Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Now this MSS. which thus had reached the kindest man in the world, was written in a furious hurry and covered with erasures, that exploded into illegible interpolations, and was indited in such a hand as we employ on a note that has to be dashed off when it is time already to go to the station. This was genially hinted at when late in November the recipient announced to me his judgment in the matter; for he prefaced his criticism with an apology for having kept it so long, and allowed that, in consenting to read and criticize, he had “rather overestimated the attention I should be able to give to a production in manuscript of such substantial length. We live in such a world of type-copy to-day that I had taken for granted your story would come to me in that form....”

  I should like to call the attention of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our national caricaturist and parodist, to this unique situation. Henry James at that time had lately evolved the style and the method which makes a deeper gulf between his earlier books and his later than exists between different periods of the work of any other artist. Nearest perhaps in this extent and depth of gulf comes the case of the painter Turner, but the most sober and quiet example of his early period is not so far sundered from the most riotous of Venetian sunrises, as is, let us say, “Roderick Hudson” from “The Ivory Tower.” Just about now Henry James had realized, as he told my mother, that all his previous work was “subaqueous”: now, it seemed to him that he had got his head above water, whereas to those who adored his earlier work he appeared to have taken a header into some bottomless depth, where no plummet could penetrate. At this precise moment when he had vowed himself to psychological analysis so meticulous and intricate that such action as he henceforth permitted himself in his novels had to be sifted and searched for and inferred from the motives that prompted it, he found himself committed to read a long and crabbed MS., roughly and voluptuously squirted on to the paper. With what sense of outrage as he deciphered it sentence by sentence must he have found himself confronted by the high-spirited but hare-brained harangues of my unfortunate heroine and her wordy friends! Page after page he must have turned, only to discover more elementary adventures, more nugatory and nonsensical dialogues. At the stage at which my story then was, I must tell the reader that the heroine was far more extravagant than she subsequently became: She was much pruned and tamed before she made her printed appearance. The greater part of her censored escapades have faded from my mind, but I still remember some occasion soon after her baby’s death when she was discovered, I think by Jack,’ doing a step-dance with her footman. It must all have seemed to Henry James the very flower and felicity of hopeless, irredeemable fiction and still he persevered.... Or did he persevere? He wrote me anyhow the most careful and kindly of letters, following it by yet another, delicately and delightfully forbearing to quench the smoking flax.

  “I am such a fanatic myself,” he writes in the earlier of these, “on the subject of form, style, the evidence of intention and meditation, of chiselling and hammering out in literary things that I am afraid I am rather a coldblooded judge, rather likely to be offensive to a young story-teller on the question of quality. I’m not sure that yours strikes me as quite so ferociously literary as my ideal.... Only remember that a story is, essentially a form, and that if it fails of that, it fails of its mission.... For the rest, make yourself a style. It is by style we are saved.”

  In case the reader has given a glance to Dodo, can he imagine a more wisely expressed opinion, that opinion, in fact, being no opinion at all? Never by any possibility could that MS. have seemed to him worth the paper it was written on, or two minutes of his own time. With what a sigh of relief he must have bundled it into its wrapper again!

  I suppose I was incorrigible on this question of scribbling, for I was not in the least discouraged. But for the time the further adventures of the book were cut short by its author’s Odysseys, for directly after Christmas my father and mother, Maggie, Lucy Tait and I started for Algiers, through which we were to journey together as far as Tunis. After that I was going on to Athens to spend the spring there studying at the British School of Archæology, and it was with a light heart that I clapped Dodo, after this austere outing, back into a drawer again to wait till I could attend to her.

  CHAPTER XIII. ATHENS AND DODO

  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: but just here, at Biskra, and nowhere else throughout the journey was my father unable to return in time. It would perhaps be going too far to say that the Queen had anything in her mind definite enough to call a premonition; but the event happening just then was at least a most curious coincidence.... A few hours afterwards a second telegram arrived, from the Prince of Wales who, with great thoughtfulness, begged him not to interrupt his tour.

  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 Carthage, the Punic Wars, the subsequent Roman occupation had no lure for him. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, was the full moon among the lesser lights of the firmament.

  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 Mi
ddleton, 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 even, and then would come the stoa of Asclepius and a great Roman colonnade, and for none of these had I a glance or a thought to spare, for over the sheer southern wall of the Acropolis there rose the south-west angle of the Parthenon. And then, with a reverence that was as sincere as love itself and not less ardent, I mounted the steps of the Propylæa, with the rebuilt shrine on the right of that fairy-presence, the Wingless Victory, who shed her pinions because for all time she was to abide in Athens; and on the left was the great bastion wall stained to an inimitable russet by the winds from Salamis, and between the great Doric columns I passed, and there in front was a bare scraped hill-top, and glowing in the sunset was the west front of the Parthenon, that serene abiding presence, set for a symbol of what Athens stood for, and, no less, of the eternal yearning of man for the glorious city of God. Behind rose the violet crown of hills, Hymettus and Pentelicus and Parnes.

  “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 transcended and translated into stone; the glory of jubilant youth and of ridden stallions, of maidens who wove the mantle of the goddess, of priests and of the hierarchy of gods was but part of some world-offering to the austere and loving and perfect presence which they had instinctively worshipped, and, as in some noble trance, had set in symbol there. With what wonder must they have beheld the completed work of their hands, and, in their work, the indwelling of the power that was its consecration.

  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 army routed and dispersed by an irritated cab-horse, which, clearly possessed by the devil, galloped and wheeled and galloped again till the Guards had very prudently taken cover among the orange trees, for it was impossible to make any effective military display, when harassed by that enraged quadruped. Sometimes I think that this distressing scene was an adumbration of how, a few years later, that same army bolted through Thessaly on the approach of the Turks. “The host of hares” was the Turkish phrase for them, and Edhem Pasha, then commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army, described to me, when I was at Volo after the Turkish occupation of Thessaly, the battle of Pharsala. “We came over the hill,” he said, without enmity and without contempt, “and we said ‘Sh-sh-sh’ and we clapped our hands, and that was the battle of Pharsala.”... How complete has been the regeneration of this versatile people may be gathered from their later campaigns against the same adversaries.

  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 sec 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 nursery-maid. But that was the dynastic custom: whenever a royal personage came forth from the palace, the bugler made all kinds of music, so that the inhabitants of Athens might, like good Nebuchadnezzarites, fall down and worship the pink little image.... Sometimes, however, their loyalty obtained a more adult reward, for on Sunday afternoon King George would generally go down to Phaleron in the steam-tram, and observe the beauties of nature. On such occasions he was marvellously democratic, and would come trotting across the belt of gravel between the palace and the tram-lines in order not to keep his citizens waiting. There is no doubt that if he had attempted to do so, the tram would have gone without him, leaving him to follow by the next, or study the beauties of nature in his own garden.

  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 recognized his mistake, and with an engaging smile, saluted instead. You took off your straw hat (or if it was winter your top-coat and bowler) and were ushered with a series of obeisances into a small bare room, furnished with a carafe of water. Then a door was thrown open, and, as in a dream, you advanced into a small apartment with a purple paper and gold stars upon it, and found the King. He always stood during these amazing interviews, and kept rising on tiptoe with his feet close together, till the instinct of unconscious mimicry made it impossible not to do the same, and he and you seesawed up and down, and talked for ten minutes about his friends in England. He had a long neck, and shoulders like a hock-bottle, and when he dipped them it was a sign that he had sufficiently enjoyed your society. He was very bald, and so also was the Crown Prince, who married the German Emperor’s sister. Both father and son (th
ough this will hardly be credited) wrote testimonials in praise of some fluid which, when rubbed on the head, produces or preserves a fine crop of hair. And if the hair-grease did them no good, as it apparently didn’t, I hope there was some sort of palm-grease that made their testimonial worth their while.

  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. Behind her came the King still playing seesaw, and behind him the Crown Prince, who did the same to the men he wanted to talk to, and a little while afterwards there was Prince George and Princess Marie, both putting people into their places. It was all very democratic, but also slightly embarrassing, because after large Prince George had pushed you back into a low chair, you had to crane your head up, as if you were talking to somebody on the top of the dome of St. Paul’s, the dome inverted being represented by his tremendous and circular waistcoat. After him came Prince Nicholas, but he had always something terribly important and slightly broad, in the shape perhaps of a “Limerick,” to communicate. So as these could not be shouted, conversation was held on more reasonable levels.

  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 some months at the British Legation, where Sir Edwin Egerton was Minister, I found myself on strangely personal terms with her. She had been a friend of an uncle of mine, who became a nationalized German after years of living in Wiesbaden, and starting from that, she talked with a curious unrestraint. Bitter little stinged remarks came out, “You are happy in being English”; or “When I come to London I am only a visitor.” On one occasion I was left alone with her on a terrace above the outlying rooms at the Legation, and to my profound discomfort, she began pacing up and down with smothered ejaculations. Then quite suddenly she said to me, “But Willie is mad!” I suppose I idiotically looked as if this was some joke, and she shook her outstretched hand at me, “I mean that he is mad,” she repeated. “Willie is mad.”... Then quite suddenly, with the arrested movement of a bird, wounded to death in mid-air, she ceased from her tragic flight, and came to earth. “If you are going to bathe again at Phaleron,” she said, with a laugh, alluding to an incident of the day before, “I must be sure there are no clothes on the beach, before I sit down to sketch. You came out of the water, and there was I...”