SOURCE: Warren, Austin. “The Happy, Vanished World of A. C. Benson.” Sewanee Review 75 (spring 1967): 268-81.

[In the following essay, Warren provides an overview of Benson's works.]

Arthur Benson, eldest son of Edward White Benson, successively Canon of Lincoln, Bishop of Truro, and Archbishop of Canterbury, lived in a charmed world of canons, dons, and writers—two of the writers his brothers. His earlier years were spent as Master at Eton; he ended his days as Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge; and his tongue—and, more remarkable, his pen—were never idle. He wrote and published upwards of forty books,—novels, poems, meditative essays, biographies: even, at the Royal Family's request, edited Queen Victoria's Diary. And all this writing was not enough. From 1897 he kept a regular diary, which, by the end of his life, amounted to something like four million words—forty substantial volumes if printed in full.

After his death, his former student and friend Percy Lubbock made a highly candid and readable volume out of the Diary (1926, apparently); and in 1926 there was published a symposiac book peculiarly British, Benson as Seen by Some Friends. It might appear that there is little more to say of Benson and his busy life after his Friends have finished with him: I say “Friends” because the British can like, respect, love without feeling it necessary to suppress their friends' difficulties, lacks, eccentricities, lapses.

Benson's friends are as candid as they are just. They liked the man, but they could not like his most popular and publishable books—books from which he excluded (apparently without awareness) three-fourths of himself.

In my youth, a “cultivated and refined” aunt of mine, who doubtless thought me “dreamy” as well as “literary”, gave me Benson's most famous book, sure that I would like it—Benson's From a College Window (1906). I hope I didn't; at any event, by virtue of its mildness it left no impression. Just now, I opened it at random to the chapter on Art and read: “But whether one be of the happy number or not who have the haunting instinct for some special form of expression, one may learn at all events to deal with life in an artistic spirit. I do not at all mean by that that one should learn to overvalue the artistic side of life, to hold personal emotion to be a finer thing than unselfish usefulness. I mean rather that one should aim at the perception of quality”—and so on. It contains pretty dreadful writing of all sorts, whether one pounces on the tritely romantic “haunting” or the banal commonplaces of “deal with” and “side of life”.

Pater's old Eton tutor, Luxmoore, called the book “thin, very thin; pleasantly written …”, and added, “but I have only read it in scraps. A. C. B. has spoilt himself by rapid writing and thin thinking. … I hope he will stop writing for a long time and do a lot of energetic and unpleasant things to take his attention off himself.” But Benson enjoyed writing these “thin” books. The first, The Upton Letters, had been published, with unsuccessful anonymity, only a year before; and it was followed by others, sample titles of which will suffice—Beside Still Waters, The Altar Fire, The Thread of Gold. These books, which went into large editions, were read all over the English-reading world, not least in America; and their tone, a mixture of the familar essayist and the lay preacher, made his readers feel that a friend was talking to them. The consequence was a copious correspondence with his readers which appears to have given Benson much pleasure—the pleasure, presumably, of reaching a wider and different kind of audience than that of his intimates, who, as he was well aware, held these lay sermons in small esteem—the pleasure, too, of knowing that his correspondents would not turn up in that more astringent world in which he daily lived. Ten years before his death, an American lady who admired his books but whom he never had met and never did meet, made him (after his repeated demurs) the gift of a “fortune”, to be expended for causes dear to him and their maintenance after his death—causes which proved to be benefits and benefactions to Magdalen.

In 1905, he resigned his Mastership and betook himself to Cambridge. The year was one of mixed “hurtness” that he had not been offered the Headmastership of Eton (which he did and didn't want) and of literary production. There is an entry of August 17 which is a kind of accounting to himself, to his friends, to Eton, doubtless to his ten-year-deceased archepiscopal father, of how much he had “produced”. Archbishop Benson was a man of affairs, a successful administrator, and the author of two scholarly books not published till after his death.

Arthur Benson wrote, then, in his Journals the following accounting: “I reflect that since I have left Eton, in addition to all my work on the Queen's letters, I have written the following books: 1. Cambridge Revisited (not published); 2. Fitzgerald [EML series] (62,200 words); 3. Upton Letters (80,000); 4. College Window (40,000); 5. Pater [EML series] (60,000); 6. Leonard [later entitled Beside Still Waters] (60,000); 7. My poetry lectures—quite a book (50,000); 8. The Thread of Gold (80,000); 9. Enough essays and articles to form a small volume by themselves (40,000); 10. I have published a book of poems.” These books were written, says Lubbock, “during the guarded hours between tea and dinner”.

Benson's friends were aware of his restless activity. He thought of himself as an introspective man—this chiefly, it would seem, because he was neither a rigorous thinker nor a scholar nor an administrator. Yet he was happy only when busy; and renouncing his career as Master at Eton for a literary life was not evidence he was introspective: he became, like his London friend Edmund Gosse, a literary man of affairs. In him, inner insecurity was accompanied by much interest in surfaces, sociability, gossip, small duties. Always busy, he was incapable both of peaceful indolence and of “inner working”.

He had three partial breakdowns, the longest not long before his death. They appear to have had no sharp, precipitating cause; and their ending returned Benson to his old routine, having learned nothing from them. One of the candid Friends, who memorialized him after his death, wrote in a mode strange to “busy” Americans: “I have always thought that in this incredible speed [with which he changed his clothes], in this failure to draw from the recuperative resources of life, the leisurely shaving and dressing and meditation of ordinary routine, lay the seeds of Nature's slow revenge on those who are impatient of her old rhythms of energy and rest.”

In 1923, he began to recover from his breakdown; and the last two years of his life were perhaps the happiest. He returned to writing; and his last two volumes of reminiscence (each the work of a few weeks) are probably his best: for Trefoil (a boy's view of Wellington School, Lincoln, and Truro) I need no “probably”. Benson's diary makes it clear that he had no center, either as a man or as a man of letters. He desires to be a great writer; but that desire could never force him either to self-limitation (to the end of his days, he continued to write and publish poetry, novels, “inspirational addresses”, and biographical vignettes) or to periods of complete silence. In part the brilliance of Trefoil may be assignable to the more or less enforced silence which preceded it.

Benson took the complaints of his friends with remarkable calm when one considers how much he wanted—or fancied he wanted—to be a real writer. In 1913, reading an account of his work in the British Review, he discovered that he was considered “complacent, condescending, superfluous, otiose”, but he easily comforted himself in reflecting that, though the busy life he leads is not conducive to writing, it gives him “variety of experience, as well as some health of body and mind …”. And with equal ease he accepted Percy Lubbock's judgement that “I can't get a certain acidity of perception and a decisiveness of phrase into my books. In my books I am solemn, sweet, retired; in real life I am rather vehement, sharp, contemptuous, a busy mocker.” Benson thinks it enough to say that he is “also something of a fatalist” and that he is “really so lazy: that is my main trouble, my hurried exuberance …”.

His “books”, as he calls them, are these collections of essays, these lay sermons. He was capable of writing better, and did. Apparently through the mediation of Edmund Gosse, he was invited to write three volumes for the “English Men of Letters” series, then ostensibly edited by John Morley. He did the Rossetti, the Fitzgerald, and the Pater, of which the first is the poorest; the Pater (strangely published in the same year as From a College Window—1906), the best. Significantly, both the Fitzgerald and the Pater end with psychological portraits (which Benson called “Personal Characteristics”), the genre at which Benson excelled; but the Pater has also another kind of portrait at which Benson excelled in the latter part of the first chapter, called “Early Life”—a portrait in which architecture, decor, modes of living, setting, have their proper due.

Gosse—if his was the responsibility—assigned Benson congenial subjects. Like Henry James, his friend, Benson relished of the past only what, partly by documents but chiefly by some tangible succession, some “laying on of hands”, he could feel. I find him speaking of the only definite influence on Pater as Ruskin, whom Pater read at nineteen; and Benson, who later wrote a book on Ruskin, wrote at the end of his life (1924) a sketch, “A Sight of Ruskin”, describing how, in 1880, when he was president of a literary society of Eton boys, he met Ruskin, then sixty-one, and talked briefly with him before the lecture. From Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites to Henry James: that is Benson's literary time-span. Literarily, he could not follow James after The Portrait of a Lady; but the personal, the pontifical, greatness of der alte James he apprehended—none better than he.

Rossetti, Fitzgerald, and Pater he seems never to have had a “sight of”; but those who knew them intimately were still living when Benson wrote. Rich in shrewd, grotesque, but “unslanted” detail are the pages from the 1903 diary on his Rossetti-afternoon with Watts-Dunton and Swinburne; and in writing his Pater he had the assistance of Pater's two maiden-lady sisters, and Shadwell, Provost of Oriel, Pater's oldest friend, and Sturgis, that Anglo-American novelist and host of all literary men from James to E. M. Forster.

The Pater I have known since my youth. It holds up, and out, remarkably well; it has not been superseded. Since I have read Benson's other work, I can see how Benson had at once to stretch and to restrain himself to write it. There are (to my later readings) obvious autobiographical things said when they are true of both subject and object—too many to cite; one shall suffice: “The praise of academic circles is reserved at the present time for people of brisk bursarial and business qualifications, for men of high technical accomplishment, for exact researchers, for effective teachers of prescribed subjects, for men of acute and practical minds, rather than for men of imaginative qualities.”

In the chapter on “Early Life”, Benson describes (doubtless partly to guard Pater—and perhaps himself—against any contamination from the blatant artificialities of Wilde) Pater's little parlor at Brasenose, which was “always furnished with a certain seemly austerity and simplicity. … His only luxury was a bowl of dried rose-leaves. He had little desire to possess intrinsically valuable objects. …” There were a few engravings on the walls; and somewhere stood a little tray of copies of beautiful Greek coins. “His outer door was always open; he was always accessible, never seemed to be interrupted by any visitor, was never impatient, always courteous and deferential; rising … in the middle of the most complicated sentence. …”

Pater's style of writing was Pater's own invention; yet, says Benson, “it is not only easy to imitate, but it is impossible, if one studies it closely, not to fall into the very mannerisms of the writer”. And Benson's book, otherwise (for him) so good and so critical, would be better if it avoided that very likely unconscious imitation—which, though it never essays the Pateric sentence structure, is damaged by overuse of certain words too dear to Pater—“blithe”, “weary”, “comely”, “dainty”, and their corresponding nouns. Benson fancies he admires most the styles (very different, each from the other) of Arnold and Newman, neither of whom he ever sounds like. It was, surely, a kind of discipline for him to try to sound like Pater—a writer who, despite his delicacies, practiced always the counsel he gave his “age”: “A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned language.”

There were strong personal overlaps between Pater and Benson—and, one may add, Henry James. All three were bachelors who liked to entertain, but, enamored of their personal schedules of work and desirous not to be pressed into intimacy, entertained with a meticulous attention to the well-being of their guests which burdened at least the hosts.

Despite The Upton Letters and Beside Still Waters, Benson was the most worldly. He was not a thinker, even on education. His extraordinary talent was the observation of people; and his books of portraits, though he subtitles at least one of them “Studies in Biography”, are always recollections of people he had to some degree known, or at least watched—commonly people of his father's generation rather than his own. The best of these, probably, are those written at the end of his life, Memories and Friends (1924), Trefoil (1923), and the Diary, published after his death with a shrewd introductory essay by Lubbock. “People” interested Benson in a curiously impersonal kind of way. He liked to be liked, and to draw people out; but, for himself, he can scarcely be said to have liked or disliked. He was what his American inferior Gamaliel Bradford once called himself, a “naturalist of souls”. He was a perceptive observer of details as well as an impressionist of the whole man; and Simon Nowell-Smith's Legend of the Master (1947) shows him to be one of the few reliable reporters of Henry James's celebrated mode of speech.

Benson's Friends—in particular one, Edward Lyttelton—thought he was crushed in childhood by fear of his father and by the lack of dogmatic instruction in religion. The latter may be true. Some “dogmatic instruction” might have made him an atheist or a skeptic, like Leslie Stephen. It would certainly have prevented the boyish immaturity and sentimentally diffuse meditations which were so much appreciated by half-educated English and Americans.

But, at this distance, the notion that his father crushed him is hard to entertain; I think of what easy access to all rights and privileges of the best ecclesiastical, academic, and intellectual society his being an Archbishop's son gave him—little of which he earned in his own right. A King's Scholar of Eton, on the foundation of Henry VI; then a Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, the “sister foundation” of Henry VI; in 1885, he returned to Eton as Master, remaining there for nearly twenty years. Two years before Benson's return to Eton, his father had been elevated from the Bishopric of Truro to the Archbishopric of Canterbury; and a little later his chaplain, the Rev. Randall Davidson, subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury, whose wife was the daughter of Archbishop Tait, was appointed Dean of the Royal Chapel at Windsor.

These “facts” I take, almost without verbal alteration, from Benson's “Prefatory Note to the American Edition” of Memories and Friends. The persons portrayed in this book were drawn, says the privileged man, from “an interesting society, because the Eton masters were selected for their attainments, and the Windsor circle enjoyed … a high degree of social experience; while at home, in my father's lifetime [the Primate died in 1896], I had opportunities of meeting a good many of the leading personalities of the day”—and those during the “tranquil and prosperous period covering the closing years of Queen Victoria's reign”.

To such a society—men and women unknown across the ocean, and those who were and are known, like James and Arnold—Benson had, all his life, easy access; and yet the charm of his portraits is partly that it was not only the internationally, or even nationally famous, whom he delineates: he was a snob, of course, but not of the obvious sort—the sort who requires newspaper celebrities. A connoisseur of persons, he had a trained taste for many kinds of excellence. Very likely had his own person been more developed and his own standards of judgment been more defined it would have been to the detriment of this ranging connoisseurship. As it is, he is boring and commonplace only when, as in The Leaves of the Tree, the 1911 volume of “Biographical Sketches”, he feels the need of writing an introductory essay on the “theory” behind his portraits and when, in his portraits themselves, he feels the need of inserting some auctorial comment, rhetorical question, or parenthetical note—“I feel”, or “I must confess”, or “I am afraid”, or “it has always seemed to me”, or “I verily believe”.

There is something false about these interpolations—these injections of the personal which unpleasantly and needlessly remind us that these are the impressions and judgements of one man and may have an element of the subjective in them; worse, which suggest that the portraits may seem painted by “anon.” (too objective), unless some irrelevant reminder that the painter is one Benson is at periodic intervals squeezed into them. The virtue of these portraits lies so much in the absence of pity, sympathy, even satire, so much in their objectivity, their matter-of-factness, that I should greatly like to cross out the injected reminders that Benson pinxit—these irrelevant touches in the falsely humble style of From a College Window.

The beautiful virtue of the portraits is their absence of the imposition of the painter: they have a humble transparent quality of direction towards the object.

Benson's best book is probably Trefoil, ostensibly a supplement to his official life of his father, in the form of an account of his father's pre-archepiscopal labors as Headmaster of Wellington College, Canon and Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, and first Bishop of the Cornish diocese of Truro (formerly a division of the See of Exeter)—ostensibly, I say, for the book is really about Benson's memories of his own early years. There are episodes both brilliant and touching from the years at Truro—two in particular. Riding with his father, bent on episcopal visitation, he saw “an old clergyman with a long grey beard, digging in the garden, like Laertes in the Odyssey. … He asked us in to a very barely furnished house … then bit by bit he told his story, and I shall never forget the mixture of dreariness and passionate emphasis with which he spoke. He had been ‘converted’, and resolved to dedicate himself to the work of the Church. He had been ordained, and with his wife had migrated to this lonely place. He was eighty years old, and had worked there for forty years. But the place was peopled with Dissenters, whom he contrived to offend, and who did their best, he declared, to thwart his efforts. He had begun with a small congregation, which had dwindled to three or four persons. He knew no one in the place, had no neighbors, spoke to no one. He talked with extreme bitterness: ‘I have spent my life in fighting with the beasts at Ephesus.’

Now, he said, he only worked in the garden just to keep himself from going crazy. His wife was dead, and he had no children.—He was not an attractive man at all, loud and continuous in speech, tactless and vindictive. … But he was deeply and horribly pathetic; and he said, when we went away, “The promise made to those who seek first the Kingdom of God—for I sacrificed everything—has not been fulfilled for me.”

There was another visit to an isolated clergyman who lived in a vicarage “with neither carpets nor curtains”, who lived on porridge and milk. The parish was “all Dissenters …”. He was evidently a good, sensible, commonplace man, with no particular zeal or enthusiasm, very diffident and tongue-tied, and with no very pressing message to deliver.

My father tried to make a few suggestions, but he shook his head; and suddenly burst into tears. Then he went on to say that he had something much on his mind, which he felt he must tell my father. He said, “I am so lonely and miserable in the evenings, that I rent a pew in the Wesleyan chapel, and go there on Sunday nights to get a little warmth and light, and to see human beings and hear them speak. I know it is very wrong, but I cannot bear the perpetual solitude.”

But the amplest and richest part of Trefoil is the account of the Cathedral, the Cathedral Close, and its denizens in the 1870's as remembered, fifty years after, by Benson. Lubbock seems right in thinking that he evaded the influence of school and university; that it was “in the precinct of a Cathedral that he knew himself to be truly at home. … He always said that he knew the language of the minster-world as he knew no other. …”

Not that Benson was ever seriously tempted to take Orders. He was never “religious”, even in his youth, though he was—how shall one say?—able to recognize religion in others, and never hostile to it, only rather puzzled. He thought, he says, at the end of the charmed description of Lincoln, that the “ethical element” was lacking in his boyhood: his father, preoccupied with “moral ideas” but afraid of “scaring or boring” his children and thinking perhaps that they would be insensibly imbibed by the endless Cathedral services the family attended; his mother, disliking and fearing “priggishness”. Was this largely indirect training “really bracing enough”? Didn't it have “an almost dilettante effect” on young Benson? But these are, perhaps, the “pious” self-castigations of old age.

I seem to find something more honest in Benson's other “concluding remarks”. As a boy, he regarded religion not as a basis of conduct but only as a “section of conduct”—charming and strange phrase which could be translated into “ritualism” if that word had not so narrowed its meaning that Anglo-Catholics are “ritualistic” and Quakers are not. As a matter of sensibility, yes, but of more than sensibility, Benson seems early to have been enamored of order—as manifest in unnamed rules and in manners and decorum. The Cathedral Close was a kind of ancient system, “a thing strangely remote from politics, social problems, sport, and even academic concerns. It was a society which might seem to an outsider to be highly artificial, but the details of which were imbibed by instinct, and so apprehended as the natural course of life. It was a big machine, the whole cathedral establishment, with a very definite subordination [one could as well say “hierarchy”] and proportion penetrating it, and knit together by an elaborate and deferential kind of courtesy. … It was an intensely decorous and sheltered affair, but it embraced so many persons that it was an essentially good training in manners.” Here Benson is, for once at least and briefly, able to generalize.

But this is at the end of the long account of life in the Cathedral Close, richly full of detail, partly architectural but chiefly personal—the two never separated. It was never Benson's temptation to neglect Madame Merle's “metaphysical” discourse to Isabel Archer: “every human being has his shell. … By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances.” So Benson's houses imply the people who live in them; and the people who live in them have naturally created their own “shells” of appurtenances.

Of all Benson's writings, I like his Lincoln best, and least know how to praise it—or even to illustrate its quality except, as my old teacher Irving Babbitt used to say, by choosing an example at random—and the examples are often too long for quoting even if abridged.

The Archdeacon was a small, precise-looking man, his shoulders much bowed, bald, with a small, rather prim mouth, and with an expression strangely compounded of amiability and acuteness. He had the most courteous and deferential manner, and accompanied his remarks, which were few, cautious, and precisely phrased, with a constant succession of little bows, like a pigeon patrolling a lawn. So determined was he not to commit himself to any too definite a statement, that I remember my father saying that when a child was born to the Archdeacon, he met him in the vestry, offered his congratulations, and asked if the infant were a girl or a boy. “I think,” said the Archdeacon, “that I may go so far as to say that it is not a girl.”

The Bishop of Lincoln was Christopher Wordsworth, nephew of the poet; and he and his wife, who dwelt in the Palace several miles from Lincoln, were “objects of frequent and baffled curiosity to us children”. The lady's “one purpose in life was to look after the Bishop, to keep him well, to intervene between him and his tendency to entire absorption in work or thought, and to interpret him to the ordinary world. ‘I suppose the Bishop is not interested in that?’ said a neighboring squire to Mrs. Wordsworth. ‘The Bishop is interested in everything, though I have not heard him mention that subject lately.’”

The Bishop is seen at luncheon, “utterly unaware of what he ate or drank. I can see him now …, wearying perhaps of the slice of mutton assigned to him, and stretching out his hand to any viands within reach—a fruit-tart, an apple, a piece of cake—and transferring it with spoon or fork to his own already occupied plate. He would take, in the intervals of his discourse, tiny morsels from the heap; then some other substance would be added, till Mrs. Wordsworth would make a sign, and the butler would remove the loaded plate and substitute a clean one—and the process would begin again. John Wordsworth [his son, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury] was in respect of food one of the most absent-minded of men; but I never in all my life saw anyone so incurious as the Bishop of Lincoln—he seemed to be living in a dream.”

Benson's world is rich in ecclesiastical personages; then come academic: in The Leaves of the Tree there is a brilliantly colored portrait of Professor Alfred Newton of Cambridge, “one of the leading ornithologists of the time”, but also a “character”. Missing are such portraits of political personages as adorn The Education of Henry Adams: the exception, Adams's friend Cecil Spring-Rice, distinguished diplomat, appears almost entirely as an Etonian. But then the whole political dimension of English life, of which Benson's friend Henry James showed himself so memorably aware in The Princess Cassimassima, fails to concern Benson. This defect even of awareness shuts him off from the very first rank of chronicles and portraitists.

By combination of family right and private literary and social talent, Benson knew almost everyone of ecclesiastical, academic, and literary status from Bishops Westcott and Lightfoot to Hardy, Henry James, and Rupert Brooke. From 1875 to 1925 he was not a central figure of cultivated English life but a figure at the center of it.

He was a brilliant, patient, passionless observer of a rich and coherent world which must have been richly comfortable for those who had the fortune to be of it—a world which once existed and now no longer exists, save on paper, in the yet eminently readable memoirs of A. C. Benson.