LAST ESSAYS pt. A. C. BENSON': THE two things -that
surprise me oftenest in human infer..- course," -Mr. Benson tells us, -" are the difficulty which some -people experience in giving themselves away, and secondly :the fact how poorly many-people talk after all the practice %they have had." - - But Mr. ,Benson himself finds no difficulty either in self- tevelation or in self-suppression.` Never does he compel the reader, as he tells us he was once compelled to do in the presence of a bore, to unfurl " a 'sort -of" mental umbrella, off which talk trickled like rain:" On the contrary, `: we cannot :choose but hear " the calm and compelling voice that speaks to us in effortless English: throughout these pages, even when
that voice is not saying anything .very exciting. .
• Intimate details • about the- doorway of Lanib House or the sick-bed reflections of a convalescent are not exactly :thrilling, and remind us at times , of Mr. Max . Beerbohin's parody of A. C. Benson, ending with the picture of a girl In a pigtail with a pink bow, playing the same scales Per- petually on her piano, over and over again. - -But that is a :mere trick of style—the outer man Benson, so to speak ; .within we find the true stuff of thought, a pulse of purpose, a quickness, a humanity, which may charm .not at all the ,dry-as-dust cognoscenti, but appeals to the plain man who buys Mr. Benson's books by the thousand.
: Two plough-horses " great glossy, gentle creatures, came plodding along side by side, with clanking harness and a fine, bronzed, silent ploughman tramping beside them." We watch them watered and stabled with the essayist. Gracefully and gently he takes us back to the wild horses of the steppes, • to the dawn-age of husbandry, through evolution up to aero- planes, and then_ down_ in an easy glide. .to .earth and .Mr. Benson. " I could not help feeling what a stranger prOditct -still-l-myself-was,--living-in-theworld;oeninasieling-its produce, never having had to raise a finger to do any part of the primal work of the world. . . ." And of the ploughman Mr. Benson says, " How little he thought that he had worked that I might lean upon his fence and think my pleasant thoughts."
But leisure is necessary for teachers, observes Mr. Benson, and the world is not to be made again in a moment ; " the difficulty is that one feels so powerless to alter the present— for the thing cannot be done by small local philanthropies or by a proffer of superiorities, which it takes an initiation to comprehend." - • . As a -boy at Eton, the author fell in love with an elm, " whose lofty beauty stood out over the house-tops and surveyed the quiet courts below." He writes of trees with a fine and intimate emotion : in this essay, and perhaps in the one on Public Speaking, we are allowed to see into the keen and sensitive mind of one who was a man of affairs as well as an essayist. - This book is full of agreeable things, and it - has more " devil " than some of -his earlier work: He is both cruel and just on the neglected art of conversation in England, for instance ; and of Gissing's novels he writes : " He hates life, he fears it ; but he does not avert his eyes from it and passes on in loathing, but undismayed."
It is always hard to convey: the flavour of a style at second hand, and here the difficulty is doubled, for this reviewer has been caught in a net of words and reflexions ; he has been oppressed by a sense of prodigal but profitless -fertility . like that of the acorns under a great oak ; he has sipped too much of Mr. Benson's honey to carry it back to the hive ; he has lit upon so many flowers that he can only murmur confusedly of the meadows he has seen. -
In our copy of Rambles and Reflections there is no "finis,": not even a full stop to the last sentence of the last ,essiy. After' Mr. Benson's manner let us look on this as a significant trifle : his voice is not stilted, he will continue to say wise and witty things to future generations : men and women who - loved and admired hh'n -lifewill continue to meet him in
ppirit and answer to his - mood- _
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