House, then presided over by Mr. Cornish. It was a well-managed place,
and the teaching was good. I suppose that all boys of an independent
mind dislike the first breaking-in to the ways of the world, and the
exchanging of the freedom of home for the barrack-life of school, the
absence of privacy, and the sense of being continually under the
magnifying-glass which school gives. It was dreadful to Hugh to have to
account for himself at all times, to justify his ways and tastes, his
fancies and even his appearance, to boys and masters alike. Bullying is
indeed practically extinct in well-managed schools; but small boys are
inquisitive, observant, extremely conventional, almost like savages in
their inventiveness of prohibitions and taboos, and perfectly merciless
in criticism. The instinct for power is shown by small boys in the
desire to make themselves felt, which is most easily accomplished by
minute ridicule. Hugh made friends there, but he never really enjoyed
the life of the place. The boys who get on well at school from the first
are robust, normal boys, without any inconvenient originality, who enjoy
games and the good-natured rough and tumble of school life. But Hugh was
not a boy of that kind; he was small, not good at games, and had plenty
of private fancies and ideas of his own. He was ill at ease, and he
never liked the town of straggling modern houses on the low sea-front,
with the hills and ports of Wales rising shadowy across the mud-stained
tide.
He was quick and clever, and had been well taught; so that in 1885 he
won a scholarship at Eton, and entered college there, to my great
delight, in the September of that year. I had just returned to Eton as a
master, and was living with Edward Lyttelton in a quaint, white-gabled
house called Baldwin's Shore, which commanded a view of Windsor Castle,
and overlooked the little, brick-parapeted, shallow pond known as
Barnes' Pool, which, with the sluggish stream that feeds it, separates
the college from the town, and is crossed by the main London road. It
was a quaint little house, which had long ago been a boarding-house, and
contained many low-coiled, odd-shaped rooms. Hugh was Edward Lyttelton's
private pupil, so that he was often in and out of the place. But I did
not see very much of him. He was a small, ingenuous-looking creature in
those days, light-haired and blue-eyed; and when a little later he
became a steerer of one of the boats, he looked very attractive in his
Fourth of June dress, as a middy, with a dirk and white duck trousers,
dangling an enormous bouquet from his neck. At Eton he did very little
in the way of work, and his intellect must have been much in abeyance;
because so poor was his performance, that it became a matter of
surprise among his companions that he had ever won a scholarship at all.
[Illustration: _Photo by Elliott & Fry_
THE THREE BROTHERS, 1882
E. F. Benson A. C. Benson R. H. Benson
at Marlborough. at Cambridge. at Mr. Cornish's School at Clevedon.
Aged 15. Aged 21. Aged 11.]
I have said that I did not know very much about Hugh at Eton; this was
the result of the fact that several of the boys of his set were my
private pupils. It was absolutely necessary that a master in that
position should avoid any possibility of collusion with a younger
brother, whose friends were that master's pupils. If it had been
supposed that I questioned Hugh about my pupils and their private lives,
or if he had been thought likely to tell me tales, we should both of us
have been branded. But as he had no wish to confide, and indeed little
enough to consult anyone about, and as I had no wish for sidelights, we
did not talk about his school life at all. The set of boys in which he
lived was a curious one; they were fairly clever, but they must have
been, I gathered afterwards, quite extraordinarily critical and
quarrelsome. There was one boy in particular, a caustic, spiteful, and
extremely mischief-making creature, who turned the set into a series of
cliques and parties. Hugh used to say afterwards that he had never known
anyone in his life with such an eye for other people's weaknesses, or
with such a talent for putting them in the most disagreeable light. Hugh
once nearly got into serious trouble; a small boy in the set was
remorselessly and disgracefully bullied; it came out, and Hugh was
involved--I remember that Dr. Warre spoke to me about it with much
concern--but a searching investigation revealed that Hugh had really had
nothing to do with it, and the victim of the bullying spoke insistently
in Hugh's favour.
Hugh describes how the facts became known in the holidays, and how my
father in his extreme indignation at what he supposed to be proved, so
paralysed Hugh that he had no opportunity of clearing himself. But
anyone who had ever known Hugh would have felt that it was the last
thing he would have done. He was tenacious enough of his own rights, and
argumentative enough; but he never had the faintest touch of the
savagery that amuses itself at the sight of another's sufferings. "I
hate cruelty more than anything in the whole world," he wrote later;
"the existence of it is the only thing which reconciles my conscience to
the necessity of Hell."
Hugh speaks in his book, _The Confession of a Convert_, about the
extremely negative character of his religious impressions at school. I
think it is wholly accurate. Living as we did in an ecclesiastical
household, and with a father who took singular delight in ceremonial and
liturgical devotion, I think that religion did impress itself rather too
much as a matter of solemn and dignified occupation than as a matter of
feeling and conduct. It was not that my father ever forgot the latter;
indeed, behind his love for symbolical worship lay a passionate and
almost Puritan evangelicalism. But he did not speak easily and openly of
spiritual experience. I was myself profoundly attracted as a boy by the
æsthetic side of religion, and loved its solemnities with all my heart;
but it was not till I made friends with Bishop Wilkinson at the age of
seventeen that I had any idea of spiritual religion and the practice of
friendship with God. Certainly Hugh missed it, in spite of very loving
and earnest talks and deeply touching letters from my father on the
subject. I suppose that there must come for most people a spiritual
awakening; and until that happens, all talk of emotional religion and
the love of God is a thing submissively accepted, and simply not
understood or realised as an actual thing.
Hugh was not at Eton very long--not more than three or four years. He
never became in any way a typical Etonian. If I am asked to say what
that is, I should say that it is the imbibing instinctively of what is
eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a
certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and
duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an
overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual
interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless
superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon--modesty entirely
forbids that--but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the
book of Job, when the patriarch says to the elders, "No doubt but ye are
the people, and wisdom shall die with you." It is a tacit belief that
all has been done for one that the world can do, and that one's standing
is so assured that it need never be even claimed or paraded.
[Illustration: _Photo by Hills & Saunders_
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
IN 1889. AGE 17
As Steerer of the _St. George_, at Eton.]
Still less was Hugh a typical Colleger. College at Eton, where the
seventy boys who get scholarships are boarded, is a school within a
school. The Collegers wear gowns and surplices in public, they have
their own customs and traditions and games. It is a small, close, clever
society, and produces a tough kind of self-confidence, together with a
devotion to a particular tradition which is almost like a religious
initiation. Perhaps if the typical Etonian is conscious of a certain
absolute rightness in the eyes of the world, the typical Colleger has a
sense almost of absolute righteousness, which does not need even to be
endorsed by the world. The danger of both is that the process is
completed at perhaps too early a date, and that the product is too
consciously a finished one, needing to be enlarged and modified by
contact with the world.
But Hugh did not stay at Eton long enough for this process to complete
itself. He decided that he wished to compete for the Indian Civil
Service; and as it was clear that he could not do this successfully at
Eton, my father most reluctantly allowed him to leave.
I find among the little scraps which survive from his schoolboy days,
the following note. It was written on his last night at Eton. He says:
"_I write this on Thursday evening after ten. Peel keeping passage._"
"Peel" is Sidney Peel, the Speaker's son. The passages are patrolled by
the Sixth Form from ten to half-past, to see that no boy leaves his room
without permission. Then follows:
_My feelings on leaving are--
Excitement.
Foreboding of Wren's and fellows there.
Sorrow at leaving Eton.
Pride as being an old Etonian.
Certain pleasure in leaving for many trivial matters.
Feeling of importance.
Frightful longing for India.
Homesickness._
_DEAR ME!_
It was characteristic of Hugh that he should wish both to analyse his
feelings on such an occasion, and to give expression to them.
V
AT WREN'S
Hugh accordingly went to Mr. Wren's coaching establishment in London,
living partly at Lambeth, when my family were in town, and partly as a
boarder with a clergyman. It was a time of hard work; and I really
retain very few recollections of him at all at this date. I was myself
very busy at Eton, and spent the holidays to a great extent in
travelling and paying visits; and I think that Christmas, when we used
to write, rehearse, and act a family play, was probably the only time at
which I saw him.
Hugh went abroad for a short time to learn French, with a party of
Indian Civil Service candidates, and no doubt forgot to write home, for
I find the following characteristic letter of my father's to him:
Lambeth Palace, S.E., _30th June_ 1889.
My dearest Hughie,--We have been rather mourning about
not hearing one word from you. We _supposed_ all would be right as
you were a large party. But _one_ word would be so easy to those
who love you so, who have done all they could to enable you to
follow your own line, against their own wishes and affection!
We hope at any rate you are writing to-day. And we have sent off
"Pioneers and Founders," which we hope will both give you happy
and interesting Sunday reading, and remind you of us.
Mr. Spiers writes that you are backward in French but getting on
rather fast.
I want you now at the beginning of this cramming year to make two
or three Resolutions, besides those which you know and have
thought of often and practised:
1. To determine never to do any secular examination work on
Sundays--to keep all reading that day as fitting "The _Lord's_
Day" and the "Day of Rest."
I had a poor friend who would have done very well at Oxford, but
he would make no difference between Sunday and other days. He
worked on just the same and in the Examination _itself_, just as
the goal was reached, he broke down and took no degree. The
doctors said it was all owing to the continuous nervous strain. If
he had taken the Sundays it would just have saved him.
Lord Selborne was once telling me of his tremendous work at one
time, and he said, "I never could have done it, but that I took my
Sundays. I never would work on them."
2. We have arranged for you to go over to the Holy Communion one
day at Dinan. Perhaps some nice fellow will go with you--Mr.
Spiers will anyhow. Tell us _which_ Sunday, so that we may all be
with you [Greek: en pneumati].
Last night we dined at the Speaker's to meet, the Prince and
Princess of Wales. It was very interesting. The Terrace of the
House of Commons was lighted with electric light. A steamer went
by and cheered!
The Shah will fill London with grand spectacles, and I suppose his
coming will have much effect on politics--perhaps on _India_ too.
All are well.--Ever your most loving father,
Edw. Cantuar.
I am going to preach at the Abbey to-night.
Hugh failed, however, to secure a place in the Indian Civil Service, and
it was decided that he should go up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and
read for classical honours.
Up to this date I do not think that anything very conscious or definite
had been going on in Hugh's mind or heart. He always said himself that
it astonished him on looking back to think how purely negative and
undeveloped his early life had been, and how it had been lived on
entirely superficial lines, without plans or ambitions, simply taking
things as they came.
I think it was quite true that it was so; his emotions were dormant,
his powers were dormant. I do not think he had either great affections
or great friendships. He liked companionship and amusement, he avoided
what bored him; he had no inclinations to evil, but neither had he any
marked inclinations to what was good. Neither had any of his many and
varied gifts and accomplishments showed themselves. I used to think
latterly that he was one of the most gifted people I had ever seen in
all artistic ways. Whatever he took up he seemed able to do, without any
apprenticeship or drudgery. Music, painting, drawing, carving,
designing--he took them all up in turn; and I used to feel that if he
had devoted himself to any one of them he could have reached a high
excellence. Even his literary gifts, so various and admirable, showed
but few signs of their presence in the early days; he was not in the
least precocious. I think that on the whole it was beneficial to him
that his energies all lay fallow. My father, stern as his conception of
duty was, had a horror of applying any intellectual pressure to us. I
myself must confess that I was distinctly idle and dilettante both as a
boy at Eton and as a Cambridge undergraduate. But much as my father
appreciated and applauded any little successes, I was often surprised
that I was never taken to task for my poor performances in work and
scholarship. The truth was that my eldest brother's death at Winchester
was supposed partly to have been due to his extraordinary intellectual
and mental development, and I am sure that my father was afraid of
over-stimulating our mental energies. I feel certain that what was going
on in Hugh's case all the time was a keen exercise of observation. I
have no doubt that his brain was receiving and gaining impressions of
every kind, and that his mind was not really inactive--it was only
unconsciously amassing material. He had a very quick and delighted
perception of human temperament, of the looks, gestures, words,
mannerisms, habits, and oddities of human beings. If Hugh had been born
in a household professionally artistic, and had been trained in art of
any kind, I think he would very likely have become an accomplished
artist or musician, and probably have shown great precocity. But he was
never an artist in the sense that art was a torment to him, or that he
made any sacrifice of other aims to it. It was always just a part of
existence to him, and of the nature of an amusement, though in so far as
it represented the need of self-expression in forms of beauty, it
underlay and permeated the whole of his life.
The first sign of his artistic enthusiasm awakening was during his time
in London, when he conceived an intense admiration for the music and
ceremony of St. Paul's. Sir George Martin, on whom my father had
conferred a musical degree, was very kind to him, and allowed Hugh to
frequent the organ-loft. "To me," Hugh once wrote, "music is the great
reservoir of emotion from which flow out streams of salvation." But this
was not only a musical devotion. I believe that he now conceived, or
rather perhaps developed, a sense of the symbolical poetry of religious
rites and ceremonies which remained with him to the end. It is true to
say that the force and quality of ritual, as a province of art, has been
greatly neglected and overlooked. It is not for a moment to be regarded
as a purely artistic thing; but it most undoubtedly has an attraction
and a fascination as clear and as sharply defined as the attraction of
music, poetry, painting or drama. All art is an attempt to express a
sense of the overwhelming power of beauty. It is hard to say what beauty
is, but it seems to be one of the inherent qualities of the Unknown, an
essential part of the Divine mind. In England we are so stupid and so
concrete that we are apt to think of a musician as one who arranges
chords, and of a painter as one who copies natural effects. It is not
really that at all. The artist is in reality struggling with an idea,
which idea is a consciousness of an amazing and adorable quality in
things, which affects him passionately and to which he must give
expression. The form which his expression takes is conditioned by the
sharpness of his perception in some direction or other. To the musician,
notes and intervals and vibrations are just the fairy flights and dances
of forms audible to the ear; to the painter, it is a question of shapes
and colours perceptible to the eye. The dramatist sees the same beauty
in the interplay of human emotion; while it may be maintained that
holiness itself is a passionate perception of moral beauty, and that the
saint is attracted by purity and compassion, and repelled by sin,
disorder, and selfishness, in the same way as the artist is attracted
and repelled by visible charm and ugliness.
Ritual has been as a rule so closely annexed to religion--though all
spectacular delights and ceremonies have the same quality--that it has
never been reckoned among artistic predilections. The aim of ritual is,
I believe, a high poetry of which the essence is symbolism and mystery.
The movement of forms solemnly vested, and with a background of
architecture and music, produces an emotion quite distinct from other
artistic emotions. It is a method, like all other arts, through which a
human being arrives at a sense of mysterious beauty, and it evokes in
mystical minds a passion to express themselves in just that way and no
other, and to celebrate thus their sense of the unknown.
But there has always been a natural terror in the religious mind of
laying too much stress on this, or of seeming to encourage too much an
æsthetic emotion. If the first business of religion is to purify life,
there will always be a suspicion of idolatry about ritual, a fear of
substituting a vague desire for beauty for a practical devotion to right
conduct.
Hugh wrote to me some years later what he felt about it all:
"... Liturgy, to my mind, is nothing more than a very fine and
splendid art, conveying things, to people who possess the
liturgical faculty, in an extraordinarily dramatic and vivid way.
I further believe that this is an art which has been gradually
brought nearer and nearer perfection by being tested and developed
through nineteen centuries, by every kind of mind and nationality.
The way in which it does, indisputably, appeal to such very
different kinds of people, and unite them, does, quite apart from
other things, give it a place with music and painting.
* * * * *
"I do frankly acknowledge Liturgy to be no more than an art--and
therefore not in the least generally necessary to salvation; and I
do not in the least 'condemn' people who do not appreciate it. It
is only a way of presenting facts--and, in the case of Holy Week
Ceremonies, these facts are such as those of the Passion of
Christ, the sins of men, the Resurrection and the Sovereignty of
Christ."
* * * * *
I have laid stress upon all this, because I believe that from this time
the poetry and beauty of ritual had a deep and increasing fascination
for Hugh. But it is a thing about which it is so easy for the enemy to
blaspheme, to ridicule ceremonial in religion as a mere species of
entertainment, that religious minds have always been inclined to
disclaim the strength of its influence. Hugh certainly inherited this
particular perception from my father. I should doubt if anyone ever knew
so much about religious ceremonial as he did, or perceived so clearly
the force of it. "I am almost ashamed to seem to know so much about
these things," I have often heard him say; and again, "I don't ever seem
able to forget the smallest detail of ritual." My father had a very
strong artistic nature--poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture,
scenery, were all full of fascination to him--for music alone of the
arts he had but little taste; and I think that it ought to be realised
that Hugh's nature was an artistic one through and through. He had the
most lively and passionate sensibility to the appeal of art. He had,
too, behind the outer sensitiveness, the inner toughness of the artist.
It is often mistakenly thought that the artist is sensitive through and
through. In my experience, this is not the case. The artist has to be
protected against the overwhelming onset of emotions and perceptions by
a strong interior fortress of emotional calm and serenity. It is certain
that this was the case with Hugh. He was not in the least sentimental,
he was not really very emotional. He was essentially solitary within; he
attracted friendship and love more than he gave them. I do not think
that he ever suffered very acutely through his personal emotions. His
energy of output was so tremendous, his power of concentration so great,
that he found a security here from the more ravaging emotions of the
heart. Not often did he give his heart away; he admired greatly, he
sympathised freely; but I never saw him desolated or stricken by any
bereavement or loss. I used to think sometimes that he never needed
anyone. I never saw him exhibit the smallest trace of jealousy, nor did
he ever desire to possess anyone's entire affection. He recognised any
sign of affection generously and eagerly; but he never claimed to keep
it exclusively as his own.
VI
CAMBRIDGE
Hugh went then to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890. He often talked
to me in later days about his time there as an undergraduate. He found a
number of his Eton contemporaries up there, and he had a very sociable
time. A friend and contemporary of his at Trinity describes him as
small, light, and boyish-looking. "He walked fast, and always appeared
to be busy." He never cared much about athletics, but he was an
excellent steerer. He steered the third Trinity boat all the time he was
at Cambridge, and was a member of the Leander club. He was always
perfectly cool, and not in the smallest degree nervous. He was,
moreover, an excellent walker and mountain-climber. He once walked up to
London from Cambridge; I have climbed mountains with him, and he was
very agile, quick, surefooted, and entirely intrepid. Let me interpolate
a little anecdote of an accident at Pontresina, which might have been
serious. Hugh and I, with a practised Alpine climber, Dr. Leith, left
Pontresina early one morning to climb a rock-peak. We were in a light
carriage with a guide and porter. The young horse which drew us, as we
were rattling down the high embanked road leading to Samaden, took a
sharp turn to the right, where a road branched off. He was sharply
checked by the guide, with the result that the carriage collided with a
stone post, and we were all flung out down the embankment, a living
cataract of men, ice-axes, haversacks, and wraps. The horse fortunately
stopped. We picked ourselves ruefully up and resumed our places. Not
until we reached our destination did we become aware that the whole
incident had passed in silence. Not one word of advice or recrimination
or even of surprise had passed anyone's lips!
But Hugh's climbing was put a stop to by a sharp attack of heart-failure
on the Piz Palù. He was with my brother Fred, and after a long climb
through heavy snow, he collapsed and was with difficulty carried down.
He believed himself to be on the point of death, and records in one of
his books that the prospect aroused no emotion whatever in his mind
either of fear or excitement, only of deep curiosity.