Arthur’s mother, Mary (or ‘Minnie’), was the only surviving daughter of the Reverend William Sidgwick, a second cousin to Edward. Reverend Sidgwick had been the headmaster of the Skipton Grammar School in Yorkshire but died of consumption in 1841, just two months after Mary’s birth. In a state of prolonged bereavement, her mother eventually settled her family in Rugby, so that her sons could attend school there. Edward Benson joined the Sidgwick household in 1853 upon his appointment as a master at Rugby, and in 1859 he and Mary were married. The same year, he was appointed headmaster of Wellington College, which had just been built on a desolate heath near the criminal lunatic asylum of Broadmoor. This is where Arthur Benson spent his childhood.
Arthur was always much more at his ease with his mother. He was born in the third year of their marriage, when Mary was twenty and his father thirty-two. In contrast to Edward, Mary was tender, light-hearted and sympathetic. Arthur’s letters to his mother during his years at Eton are much more expressive than anything he could have written to his father. They show him relating to her more as a peer than as a mother. For example, as a twelve-year-old, he wrote:
WRETCHED MOTHER
GRACELESS REPROBATE
This is from your pining son whose bones are starting through his skin, who can neither eat nor drink for want of
YOUR LETTERS.
If the writing is not legible, it is probably owing to the tears which are steeping the paper at this instant.
Yet though so wasted by not getting your letters, I have managed to
PASS
Arthur later recalled that as children, ‘our relations [with our mother] were perfect. We trusted her, we turned to her for everything; she was the gayest and liveliest, as well as the most perceptive of companions’.
The children were also very close to one another, perhaps because of their father’s ferocity. None of them married. In adulthood, the two sisters gravitated to female networks, and all three of the Benson brothers were most comfortable in predominantly male surroundings. To assume the role of paterfamilias as discharged by their father was inconceivable to them. They could see no connection between romantic love and the emotional and material demands of women. In their youth they all experienced passionate friendships with their contemporaries and with older males; as adults they maintained many of these friendships, but constantly looked for companionship with increasingly younger men. By the age of thirty-five, Arthur had already discounted himself from being able to continue the Benson line and thought it lost unless his novelist brother, Fred, could be persuaded to marry. Only homosocial circles could provide the Bensons with the type of company they craved. The youngest brother, Hugh, sought it in the Roman Catholic church; Fred in literature and leisure; and Arthur in public schools, universities and literature.
Arthur’s literary output was prodigious, running to over sixty published volumes. He was occasionally made the butt of satire by his family, which he took in good part. In 1906 his sister Maggie wrote to their brother Hugh:
Did you see ‘Signs of the Times’ in Punch?
‘Self-denial week. Mr A.C. Benson refrains from publishing a book’!
In addition to his published books and family memoirs, Arthur maintained a diary for almost thirty years. It comprised 180 volumes, calculated by David Newsome to be more than four million words. Seven years after commencing the diary, he confessed:
I reflect that, intimate in some ways as this diary is, there are at least two thoughts often with me, that really affect my life, to which I never allude here. I suppose people’s ideas of privacy differ very much … I don’t think my sense of privacy is very general – but it is very strong about one or two things – and I have a carefully locked and guarded strong room. Anyone might think they could get a good picture of my life from these pages but it is not so.
Benson demonstrated the same capacity to keep things hidden in his published works. Brian Masters has observed that Benson often concealed emotionally laden episodes behind writing that was ‘bland, truthful but completely locked against the inquisitive’. His treatment of the courtship and marriage of his parents, which he described in his biography of his father, was typical.
Edward Benson, at the age of twenty-three, had fallen ‘hopelessly and devotedly in love’ with Minnie, who was then just eleven; she was ‘a fine and beautiful bud,’ Edward wrote rather pruriently in his diary. Then, according to Fred Benson’s transcription of the journal, Edward took ‘refuge in cipher’ before continuing his account:
It is not strange that I should have thought first of the possibility that some day dear little Minnie might become my wife. Whether such an idea ever struck the guileless little thing herself I cannot tell. I should think it most unlikely.
The following year, Edward went to live in the Sidgwick household of his widowed cousin. He was studying at Rugby to take orders and was only required to teach one hour each day. He ‘desired Minnie’s company constantly, was never happy away from her and dreamed of nothing else but of some day making her his wife’. He tutored her and wanted her to accompany him on his frequent horse-rides and walks, which created tension within the household – she was still a little girl. Edward waited another year before he asked Minnie’s mother if he could speak to her on ‘The Subject’. In his diary, he described the proposal in lengthy detail:
Let me try to recall each circumstance: the arm-chair in which I sat, how she sat as usual on my knee, a little fair girl with her earnest look, and then [I] got quietly to the thing, and asked if she thought it would ever come to pass that we should be married. Instantly without a word, a rush of tears fell down her cheeks, and I really for a moment was afraid. I told her that it was often in my thoughts, and that I believed that I should never love anyone so much as I should love her if she grew up as it seemed likely … [Accepting Edward’s handkerchief] she made no attempt to promise, and said nothing silly or childish, but affected me very much by quietly laying the ends of my handkerchief together and tying them in a knot, and quietly putting them into my hand.
Ambitious young men grooming ‘young girls to adorn the blessed position of their future wives’ was not unusual, but only rarely were the girls this young. Once they were married, Edward continued to take Minnie on his lap, particularly when he was finding fault with her. Yet he also sought emotional refuge in her company, casting her as a more mature, wifely figure, like Coventry Patmore’s ‘Angel in the House’. In his black depressions, he longed to ‘lay my head on your breast and be comforted’, surely a bewildering role for a young girl-wife.
Soon after their marriage, Edward and Mary were living in a new house in the grounds of a new school where Edward, an inexperienced headmaster, was trying to bring the staff and boys up to the exacting standards of the Prince Consort. At home, Mary was dealing with servants, budgets, sex, pregnancies and babies.
Arthur read his father’s diary in preparation for writing his biography but declared the entries ‘too sacred for quotation’. In the two-volume book he took just one paragraph to describe his parents’ courtship and marriage:
And here I must touch, however gently, upon what was the central fact of my father’s life – the companionship of my mother. From the time when he was at the University, and played with her as a little child, he desired some day to make her his wife. When he came to live with the Sidgwick household at Rugby, and, in the intervals of his schoolwork, found time to teach her, this desire was formulated not only to himself but also to others. Before he began his first independent work, when she was just eighteen, they were married, and the camaraderie of the Rugby household was exchanged for the close companionship of married life among the wild and heathery solitudes of Wellington. Thus her life was bound up with his in a way which is seldom possible to a wife. There was not a single thought or plan or feeling which he did not share with her: and from first to last her whole life and energies were devoted to him. For many years she was his sole secretary. He consulted her about everythi
ng, depended on her judgement in a most unusual way, and wrote little for public utterance that he did not submit to her criticism. My father had an intense need of loving and being loved; his moods of depression, of dark discouragement, required a buoyant vitality in his immediate circle. One cannot constantly recur to the fundamental facts of life, but without a knowledge of this it would be impossible to understand my father’s character and career.
Arthur’s limited and rather adolescent understanding of adult heterosexual relationships is shown in his simplistic belief that there ‘was not a single thought or plan or feeling which he did not share with her: and from first to last her whole life and energies were devoted to him’. Arthur glossed over and perhaps did not comprehend the suffocating effect of the childhood courtship and the inherent loneliness, for Mary, of ‘the close companionship of married life among the wild and heathery solitudes of Wellington’. What was he then to make, as editor, of the young Victoria’s passion for Albert, or her need for companionship and love? Of her ‘bad nerves’ after the birth of her second baby, or even of Albert’s sense of isolation?
While writing his father’s biography, Arthur had no knowledge that his mother had written a diary. It contained her anguished recollection of the courtship and the emotional pain within the marriage. She described her sense of entrapment, having been married at such an early age. She believed this had stifled the growth of her feelings for Edward and her ability to express such emotions. She longed to satisfy her masterful and demanding husband but her lack of heterosexual feelings, and anxiety about having left her mother alone, tore at her. Her account of their honeymoon in France and Switzerland, written in a fractured style many years later, poignantly expresses her attempts to make sense of the events:
Wedding night – Folkstone [sic]– crossing – Oh how my heart sank – I daren’t let it – no wonder – an utter child … danced and sang into matrimony, with a loving but exacting, a believing and therefore expecting spirit. 12 years older, much stronger, much more passionate! And whom I didn’t really love – I wonder I didn’t go more wrong …
Paris – the first hard word about the washing – But let me think how hard it was for Ed. He restrained his passionate nature for 7 years and then got me! this unloving childish, weak, unstable child! Ah God, pity him! Misery – knowing that I felt nothing of what I knew people ought to feel. Knowing how disappointed he was – trying to be rapturous – not succeeding – feeling so inexpressibly lonely and young, but how hard for him! Full of all religious and emotional thoughts and yearnings – they had never woke in me. I have learnt about love through friendship. How I cried at Paris! Poor lonely child, having lived in the present only, living in the present still. The nights! I can’t think how I lived.
Although Mary began the diary seventeen years after her wedding night, the emotion was still palpable. One of the few complete sentences was: ‘I have learnt about love through friendship.’ The one thing Mary was certain of was her emotional debt to other women. Indeed, the diary was begun as a cathartic self-examination on the advice of a new friend, Mrs Mylne. Mary went on to establish passionate relationships with several women of high spirituality. After Edward’s death in 1896 she set up house with Lucy Tait, daughter of the previous Archbishop of Canterbury.
Arthur and his brother Fred read their mother’s diaries together in August 1923, as they sorted her papers following her death. ‘She was afraid of Papa (I don’t wonder),’ wrote Arthur, ‘and it must have been terrible to be so near him and his constant displeasure … In fact this little record changes my whole view of their relations … probably they should never have married.’ He did not ponder what effect his parents’ relationship had had on him. He knew himself well enough: ‘My own real failing is that I have never been in vital touch with anyone – never either fought with anyone or kissed anyone! … not out of principle, but out of a timid and rather fastidious solitariness.’ He did not know or care to explore the cause.
During the ten years after 1892, Arthur published on average one book a year and during the following decade this rate more than doubled. These included gentle little prose collections, containing gentle reflections on nature and philosophical themes, which sold well, particularly amongst female readers. But he also wrote about individual men’s lives, their characters and achievements. The men he chose were exceptional, mostly unmarried, or men for whom marriage was ‘a closet’ in Brenda Maddox’s sense. He became something of a champion of homosexual and ambivalent men. In 1923, the year before his death, Arthur recorded a conversation with his brother Fred:
We discussed the homo sexual [sic] question. It does seem to me out of joint that marriage should be a sort of virtuous duty, honourable, beautiful and praiseworthy – but that all irregular sexual expression should be bestial and unmentionable. The concurrence of the soul should be the test surely?
The novelty of the term ‘homosexual’ is evident in Arthur’s writing of it as two separate words. He believed that men should be judged according to their depth of feeling, not social conventions or legalities. This was especially apparent in his biographical writings and in his celebration of the lives of men, many of whom he knew to be of ‘irregular sexual expression’.
These books were published with neither fanfare nor secrecy, but sympathisers would have identified the encoded messages. Benson’s first book, published under the pseudonym Christopher Carr, was Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, extracted from his letters and diaries, with reminiscences of his conversation by his friend Christopher Carr of the same College. It was published after Benson’s return to Eton as master and he was soon identified as the author. The memoir described a love affair between two Eton boys. Such friendships, Benson wrote,
are truly chivalrous and absolutely pure, are above all other loves, noble, refining, true; passion at white heat without taint, confidence of so intimate a kind as cannot even exist between husband and wife, trust as cannot be shadowed, are its characteristics.
But the affair painfully disintegrated when the boys were reunited at Cambridge, thwarted by guilt and a crisis of faith.
Benson’s second book was a collection of biographical sketches called Men of Might: Studies of Great Characters, written in collaboration with his lifelong friend and fellow Eton master, Herbert Tatham. Published in 1892, this volume was written as a teaching aid, aiming to supply schoolmasters with ‘lectures on men of various eras and denominations for boys 15 to 18 years old’. The subjects chosen were ‘Socrates, Mahomet, St Bernard, Savonarola, Michael Angelo, Carlo Borromeo, Fenelon, John Wesley, George Washington, Henry Martyn, Dr Arnold, David Livingstone, General Gordon, and Father Damien, the leper priest of Molokai’. Benson and Tatham’s mission was to instil in boys (and any other readers) a sense of glory in manhood, of the faith men could have in each other, and of the love and moral strength they could give to one another. Their collaboration itself grew out of a quintessentially homosocial friendship that began in boyhood and lasted for thirty-five years, until Tatham’s death in a fall in the Alps in 1909.
Benson was writing at a time when there was a culture of homosocial and homosexual literature and publishing. Examples included the Yellow Book, the Uranian poetry movement and the journals of individual men. In 1897, both Benson and Esher were among the twenty-three subscribers to the publication of the Journals of William Cory. We met Cory previously as William Johnson, the Eton master (and Esher’s mentor) dismissed in 1872 for indecent behaviour with a student. The Journals collected Cory’s accounts of his romances with men and boys. Later, in 1902, Esher sent Benson four large volumes of Cory’s letters to read. Benson wrote in his diary:
They are deeply, wonderfully, moving and fascinating. The extraordinary mixture of shrewdness, knowledge, & dryness with abundant passion and sentiment. The high estimation in which he held the intellect – and yet … The letters about the boyfriendships are very touching. It is odd to be surrounded, as we still are, by all th
is charm and not to feel it. But those lost and haunting purences of whom he writes – those boys with serene eyes … with low voices full of the fall of evening … they stand in these pages in a magic light of which no mortal would ever have for me … I almost wish it were not so; if one could passionately idealise, like Newman, how much happiness … how much pain … and no one sees the dangers more clearly than I do.
Benson himself had published poetry expounding the beauty of boys and of boys’ friendships, almost always in a lyrical tone of sad recollection. In ‘A Song of Sweet Things That Have an End’, he wrote:
Heart speaketh to heart
Friend is glad with friend;
The golden hours depart,
Sweet things have an end.
When Benson was asked to write an introduction to a collection of Cory’s poems, he agreed. The result bordered on hagiography, further demonstrating his ability to be ‘bland, truthful but completely locked against the inquisitive’. He celebrated Cory’s influence and downplayed the behaviour of his dismissal:
There are many men alive who trace the fruit and flower of their intellectual life to his generous and free-handed sowing. But in spite of the fact that the work of a teacher of boys was intensely congenial to him, that he loved generous boyhood and tender souls, and awakening minds with all his heart, he was not wholly in the right place as an instructor of youth … He began to feel his strength unequal to the demands made upon it; and he made the sudden resolution to retire from his Eton work.
Censoring Queen Victoria Page 4
