interest in family history and genealogy. We went up to Yorkshire for a
few days one winter, stayed at Pateley Bridge, Ripon, Bolton Abbey,
Ripley, and finally York. At Pateley Bridge we found the parish
registers very ancient and complete, and by the aid of them, together
with the printed register of Fountains Abbey, we traced a family tree
back as far as to the fourteenth century, with ever-increasing evidence
of the poverty and mean condition of our ancestral stock. We visited the
houses and cradles of the race, and from comfortable granges and
farmsteads we declined, as the record conducted us back, to hovels and
huts of quite conspicuous humility and squalor. The thermometer fell
lower and lower every day, in sympathy with our researches. I remember a
night when we slept in a neglected assembly-room tacked on to a country
inn, on hastily improvised and scantily covered beds, when the water
froze in the ewers; and an attempt to walk over the moors one afternoon
from Masham into Nidderdale, when the springs by the roadside froze into
lumpy congealments, like guttering candles, and we were obliged to turn
back; and how we beguiled a ten-mile walk to Ripon, the last train
having gone, by telling an enormous improvised story, each taking an
alternate chapter, and each leaving the knots to be untied by the next
narrator. Hugh was very lively and ingenious in this, and proved the
most delightful of companions, though we had to admit as we returned
together that we had ruined the romance of our family history beyond
repair.
[Illustration: _Photo by Elliott & Fry_
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
IN 1893. AGED 21
As an Undergraduate at Cambridge.]
Hugh did very little work at Cambridge; he had given up classics, and
was working at theology, with a view to taking Orders. He managed to
secure a Third in the Tripos; he showed no intellectual promise
whatever; he was a very lively and amusing companion and a keen debater;
I think he wrote a little poetry; but he had no very pronounced tastes.
I remember his pointing out to me the windows of an extremely
unattractive set of ground-floor rooms in Whewell's Court as those which
he had occupied till he migrated to the Bishop's Hostel, eventually
moving to the Great Court. They look down Jesus Lane, and the long,
sombre wall of Sidney Sussex Garden. A flagged passage runs down to the
right of them, and the sitting-room is on the street. They were dark,
stuffy, and extremely noisy. The windows were high up, and splashed with
mud by the vehicles in the street, while it was necessary to keep them
shut, because otherwise conversation was wholly inaudible. "What did you
do there?" I said. "Heaven knows!" he answered. "As far as I can
remember, I mostly sat up late at night and played cards!" He certainly
spent a great deal of money. He had a good allowance, but he had so much
exceeded it at the end of his first year, that a financial crisis
followed, and my mother paid his debts for him. He had kept no accounts,
and he had entertained profusely.
The following letter from my father to him refers to one of Hugh's
attempts to economise. He caught a bad feverish cold at Cambridge as a
result of sleeping in a damp room, and was carried off to be nursed by
my uncle, Henry Sidgwick:
Addington Park, Croydon,
_26th Jan._ 1891.
Dearest Hughie,--I was rather disturbed to hear that you
imagined that what I said in October about not _needlessly
indulging_ was held by you to forbid your having a fire in your
bedroom on the ground floor in the depth of such a winter as we
have had!
You ought to have a fire lighted at such a season at 8 o'clock so
as to warm and dry the room, and all in it, nearly every
evening--and whenever the room seems damp, have a fire just
lighted to go out when it will. It's not wholesome to sleep in
heated rooms, but they must be dry. A _bed_ slept in every night
keeps so, if the room is not damp; but the room must not be damp,
and when it is unoccupied for two or three days it is sure to get
so.
_Be sure_ that there is a good fire in it all day, and all your
bed things, _mattress and all_, kept well before it for at _least_
a _whole day before you go back from Uncle Henry's_.
How was it your bed-maker had not your room well warmed and dried,
mattress dry, etc., before you went up this time? She ought to
have had, and should be spoken to about it--_i.e._ unless you told
her not to! in which case it would be very like having no
breakfast!
It has been a horrid interruption in the beginning of term--and
you'll have difficulty with the loss of time. Besides which I
have no doubt you have been very uncomfortable.
But I don't understand why you should have "nothing to write
about" because you have been in bed. Surely you must have
accumulated all sorts of reflective and imaginative stories there.
It is most kind of Aunt Nora and Uncle Henry--give my love and
thanks to both.
I grieve to say that many many more fish are found dead since the
thaw melted the banks of swept snow off the sides of the ice. It
is most piteous; the poor things seem to have come to the edge
where the water is shallowest--there is a shoal where we generally
feed the swans.
I am happy to say the goldfish seem all alive and merry. The
continual dropping of fresh water has no doubt saved them--they
were never hermetically sealed in like the other poor things.
Yesterday I was at Ringwould, near Dover. The farmers had been up
all night saving their cattle in the stalls from the sudden
floods.
Here we have not had any, though the earth is washed very much
from the hills in streaks.
We are--at least I am--dreadfully sorry to go to London--though
the house is very dull without "the boys."
All right about the books.--Ever your loving father,
Edw. Cantuar.
Hugh was much taken up with experiments in hypnotism as an
undergraduate, and found that he had a real power of inducing hypnotic
sleep, and even of curing small ailments. He told my mother all about
his experiments, and she wrote to him at once that he must either leave
this off while he was at Cambridge, or that my father must be told. Hugh
at once gave up his experiments, and escaped an unpleasant contretemps,
as the authorities discovered what was going on, and actually, I
believe, sent some of the offenders down.
Hugh says that he drifted into the idea of taking Orders as the line of
least resistance, though when he began the study of theology he said
that he had found the one subject he really cared for. But he had
derived a very strong half-religious, half-artistic impression from
reading John Inglesant just before he came up to Cambridge. He could
long after repeat many passages by heart, and he says that a
half-mystical, half-emotional devotion to the Person of Our Lord, which
he derived from the book, seemed to him to focus and concentrate all his
vague religious emotions. He attended the services at King's Chapel
regularly, but he says that he had no real religious life, and only
looked forward to being a country clergyman with a beautiful garden, an
exquisite choir, and a sober bachelor existence.
It was on an evening walk at Addington with my mother that he told her
of his intention to take Orders. They had gone together to evensong at a
neighbouring church, Shirley, and as they came back in the dusk through
the silent woods of the park, he said he believed he had received the
call, and had answered, "Here am I, send me!" My mother had the words
engraved on the inside of a ring, which Hugh wore for many years.
By far the closest and dearest of all the ties which bound Hugh to
another was his love for my mother. Though she still lives to bless us,
I may say this, that never did a mother give to her children a larger
and a wiser love than she gave to us; she was our playmate and
companion, but we always gave her a perfectly trustful and unquestioning
obedience. Yet it was always a reasonable and critical obedience. She
never exacted silent submission, but gave us her reasons readily. She
never curtailed our independence, or oppressed us with a sense of
over-anxiety. She never demanded confidence, but welcomed it with
perfect, understanding.
The result of this with Hugh was that he came to consult her about
everything, about his plans, his schemes, his books, his beliefs. He
read all his writings aloud to her, and deferred much to her frankly
critical mind and her deeply human insight. At the time when he was
tending towards Rome, she accompanied him every step of the way, though
never disguising from him her own differences of opinion and belief. It
was due to her that he suspended his decision, read books, consulted
friends, gave the old tradition full weight; he never had the misery of
feeling that she was overcome by a helpless distress, because she never
attempted to influence any one of us away from any course we thought it
right to pursue. She did not conceal her opinion, but wished Hugh to
make up his own mind, believing that everyone must do that, and that the
only chance of happiness lies there.
[Illustration: _Photo by H. Walter Barnett, 12 Knightsbridge, S.W._
MRS. BENSON
MAY, 1910]
There was no one in the world whom he so regarded and admired and loved;
but yet it was not merely a tender and deferential sentiment. He laid
his mind open before her, and it was safe to do that, because my mother
never had any wish to prevail by sentiment or by claiming loyalty. He
knew that she would be perfectly candid too, with love waiting behind
all conflict of opinion. And thus their relation was the most perfect
that could be imagined, because he knew that he could speak and act with
entire freedom, while he recognised the breadth and strength of her
mind, and the insight of her love. No one can really understand Hugh's
life without a knowledge of what my mother was to him--an equal friend,
a trusted adviser, a candid critic, and a tender mother as well. And
even when he went his own way, as he did about health and work, though
she foresaw only too clearly what the end might be, and indeed what it
actually was, she always recognised that he had a right to live as he
chose and to work as he desired. She was not in the least blind to his
lesser faults of temperament, nor did she ever construct an artificial
image of him. My family has, I have no doubt, an unusual freedom of
mutual criticism. I do not think we have ever felt it to be disloyal to
see each other in a clear light. But I am inclined to believe that the
affection which subsists without the necessity of cherishing illusions,
has a solidity about it which more purely sentimental loyalties do not
always possess. And I have known few relations so perfect as those
between Hugh and my mother, because they were absolutely tender and
chivalrous, and at the same time wholly candid, natural, and open-eyed.
It was at this time that my eldest sister died quite suddenly of
diphtheria. I have told something of her life elsewhere. She had
considerable artistic gifts, in music, painting, and writing. She had
written a novel, and left unpublished a beautiful little book of her own
experiences among the poor, called _Streets and Lanes of the City_. It
was privately printed, and is full of charming humour and delicate
observation, together with a real insight into vital needs. I always
believe that my sister would have done a great work if she had lived.
She had strong practical powers and a very large heart. She had been
drawn more and more into social work at Lambeth, and I think would have
eventually given herself up to such work. She had a wonderful power of
establishing a special personal relation with those whom she loved, and
I remember realising after her death that each of her family felt that
they were in a peculiar and individual relation to her of intimacy and
confidence. She had sent Hugh from her deathbed a special message of
love and hope; and this had affected him very much.
We were not allowed to go back at once to our work, Fred, Hugh, and
myself, because of the possibility of infection; and we went off to
Seaford together for a few days, where we read, walked, wrote letters,
and talked. It was a strange time; but Hugh, I recollect, got suddenly
weary of it, and with the same decision which always characterised him,
said that he must go to London in order to be near St. Paul's. He went
off at once and stayed with Arthur Mason. I was struck with this at the
time; he did not think it necessary to offer any explanations or
reasons. He simply said he could not stand it, quite frankly and
ingenuously, and promptly disappeared.
VII
LLANDAFF
In 1892 Hugh went to read for Orders, with Dean Vaughan, who held the
Deanery of Llandaff together with the Mastership of the Temple. The Dean
had been a successful Headmaster of Harrow, and for a time Vicar of
Doncaster. He was an Evangelical by training and temperament. My father
had a high admiration for him as a great headmaster, a profound and
accomplished scholar, and most of all as a man of deep and fervent
piety. I remember Vaughan's visits to Lambeth. He had the air, I used to
think, rather of an old-fashioned and highly-bred country clergyman than
of a headmaster and a Church dignitary. With his rather long hair,
brushed back, his large, pale face, with its meek and smiling air, and
his thin, clear, and deliberate voice, he gave the impression of a
much-disciplined, self-restrained, and chastened man. He had none of the
brisk effectiveness or mundane radiance of a successful man of affairs.
But this was a superficial view, because, if he became moved or
interested, he revealed a critical incisiveness of speech and judgment,
as well as a profound and delicate humour.
He had collected about himself an informal band of young men who read
theology under his direction. He used to give a daily lecture, but there
was no college or regular discipline. The men lived in lodgings,
attended the cathedral service, arranged their own amusements and
occupations. But Vaughan had a stimulating and magnetic effect over his
pupils, many of whom have risen to high eminence in the Church.
They were constantly invited to meals at the deanery, where Mrs.
Vaughan, a sister of Dean Stanley, and as brilliant, vivacious, and
witty a talker as her brother, kept the circle entranced and delighted
by her suggestive and humorous talk. My brother tells the story of how,
in one of the Dean's long and serious illnesses, from which he
eventually recovered, Mrs. Vaughan absented herself one day on a
mysterious errand, and the Dean subsequently discovered, with intense
amusement and pleasure, that she had gone to inspect a house in which
she intended to spend her widowhood. The Dean told the whole story in
her presence to some of the young men who were dining there, and
sympathised with her on the suspension of her plans. I remember, too,
that my brother described to me how, in the course of the same illness,
Mrs. Vaughan, who was greatly interested in some question of the Higher
Criticism, had gone to the Dean's room to read to him, and had suggested
that they should consider and discuss some disputed passage of the Old
Testament. The Dean gently but firmly declined. Mrs. Vaughan coming
downstairs, Bible in hand, found a caller in the drawing-room who
inquired after the Dean. "I have just come from him," said Mrs.
Vaughan, "and it is naturally a melancholy thought, but he seems to have
entirely lost his faith. He would not let me read the Bible with him; he
practically said that he had no further interest in the Bible!"
Hugh was very happy at Llandaff. He says that he began to read John
Inglesant again, and explored the surrounding country to see if he could
find a suitable place to set up a small community house, on the lines of
Nicholas Ferrar's Little Gidding. This idea was thenceforth much in his
mind. At this time his day-dream was that it should be not an ascetic
order, but rather devotional and mystical. It was, I expect, mainly an
æsthetic idea at present. The setting, the ceremonial, the order of the
whole was prominent, with the contemplation of spiritual beauty as the
central principle. The various strains which went to suggest such a
scheme are easy to unravel. Hugh says frankly that marriage and
domesticity always appeared to him inconceivable, but at the same time
he was sociable, and had the strong creative desire to forth and express
a definite conception of life. He had always the artistic impulse to
translate an idea into visible and tangible shape. He had, I think,
little real pastoral impulse at this, if indeed at any time, and his
view was individualistic. The community, in his mind, was to exist not,
I believe, for discipline or extension of thought, or even for
solidarity of action; it was rather to be a fortress of quiet for the
encouragement of similar individual impulses. He used to talk a good
deal about his plans for the community in these days--and it is
interesting to compare with this the fact that I had already written a
book, never published, about a literary community on the same sort of
lines, while to go a little further back, it may be remembered that at
one time my father and Westcott used to entertain themselves with
schemes for what they called a _Coenobium_, which was to be an
institution in which married priests with their families were to lead a
common life with common devotions.
But I used to be reminded, in hearing Hugh detail his plans, of the case
of a friend of ours, whom I will call Lestrange, who had at one time
entered a Benedictine monastery as a novice. Lestrange used to talk
about himself in an engaging way in the third person, and I remember him
saying that the reason why he left the monastery was "because Lestrange
found that he could only be an inmate of a monastery in which Lestrange
was also Abbot!" I did not feel that in Hugh's community there would be
much chance of the independent expression of the individualities of his
associates!
He was ordained deacon in 1894 at Addington, or rather in Croydon parish
church, by my father, whose joy in admitting his beloved son to the
Anglican ministry was very great indeed.
Before the ordination Hugh decided to go into solitary retreat. He took
two rooms in the lodge-cottage of Burton Park, two or three miles out
of Lincoln. I suppose he selected Lincoln as a scene endeared to him by
childish memories.
He divided the day up for prayer, meditation, and solitary walks, and
often went in to service in the cathedral. He says that he was in a
state of tense excitement, and the solitude and introspection had an
alarmingly depressing effect upon him. He says that the result of this
was an appalling mental agony: "It seemed to me after a day or two that
there was no truth in religion, that Jesus Christ was not God, that the
whole of life was an empty sham, and that I was, if not the chiefest of
sinners, at any rate the most monumental of fools." He went to the
Advent services feeling, he says, like a soul in hell. But matters
mended after that, and the ordination itself seemed to him a true
consecration. He read the Gospel, and he remembered gratefully the
sermon of Canon Mason, my father's beloved friend and chaplain.
VIII
THE ETON MISSION
There were many reasons why Hugh should begin his clerical work at
Hackney Wick, though I suspect it was mainly my father's choice. It was
a large, uniformly poor district, which had been adopted by Eton in
about 1880 as the scene of its Mission. There were certain disadvantages
attending the choice of that particular district. The real _raison
d'être_ of a School Mission is educative rather than philanthropic, in
order to bring boys into touch with social problems, and to give them
some idea that the way of the world is not the way of a prosperous and
sheltered home. It is open to doubt whether it is possible to touch
boys' hearts and sympathies much except by linking a School Mission on
to some institution for the care of boys--an orphan school or a
training ship. Only the most sensitive are shocked and distressed by the
sight of hard conditions of life it all, and as a rule boys have an
extraordinarily unimaginative way of taking things as they see them, and
not thinking much or anxiously about mending them.
In any case the one aim ought to be to give boys a personal interest in
such problems, and put them in personal touch with them. But the Eton
Mission was planted in a district which it was very hard to reach from
Eton, so that few of the boys were ever able to make a personal
acquaintance with the hard and bare conditions of life in the crowded
industrial region which their Mission was doing so much to help and
uplift, or to realise the urgency of the needs of a district which most
of them had never visited.
But if the Mission did not touch the imagination of the boys, yet, on
the other hand, it became a very well-managed parish, with ample
resources to draw upon; and it certainly attracted the services of a
number of old Etonians, who had reached a stage of thought at which the
problem of industrial poverty became an interesting one.
Money was poured out upon the parish; a magnificent church was built, a
clergy-house was established, curates were subsidised, clubs were
established, and excellent work was done there. The vicar at this time
was a friend and contemporary of my own at Eton, St. Clair Donaldson,
now Archbishop of Brisbane. He had lived with us as my father's chaplain
for a time, but his mind was set on parish work rather than
administration. He knew Hugh well, and Hugh was an Etonian himself.
Moreover, my father was glad that Hugh should be with a trusted friend,
and so he went there. St. Clair Donaldson was a clergyman of an
Evangelical type, though the Mission had been previously conducted by a
very High Churchman, William Carter, the present Archbishop of Capetown.
But now distinctive High Church practices were given up, and the parish
was run on moderate, kindly, and sensible lines. Whether such an
institution is primarily and distinctively religious may be questioned.
Such work is centred rather upon friendly and helpful relations, and
religion becomes one of a number of active forces, rather than the force
upon which all depends. High-minded, duty-loving, transparently good and
cheerful as the tone of the clergy was, it was, no doubt, tentative
rather than authoritative.
Hugh's work there lay a good deal in the direction of the boys' clubs;
he used to go down to the clubs, play and talk with the boys, and go out
with them on Saturday afternoons to football and cricket. But he never
found it a congenial occupation, and I cannot help feeling that it was
rather a case of putting a very delicate and subtle instrument to do a
rough sort of work. What was needed was a hearty, kindly,
elder-brotherly relation, and the men who did this best were the
good-natured and robust men with a generic interest in the young, who
could set a clean-minded, wholesome, and hearty example. But Hugh was
not of this type. His mind was full of mystical and poetical ideas of
religion, and his artistic nature was intent upon expressing them. He
was successful in a way, because he had by this time a great charm of
frankness and simplicity; he never had the least temptation to draw
social distinctions, but he desired to find people personally
interesting. He used to say afterwards that he did not really believe in
what involved a sort of social condescension, and, like another incisive
missioner, he thought that the giving up a few evenings a week by
wealthy and even fashionable young-men, however good-hearted and
earnest, to sharing the amusements of the boys of a parish, was only a
very uncomfortable way of showing the poor how the rich lived! There is
no sort of doubt about the usefulness and kindliness of such work, and
it obviously is one of the experiments which may tend to create social
sympathy: but Hugh came increasingly to believe that the way to lead
boys to religion was not through social gatherings, but by creating a
strong central nucleus of Christian instruction and worship; his heart
was certainly not in his work at this time, though there was much that
appealed to him particularly to his sense of humour, which was always
strongly developed.
There was an account he gave of a funeral he had to conduct in the early
days of his work, where, after a large congregation had assembled in the
church, the arrival of the coffin itself was delayed, and he was asked
to keep things going. He gave out hymns, he read collects, he made a
short address, and still the undertaker at the door shook his head. At
last he gave out a hymn that was not very well known, and found that the
organist had left his post, whereupon he sang it alone, as an
unsustained solo.