  A CURIOUS incident marked that Algerian tour. Before going, my father told Queen Victoria of his intention, and she had at first been against his travelling so far afield, putting it to him that if his presence in England was urgently and instantly required, there might be some difficulty about his getting back in time. Whether she had in her mind the possibility of her own sudden death she did not explain. But presently she seemed to think that her reluctance that he should be so remote from England was unfounded: she changed her mind and wished him an interesting and delightful journey. So from Algiers we went slowly eastwards visiting Constantine, Tebessa, Timeghad and Fort National on the way, our most remote point from England—via Tunis on the one side or (retracing our steps) Algiers on the other—being Biskra. We got there late one afternoon, and waiting for my father was a telegram from the Lord Chamberlain, announcing the death of Prince Edward, Duke of Clarence, from influenza, and giving the date for the funeral. My father and I with guides and Bradshaws vainly attempted to find a route by which he could get back to England in time, but such route did not exist. Had this news come that morning he could have got back, so also could he, if the funeral had been arranged for the day after that for which it was fixed: My father was thus able to realize one of the dearest dreams of his life, namely, to see with his mortal eyes the Carthage which he knew so intimately in connection with his lifelong study of Cyprian. His book on Cyprian which had occupied his leisure for some thirty years was now approaching completion, and long had he yearned to behold the ruined site where Cyprian had worked as bishop, to wander with his own feet over the shores and hills, which, all these years, had been so familiar to him; and that visit to Carthage had for him the sacredness of some pilgrimage for which his heart hungered. His own enthusiasm was so keen that I feel sure that he had no idea that his Mecca could be less to us than to him, and I have the vision of him kneeling on the site of some early Christian church, with his face all aglow with the long-deferred consummation. Just as his appreciation of a picture was mainly due to the nature of its subject, just as his pleasure in music was derived from the words which were sung to it, so now, as his diary records, he saw enchanting loveliness in that bare and featureless hill where Carthage once stood, for Cyprian’s sake, and wondered at the want of perception which caused other travellers to find nothing admirable in that bleak place. For once the classical associations of Car At Tunis I left the rest of them, going on my own special pilgrimage, and via Malta and Brindisi I came to the city already known to me by map and picture, and hallowed by some kind of predestined love. And just as my father was enchanted with that ugly little hill of Carthage because Cyprian had dwelt there, how was I not transported when above mean streets and miry ways I saw the sparkle of that marble crown of temples on the Acropolis? For indeed, from the time that Beesly had read us his Trojan Queen’s Revenge, some idea, some day-dream of Athens had been distilled, drop by drop, into my blood. Whatever was lovely, whatever must be estimated and esteemed I always laid alongside some Greek standard. Not alone were things directly Greek, like the chorus of the Œdipus in Colonos, the chorus in Swinburne’s Atalanta, the teachings of Middleton, the holy dead in the Street of Tombs tested by the Hellenic touchstone, but whatever moved my heart, the vision of Mary Anderson in the Winter’s Tale, the joy of athletics, the austere crests of mountains, the forest of Savernake, the Passion-music of Bach, had been instinctively subjected to the same criterion. The material standard and symbol of that, by this subtle subconscious distillation, had always been the Acropolis, and on this crystalline January afternoon, it was mine to hurry along a tawdry Parisian boulevard, set with pepper trees, to see on one side the columns of the temple of Zeus, and on the other the circular Shrine of the Winds. On the right, as I knew well, I should soon pass the theatre of Dionysus and not turn aside for that “Holy, holy, holy!” was the first message of it, and then like the dawn flowing down the cliffs of the Matterhorn, it illuminated all that on earth had the power to be kindled at its flame. Like the Sphinx it articulated its unanswerable riddle, and by its light it revealed the solution, and by its light it hid it again. The architect who had planned it, the sculptor who had decorated it, the hands that had builded it and formed the drums of its columns into monoliths of translucent stone had thrown themselves into the furnace of the creation that transcended all the wit and the cunning of its creators. They raised but a fog or a smoke of human endeavour, and from outside, no less than from the heart of their love, there dawned for them and for us the light invisible. Whatever love of beauty was in their souls was tran A tremendous impression, such as that first sight of the Parthenon undoubtedly made on me, would be a very doubtful gain, if it caused the rest of life to seem uninteresting by comparison, for any kind of initiation must quicken rather than blunt the workaday trivial activities, and certainly in this case I lost no perception of the actual in the flash of the absolute. Athens at that time (to fuse together the impressions of this and subsequent years) was the most comic of European capitals; it was on the scale of some small German principality, and while aping the manner of Paris in a backwater, claimed descent from Pericles. It was opera-bouffe, seriously carried out, imagining itself in fact to be the last word in modern enlightenment no less than in classical romance. It was with just that classical seriousness that the Olympic games were, a little later, reinaugurated here, and with all the gaiety of opera-bouffe that defeated competitors passionately argued with judges and umpires. At the top of the town came “Constitution Square,” which comprised an orange-garden and a parade-ground, where on festive occasions the regiments of Guards deployed and manoeuvred, quite, or nearly, occupying the centre of it: and there have these eyes seen the flower of the Greek On three sides of Constitution Square, were hotels and cafÉs and the residence of the Crown Prince Constantine subsequently cast by destiny for the ludicrous rÔle of “King Tino.” On the fourth side the Royal Palace, of a similarly pretentious and ugly style as that which looks over St. James’s Park, presented a mean and complicated face to the steam-tramway that puffed through the top of the square on its way to Phaleron. A royal baby, that year or the next, had seen the light, and we foreign but loyal Athenians, what time a bugler stationed in the colonnade of the palace made all kinds of music, craned our necks and focussed our eyes to see the King come forth. But in nine cases out of ten, it was not King George who emerged but a perambulator pushed by an English He was democratic also towards foreigners. A tourist staying in one of the respectable hotels round Constitution Square, for instance, was quite at liberty to intimate to the Minister of his country that an audience with the King would be agreeable, and in due course some footman from the palace, in gorgeous well-worn livery, would bear a missive with a tremendous crown on the envelope which informed him that King George would give him an audience next day. Or, if you did not express your loyal desire, it would perhaps be intimated that it would be quite in order if you did so, and thereupon, on the appointed morning you would put on your evening dress-clothes (rather green in the sunlight), and a white tie, and a straw hat, and present yourself at the palace door. On seeing this apparition the bugler stationed there has been known to give one throaty blast, thinking that anyone so ridiculously attired must be a royal personage, then, catching the affrighted eye of the visitor, he recog Queen Olga was Russian, daughter of the Grand Duke Constantine, a wonderfully beautiful woman, whom I had seen first when I came up from Marlborough for the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. She had an engaging habit when she came round the room at balls or after dinner in order to talk to the guests, of putting her hands on the shoulders of the women she was conversing with, and shoving them back into their seats, so that they should sit down without ceremony. Sometimes she would want to talk to two or three people together, and down they would go like ninepins, while she stood. Be King George’s family, as all the world knows, had made magnificent marriages. He was the brother of Queen Alexandra, and of the Dowager Empress of Russia, and his eldest son had brought as wife to Athens the German Emperor’s sister, to whom, I suspect, these bugle-regulations were due. The “in-laws” consequently were often being bugled for, and the tram to Phaleron on a Sunday afternoon would now be a fine target for Bolsheviks. The Crown Princess was constantly engaged during these years on her wifely duties, and the arrival of the Empress Frederick in Athens usually implied that there would soon be fireworks in Constitution Square. But when I write of her, there is no opera-bouffe atmosphere that I can attempt or desire to reproduce, for tragic were her past years, bitter her present years, and grim agonies of mortal disease were already making ambush for her. During the three or four ensuing years, when, instead of being at the British School or at a hotel, I spent Or the bugle sounded, and there was the unhappiest of the Czars looking very small beside his cousin Prince George. Or again, one afternoon, when, by perpetual permission, I was allowed to seek the shade and coolness of the palace gardens, I heard the trampling of foot-steps, and shrill expostulations, from behind a hedge of oleander. Round the corner came the originators of this disturbance.... King George seemed to have taken a dislike to his sister’s hat, and had plucked it from her head and was kicking it along the garden path, while she My first spring in Greece was mostly spent out of Athens, for with another student I was put in charge of the British excavations at Megalopolis. All the plums had already been picked out of it, for the theatre had been completely cleared, and the excavation of the year before had laid bare the entire plan of the great Council hall, the Thersilion, built in the time of Epaminondas, so that this year excavation was equivalent to sitting on a wall while a lot of workmen removed tons of earth in which nothing could possibly be discovered. It was not thrilling, but at least one could incessantly talk to them in what purported to be modern Greek, until it became so. There had been considerable excitement about Megalopolis the year before, for the British excavators had thought they had triumphantly refuted the German theory, announced by Dr. DÖrpfeld, that fourth century Greek theatres had no stage. They had unearthed steps and columns, which, they considered, proved the existence of a stage, and, rather prematurely, had announced their anti-German discovery in the Hellenic Journal with something resembling a crow of satisfaction. On which this dreadful Dr. DÖrpfeld came down from Athens with a note-book and a tape measure, and in a couple of hours in the pouring rain had proved quite conclusively, so that no further argument was possible, that the British, with a year to think about it, had quite misinterpreted E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 26 [Page 287 their own evidence, and demonstrated how what they had taken for a stage was merely a back wall. Their researches in fact had merely confirmed his theory. Then he rolled up his measure and went back to Athens.... So another and I cleaned up these rather depressing remains, and when that was done we hired mules and went a-wandering through the country and saw the spring “blossom by blossom” (even as Beesly had read) alight on the hills. Blossom by blossom, too, Greece itself, no longer pictured in photographs or bored for in books, opened its myriad lovelinesses, even as the scarlet anemone made flame in the thickets, and the nightingales “turned the heart of the night to fire” in the oleanders by the Eurotas. We visited Homeric MycenÆ, and Epidaurus, the Harrogate of the fourth century B.C., and in archÆological intervals I speared mullet by the light of a flaming torch on moonless nights with the fishermen of Nauplia, and ate them for early breakfast, broiled on the sea-shore, before the sun was up. I crossed the Gulf of Corinth and went to Delphi, where the French school were beginning the excavations that were destined to yield more richly than any soil in Greece except the precinct at Olympia. There, too, I went, and if to me the Parthenon had been a revelation of the glory of God, there I took my shoes from off my feet, and worshipped the glory of man, because the Hermes of Praxiteles “caring for the infant Dionysus,” embodied, once and for all, the possible, the ultimate, beauty of man, even as the Louvre held the ultimate glory of woman.... A few weeks more in Athens were busy with the record of the meagre results from Megalopolis, and I left for England, knowing in my very bones that Athens was in some subtle way my spiritual mother, so that on many subsequent jour Dodo had been put back in her drawer, after her expedition to Henry James: now for the second time I took her out and tasted her, as if to see whether she seemed to have mellowed like a good wine, or become sour like an inferior one, in which case I would very gladly have poured her on the earth like water, and started again. But I could not, reading her once more, altogether cast her off: she had certain gleams of vitality about her, and with my mother’s connivance and help again I submitted her to a professional verdict. This time it was my mother’s friend, Mrs. Harrison, known to our admiring family as “Lucas Malet,” author of the adorable Colonel Enderby’s Wife, who was selected to pronounce on my story, and again, I am afraid, it was without the slightest realization of this highway robbery on the time of an author that I despatched the book. Anyhow those two assaults on Henry James and Lucas Malet have produced in me a fellow-feeling for criminals such as I was a quarter of a century ago, so that now, when, as occasionally happens, some light-hearted marauder announces that he or she (it is usually she) is sending me her manuscript, which she hopes I won’t mind reading, and telling her as soon as possible exactly what I think of it, and to what publisher she had better send it (perhaps I would write him a line too) and whether the heroine isn’t a little overdone (but her mother thinks her excellent), and would I be careful to register it when I return it, and if before next Thursday to this address, and if after next Friday to another, etc. etc., I try to behave as Lucas Malet behaved in similar circumstances. But I can never hope to emulate Lucas Malet’s tact and wisdom in her genial, cordial, and honest reply (when she had had the privilege of wading through these sheets), for they still remain to me, who know her answer almost by heart, to be the first and the last word in the true theory of the writing of fiction. Her deft incisions dissected, from lungs and heart and outwards to the delicate fibre of the skin that protects and expresses the life within, the structure of stories, short or long, that are actually alive. First must come the “idea,” the life that is to vitalize the complete animal, so that its very hair and nails are fed with blood.... And then, since I cannot possibly find words as apt and as sober as hers I will quote from the letters themselves. “First the idea, then the grouping, which is equivalent to our drama—then a search for models from whom to draw. Most young English writers—the artistic sense being a matter of experience, not of instinct, with most of us—begin just the other way about. Begin with their characters ... rummage about for a story in which to place them, and too often leave the idea out of the business altogether.... One evil consequence of this method—among many others—is that there is a distracting lack of completeness and ensemble in so much English work. The idea should be like the thread on which beads are strung. It shouldn’t show, except at the two ends; but in point of fact it keeps the beads all together and in their proper relation.” Then, to one already hugely interested in this admirable creed of the art of fiction, Lucas Malet proceeded For such a person as I happened to be, that, as I then believed and still believe, was the wisest resolution I could make. The habit of immediate activity, physically or mentally violent, had, from the days when butterflies, plants, athletics, friendship, Saturday Magazines were all put under contribution to feed the raging energies of life, become an instinct. If there was a kick left in my wholly boyish nature, it had become a habit to kick, and not to save the energy for any future emergency: if there was a minute to spare, somehow to use or enjoy it. To what use that minute and that kick were devoted, so I now see, did not particularly matter: the point was to kick for just that minute. No doubt there are other and admirable uses to which energy may be put; some make reservoirs, into which they pour and store their vital force, and while it increases, screw down their sluice, and let the gathered waters rest and reflect. Such as these probably achieve the most abiding results, for when they choose to raise their sluice, they can, by the judicious use of winch and shutter, continue to irrigate the field which they have determined to make fruitful, for a period that they can certainly estimate. They burn a steady unwavering candle which will always illuminate a fixed area, and from the areas which do not concern them they hide their ray and thus economize their wax and their wick. But how surely are there others who from their very nature are unable to construct their reservoirs or burn this one decorous candle. Whatever head of water there is, it must be instantly dispersed, whatever candle there is, it must be lit at both ends, and if that is not enough, it must be broken in half, and its new ends of wicks kindled and used for the exploration of some trumpery adventure: “trumpery,” that is to say, in the vocabu So, after this second visit to Greece, I came home to find to my incredulous and incurious surprise, that in the interval I had become, just for the focus of a few months, famous or infamous. One of those rare phenomena, less calculable than the path of a comet, which periodically is to destroy the world, had occurred, and there was a “boom” in Dodo, and no one was more astonished than the author, when his mother met him arriving by the boat train at Victoria, and hinted at what was happening. All sorts of adventitious circumstances aided it: it was thought extremely piquant that a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury should have written a book so frankly unepiscopal, and quite a lot of ingenious little paragraphists invented stories of how I had read it aloud to my father and described his disconcertedness: the title-rÔle But its success apart from the delightful comedy of such a first act to its author, led on to a truly violent situation when the curtain rose again, for the critics, justly enraged that this rare phenomenon called a “boom” should not have been detected and heralded by their auguries and by them damned or deified, laid aside a special pen for me, ready for the occasion when I should be so imprudent as to publish another novel; and they all procured a large bottle of that hot ink which Dante dipped for, When his left hand i’ the hair of the wicked, Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma Bit unto the live man’s flesh for parchment, Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, and since they were proposing to “let the wretch go festering” through London, they read up Macaulay’s re (1) The Pall Mall Gazette. (The Rubicon, E. F. Benson.) “Mr. Benson’s New Play.
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. (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 evi 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.... | |||||||||||
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