due to him for one thing: his book consists of only two volumes; it might have been in three....

  How they Mate in the ‘Hupper Suckles.’...

  Languour, Cigarettes and Blasphemies....

  We conclude this enthusiastic appreciation of Mr. Benson with the bold avowal that we regard The Rubicon as almost truly perfect of its kind, and probably unsurpassable. Any one of Shakespeare’s most remarkable gifts may be found, perhaps, in equal measure in the writings of some minor author; but none ever had such a union of so many as he. So it is with Mr. Benson. A school-girl’s idea of ‘plot,’ a nursery-governess’s knowledge of the world; a gentleman’s ‘gentleman’s’ views of high life; an undergraduate’s sense of style and store of learning; a society paragraphist’s fine feeling and good taste; a man-milliner’s notion of creating character: of each of these you may find plenty of evidence in the novels of the day; but nowhere else — unless it be in Dodo — will they all be found welded into one harmonious unity as they are here!..

  Here is but the most random plucking of these blossoms, but what a nosegay! The flower from Vanity Fair grew of course from the same root as that from the St. James’s Budget, and this is interesting as showing the excellent co-ordination between these different attacks. As a Press-campaign on an infinitesimal scale, I give the foregoing as a classical example. No book, however bad, could possibly have called forth, in itself, so combined an onslaught: every gun in Grub Street was primed and ready and sighted not on The Rubicon at all, but on the author of Dodo. But herein is shown the inexpediency of using up all your ammunition at once, on so insignificant a target. It was clear that if the respectable journals of London made so vigorous an offensive, that offensive had to be final, and the war to be won. Still more clear was it that, if this was not a preconcerted, malicious and murderous campaign not on a particular book, but on an individual, the entire columns of the London Press must henceforth be completely devoted to crushing inferior novels. The Rubicon was but one of this innumerable company: if the Press had determined to crush inferior novels, it was clear that for a considerable time there would be no room in its columns for politics, or sport or foreign news or anything else whatever. Not even for advertisements, unless we regard such attacks as being unpaid advertisements....

  So there was no more firing for the present, and it was all rather reminiscent of the tale of how Oscar Wilde went out shooting, and fell down flat on the discharge of his own gun.

  The Press, after that, had nothing more to shoot at me, for all their heaviest shells had been launched; so the blighted author walked off, as Mr. Mantalini said, as comfortable as demnition, and proceeded vigorously to write The Babe, B.A. and other tranquil works, just as if he had not been blown into a thousand fragments.

  The Press-notices, in fact, from which these six extracts are taken, were a huge lark, and one day I found my father (who so far from summoning family councils on the subject never spoke to me about my public scribblings at all) wide-eyed and absorbed in one of these contemporary revilings. Suddenly he threw his head back with a great shout of laughter, and slapped me on the back. “You’ve got broad enough shoulders to stand that sort of thing,” he said. “Come along, are the horses ready?” and out we went riding. But less humorous were certain private kicks which I got (and no doubt deserved) from less ludicrous antagonists. Of these the chief, and the most respected both then and now, must be nameless. He had been so hot in appreciation and so cordial over Dodo, politely observing in it a “high moral beauty” that I find him (in this same forgotten box) writing to me, before the appearance of The Rubicon, in these words à propos of the growing public taste for realism:

  “The public in the next generation will be what you and one or two others like you choose to make it. Good work in any style gives that style vogue.... It’s ever when you are most serious you are at your best. Work, work and live.”

  Well, I worked and lived like the devil for strenuousness. Then The Rubicon made its appearance, and the same friend took a blistering pen instead:

  “If anything could possibly give a more serious blow to your
chances of future and legitimate success than the publication of The Rubicon, it would be to bring out within three or four years another novel.... It does not seem to me that you have formed the slightest conception of the true situation. It is this. Your first book, from accidental and even parasitic causes — things that were not in the book at all — enjoyed an entirely abnormal and baseless success. You have now to begin again, and for several years the public will certainly not listen to you as a novelist.”

  For the life of me, I cannot now, reading these explosive records over again, determine whether I could have gained anything by paying the smallest attention to them. Logically, it was impossible to do so, for they clearly were directed, as I have said, not against this wretched old Rubicon, but against the person who had dared to capture success with Dodo. Rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me that vituperation so violent could not be regarded as other than comic. If I was a nursery-governess and a man-milliner, and a gentleman’s gentleman it was all very sad, but I was less overwhelmed because I was already terribly interested in the Babe, B.A. and not at all interested in the St. James’s Budget, except as a humorous publication, which the Babe, B.A. tried to be, too. And then there were delightful plans ahead; this autumn Maggie was to come out to Athens with me, and we were to go on to Egypt together, and have a Tremendous Time...,

  CHAPTER XIV. ATHENS AND EGYPT

  SO there was Athens again, with its bugles and its Royal Babies, and its eternal Acropolis, which custom never staled. Maggie jumped into the Hellenic attitude at once, adoring the adorable, filling with the laughter of her serious appreciation the comedy of the life there, enjoying it all enormously, and finding ecstatic human interest in Oriental situations. One day the M.P. for Megalopolis appeared in Athens, and so, of course, I asked him to tea in the Grand Hotel, and Maggie put in some extra lessons in modern Greek with the English vice-consul, in order that a tongue-tied female should not mar the entertainment. The M.P.’s remarks were mostly unintelligible to her, and these I translated back for her benefit, and if she could find a phrase that fitted she slowly enunciated it, and if not she said to him, syllable by syllable, “I should like to see your wife and children, but we are going to Egypt.” All the “circles” in Athens embraced at once her cordial and eager humanity. She sketched all morning, and when I came to the rendezvous, there would be a dozen young Greek urchins round her canvas, to whom, as she washed in a lucent sky, she made careful and grammatical remarks.... She captivated the heart of the archaeologists, and Dr. Dörpfeld who had proved himself so fatal to the theories of the British School at Megalopolis, addressed his most abstruse arguments to her as he announced that “die Enneakrounos, ich habe gewiss gefunden” when he gave his out-of-door lectures. The English Minister, Sir Edwin Egerton, used to wrap her shawl round her, as she left the Legation after dinner, saying, “Now you look like a Tanagra figure,” and the Queen asked her in strict confidence, whether the English aristocracy really behaved as her brother said they behaved in that odd book called Dodo. The answer to that was given in a performance we got up, ostensibly for the amusement of the English governesses in Athens at Christmas, of the Duchess of Bayswater. Of course we got it up primarily because we wanted to act, and then it grew to awful proportions. The English Mediterranean Fleet happened to come into the Piraeus about then, and Admiral Markham asked if a contingent of two hundred blue-jackets or so might stand at the back of the English governesses. On which, the style of the entertainment had to be recast altogether, and we bargained that, if they came the performance should consist of two parts. The first part should be supplied by sailors, who would dance hornpipes, and sing songs, and the second part should consist of The Duchess of Bayswater. That was agreed, and we engaged a large public hall.

  Then Regie Lister who was a Secretary of Legation, let slip to the Crown Princess that we were getting up an entertainment for (and with) sailors and English governesses, and she, under promise of discretion as regards her relatives, was allowed to be one of the English governesses. With truly Teutonic perfidiousness, she informed all the Kings and Queens then in Athens what was going on, and just as the curtain was about to go up for The Duchess of Bayswater a message came from the palace that the entire host of royalties was then starting to attend it. And so there was a row of Kings and Queens and ten rows of English governesses, and a swarm of English sailors. But we refused to cut out a topical allusion to the Palace bugles.

  And at precisely this point, the epoch of those absurd theatricals, the sparkle and comedy of Athenian existence was overshadowed or enlightened for me by the birth of a great friendship. Regie Lister had the greatest genius for friendship of any man I ever met; no one, not even Alfred Lyttelton, had a finer gift or a more irresistible charm for men and women alike. The two, extraordinarily dissimilar in most respects, were identical in this, that they compelled others to love them, because they loved so magnificently themselves. Alfred Lyttelton, for all his exuberant virility, had the feminine quality of giving himself instead of taking, which is what I mean by magnificent love, and Regie’s genius in friendship sprang from precisely the same abandonment. There they diverged north and south, for Regie had practically none of the manliness that was so characteristic of the other. But he had superbly the qualities of his defects; in matters of intellect, the direct masculine attack was represented by intuition and diplomacy and extreme quickness, and in matters of affection by a certain robust tenderness, quite devoid of sentimentality. All mankind, whether male or female, is compounded of both sexes: the man without any womanly instincts would be a mere monster; the woman without any grit of manliness in her, a mere jelly-fish, and in Regie’s nature the woman had a large share. One quality supposed to be a defect of women rather than men he was quite without: he had no notion whatever of “spite,” and was incapable of taking revenge on anyone who had annoyed or crossed him. Most shining of all among his delightful gifts was his instinct of seeing the best in everyone. Wherever he went in his diplomatic posts, Athens, Constantinople, Copenhagen, Rome, Paris, or Tangiers, he found, without the least “setting to work” about it, that there never was so heavenly a place, nor so delightful an entourage. At heart he was really Parisian; that city, with its keen kaleidoscopic gaiety, its intellectual and artistic atmosphere, dry and defined as its own air, suited him best, but this instinct to find everyone with whom he came in contact delightful, brought out, as was natural, all that there was delightful in them, and thus his instinct was justified. He was incapable of being bored for more than a couple of minutes together, and would have found something that could be commuted into cheerfulness in the trials of Job. Whether he liked a person or not, he always gave his best, not with the idea of making himself popular, but because that was the natural expression of his temperament. His amiability made the ripe plums easily drop for him, but when he had determined to get something which did not come off its stalk for the wishing, he had indomitable perseverance, and that rather rare gift of being able to sit down and think until a method clarified itself.

  With him, then, I struck up a friendship which dispensed with all the preliminaries of acquaintanceship: there was no gradual drawing together about it, it leaped into being, and there it remained, poised and effortless. Often during the ensuing years after he had left Athens and was at his post in some European capital, we did not meet for months together, but when the meeting came, relations were taken up again, owing to some flamelike quality in him which warmed you as soon as you got near him, without break or sense of there having been a break. Morning by morning he came down to the museum where I was studying sculpture with his paints and sketching-block, and made the most admirable pictures of some Greek head; we took excursions round Athens up Hymettus or Pentelicus, we usually dined together at some house of an evening, where he made cosmopolitan diplomatists act charades or play some childish and uproarious game. Best of all was it to leave Athens, and wander three or four days at a time in the Peloponnese. We cast pennies into the Styx, we
lost our way and our mules and their drivers on the slopes of Cyllene, and were rescued by a priest who tucked up his skirts, and hurled huge stones at the savage shepherd-dogs; we slept in indescribable inns, where were all manner of beasts, we bathed in the Eurotas, and lay that night among goats in a shed on the Langarda Pass, and the sorriest surroundings were powerless to abate Regie’s enjoyment. And on one unique and memorable day we hunted for the temple at Bassae in a thick fog, and almost despaired of finding it, when out of the heart of the enshrouding mist there came the roar of a great wind that tore the fog into tatters, and lo, not a hundred yards away was the grave grey temple. The flying vapours vanished, chased like frightened sheep along steaming hillsides and through the valleys below, and all the Peloponnese swam into sight, from the Gulf of Corinth to the western sea, and from the west to the bays of the south, and from the south to the waters of Nauplia.... Did two more ecstatic pilgrims ever behold the shrine of Apollo?

  For the next three winters slices of Egypt were sandwiched between visits to Greece. I started with Greece, went on with Maggie, or on other occasions joined her at Luxor, and came back to Greece, living, after Regie’s departure for Constantinople, at the Legation with Sir Edwin Egerton, the most hospitable of mankind. But the magic of Egypt, potent and compelling as it was, was a waving of a black wand compared to the joyful spell of Greece. “All who run may read; only run” was the Greek injunction: “All who read must run away” seemed the equivalent in the Nilotic incantation. To get under the spell of Greece implied a rejuvenation into a world that was like dawn on dewdrops and gave so sunny an answer to the “obstinate questionings” that there was no need even to ask what the riddle had been.