Books of the Day
Last and Best
IT is a hundred years (or so) since I reviewed a book ; and the Editor of The Spectator, very kindly wishing me to celebrate this centenary, has sent me attractive material for the celebra- tion. Too attractive, in a sense. In my salad days I was fairly good at slating a book, but was dull in praising one, and now am likely to be duller still. I pause, wondering, " Couldn't I possibly slate this one? " Alas, no. I was always honest, even when young, and am now too old to turn over a new leaf. With a heavy heart I embark on eulogy. The book is one that makes me wish I had known the writer much better than I did. I knew him for many years, and we had many friends in common, but I think we were not personally much interested in each other's doings. I had read Dodo, of course, when it burst upon the world, and thought it very brilliant—as, indeed, in a rather garish way, it was. And The Babe, B.A., was a very bright affair also. But nobody pressed me to read the rather more serious novels that followed, year after year, though they too were very popular. Two or -three of them I did read. Very bright they seemed to me, but thin, not very real. And now I find that Benson himself, in later years, felt as I did about them. " They lacked," he says, " the red corpuscle . . . I had often tried to conceal my own lack of emotion in situations that were intended to be moving, by daubing them over with sentimentality." He excepts three or four works from this candid indictment, " but," he says, " I had lost or was fast losing any claims to be called a serious novelist," and the spirit moved him to roam away into fresh fields of labour. He does not claim to have made in them any important discovery. Neverthe- less he made one. He found himself.
He found also Charlotte Brontë. His book about her (the first of his biographical books) was an admirable study of character and circumstance. It was what we reviewers call " penetrat- ing." It was tenderly acute and, with all due deference to the foregoing Mrs. Gaskell, inflexibly judicial. In fiction he had been hampered by lack of power to create significant men and women But here, created already for him, was Charlotte, and here Emily and those others ; and his keen intelligence could work freely, at case ; and his innate gift for narrative shone as never before. He then strode, briskly, firmly, from Haworth Parsonage to Balmoral, where he abode with equally good results : his Victoria rivalled his Charlotte. And presently he gave us those two fascinating works, As We Were and As We Are, the ripe fruits of social experience and observation—the wisdom of a man in love with things past, and in charitable touch with present things. There was plenty of autobiography mixed in with those musings. And now, in Final Edition (the best, I think, of all his books), there is no lack of pensive digressions in what is mainly the story of Benson's own life.
For autobiography there is a huge demand nowadays, and a not less huge supply. But many of the autobiographists are, alas, gravely handicapped. They have not had interesting lives, or haven't very good memories, or aren't in themselves obviously interesting or charming persons, or haven't a gift for writing. Some of them, indeed, have all these handicaps, and so their perseverance is all the more creditable to them. It is not for doggedness that Benson can be extolled. He had not had to wrestle with any of those awful drawbacks. He had lived in the centre of things, he had a keenly discriminating eye, he knew intimately many people well worth knowing, he had a very clear memory for anything that mattered, anything characteristic or illuminating or amusing ; and he could write: he had become, in course of time, master of a lucid, concise, light, flexible prose that exactly fulfilled his purposes ; a prose abundant in natural felicities ; a prose greatly superior to that of either of his brothers, who never were able to curb or chasten their immense facility. I remember a rather wicked fable told to me by a friend of the three. When Arthur lay dying, he still wrote continuously. Hugh and Fred had been sent for, Arthur was well-pleased to see them, but soon the fountain pen was travelling fast across the writing-pad. Hugh and Fred sat down, produced their own pads and pens, and resumed their work. Presently the nurse approached them, and said, in a low voice, " Your brother's heart has ceased to beat. But—it is very strange —he is still writing." " Strange? Not at all," said the brothers, and went on writing. As a matter of fact, of course, the three were very fond of one another, though none of them ever was able to admire the works of the other two. One of the most amusing scenes in Final Edition is that in which the three sit reading to their mother, one evening, at Tremans, caustic burlesques of one another's works. Each of the parodied was rather puzzled than pained, angrier than hurt. But " Oh, you clever people," said Mrs. Benson, " why don't you all for
the future write each other's books instead of your own? you do it so much better."
But amidst all the fun that pervades this book, one is conscious of a serious, a gallant and even noble character. E. F. Benson, unlike his respectively academic and ecclesiastic brothers, had always been a man of the world, a lover of society, and of various sports, and of travel. Twenty years ago he began to have symptoms of arthritis. Gradually he was crippled, but in the fell process he never lost heart, and he writes of it with complete stoicism—and even with blithe wit. Only once does he. repine__ ard then, I am bound to say, without good reason. " The presence of him who shuffles along on a stick, and who cannot pick it up if he drops it, does not promote gaiety . . . He may feel, among many faces and the alert movements of acquaintances, that he is a tiny speck of 'tarnish on their silver hours, and will
wonder if they are not suffering him rather than ." welcoming The last time I met him was at a luncheon party given not long ago by an old friend of ours. Of course one couldn't help feeling sorry for him. But how could one not have delighted in his talk, of which the sparkle was as gay, and the point as keen, as
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