Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  A married woman herself, Tan knew all about the interplay of love and duty. ‘Is it not really the same sin in my neglects and my loves?’ Mary wrote on the left-hand side of her diary, after she had recorded her neglect of household duties while in the grip of a Schwärmerei. ‘O Lord, stir my whole nature – rouse, cleanse, fill.’ No matter how Mary felt about her passionate friendships, her Christian duty was to her husband – a duty that required even more effort on her part ‘than if at first our love had been that strong human passion’. ‘What, and how far, is the union of two souls in matrimony, and what is individuality?’ she asked herself in her diary. It seemed that individuality must take a tumble. Tan was God’s messenger. Tan would show her the way. In the same way as she had learned to submit first to her mother, then to her husband, Mary now bent her knee not only to her Lord, but to Tan. More effectively than Mary’s real mother had ever managed to do, her ‘Mother in Christ’ put a damper on her dangerous ‘volatility’. To the outside world, Mrs Mylne appeared to produce a stabilizing, calming effect on Mrs Benson.

  Mary found it difficult to confide in Edward the power she derived from this charismatic experience, from the personal, mystical religion she was fashioning for herself. He had also attended the Mission, and been affected by it. Some of the ferocity of his old conviction softened, but he was still the orthodox High Churchman, marching ahead on his granite road, with little sympathy for Mary’s new Evangelical bent. He did not agree with her that her experience of human love could lead to divine love. At the end of March he wrote her a long letter saying, ‘one must, I am certain, begin by loving Him above all persons and things’, yet they were now, he acknowledged, at least facing in the same direction. Edward did offer a form of apology for ‘my temper, my pride, my resentment, my self-government. . . my opinion of myself’, but, he went on ‘a time comes when we must begin to draw to a close our self-analysis’. And he could not resist a few pages of high-minded preaching. After that, Mary was largely silent to her husband on the matter of her personal religious beliefs, but she did begin to participate more in his life at Lincoln, spent more time at home, and became known as a sparkling speaker at ladies’ events.

  These changes were not easy for Mary. Tan had not quashed her rebelliousness entirely, and assuming the mantle of duty had never come naturally to her. ‘I fancied most foolishly that when I became a Christian, [Edward] and I would be more in union,’ Mary wrote in her diary, ‘I didn’t do it for this, God knows – but I did think this would come with it. . . I have expected that Christianity would do away with the necessity of my accommodating myself to him.’ That was not the case, and as rebellion resurfaced, Mary spent whole nights raging, sometimes not against anything in particular, simply with ‘a desire for lawlessness as such’. Then Tan would be contacted, and she would come and pray, and duty and God’s will prevailed. ‘I need discipline, discipline, discipline,’ Mary commanded herself. ‘I must guard myself against unnecessarily opposing.’ She must give up her habit of grumbling about Edward’s ways and thoughts (to which she was particularly susceptible in the periods that followed the delights of a visit from any of her brothers); she must become the devoted wife, the ‘staff on which he leaned, and the wings that gave him flight’ – even if, at times, she reduced that devotion to its bare bones. ‘What does a woman owe to her husband and her family?’ she asked. ‘To herself?’ ‘Let me see,’ she noted in the diary. ‘Economy, punctuality, tidiness – these I owe to him and these I will steadily cultivate – I ought to try to please him more, and, please God, I will.’

  Sometimes Mary’s ‘falls’ involved Tan herself. They would spend too much time together, and Mary would neglect her duties, as with Schwärmereien of old. At times, surges of ‘the old love. . . the ungoverned desire’ might engulf her, as they did one afternoon at the end of May, after she had taken the children on an outing: ‘Uneasiness began on Saturday, after the Circus,’ she confessed to her diary. ‘Somehow, I cannot clearly see how, the suppleness, litheness of the limbs stirred me to an uneasy restlessness, a fierceness, a tingling. I came away and went to Tan and sitting there with her told her all. She helped me as she always does – but the restless desire increased, and I knew instinctively wasn’t good, and I had a quiet evening quite alone, and sought God here in the oratory – and the consciousness of stain came, more than ever before – and it seemed as if the very core, the very ich, self citadel into which one retired from God before. . . as if this was bad and rotten.’ When it came to ‘the old love’, guilt and a besetting consciousness of sin was with Mary to stay. Yet these feelings were at her core, her very ich (as on other occasions, Mary retreated into German to express a difficult or intense emotion), and as ‘the old love’ was associated with neglect of her duty to Edward, this ‘self citadel into which one retired’ must, corrupted, be pushed deeper and further away.

  MRS BENSON TAPS INTO THE ZEITGEIST AND ANTICIPATES DR FREUD’S NOTION OF THE ID

  I have come to this, then. . . that within the source of all feeling, spring of all action, lies a self, the self. What remains undamaged through all the years, from childhood to youth, youth to middle life is not the will, but something further back than that – something by which the will itself is set in motion. . . from this the will is agitated, stirred. . .

  Diary, Saturday, 10 June 1876

  Edward did not take to Mrs Mylne. Perhaps it was her strong Evangelical belief, of which he disapproved, perhaps it was the intensity of her friendship with his wife, which made him uneasy. He seemed unaware that she had in effect saved his marriage and, by extension, any career he might hope for within the Church.

  On the morning of 4 December 1876, Edward was dressing before breakfast in time for the early service at the cathedral. The eccentric layout of the Chancery meant that from his bedroom window he could see, across a small court, into the hall where the morning post was laid out on a table. Through the winter’s gloom, Edward glimpsed the white envelopes and, he said later, had an immediate presentiment of momentous news. With the post was a letter from the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (who had recently been made Earl of Beaconsfield), offering him the newly created See of Truro, in Cornwall. There was another, from Queen Victoria, expressing her personal wish that he would accept. Edward’s energies in Lincoln had not gone unnoticed. After just three and a half years in direct service of the Church, he was being invited to ascend from his relatively lowly cathedral position to become a bishop, without having to suffer the inconvenience of any tiresome steps in between.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Great Western Railway had only recently crossed the River Tamar into Cornwall. Much of the county was wild and little travelled. Edward was offered £3,000 a year, substantially more than he had ever earned before. Yet out of that stipend he would, in the absence of good rail connections across his diocese, need to maintain a carriage and pair; he would also have to provide for a house, ‘and a sufficient house’ at that (he mused in a letter seeking advice from his friend Canon Westcott). In addition, he would be obliged to cover substantial travel costs to London, and make generous subscriptions, as ‘Bishops who do not give subscriptions are not able to raise subscriptions’ – there was yet a cathedral to be built.

  Mary was horrified at the idea, and said as much. ‘The position has no attraction for my wife or for me,’ Edward told Westcott. Yet such, he felt, was his calling, and he accepted the invitation within days. The Prime Minister was delighted. ‘Well, we have got a Bishop!’ he wrote to a friend. Fred and Maggie were similarly exultant when they were told a few days later, whispering to each other on their morning walk, with secret smiles: ‘The Lord Bishop of Truro! The Lord Bishop of Truro!’ Nellie read to the others, amidst great hilarity, newspapers that speculated on just what this mysterious new bishop was like. ‘A stout and hearty-looking man of the medium height,’ said one; another had him at ‘above the middle height by a good deal’ and admired his ‘thin intellectual looking face’, and yet anothe
r admired him as ‘the very model of a handsome Englishman!’ The children were particularly delighted by a report that both the Reverend and Mrs Benson desired the well-being of the masses and enjoyed mixing with the working classes. But their mother told Susan Wordsworth that the prospect of life at the very end of England made her feel wretched and rebellious. She knew no one in that part of the world. She would be an impossibly long journey away from Tan, and indeed from everyone and everything else in Lincoln, where she had only just begun to settle and make a life for herself. She would see far less of her brothers Henry and Arthur, in whose company she delighted and found support, and of her mother (who was drifting slowly towards death in a mournful progress from spa to spa, taking cures). Yet Mary had indeed learned to quell her rebelliousness. God led, Edward followed, Mary obeyed.

  Once again the Bensons (and Beth) packed up house – the oak sideboard and the comfortable ottoman, the Arabian epergne and blancmange-sized royal pincushion, the books, Floral Lotto, and now also the little harmonium and a set of bronzed dessert dishes, made for Edward with iron from nearby Coleby Mines, by members of his working-men’s bible class – a gift that moved him to tears. All were, in the spring of 1877, covered or boxed up and dispatched to Truro. The issue of where to live had been quickly resolved. The parish of Kenwyn had recently been much reduced in size, and its diminished income meant that upkeep of the vicarage – a handsome, stone-built country house which a passing John Wesley had called ‘fit for a nobleman’ – was proving too expensive. The vicar was happy to take a long vacation until more modest accommodation could be built for him. Edward rented the old vicarage, and had soon raised enough money for it to be acquired by the new See.

  *

  Fred awoke exultant on his first morning in Kenwyn. In place of the ‘sorry serge of ivy’ that had enclosed the Chancery, their new home was a bower of climbing roses and japonica, tree fuchsias and magnolia. The house itself was smaller than both the Lodge at Wellington and the Lincoln Chancery and was initially a tight fit, but as soon as it was purchased, Edward had it substantially extended, naming it ‘Lis Escop’ – ‘Bishop’s Palace’ in Cornish. A governess was enlisted to help Beth look after the younger children, and (now that the family was no longer having to live quite so much ‘in holy poverty’) Parker, their old butler from Wellington College, returned to them. Ranks below stairs were further increased by Maclean the coachman, Tregunna the gardener, a maid for Mary, a cook, and a host of other local help.

  Edward invested in a brougham – a light but tough little enclosed carriage that seated two comfortably – and a larger, more elegant open barouche. Two strong horses were found to pull them, which were also suitable for riding. The new Bishop set out on forays to the farther reaches of his diocese, usually accompanied by a chaplain to take Confirmations. With a billowing black cloak over his purple cassock, his pastoral staff in a special leather case (in one large house it was taken to the gunroom by mistake) and with piles of books, papers and luggage packed into the carriage, he would head off to isolated – sometimes desolate – spots, where he was ‘a foreigner from England’. Here were ancient churches, barely attended, lonely priests who struggled with poverty on miserable endowments, who were shunned, even harassed by Dissenters. One priest was so lonely in his unpeopled church that he rented a pew in the Wesleyan chapel, and would go there of a Sunday evening ‘to get a little warmth and light, and to see human beings and hear them speak’. Others were more eccentric in their isolation, such as the vicar who did not go into his church at all, but spent Sundays walking in the rectory garden in a flowered dressing gown, smoking a hookah; the one who requested ‘white wine for a change’ at Communion; or the absent-minded parson whose sister had to secure him to the altar rail with a dog chain and padlock to prevent him from wandering off before the service was over.

  At Lis Escop Mary, too, was lonely. ‘One gets gradually to accept the fact that we are living here, but at present entirely free from any outside attraction,’ she wrote to Susan Wordsworth, a month or two after moving in. ‘It is so strange to live so alone, horribly free sometimes it feels.’ She felt rage and rebellion welling up inside her again. ‘Oh I know how dreadful it is!’ she confided to Susan. ‘I had thought I was never going to be rebellious again. I wonder if you know, to whom I don’t think Nature has given a rebellious heart, what an awful inheritance it is – and when a lovely life alters and comes right away, down here where nothing is helpful and all is strange, and one’s heart so sore – there comes wilfulness and one doesn’t struggle and it lays hold.’ Yet the woman whose absence made Mary’s ‘heart so sore’ had implanted such religious purpose within her that she set herself to push these feelings ever deeper. Elizabeth Wordsworth may have dismissed Tan and her milieu as a ‘little spiritual hothouse in Minster Yard’, but the ecstatic religious atmosphere that prevailed there nurtured hardy seedlings.

  The customary round of opening moves and introductions began: the leaving of cards and receiving of cards; the first visits, the returned visits and the non-returned visits, as the elaborate rules of Victorian social intercourse were brought into play, and the whole slow system of making new friends and acquaintances got under way. Of course, Edward’s exalted status brought with it a host of visitors – curates and canons, the managers of works and the chairmen of charities, fellow bishops and passing dignitaries – but for many months Mary found it deadening to the heart to be coming home from a drive and for there to be no excitement at the possibility that someone interesting might have called in their absence. Life at Lis Escop reminded her of the early years in the Blue House, when her mother discouraged outside friends. And like the Sidgwicks in Rugby, the Benson children at Kenwyn became self-sufficient – ‘a close little corporation with clearly defined interests of our own,’ Arthur later wrote, ‘critical and observant. . . we were rather unduly afraid of life, and thought the mêlée a rougher, harsher less kindly place than it was in reality.’ Lis Escop, with its spacious sloping grounds overlooking a glebe of meadows and quiet fields, with a view across the rooftops of Truro to the Fal estuary, offered an idyllic retreat.

  ARTHUR BENSON RECALLS LIS ESCOP, IN HIS BIOGRAPHY OF HIS FATHER

  No sweeter place could well be imagined than Lis Escop. In the soft air trees and shrubs grew with great luxuriance. Camellias flowered and Hydrangeas grew richly out of doors. No severity of winter ever emptied the beds of flowers. The windows commanded a wide view down the green valley in which Truro lies; the spire of St Mary’s, soon to be replaced by the new Cathedral, rose from the grey slate roofs amid the smoke of the little city. The valley was crowned by the high airy viaduct of the Great Western Railway, and below lay the wide tidal creek that runs up with its great mud-flats among the steep wooded hills from Falmouth harbour, closed by an elbow of the hills, and looking like an inland lake from Kenwyn.

  The calm of the Bensons’ life in Cornwall was disrupted just a few months after the family had moved into Lis Escop. In February 1878, Martin died at school in Winchester, at the age of seventeen. He had been showing exceptional promise, was a brilliant scholar, and his death was utterly unexpected. Martin had always been possessed by a passion for learning, taking such intense pleasure in it that Beth once remarked: ‘He always worked as if he were not working at all.’ He once taught himself enough Italian in a few weeks to take in the literary classics with ease, he read Carlyle’s French Revolution while still at prep school, and enjoyed exchanging original versions of Latin hymns with his father. At Lincoln, he had spotted an original Dürer woodcut pasted on to the flyleaf of a trifling volume in a penny bookstall, and already at the age of eight, on hearing Edward mention ‘idle boys’, had asked:

  ‘But why are they idle?’

  ‘They don’t want to know what they are being taught.’

  ‘Not to know? Not to know? Not want to know things? Oh! No

  – can’t be that!’

  As he grew a little older, Martin had taken on Edward’s intens
ely serious, fervently religious turn of mind. Of all the children, he was the least afraid of his father, and seemed the only one of them who could talk to him with some ease and frankness. In his eldest son, Edward saw a spiritual heir who might carry on his work on Earth. ‘From the time he was six years old,’ recalled Edward, ‘I always said he was “better company” to me in the diversity of interests which he awoke and pursued than any friend I had except two or three.’ Edward drove his son hard, and Martin did not rebel. If the boy faltered in his step, he would be pulled up with such exhortations as: ‘Pray pick up directly. Do not flag with the goal in sight.’ When he was moved to a higher division at school and bullied by older boys for his diligence (and, to top it all, thought he had lost a railway ticket Edward had given him), Mary commiserated, writing to her ‘Dearest of dear old boys’, telling him how she missed him, how he would do the ‘beasts’ who tormented him good, and inserting a line in tiny writing: ‘(Don’t tell anyone, but I lost a ticket myself once)’. His father had no sympathy. In response to occasional criticism from masters of Martin’s ‘dreaminess’ or ‘inattentiveness’, Edward railed: ‘What you seem to want intellectually is concentration of mind and body. For Listlessness of Attitude (want of smartness) springs from and then tends to reproduce Listlessness of Attention.’ He would swoop on the smallest mistake in otherwise faultless Latin prose with: ‘Remember Accuracy is the very soul of a scholar.’ The boy had progressed through Winchester College with an ever-burgeoning bag of prizes and honours.