• FATHER HUGH BENSON"
THE opening sentence of Mr. Benson's preface to his Memoirs of a Brother disarms a critic. "This book was begun . . . only to place on record some of my brother's sayings and doings, to fix scenes and memories before they suffered from any dim obliteration of time, to catch, if I could, for my own comfort and delight the tone and sense of that vivid and animated atmosphere which Hugh always created about him." This description of the author's purpose exactly applies to the first half of the volume, and had it equally applied to the whole the reader might have expected to see "Privately printed" on the title-page. The book is interesting to near relatives and to those of Father Hugh Benson's converts who wish to know all they CAD of his childhood and youth, but there is hardly anything to foretell the really striking personality that he became in the last ten years of a life so prematurely ended. His career as an Anglican clergyman was altogether uneventful. He had done very little work at Cambridge, though he "managed to secure a Third in the [Theological] Tripes." He was chiefly interested in experiments in hypnotism, which prob- ably proved useful years afterwards when he was writing The Necromancer. By Ids own account, he "drifted into the idea of taking Orders as the line of least resistance, though when he began the study of theology he had found the one subject he really eared for." He did not find it at the Eton Mission at Hackney Wick, where "his heart was certainly not in his work, though there was much that appealed to him, particularly to his sense of humour, which was always strongly developed." At Kemsing, his next curacy, he began to find out that he had the power of preaching, and that it was in this direction rather than in parish work "that his life was going to lie." An opportunity for develop- ing this faculty offered itself in the Community of the Resurrection, lately founded by Canon Gore (now the Bishop of Oxford). Here he led a life of "evangelistic mission work with long spaces of study and devotion, six months roughly being devoted to outside activities and six to Com- munity life." He spent his years as a probationer mainly in study, and took the vows (which bad to be renewed annually) in 1901. In many ways his new life suited him welL The work at times was hard. "Hugh records that once after a mission in London they spent four days in interviewing people, and hearing confessions for eleven hours a day, with occa- sional sermons interspersed." But then the missioners had been "refreshed and reinvigorated by long, quiet, and careful preparation" in the intervals spent at Mirfield.
Idirfield was his first experience of the Church of England in the only form in which it was likely really to appeal to him. But what attracted him at Mirfield was the presence of certain characteristics which belonged only to a part of the Church of England, and what he wanted was a Church which claimed to speak with absolute authority upon Christian truth and which spoke with a single voice. Mr. Arthur Benson quotes a speech of his brother's made after he had left the Church of England which exactly expresses this need. He had " advanced some highly contestable points as assumptions,
• Rugh: Memoirs of a Broth., By Arthur Christopher Benson. London: 11.1114 EV:W. sad Co. Cra 6.1. sot-1
and my aunt, Mrs. Henry Sidgwiek, in an agony of rationality, said to him, But surely these are matters of argument, Hugh?' To which Hugh replied,' Well, you see, I have the misfortune, as you regard it, of belonging to a Church wh ich happens to know." There were too many things which the Church of England did not "happen to know" to keep him in it when he had once started on this line. The Highest Anglican must admit that his Church is in a very special sense a Church of open questions, and to Hugh Benson this idea was abhorrent. Among Anglicans he "was fretted by having to find out how much or how little each believed, Among Catholics that can be taken for granted." When once the change was made his character rapidly developed on various sides. He became a really great preacher in spite of the physical disadvantage of a slight stammer and of the mental disadvantage of extreme nervous- ness, which never, however, lasted beyond the first few words of his sermon. He told his brother that when he was about to preach he stayed in the vestry during the previous service and "would lie on a sofa or sit in a chair in agonies of nervousness, with actual attacks of nausea and even sickness," until the time came to go into the pulpit. In his own judgment, a real anxiety as to the effect of a sermon on the audience "was a necessary stimulus to the preacher, and evoked a mental power which con- fidence was apt to leave dormant." At all events, on the rare occasions when he felt free from this anxiety the sermon, in his opinion, was a failure. In his case extempore preaching implied no want of preparation. "He attained his remarkable facility by persistent, continuous, and patient toil." His own belief was that his real facility lay in writing far more than in preaching, and certainly the level of his novels is very high when it is remembered that they were largely written in the intervals of mission preaching and often interrupted by preaching visits to Rome and America. He died at forty-two, and his working life hardly lasted more than ten years. He might have lived longer if he had taken things more easily, but then he must have been a different man. In the words of the doctor who attended him in his last illness, "it was the way of Monsignor to put the work of a month into a week; he could not do otherwise. I cannot think of Monsignor as sitting with folded bands."
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