ATHENS AND DODO
A curious incident marked that Algerian tour. Before going, my father
told Queen Victoria of his intention, and she had at first been against
his travelling so far afield, putting it to him that if his presence in
England was urgently and instantly required, there might be some
difficulty about his getting back in time. Whether she had in her mind
the possibility of her own sudden death she did not explain. But
presently she seemed to think that her reluctance that he should be so
remote from England was unfounded: she changed her mind and wished him
an interesting and delightful journey. So from Algiers we went slowly
eastwards visiting Constantine, Tebessa, Timeghad and Fort National on
the way, our most remote point from England--via Tunis on the one side
or (retracing our steps) Algiers on the other--being Biskra. We got
there late one afternoon, and waiting for my father was a telegram from
the Lord Chamberlain, announcing the death of Prince Edward, Duke of
Clarence, from influenza, and giving the date for the funeral. My father
and I with guides and Bradshaws vainly attempted to find a route by
which he could get back to England in time, but such route did not
exist. Had this news come that morning he could have got back, so also
could he, if the funeral had been arranged for the day after that for
which it was fixed: but just here, at Biskra, and nowhere else
throughout the journey was my father unable to return in time. It would
perhaps be going too far to say that the Queen had anything in her mind
definite enough to call a premonition; but the event happening just then
was at least a most curious coincidence.... A few hours afterwards a
second telegram arrived, from the Prince of Wales who, with great
thoughtfulness, begged him not to interrupt his tour.
My father was thus able to realize one of the dearest dreams of his
life, namely, to see with his mortal eyes the Carthage which he knew so
intimately in connection with his lifelong study of Cyprian. His book on
Cyprian which had occupied his leisure for some thirty years was now
approaching completion, and long had he yearned to behold the ruined
site where Cyprian had worked as bishop, to wander with his own feet
over the shores and hills, which, all these years, had been so familiar
to him; and that visit to Carthage had for him the sacredness of some
pilgrimage for which his heart hungered. His own enthusiasm was so keen
that I feel sure that he had no idea that his Mecca could be less to us
than to him, and I have the vision of him kneeling on the site of some
early Christian church, with his face all aglow with the long-deferred
consummation. Just as his appreciation of a picture was mainly due to
the nature of its subject, just as his pleasure in music was derived
from the words which were sung to it, so now, as his diary records, he
saw enchanting loveliness in that bare and featureless hill where
Carthage once stood, for Cyprian’s sake, and wondered at the want of
perception which caused other travellers to find nothing admirable in
that bleak place. For once the classical associations of Carthage, the
Punic Wars, the subsequent Roman occupation had no lure for him.
Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, was the full moon among the lesser lights
of the firmament.
At Tunis I left the rest of them, going on my own special pilgrimage,
and via Malta and Brindisi I came to the city already known to me by map
and picture, and hallowed by some kind of predestined love. And just as
my father was enchanted with that ugly little hill of Carthage because
Cyprian had dwelt there, how was I not transported when above mean
streets and miry ways I saw the sparkle of that marble crown of temples
on the Acropolis? For indeed, from the time that Beesly had read us his
_Trojan Queen’s Revenge_, some idea, some day-dream of Athens had been
distilled, drop by drop, into my blood. Whatever was lovely, whatever
must be estimated and esteemed I always laid alongside some Greek
standard. Not alone were things directly Greek, like the chorus of the
_Œdipus in Colonos_, the chorus in Swinburne’s _Atalanta_, the teachings
of Middleton, the holy dead in the Street of Tombs tested by the
Hellenic touchstone, but whatever moved my heart, the vision of Mary
Anderson in the _Winter’s Tale_, the joy of athletics, the austere
crests of mountains, the forest of Savernake, the Passion-music of Bach,
had been instinctively subjected to the same criterion.
The material standard and symbol of that, by this subtle subconscious
distillation, had always been the Acropolis, and on this crystalline
January afternoon, it was mine to hurry along a tawdry Parisian
boulevard, set with pepper trees, to see on one side the columns of the
temple of Zeus, and on the other the circular Shrine of the Winds. On
the right, as I knew well, I should soon pass the theatre of Dionysus
and not turn aside for that even, and then would come the stoa of
Asclepius and a great Roman colonnade, and for none of these had I a
glance or a thought to spare, for over the sheer southern wall of the
Acropolis there rose the south-west angle of the Parthenon. And then,
with a reverence that was as sincere as love itself and not less ardent,
I mounted the steps of the Propylæa, with the rebuilt shrine on the
right of that fairy-presence, the Wingless Victory, who shed her pinions
because for all time she was to abide in Athens; and on the left was the
great bastion wall stained to an inimitable russet by the winds from
Salamis, and between the great Doric columns I passed, and there in
front was a bare scraped hill-top, and glowing in the sunset was the
west front of the Parthenon, that serene abiding presence, set for a
symbol of what Athens stood for, and, no less, of the eternal yearning
of man for the glorious city of God. Behind rose the violet crown of
hills, Hymettus and Pentelicus and Parnes.
“Holy, holy, holy!” was the first message of it, and then like the dawn
flowing down the cliffs of the Matterhorn, it illuminated all that on
earth had the power to be kindled at its flame. Like the Sphinx it
articulated its unanswerable riddle, and by its light it revealed the
solution, and by its light it hid it again. The architect who had
planned it, the sculptor who had decorated it, the hands that had
builded it and formed the drums of its columns into monoliths of
translucent stone had thrown themselves into the furnace of the creation
that transcended all the wit and the cunning of its creators. They
raised but a fog or a smoke of human endeavour, and from outside, no
less than from the heart of their love, there dawned for them and for us
the light invisible. Whatever love of beauty was in their souls was
transcended and translated into stone; the glory of jubilant youth and
of ridden stallions, of maidens who wove the mantle of the goddess, of
priests and of the hierarchy of gods was but part of some world-offering
to the austere and loving and perfect presence which they had
instinctively worshipped, and, as in some noble trance, had set in
symbol there. With what wonder must they have beheld the completed work
of their hands, and, in their work, the indwelling of the power that was
its consecration.
A tremendous impression, such as that first sight of the Parthenon
undoubtedly made on me, would be a very doubtful gain, if it caused the
rest of life to seem uninteresting by comparison, for any kind of
initiation must quicken rather than blunt the workaday trivial
activities, and certainly in this case I lost no perception of the
actual in the flash of the absolute. Athens at that time (to fuse
together the impressions of this and subsequent years) was the most
comic of European capitals; it was on the scale of some small German
principality, and while aping the manner of Paris in a backwater,
claimed descent from Pericles. It was _opera-bouffe_, seriously carried
out, imagining itself in fact to be the last word in modern
enlightenment no less than in classical romance. It was with just that
classical seriousness that the Olympic games were, a little later,
reinaugurated here, and with all the gaiety of _opera-bouffe_ that
defeated competitors passionately argued with judges and umpires. At the
top of the town came “Constitution Square,” which comprised an
orange-garden and a parade-ground, where on festive occasions the
regiments of Guards deployed and manœuvred, quite, or nearly, occupying
the centre of it: and there have these eyes seen the flower of the
Greek army routed and dispersed by an irritated cab-horse, which,
clearly possessed by the devil, galloped and wheeled and galloped again
till the Guards had very prudently taken cover among the orange trees,
for it was impossible to make any effective military display, when
harassed by that enraged quadruped. Sometimes I think that this
distressing scene was an adumbration of how, a few years later, that
same army bolted through Thessaly on the approach of the Turks. “The
host of hares” was the Turkish phrase for them, and Edhem Pasha, then
commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army, described to me, when I was at
Volo after the Turkish occupation of Thessaly, the battle of Pharsala.
“We came over the hill,” he said, without enmity and without contempt,
“and we said ‘Sh-sh-sh’ and we clapped our hands, and that was the
battle of Pharsala.”... How complete has been the regeneration of this
versatile people may be gathered from their later campaigns against the
same adversaries.
On three sides of Constitution Square, were hotels and cafés and the
residence of the Crown Prince Constantine subsequently cast by destiny
for the ludicrous rôle of “King Tino.” On the fourth side the Royal
Palace, of a similarly pretentious and ugly style as that which looks
over St. James’s Park, presented a mean and complicated face to the
steam-tramway that puffed through the top of the square on its way to
Phaleron. A royal baby, that year or the next, had seen the light, and
we foreign but loyal Athenians, what time a bugler stationed in the
colonnade of the palace made all kinds of music, craned our necks and
focussed our eyes to see the King come forth. But in nine cases out of
ten, it was not King George who emerged but a perambulator pushed by an
English nursery-maid. But that was the dynastic custom: whenever a
royal personage came forth from the palace, the bugler made all kinds of
music, so that the inhabitants of Athens might, like good
Nebuchadnezzarites, fall down and worship the pink little image....
Sometimes, however, their loyalty obtained a more adult reward, for on
Sunday afternoon King George would generally go down to Phaleron in the
steam-tram, and observe the beauties of nature. On such occasions he was
marvellously democratic, and would come trotting across the belt of
gravel between the palace and the tram-lines in order not to keep his
citizens waiting. There is no doubt that if he had attempted to do so,
the tram would have gone without him, leaving him to follow by the next,
or study the beauties of nature in his own garden.
He was democratic also towards foreigners. A tourist staying in one of
the respectable hotels round Constitution Square, for instance, was
quite at liberty to intimate to the Minister of his country that an
audience with the King would be agreeable, and in due course some
footman from the palace, in gorgeous well-worn livery, would bear a
missive with a tremendous crown on the envelope which informed him that
King George would give him an audience next day. Or, if you did not
express your loyal desire, it would perhaps be intimated that it would
be quite in order if you did so, and thereupon, on the appointed morning
you would put on your evening dress-clothes (rather green in the
sunlight), and a white tie, and a straw hat, and present yourself at the
palace door. On seeing this apparition the bugler stationed there has
been known to give one throaty blast, thinking that anyone so
ridiculously attired must be a royal personage, then, catching the
affrighted eye of the visitor, he recognized his mistake, and with an
engaging smile, saluted instead. You took off your straw hat (or if it
was winter your top-coat and bowler) and were ushered with a series of
obeisances into a small bare room, furnished with a carafe of water.
Then a door was thrown open, and, as in a dream, you advanced into a
small apartment with a purple paper and gold stars upon it, and found
the King. He always stood during these amazing interviews, and kept
rising on tiptoe with his feet close together, till the instinct of
unconscious mimicry made it impossible not to do the same, and he and
you seesawed up and down, and talked for ten minutes about his friends
in England. He had a long neck, and shoulders like a hock-bottle, and
when he dipped them it was a sign that he had sufficiently enjoyed your
society. He was very bald, and so also was the Crown Prince, who married
the German Emperor’s sister. Both father and son (though this will
hardly be credited) wrote testimonials in praise of some fluid which,
when rubbed on the head, produces or preserves a fine crop of hair. And
if the hair-grease did them no good, as it apparently didn’t, I hope
there was some sort of palm-grease that made their testimonial worth
their while.
Queen Olga was Russian, daughter of the Grand Duke Constantine, a
wonderfully beautiful woman, whom I had seen first when I came up from
Marlborough for the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. She had an
engaging habit when she came round the room at balls or after dinner in
order to talk to the guests, of putting her hands on the shoulders of
the women she was conversing with, and shoving them back into their
seats, so that they should sit down without ceremony. Sometimes she
would want to talk to two or three people together, and down they would
go like ninepins, while she stood. Behind her came the King still
playing seesaw, and behind him the Crown Prince, who did the same to the
men he wanted to talk to, and a little while afterwards there was Prince
George and Princess Marie, both putting people into their places. It was
all very democratic, but also slightly embarrassing, because after large
Prince George had pushed you back into a low chair, you had to crane
your head up, as if you were talking to somebody on the top of the dome
of St. Paul’s, the dome inverted being represented by his tremendous and
circular waistcoat. After him came Prince Nicholas, but he had always
something terribly important and slightly broad, in the shape perhaps of
a “Limerick,” to communicate. So as these could not be shouted,
conversation was held on more reasonable levels.
King George’s family, as all the world knows, had made magnificent
marriages. He was the brother of Queen Alexandra, and of the Dowager
Empress of Russia, and his eldest son had brought as wife to Athens the
German Emperor’s sister, to whom, I suspect, these bugle-regulations
were due. The “in-laws” consequently were often being bugled for, and
the tram to Phaleron on a Sunday afternoon would now be a fine target
for Bolsheviks. The Crown Princess was constantly engaged during these
years on her wifely duties, and the arrival of the Empress Frederick in
Athens usually implied that there would soon be fireworks in
Constitution Square. But when I write of her, there is no _opera-bouffe_
atmosphere that I can attempt or desire to reproduce, for tragic were
her past years, bitter her present years, and grim agonies of mortal
disease were already making ambush for her. During the three or four
ensuing years, when, instead of being at the British School or at a
hotel, I spent some months at the British Legation, where Sir Edwin
Egerton was Minister, I found myself on strangely personal terms with
her. She had been a friend of an uncle of mine, who became a
nationalized German after years of living in Wiesbaden, and starting
from that, she talked with a curious unrestraint. Bitter little stinged
remarks came out, “You are happy in being English”; or “When I come to
London I am only a visitor.” On one occasion I was left alone with her
on a terrace above the outlying rooms at the Legation, and to my
profound discomfort, she began pacing up and down with smothered
ejaculations. Then quite suddenly she said to me, “But Willie is mad!” I
suppose I idiotically looked as if this was some joke, and she shook her
outstretched hand at me, “I mean that he is mad,” she repeated. “Willie
is mad.”... Then quite suddenly, with the arrested movement of a bird,
wounded to death in mid-air, she ceased from her tragic flight, and came
to earth. “If you are going to bathe again at Phaleron,” she said, with
a laugh, alluding to an incident of the day before, “I must be sure
there are no clothes on the beach, before I sit down to sketch. You came
out of the water, and there was I....”
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 modern 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. Dörpfeld, 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. On which this dreadful Dr.
Dörpfeld 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
[Illustration: E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 26
[Page 287]
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 archæological 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, οἴκοθεν οἴκαδε.
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 I 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
1893. 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-rôle
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.
Lord Anæmia.
Donjuans (_sic_).
Madonna de Clapham.
Jelly Fish.
Vulgarities.
Indecencies.
_Time_, The Middle Classes. _Place_, Le Pays Inconnu.
_Mise en scène_, Fluff.”
Then follows a short analysis, not so fragrantly precious, and then
comes comment.
“All the gutter-elements of _Dodo_ are rehashed and warmed up again
with no touch of novelty or improvement or chastisement.... The
Lives of the Bad are interesting assuredly ... but then they must
be living and bad, and these pithless people are only galvanic
[galvanized?] and vulgar. _We do not wish to be hard on Mr.
Benson._ Let him give three years to investigating the distinctions
between good writing and bad writing, between wit and vulgarity ...
and then we should not be surprised if he produced something worth
finding serious fault with.”
(2) The (late) _Standard_. (A column and a half.)
“Taking the book as a whole, it is an absolute failure. As a rule,
the writing is forced and uneasy, the reflections confused or
lumbering. The character-drawing is crude and uncertain. It is
emphatically one of those books that are sensual, earthly and
unwholesome.”
(3) _Vanity Fair._ (One column.)
“Of style he has little: of wit he has no idea ... of plot there is
less in _The Rubicon_ than is generally to be found in a penny
novelette: of knowledge of Society (if he have any) Mr. Benson
shows less here than is usually possessed by the nursery-governess;
and in grammar he seems to be as little expert as he is in natural
science: of which his knowledge seems to equal his smattering of
the Classics ... ill-named, full of faults, betraying much
ignorance of manners and unknowledge [_sic_] of human nature: a
book, indeed, compact of folly and slovenliness: guiltless of any
real touch of constructive art; without form and void: a book of
which I fear that I have made too much.”
(4) _Daily Chronicle._ (One column.)
“A PUZZLE FOR POSTERITY.
What will the critical students of, say, two generations ahead,
make of the fact that in the spring of 1894 the newspapers of
London treated the appearance of a new novel by Mr. E. F. Benson as
an event of striking importance in the world of books? The thought
that death will rid us of the responsibility for that awkward
explanation lends an almost welcome aspect to the grave....
That _The Rubicon_ is the worst-written, falsest and emptiest of
the decade, it would be, perhaps, too much to say. In these days of
elastic publishing standards and moneyed amateurs, many queer
things are done, and Mr. Benson’s work is a shade better than the
poorest of the stuff which would-be novelists pay for the privilege
of seeing in print.... A certain interest attaches, no doubt, to
the demonstration which it affords that a young gentleman of
university training can meet the female amateurs on their own
ground, and be every whit as maudlin and absurd as they know how to
be. But the sisterhood have an advantage over him in the fact that
they can spell.... There are a score of glaring grammatical errors,
to say nothing of the clumsiness and incompetency which mark three
sentences out of five throughout the book. Bad workmanship might
be put aside as the fault of inexperience, if the young man had an
actual story to tell ... but there is nothing of that sort here....
The heroine is from time to time led over to as near [_sic_] the
danger line of decency as the libraries will permit. She is made to
utter several suggestive speeches, and once or twice quite skirts
the frontier of the salacious....”
(5) _The World._ (Length unknown: I cannot find the second half of it.)
“But, alas! Eva Hayes in _The Rubicon_ is quite as vulgar, quite as
blatant in the bad taste she is pleased to exhibit on every
occasion, as her predecessor _Dodo_, and is dull beyond description
into the bargain. From beginning to end of the two volumes there is
not one spark or gleam of humour, or sign of true observation and
knowledge of humanity.”
(6) The (late) _St. James’s Budget_. (Six columns.)
“ANOTHER UNBIRCHED HEROINE.
It might have been supposed that the son of an Archbishop was
hardly the sort of person to shine in this kind of literature, but
Mr. Benson has taught us better than that. Yet our thanks are due
to him for one thing: his book consists of only two volumes; it
might have been in three....
How they Mate in the ‘Hupper Suckles.’ ...
Languour, Cigarettes and Blasphemies....
We conclude this enthusiastic appreciation of Mr. Benson with the
bold avowal that we regard _The Rubicon_ as almost truly perfect of
its kind, and probably unsurpassable. Any one of Shakespeare’s most
remarkable gifts may be found, perhaps, in equal measure in the
writings of some minor author; but none ever had such a union of so
many as he. So it is with Mr. Benson. A school-girl’s idea of
‘plot,’ a nursery-governess’s knowledge of the world; a gentleman’s
‘gentleman’s’ views of high life; an undergraduate’s sense of style
and store of learning; a society paragraphist’s fine feeling and
good taste; a man-milliner’s notion of creating character: of each
of these you may find plenty of evidence in the novels of the day;
but nowhere else--unless it be in _Dodo_--will they all be found
welded into one harmonious unity as they are here!...”
Here is but the most random plucking of these blossoms, but what a
nosegay! The flower from _Vanity Fair_ grew of course from the same root
as that from the _St. James’s Budget_, and this is interesting as
showing the excellent co-ordination between these different attacks. As
a Press-campaign on an infinitesimal scale, I give the foregoing as a
classical example. No book, however bad, could possibly have called
forth, in itself, so combined an onslaught: every gun in Grub Street was
primed and ready and sighted not on _The Rubicon_ at all, but on the
author of _Dodo_. But herein is shown the inexpediency of using up all
your ammunition at once, on so insignificant a target. It was clear that
if the respectable journals of London made so vigorous an offensive,
that offensive had to be final, and the war to be won. Still more clear
was it that, if this was not a preconcerted, malicious and murderous
campaign not on a particular book, but on an individual, the entire
columns of the London Press must henceforth be completely devoted to
crushing inferior novels. _The Rubicon_ was but one of this innumerable
company: if the Press had determined to crush inferior novels, it was
clear that for a considerable time there would be no room in its columns
for politics, or sport or foreign news or anything else whatever. Not
even for advertisements, unless we regard such attacks as being unpaid
advertisements....
So there was no more firing for the present, and it was all rather
reminiscent of the tale of how Oscar Wilde went out shooting, and fell
down flat on the discharge of his own gun.
The Press, after that, had nothing more to shoot at me, for all their
heaviest shells had been launched; so the blighted author walked off, as
Mr. Mantalini said, as comfortable as demnition, and proceeded
vigorously to write _The Babe, B.A._ and other tranquil works, just as
if he had not been blown into a thousand fragments.
The Press-notices, in fact, from which these six extracts are taken,
were a huge lark, and one day I found my father (who so far from
summoning family councils on the subject never spoke to me about my
public scribblings at all) wide-eyed and absorbed in one of these
contemporary revilings. Suddenly he threw his head back with a great
shout of laughter, and slapped me on the back. “You’ve got broad enough
shoulders to stand that sort of thing,” he said. “Come along, are the
horses ready?” and out we went riding. But less humorous were certain
private kicks which I got (and no doubt deserved) from less ludicrous
antagonists. Of these the chief, and the most respected both then and
now, must be nameless. He had been so hot in appreciation and so cordial
over _Dodo_, politely observing in it a “high moral beauty” that I find
him (in this same forgotten box) writing to me, before the appearance of
_The Rubicon_, in these words à propos of the growing public taste for
realism:
“The public in the next generation will be what you and one or two
others like you choose to make it. Good work in any style gives
that style vogue.... It’s ever when you are most serious you are at
your best. Work, work and live.”
Well, I worked and lived like the devil for strenuousness. Then _The
Rubicon_ made its appearance, and the same friend took a blistering pen
instead:
“If anything could possibly give a more serious blow to your
chances of future and legitimate success than the publication of
_The Rubicon_, it would be to bring out within three or four years
another novel.... It does not seem to me that you have formed the
slightest conception of the true situation. It is this. Your first
book, from accidental and even parasitic causes--things that were
not in the book at all--enjoyed an entirely abnormal and baseless
success. You have now to begin again, and for several years the
public will certainly not listen to you as a novelist.”
For the life of me, I cannot now, reading these explosive records over
again, determine whether I could have gained anything by paying the
smallest attention to them. Logically, it was impossible to do so, for
they clearly were directed, as I have said, not against this wretched
old _Rubicon_, but against the person who had dared to capture success
with _Dodo_. Rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me that vituperation so
violent could not be regarded as other than comic. If I was a
nursery-governess and a man-milliner, and a gentleman’s gentleman it was
all very sad, but I was less overwhelmed because I was already terribly
interested in the _Babe, B.A._ and not at all interested in the _St.
James’s Budget_, except as a humorous publication, which the _Babe,
B.A._ tried to be, too. And then there were delightful plans ahead; this
autumn Maggie was to come out to Athens with me, and we were to go on to
Egypt together, and have a Tremendous Time....