Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  An easterly gale and floods of driving rain kept him indoors one morning, and he wrote to Markham. An extract from his letter will give the state of his feelings better than anything else.

  “I have been here between a week and a fortnight,” he wrote, “and I am no nearer making up my mind than I was at first If the beauty of the whole place was not so overwhelming, I should have merely, as I expected to do, studied how the sculptors of that day rendered muscles, and examined the technique of their work. As it is, I have done nothing of the kind. Now and then when I am tired I suddenly remember the absolute perfection of some detail, but in general I don’t consciously notice it. The art is so triumphant that one cannot look at it in pieces. Men admired the sun before they peered at him through telescopes and found out sun-spots, and it was not till after that they tried to explain the sun-spots. It is the same with me; I can only look and wonder. An Englishman has offered very kindly to lend me some books about sculpture. The suddenness of my refusal startled him. I care nothing at present about schools, and the way one man rendered eyes and another rendered hair. I can’t judge it yet. But if they will build a temple of Pentelic marble in London, and stain it orange and red with weather, and put a hollow turquoise over it for a sky, and the Ionian Sea the colour of a sapphire in the background, I will do a statue for it. Some one told me once that I was not ambitious! Do you agree with that verdict? To-morrow if it is fine I go to Olympia. There is the finest thing of all there — a Hermes by Praxiteles. I don’t think either Praxiteles or Hermes come into your line. One was a god, and I rather expect to find that the other was too.”

  From an artistic standpoint that visit to Olympia was perhaps the making of Tom; for all financial purposes it was his ruin. When he saw it, he said, “By Gad!” and stopped there half a day. The young god stands with his head a little bent, and a smile on his lips, looking at the babe whom he carries on his arm, half lost in his own thoughts. And the divine fire descended on Tom.

  He stopped at Olympia for a day and a half, and then returned to Athens. Another artist had arrived at his hotel a day or two before, rather to Tom’s disgust, but he quickly made friends with him, and had left with him several photographs of a couple of statuettes he had made that autumn in England. They were extremely pretty and essentially modern in style. Manvers himself was of the most advanced realistic school, and had got past mere prettiness, and recorded sheer ugliness with the most amazing skill. He worked a good deal in Paris, but had come south owing to ill-health, and found a cynical pleasure in watching Tom’s enthusiasm for a school that was almost comically passé, as passé as crinoline. He had been through the same stage himself.

  He had looked at the photographs Tom had given him with a good deal of respect, and was turning them over for the third or fourth time, when Tom himself came into the room on his return from Olympia. Manvers was lying at full length on a sofa, smoking a bitter weed.

  “Ah, there you are!” he said. “Do you know these are devilish pretty?”

  Tom strode across the room, and when he saw what Manners was looking at, he frowned.

  “Give them me, Manvers,” he said, and twitched them out of his hand.

  It was a damp, windy day, and Manvers, who hated any temperature but the warmest, had made the hotel proprietor light a fire in the smoking-room. Tom looked at the photographs for a moment with intense disgust, and threw them into the fire. In a few moments the draught had carried a few fragments of crinkly ash up the chimney.

  Manvers took a puff or two at his bitter weed.

  “Ah! the Hermes is to blame for that, I suppose,” he said. “I’ve seen the photographs of it. That is why I did not go to Olympia with you. Partly also, because it is cold. I’m sorry you threw those photographs away; they were very pretty.”

  “They were abominations,” said Tom, and sat down.

  ‘ And so you are going to set up a very life-size Apollo — six foot four in his sandals — as I did,” said Manvers, “and you will gnash your teeth over it every day for a month, and then you will return to your senses.”

  “For the first time in my life I am fully sane,” said Tom. “I have seen perfection, and I know what it means. I shall find out the way to do it. Don’t laugh — I shall. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. It has been done once, and it can be done again. What a blind fool I have been!”

  Manvers crossed one leg over the other.

  “Yes, it’s delicious to feel like that,” he said. “I quite envy you. I felt like it once — and those things don’t happen twice. I congratulate you with all my heart, and I shall congratulate you more when you have recovered.”

  Tom snorted with indignation.

  “I am as sane as you are,” he said, “but I shan’t set up a life-size statue just yet; I have got to study first. I know what the language means, and I am going to read all that exists in it. I have got the key to it all. The whole thing used to puzzle me; it was an unknown tongue, obsolete and dead, I thought it. But now I have the means of finding it all out.” Manvers closed his eyes.

  “Nunc dimittis,” he said piously. “I suppose we may expect a new Greek god every year for the present What will you do with them, by-the-by? Life-size figures take up such a lot of room in a studio.”

  “That’s so like you,” said Tom; “as if it matters anything to me what happens to them. I shall produce them, that is enough.”

  “So the rest of the world will think, as you will find.”

  “What?”

  “I mean they won’t go a step further, and wish to possess them.”

  “My dear Manvers, what do I care?”

  Manvers looked at him composedly.

  “Yes, of course, it doesn’t matter to you just yet. But when the masterpieces are fruitful and multiply (masterpieces breed like rabbits, you know), you will begin to wonder by degrees why they are unappreciated. You will be like a struggling curate with many children. He loves them all, but he cannot help wondering wistfully what will happen to them.” Tom shook his head with an air of benign superiority.

  “You don’t really think that, do you?”

  “Ah, well, it would be driving the case to extremes. What I expect will happen is that you will get tired of your masterpieces, or rather your first masterpiece, long before the rest of the world has an opportunity of doing so.”

  Tom looked at him compassionately.

  “Poor chap; of course you are blasé and disillusioned. It must be very uncomfortable.”

  “From your point of view, I am, but not from my own. I saw a woman in the streets to-day with high-heeled boots and a parasol with lace round the edge, and the face of... well, not of a fallen angel, but an angel who never rose. To you that would mean nothing, but to me it was a solid ingot of inspiration for terra-cotta tossed in my path. From my point of view you are simply blind.”

  “Long may I remain so!” remarked Tom. “There’s the bell for dinner. I am not going to eat no dinner because the heavens are opened.”

  “Did no manna fall into the railway carriage? “ asked Manvers. “How forgetful of the Olympians!”

  “No, I had lunch at Corinth,” said Tom, laughing.

  Whether Tom was sane or not, he was not sufficiently mad to set up a life-size Apollo in his bedroom. The artist’s inspiration had descended on him, but not at present the artist’s inevitable need of producing. The inspiration had come in a flood, and he bathed in it; there would be time enough afterwards to wade out and devote himself to the task of utilizing a given amount of the water. He wandered about the museums, and sat on the steps of the Parthenon, picturing to himself the two long rows of statues which once led up from the gates, and turning to the long riband of frieze on the west to people the path again with the Panathenaic procession. They were gods, Athens was a city of gods, and gods could not die; they were youth, beauty, enthusiasm all realized, ready to be realized again. It was all very well for Manvers to talk about phases, and developments, and schools that were passées, a
nd schools that were decadent, but when you are face to face with perfection....

  Such was his creed. He believed in beauty. Even the classics — Xenophon with his parasangs, Thucydides with his Peloponnesian war — were glorified. Those men had been of the beautiful race, they had lived in the country where beauty unveiled had dwelt. They were to him as are, to one seeking for his love, men met by the wayside, men with whom she has spoken, on whom perhaps she smiled. They may not have known how fair she was, but even they were men different from others, for they had seen her, and could not be the same after that.

  So he gave himself up heart and soul to his religion, and his religion lay broadcast like manna; he sat in the Dionysiac theatre, and read Aristophanes; he spelt out shorter Greek inscriptions with reverence; he walked to Eleusis by the sacred way; he sat an hour on the barrow at Marathon that holds the bones of the Greeks who conquered the Persians and died in victory. If this is to be mad, it is a pleasant thing to be mad, but it is a form of madness which is the outcome of youth and enthusiasm, and possibly genius, and is therefore not so common or so incurable as other forms.

  Maud Wrexham’s anticipations about her visit to Athens were a good deal heightened by the knowledge that she would find Tom Carlingford there. They had met several times during the autumn in England, and she found his company very stimulating. Tom above all things was an enthusiast, and enthusiasts are usually very sympathetic people, because, having seen unlimited vistas opening out in their own line they are willing, even eager, to allow for unlimited vistas in any other. Maud’s vista was a wide one, embracing all mankind, just in the same way as Tom’s did, the difference lying in the fact that Tom meant to compass his ends by artistic achievement, which would compel admiration and awe, whereas Maud’s programme was entirely vague. She had a passion for the human race, and intended that they should have a passion for her.

  Tom and she, being already fairly intimate, saw a good deal of each other. Maud, too, had experienced a quite peculiar pleasure in the sight of the Acropolis, and Tom’s presence by no means lessened it.

  They were sitting one bright winter’s day on the steps of the little temple to Nike, which looks over the lower Attic plain, and across the narrow sea to Ægina and Salamis, and Tom was feeling a new-found joy in having some one to whom he could talk fully, being sure of sympathy. Though his artist’s nature had not yet insisted on the life-size Apollo, expression of some sort was becoming necessary to him.

  He pointed towards Salamis.

  “That’s where they smashed the Persian fleet,” he said, “and our Lady of Victory was standing here where you and I are sitting. She used to be a winged goddess, but when she saw that, she plucked off her wings, and became the Wingless Victory. At least, that is my version. And here they set her temple on high.”

  Maud’s eyes sparkled, and she said nothing for a minute or two.

  “I’m afraid I’m a pagan,” she remarked at length; “ I believe in these gods and goddesses.”

  “Why, of course you do,” said Tom. “These myths could never have been invented; they were a conviction. And a conviction is the only religion worth having.”

  “But doesn’t it matter what the conviction is?”

  “No, certainly not. One man’s conviction may not be the conviction of another man, or of any other man, but it is the true thing for him. A man’s conviction is that for which he was made.”

  “But don’t you believe in a time when every one, dead or alive, will have the same conviction?”

  “I hardly know. But at any given moment I can’t realize that it’s any conviction which I don’t share at that moment.”

  Maud flushed ever so faintly before she spoke again. “What is your conviction at this moment?”

  Tom looked at her seriously, and examined the ferrule of his stick without speaking.

  “What is yours?” he asked.

  “Ah! but my question came first.”

  “My conviction is that a man can realize either in others, or in some image in his brain which he works out perfectly or imperfectly, ideal beauty. It may be moral or physical beauty. And his mission is to do it.”

  Maud had waited for his answer with an anxiety she could hardly explain to herself; her heart took upon itself to beat with quick throbs, that seemed to make her whole being alert. But this was only half an answer.

  “And what is he to do with it when he has realized it?” she asked, with the same intentness.

  “Surely that is enough,” said Tom. “He loves it, of course.”

  He stood up and looked out over the sea. “My God! he loves nothing else!” he added.

  For the life of her Maud could not help questioning him further.

  “Yes, that, of course. But here one is in this puzzling world, and how is one to begin? My conviction is—”

  “Yes, I know,” broke in Tom; “I remember you telling me perfectly. You want to make the whole world yours. So do I; and here is my first step ready for me.”

  “Yes, you are an artist. That is a serviceable tool.”

  “A tool? It is the end in itself. If you use it rightly, all the rest is there. The mainspring of this civilization which we see here was beauty. They conquered the Persians for the beauty of the thing.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure about that! I think their hearths and homes had something to do with it.”

  “Then why had no one else conquered the Persians? Every nation they had already subdued had its hearths and homes. The Greeks had no more hearths and homes than others, and the biceps of the Greek was no bigger than that of other men. Everything else was only the wire down which the electric current came — and the electric current which killed the Persian was the love of art.”

  “Then why did they fall before Rome?”

  “Because the current had grown weak. Their art degenerated, and they fell.”

  Maud scratched the cement pavement at her feet meditatively. She felt rather chilled and discouraged. She had expected — well, what had she expected?

  “I think you are inhuman,” she said at last.

  “Yes, I know I am. I believe I have got hold of this tool, as you call it, and I think of nothing else but how to use it I must go back to England soon, and work.”

  Maud had stood up, and the least tremor passed over her. Tom noticed it.

  “You are catching cold,” he said, “sitting here. What an ass I was not to think of it before! Here’s your cloak; let me help you on with it.”

  “Thanks — it is rather cold. I thought you were going to be out here all the winter.”

  “I feel just now that I should like to stop here for ever.”

  They had strolled back into the Acropolis, and Maud felt glad they were moving, for a silence then is less embarrassing than when one is stopping still. Their talk had been a little upsetting to her in some way, and she wanted a moment to steady herself in. They had left Arthur Wrexham sitting in a rather forlorn manner on a large slab of cold Pentelic marble. He refused to come on to the Nike bastion because he was smoking a cigarette, and there was a wind there. So he contented himself with answering in a vaguely appreciative manner, how very classic it all was, and that he should certainly come there again. His opportune appearance at this moment, sitting in a more sheltered corner than ever, facing a blank white wall, gave Maud an opportunity of recovering herself.

  “Dear Arthur, are you finding it all very classic,” she said, “and just a little melancholy? Never mind; we can’t take you to the museum, as we threatened to do, because it closes at twelve, so you need only just walk up as far as the Parthenon, because I want to look at something, and then we’ll all go down. Really, you are a very bad chaperon; you sit in a corner opposite a blank wall. Mr. Carlingford has been saying the most unconventional things.”

  “I have been mentioning the objects and purposes of art,” remarked Tom.

  “Ah, how nice!” murmured Arthur; “all about Doric columns and so on, I suppose. Do tell me some day. Maud,
we shall be dreadfully late for lunch.”

  “Yes, dear, I know we shall,” said Maud.

  “Well, then, wouldn’t it really be as well to leave the Parthenon alone, just for the present? You can see the Parthenon any day.”

  “Well, you can have lunch any day,” said Maud; “and you do have it every day.”

  Arthur Wrexham made a resigned little sound, partaking of the nature of a sigh, and followed them. They were lunching with Tom at his hotel, and when they went out on to the balcony afterwards to drink the thick sweet Turkish coffee, they found Manvers sitting in the sun, feeding on his own thoughts. The thoughts chiefly ran on the subject of the possibility of representing lace — real thin lace, and not great fluffy bunches of it — in terra-cotta, and it really seemed as if it might be done. La dame qui s’amuse must have lace, all round her parasol and down the front of her dress.