Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Or the bugle sounded, and there was the unhappiest of the Czars looking very small beside his cousin Prince George. Or again, one afternoon, when, by perpetual permission, I was allowed to seek the shade and coolness of the palace gardens, I heard the trampling of foot-steps, and shrill expostulations, from behind a hedge of oleander. Round the corner came the originators of this disturbance.... King George seemed to have taken a dislike to his sister’s hat, and had plucked it from her head and was kicking it along the garden path, while she followed remonstrating. “But it’s an ugly hat,” said he, delighted to find some kind of umpire, “and therefore I took it and I kicked it, and she cannot wear it any more....” (Was there ever anything so like the immortal Rose and the Ring?) “My hat!” said the injured owner tersely, as she recovered her hopelessly damaged property.... “So rude of you, George.”

  My first spring in Greece was mostly spent out of Athens, for with another student I was put in charge of the British excavations at Megalopolis. All the plums had already been picked out of it, for the theatre had been completely cleared, and the excavation of the year before had laid bare the entire plan of the great Council hall, the Thersilion, built in the time of Epaminondas, so that this year excavation was equivalent to sitting on a wall while a lot of workmen removed tons of earth in which nothing could possibly be discovered. It was not thrilling, but at least one could incessantly talk to them in what purported to be modem Greek, until it became so. There had been considerable excitement about Megalopolis the year before, for the British excavators had thought they had triumphantly refuted the German theory, announced by Dr. Dôrpfeld, that fourth century Greek theatres had no stage. They had unearthed steps and columns, which, they considered, proved the existence of a stage, and, rather prematurely, had announced their anti-German discovery in the Hellenic Journal with something resembling a crow of satisfaction.

  E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 26

  On which this dreadful Dr. Dôrpfeld came down from Athens with a note-book and a tape measure, and in a couple of hours in the pouring rain had proved quite conclusively, so that no further argument was possible, that the British, with a year to think about it, had quite misinterpreted their own evidence, and demonstrated how what they had taken for a stage was merely a back wall. Their researches in fact had merely confirmed his theory. Then he rolled up his measure and went back to Athens.... So another and I cleaned up these rather depressing remains, and when that was done we hired mules and went a-wandering through the country and saw the spring “blossom by blossom” (even as Beesly had read) alight on the hills. Blossom by blossom, too, Greece itself, no longer pictured in photographs or bored for in books, opened its myriad lovelinesses, even as the scarlet anemone made flame in the thickets, and the nightingales “turned the heart of the night to fire” in the oleanders by the Eurotas. We visited Homeric Mycenæ, and Epidaurus, the Harrogate of the fourth century B.C., and in archaeological intervals I speared mullet by the light of a flaming torch on moonless nights with the fishermen of Nauplia, and ate them for early breakfast, broiled on the sea-shore, before the sun was up. I crossed the Gulf of Corinth and went to Delphi, where the French school were beginning the excavations that were destined to yield more richly than any soil in Greece except the precinct at Olympia. There, too, I went, and if to me the Parthenon had been a revelation of the glory of God, there I took my shoes from off my feet, and worshipped the glory of man, because the Hermes of Praxiteles “caring for the infant Dionysus,” embodied, once and for all, the possible, the ultimate beauty of man, even as the Louvre held the ultimate glory of woman.... A few weeks more in Athens were busy with the record of the meagre results from Megalopolis, and I left for England, knowing in my very bones that Athens was in some subtle way my spiritual mother, so that on many subsequent journeys, as I went from England there, and from there back to England again, I travelled but from home to home,

  Dodo had been put back in her drawer, after her expedition to Henry James: now for the second time I took her out and tasted her, as if to see whether she seemed to have mellowed like a good wine, or become sour like an inferior one, in which case I would very gladly have poured her on the earth like water, and’ started again. But I could not, reading her once more, altogether cast her off: she had certain gleams of vitality about her, and with my mother’s connivance and help again I submitted her to a professional verdict. This time it was my mother’s friend, Mrs. Harrison, known to our admiring family as “Lucas Malet,” author of the adorable Colonel Enderby’s Wife, who was selected to pronounce on my story, and again, I am afraid, it was without the slightest realization of this highway robbery on the time of an author that I despatched the book. Anyhow those two assaults on Henry James and Lucas Malet have produced in me a fellow-feeling for criminals such as I was a quarter of a century ago, so that now, when, as occasionally happens, some light-hearted marauder announces that he or she (it is usually she) is sending me her manuscript, which she hopes I won’t mind reading, and telling her as soon as possible exactly what I think of it, and to what publisher she had better send it (perhaps T would write him a line too) and whether the heroine isn’t a little overdone (but her mother thinks her excellent), and would I be careful to register it when I return it, and if before next Thursday to this address, and if after next Friday to another, etc etc., I try to behave as Lucas Malet behaved in similar circumstances.

  I do not for a moment say that I succeed, but I can still remember how pleasant it should seem, from the point of view of the aspirant scribbler, that somebody should be permitted to read what has been written with such rapture and how important it all is....

  But I can never hope to emulate Lucas Malet’s tact and wisdom in her genial, cordial, and honest reply (when she had had the privilege of wading through these sheets), for they still remain to me, who know her answer almost by heart, to be the first and the last word in the true theory of the writing of fiction. Her deft incisions dissected, from lungs and heart and outwards to the delicate fibre of the skin that protects and expresses the life within, the structure of stories, short or long, that are actually alive. First must come the “idea,” the life that is to vitalize the complete animal, so that its very hair and nails are fed with blood.... And then, since I cannot possibly find words as apt and as sober as hers I will quote from the letters themselves.

  “First the idea, then the grouping, which is equivalent to our drama — then a search for models from whom to draw. Most young English writers — the artistic sense being a matter of experience, not of instinct, with most of us — begin just the other way about. Begin with their characters... rummage about for a story in which to place them, and too often leave the idea out of the business altogether.... One evil consequence of this method — among many others — is that there is a distracting lack of completeness and ensemble in so much English work. The idea should be like the thread on which beads are strung. It shouldn’t show, except at the two ends; but in point of fact it keeps the beads all together and in their proper relation.”

  Then, to one already hugely interested in this admirable creed of the art of fiction, Lucas Malet proceeded to a dissection, just and kind and ruthless, of the story as it stood. She hurt in order to heal, she cut in order that healthy tissue (if there was any) might have the chance to grow. She showed me by what process (if I applied it seriously and successfully) I might convert my Dodo-doll into something that did not only squeak when pressed in the stomach, and gave no other sign of vitality than closing its eyes when it was laid flat. In consequence, greatly exhilarated by this douche of cold water, I collected such fragments of an “idea” as existed, revised what I had written, and wrote (in pursuance of the “idea”) the second volume, as it subsequently appeared, in those days when novels were originally issued in three or two volumes at the price of a guinea and a half or a guinea. I finished it that autumn, sent it to the publisher recommended by Lucas Malet, who instantly accepted it. It came out in the following spring, that of 189
3. I was out in Greece again at the time, and though it was my first public appearance (since Sketches from Marlborough may be considered as a local phenomenon) I feel sure that from the time when, with trembling pride, I corrected the long inconvenient galley sheets that kept slipping on to the floor, I gave no further thought to it at all. Bad or good, I had done my best; what happened concerned me no more, for I was quite absorbed in the study of the precinct of Asclepios on the slopes of the Acropolis, in the life at Athens, and in a volume of short stories that I began to write with a pen still wet, so to speak, with the final corrections on the proof sheets of Dodo. She was done with, so far as I was concerned, and it was high time, now that I was twenty-five, to get on with something else, before the frosts of senility paralysed all further effort.

  For such a person as I happened to be, that, as I then believed and still believe, was the wisest resolution I could make. The habit of immediate activity, physically or mentally violent, had, from the days when butterflies, plants, athletics, friendship, Saturday Magazines were all put under contribution to feed the raging energies of life, become an instinct. If there was a kick left in my wholly boyish nature, it had become a habit to kick, and not to save the energy for any future emergency: if there was a minute to spare, somehow to use or enjoy it. To what use that minute and that kick were devoted, so I now see, did not particularly matter: the point was to kick for just that minute. No doubt there are other and admirable uses to which energy may be put; some make reservoirs, into which they pour and store their vital force, and while it increases, screw down their sluice, and let the gathered waters rest and reflect. Such as these probably achieve the most abiding results, for when they choose to raise their sluice, they can, by the judicious use of winch and shutter, continue to irrigate the field which they have determined to make fruitful, for a period that they can certainly estimate. They burn a steady unwavering candle which will always illuminate a fixed area, and from the areas which do not concern them they hide their ray and thus economize their wax and their wick. But how surely are there others who from their very nature are unable to construct their reservoirs or burn this one decorous candle. Whatever head of water there is, it must be instantly dispersed, whatever candle there is, it must be lit at both ends, and if that is not enough, it must be broken in half, and its new ends of wicks kindled and used for the exploration of some trumpery adventure: “trumpery,” that is to say, in the vocabulary of the wise and prudent, but how colossal in the sight of the wild-eyed adventurer. And just here, just where a moral lesson should be drawn showing the early decay and the untimely end of these spendthrifts of energy, the whole tendency of Nature lies in precisely the opposite direction to that in which natural and moral economy ought to tend, for it is the careful who grow early old, and the careful investor of energy who declares bankruptcy, and retires in middle life to the club windows, where he shows a bald head to St. James’s Street, and a sour visage to the waiters. Somehow so it most inexorably seems, those who spend, have; those who save, lack. Not that the spender could, by the laws and instincts of his nature, have done otherwise than court bankruptcy: not that the investor could have done otherwise than court affluence. But the one careful candle, as a matter of experience, gets blown out, and the irrelevant candle-ends continue to flare....

  So, after this second visit to Greece, I came home to find to my incredulous and incurious surprise, that in the interval I had become, just for the focus of a few months, famous or infamous. One of those rare phenomena, less calculable than the path of a comet, which periodically is to destroy the world, had occurred, and there was a “boom” in Dodo, and no one was more astonished than the author, when his mother met him arriving by the boat train at Victoria, and hinted at what was happening. All sorts of adventitious circumstances aided it: it was thought extremely piquant that a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury should have written a book so frankly unepiscopal, and quite a lot of ingenious little paragraphists invented stories of how I had read it aloud to my father and described his disconcertedness: the title-role and other characters were assigned to various persons who happened then to be figuring in the world, but apart from all these adventitious aids, this energetic and trivial experiment had — in those ancient days — a certain novelty of treatment. There were no explanations; whatever little life its characters were possessed of, they revealed by their own unstinted speech. That, as I have already explained, had been the plan of it in my mind, and the execution, whatever the merits of the plan might be, was in accordance with it. It went through edition after edition, in that two-volume form, price a guinea (against which shortly afterwards the libraries revolted) and all the raging and clamour, of course, only made it sell the more. It had received very scant notice in the Press itself; what (as always happens) made it flourish so furiously was that people talked about it.

  But its success apart from the delightful comedy of such a first act to its author, led on to a truly violent situation when the curtain rose again, for the critics, justly enraged that this rare phenomenon called a “boom” should not have been detected and heralded by their auguries and by them damned or deified, laid aside a special pen for me, ready for the occasion when I should be so imprudent as to publish another novel; and they all procured a large bottle of that hot ink which Dante dipped for,

  When his left hand i’ the hair of the wicked,

  Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma

  Bit unto the live man’s flesh for parchment,

  Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, and since they were proposing to “let the wretch go festering” through London, they read up Macaulay’s review of Mr. Robert Montgomery’s poems to see how it was done. If they had not noticed Dodo, they would at least notice her successor. Indeed the fairy godmother who presents a young author at his public christening with a boom, brings him a doubtful gift, for when next I challenged attention all these little Macaulays and Dantes uncorked their hot ink, and waited pen in hand till Mr. Methuen sent them their “advance copies.” Then, saying “one, two, three — go,” they all produced on the birth-morning of the unfortunate book columns and columns of the most blistering abuse that I remember ever beholding in God-fearing journals. This blasted infant was a small work called The Rubicon, now so completely forgotten that I must ask the reader to take my word for it that it was quite a poor book. It was not even very, very bad: it was just poor. Critics have hundreds of poor books submitted to their commiserated notice, and they are quite accustomed to that, and tell the public in short paragraphs that the work in question is “decidedly powerful,” or “intensely interesting” or “utterly futile,” and there is an end of it as far as they are concerned. Had this blasted infant been a first book it would naturally have received no more than a few rude little notices, and perhaps a few polite little notices. But as it was the successor to the abhorred comet it was concertedly singled out for the wrath of the Olympians. The candidatus exercitus of the entire Press went forth with howitzers and Maxims (in both senses), with cannons of all calibres, with rifles and spears and arrows and sharp tongues to annihilate this poor little May-fly. That I am not exaggerating the stupendous character of this fusillade can be shown from a few extracts. In those days I used to take in Press-cuttings, and among a heap of more precious relics in a forgotten box I came across the other day a packet of these, which contained such flowers as I could not leave to blush unseen, and I picked and here present a little nosegay of them.

  (1) The Pall Mall Gazette. (The Rubicon, E. F. Benson.)

  “MR. BENSON’S NEW PLAY.

  Dramatis Personæ.

  Exhumée Dodo. Madonna de Clapham.

  Lord Anaemia. Jelly Fish.

  Donjuans (sic). Vulgarities. Indecencies.

  Time, The Middle Classes. Place, Le Pays Inconnu.