Occasionally we have fired off a culverin or two in honour of Stella
Benson, that remarkably agile and humorous creature, who is, with May
Sinclair and “Elizabeth,” one of our favourite female novelists. So we
are particularly pleased to have F. H. P. recall to us a passage about
the Dog David, in _Living Alone_:
David Blessing Brown, a dog of independent yet loving habit,
had spent about four-fifths of his life in the Brown family.
He was three years old and though ineligible for military
service made a point of wearing khaki about his face and in a
symmetrical heart-shaped spot near his tail. To Sarah Brown he
was the Question and the Answer, his presence was a constant
playtime for her mind; so well was he loved that he seemed to
her to move in a little mist and glamour of love....
I believe that Sarah Brown had loved the Dog David so much that
she had given him a soul. Certainly other dogs did not care for
him. David said that they had found out that his second name
was Blessing and that they laughed at him for it. His face was
seamed with the scars of their laughing. But I know that the
enmity had a more fundamental reason than that. I know that
when men speak with the tongues of angels they are shunned and
hated by men, and so I think that when dogs approach humanity
too nearly they are banished from the love of their own kind.
If you do not recognize, even in that little random passage, the
curious quality of Stella Benson’s talent, then we fear (brave friends)
we can never agree about literature. In her writing we always seem to
see that special and bewildering richness that we prize most of all;
something that does not lie in any particular nicety or adornment of
words, but in an underrunning flavour and queer subtlety of meaning. Is
there any subject in the world more trite, more shopworn, and defaced
by acres of blab than Dogs and their relations to mankind? There is
not. And yet see how Stella Benson, without one pompous or pretentious
word, and with a humour both mocking and tender, has not only said
something new, but something which, as soon as it is said, becomes old,
because it is permanent. That is what, in lieu of a better word, we are
inclined to call genius, and we have never read a page of Miss Benson’s
work which did not show it.
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