E. F. Benson

“ 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. ”

“ Of all the temples in the world, built by the wisdom of cunning artificers, and consecrated by the love of reverent hearts, none can surpass and few can equal the glory of that holy and beautiful house which the founder of King’s decreed for the worship of God, with its jewelled windows and the fan-vaulting of its incomparable roof. Half-way up, separating choir from nave, is the tall oak screen stretching from side to side, on which stands the organ, a “huge house of sounds” with walls of gilded pipes, and, at the corners, turrets where gold angels with trumpets to their mouths have alighted. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ Friendship, engines, and poetry, then, were the safety-valves—not choked with blotting-paper like that of the much-enduring “Dart”—through which my growing vitality discharged itself, and I used to lie awake at night, making rhymes and phrases and thinking of the friend of my heart, and trying to devise some plan by which the “Dart” should generate a more abundant supply of steam. To these objects of existence, when the summer term began, was added cricket, but never did my school work arouse one ounce of latent energy, even though scholarship time was coming near again. ”

“ No one, when all were so intent on the businesses in hand, had estimated when a play, for instance, must be written and rehearsed and managed, how largely it was Nellie’s enthusiastic energy that carried things through. So there was no play that Christmas, and the year after four of us, my father and mother and Maggie and I, were in Algiers, another year they were in Florence, and another Maggie and I were in Egypt, and so that particular blaze of young activity of which Christmas holidays had been the type and flower came to an end. ”

“ Though mentally, as regards the metres of foreign verse and the inexorable grammar of Greek and Latin, I was as idle “as a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” I gorged myself not only on the readings of Waterfield, but on music. That frail widow, Mrs. Russell, is probably unknown to fame as a teacher of the piano, but I owe her an undying debt of gratitude. ”

“ There first did I hear the music of Pan’s flute with the inward ear, and with the inward eye did I see the dancing satyrs, and the dryads of the woods; and if, as most surely I believe, my disembodied spirit shall some day visit the places where I learned to love the beauty of this peerless world, how swiftly will it traverse the thyme-tufted downs of Wiltshire to breathe again the noble and august serenity of the forest, and see the fritillaries poise on the bracken at the edge of the grass-rides. ”

“ It would be as unreasonable to take a carte-de-visite photograph of a man with a stupid mouth and a chin-beard, and hope to make it impressive by enlarging it to the size of the Great Pyramid. Indeed, the bigger the enlargement, the sorrier would be the result. But by that time I had the sense to see how delicate and delightful an artist is Handel when he confines himself to the limits of his true territory. For sweetness and neatness of melody, in the violin sonata in A, the piano sonatas, and songs from countless operas, I knew he had no rival—in the silver standard. ”

“ By one of Nature’s most admirable devices our memories always retain a keener sense of such experiences as have been enjoyable, than those of the drabber sort, and to-day I find nothing that I can pick out of the bran-pie that was not bright and alluring. There were friendships and hero-worships, the initiation, in a blue and black striped jersey, into the muddy mysteries of Rugby football, and the dizzy heights (soaring far above the sordid business of the foundation-scholarship) of playing in the lower team of the house. ”

“ His mind was like a cage-full of monkeys, all intent on some delirious and unintelligible business. “Show me a man with a green nose,” he once passionately exclaimed, “and I’ll believe in ghosts.” He had a voice as curious as his boots, in range a tenor, in quality like the beating of a wooden hammer on cracked metal plates, and every week he held a glee-singing meeting after Hall in his rooms, and refreshed his choir with Tintara wine, hot tea-cakes, and Borneo cigars. ”

“ For one morning, at Cambridge, where I had returned for a few weeks before we went out to Switzerland in August, I desisted from the perusal of Miss Harrison’s Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, and wrote on the top of a piece of blue foolscap a word that has stuck to me all my life. For a long time there had been wandering about in my head the idea of some fascinating sort of modern girl, who tackled life with uncommon relish and success, and was adored by the world in general, and had all the embellishments that a human being can desire except a heart. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life in those holidays was an orgy, celebrated in an atmosphere of absolutely ceaseless argument and discussion. Every question rose to boiling-point: for while we regarded each other with strong and quite unsentimental affection we were violently critical of each other. We drew biting caricatures of my father going to sleep after tea, of my mother keenly observant above and not through her spectacles, of Hugh falling off Ajax, of any ludicrous and humorous posture. ”

“ All the time she was a very young woman married to a man twelve years her senior who was as violently individual as anyone could be. But for us she floated there like the moons of eau-de-Cologne which embellished our handkerchiefs, carrying something of the fairyhood of Abracadabra, and all the wizardry of her own inimitable wisdom. After Beth it was she who first emerged out of the landscape which once embraced trees and people alike, and to us soared upwards like a rising constellation. She could not take Beth’s place, for Beth filled that, but she enlarged a child’s heart, and dwelt there. ”

“ For me that voluntary unsupervised reading, that browsing at will in Attic and Roman pastures, gave me precisely all I had lacked before; the two dead languages stirred and lived, the dry bones moved, and the sinews and the flesh came up on them, and the skin covered them, and the winds of the delicate Athenian air breathed upon them. Four years ago Beesly had awakened in me the sense of the Greek genius for beauty, but not till now had the flame spread to the language. ”

“ Will you have a game?” and the answer, if things were going well would be, “O ripping; thanks awfully!”
Then a precious minute would go by in silence and it was time to get up and go into chapel, with a new joy of life swimming into your ken. Never did Cortez stare at the Pacific with a wilder surmise than that with which he and you looked at each other as together you passed out of the dusk into the brightly lit ante-chapel, thinking of that game of squash to-morrow, which perhaps was to lay the foundation-stone of the temple of a new friendship. ”

“ THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN EVEN away from Cambridge, which in those undergraduate years was necessarily the hot hub of the universe, life remained as highly coloured as at the time when Lambeth and Addington first flung open their adorable pasturages. It was thrilling to know that Robert Browning was coming to dinner one night, to be grasped by the hearty hand that had written the poems of which a fives competition had procured me a copy. ”

“ Slowly, as the mists of infancy dispersed through which like sundered mountain-tops were seen these scattered incidents, a more panoramic vision of life as a coherent whole made its appearance. There had been vignettes, now of the Wilderness, now of my father’s study, now of the nursery, with nothing except the continuous association with Beth to bind them together. ”

“ Delightful as Truro had been, we all welcomed the idea of these expanded grandeurs, and felt colossally capable of taking advantage of them to the utmost. How great a man my father had become was most pointedly brought home to me by the fact that, when he came down to Marlborough soon after his appointment for my confirmation, I could, then and there, measure the altitude of his pinnacle by the fact that there appeared on the school notice-board next day an inscription to the effect that His Grace had asked that a whole holiday should be given to the school in honour of his visit. ”

“ It was{18} a dark autumn day, and the rain beat softly on the roof, but verily, when I opened the trunk and found them there, the sunlight of the dawn of life shot level and delicious rays from the far horizon, and cast a rainbow over the weeping sky.
People in those very early days, with the exception of Beth, were more part of the general landscape of life than human beings, similar in kind to myself, with an individuality of their own. They were not loved or feared: they were but a part of the general environment, like the walls of the nursery, or trees or dinner or beds. ”

“ Sometimes I took a holiday from the remote and{315} swarming past, and with a horse in place of the demurer donkey, went far out into the desert on the other side of the Nile. Pebbles and soft sand, hard sand and rocks succeeded each other in slope and level, and the horse whinnied as he sniffed the utter emptiness of the unbreathed air. One kite hung, a remote speck in the brazen sky, and the silence and the solitude wove the unutterable spell of the desert. There, out of sight of all that makes the planet habitable, your horse alone made the link with the ephemeral living world ”

“ 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. ”