by E. F. Benson
Apart from their present professions both Arthur and Hugh were moving towards the pursuit, that of authorship, which was soon to take at least equal rank with their other work. Within ten years it was as an essayist, a writer of delicate meditative prose that Arthur was most widely known, and to this he devoted the flower of his energy, while Hugh served his Church not as a parish priest, but as preacher and as writer of propagandist novels, novels with the purpose of showing the dealings of God through His Church. As works of art his sermons far transcended his books, an opinion which no one I think who ever listened to that tumultuous eloquence could doubt. They carried his untrammelled message; while he preached, he could say with supreme instinctive art all that in novel-writing he had more indirectly to convey: his sermons had an overwhelming sincerity which made the delivery of them flawless and flame-like. When he wrote he was never quite so inspired: the message was the same, but it had to be wrapt about with the allegory of ordinary life, he had to convey it in terms of country houses or historical episode, and the sermon which was the underlying intention was often a handicap to the art of story-telling. But it was towards his books that his inclination tended; his joy of achievement lay in the written, not in the spoken word.
Then came the closing summer of this period, after which the whole stage and manner of life was altered altogether. That year I had stayed late in the south, going on from Athens to Capri, and laying the foundation then of that Italian castle of dreams, which was afterwards to take a more solid form. Maggie had supplemented Egypt with a cure at Aix-les-Bains, but in August we were all together again at Addington, and once more, as before Nellie’s death, and never since then, there were hundreds of small cones on the cedar that scattered the sulphur-like powder. Arthur came there before he went to Scotland, Hugh had a holiday release from the Eton mission, Maggie was established there deep in the collation of the results from the digging at Luxor. Soon my father and mother were to start on a tour through Ireland, and when September saw their departure, Maggie and I stayed on for a little and then drifted off on different visits. We were all free to stop at home if we liked, and ask friends there; Addington was just an ark for any wandering family doves, picnicky as my mother said, but there it was... Maggie and I saw my father and mother off, and as from my first remembered days and ever afterwards when he wished “good night” or “good bye,” he kissed me, and said, “God bless you, and make you a good boy always.” Then, after he got into the carriage, he waved his hands with some affectionate and despairing gesture, saying, “I can’t bear leaving you nice people here,” and the carriage turned, and went up the slope in front of the house. A very few days afterwards, Maggie and I went off on our ways, leaving Beth at the front door, saying, “Eh, pray-a-do come back soon.”
I had trysted with a friend to spend a few days at Addington early in October, and arrived there to find a letter from him that he was prevented, and I was in two minds as to whether to stop here alone, or go off on some other visit for the Sunday. That scarcely seemed worth while, for I had learned that my father and mother were leaving Ireland that day, and would spend the Sunday with Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden. The Irish tour therefore was over, and they would be back on Monday. Beth and I talked about it, and she said, “Nay, don’t you go away to-day, you be here for when your Papa and Mamma get back. Have a quiet Sunday, you and me.”
It was arranged so: and after lunch on Sunday I went out for a long walk through the myriad paths of the Park, where the beeches were russeting and the squirrels gathering the nuts, and came home in time to have tea with Beth. There was a telegram for me on the hall-table, and glancing at the sender’s name first I saw it was from Mrs. Gladstone.
‘Your father passed over quite peacefully this morning,” it said. “Can you come with Maggie?”
I did not comprehend at first what it meant. My father was a very bad sailor, and it was quite possible that Mrs. Gladstone had merely telegraphed the little news that he was comfortably back in England. For one or two or three long seconds which seemed like hours, I tried to think that this was what she meant. But then my father had crossed not “this morning” but on Friday: and why should I “come with Maggie”? I suppose that the comprehension of the real meaning of this message was only a matter of a moment, and I think the envelope of the telegram was scarcely crumpled up in my hand before I knew. Just then, Beth, having seen my entry from the window of her room, came down to tell me that she had got tea ready. And she saw that something had happened, for her hands made a Quivering motion, and then were clasped.
“Is there any trouble?” she asked.
I could get up to London that night, but not to Chester. I slept in the Euston Hotel and went on by an early train next morning.
My father and mother had arrived at Hawarden on Saturday: he was very well and in tremendously good spirits, and sat up late that night talking with Mr. Gladstone. They had all gone to early communion on Sunday morning, returned for breakfast, and walked again to church for the eleven o’clock service. Mrs. Gladstone and they were in a pew together, and during the Confession, my father sank back from his upright kneeling, and did no more than sigh.... He bowed himself before his Lord, as he met Him face to face....
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
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Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Joseph Conrad
Leo Tolstoy
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
William Shakespeare
Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charles Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
(Forthcoming: 2015-2016)
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Ancient Classics
Aeschylus
Apuleius
Apollonius of Rhodes
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arrian
Bede
Cassius Dio
Catullus
Cicero
Demosthenes
Diodorus Siculus
Diogenes Laërtius
Euripides
Frontius
Herodotus
Hesiod
Hippocrates
Homer
Horace
Josephus
Julius Caesar
Juvenal
Livy
Longus
Lucan
Lucretius
Marcus Aurelius
Martial
Nonnus
Ovid
Pausanias
Petronius
Pindar
Plato
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Younger
Plotinus
Plutarch
Polybius
Propertius
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Sallust
Sappho
Seneca the Younger
Sophocles
Statius
Suetonius
Tacitus
Terence
Theocritus
Thucydides
Tibullus
Virgil
Xenophon
Delphi Poets Series
A. E. Housman
Alexander Pope
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Andrew Marvell
Beowulf
Charlotte Smith
Christina Rossetti
D. H Lawrence (poetry)
Dante Alighieri (English)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Delphi Poetry Anthology
Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)
Edmund Spenser
Edward Lear
Edward Thomas
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson
Ezra Pound
Friedrich Schiller (English)
George Herbert
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Isaac Rosenberg
Johan Ludvig Runeberg
John Clare
John Donne
John Dryden
John Keats
John Milton
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Lord Byron
Ludovico Ariosto
Luís de Camões
Matthew Arnold
Michael Drayton
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robert Browning
Robert Burns
Robert Frost
Robert Southey
Rumi
Rupert Brooke
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Walter Raleigh
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Gray
Thomas Hardy (poetry)
Thomas Hood
T. S. Eliot
W. B. Yeats
Walt Whitman
Wilfred Owen
William Blake
William Cowper
William Wordsworth
Masters of Art
Caravaggio
Claude Monet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Diego Velázquez
Gustav Klimt
J. M. W. Turner
Johannes Vermeer
John Constable
Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo
Paul Cézanne
Paul Klee
Peter Paul Rubens
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Sandro Botticelli
Raphael
Rembrandt van Rijn
Titian
Vincent van Gogh
Wassily Kandinsky
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Rye Cemetery — Benson’s final resting place
Benson’s grave