BOOKS.

ARCHBISHOP BENSON'S LIFE.*

Mn. ARTHUR BENSON has had a difficult work to do, and he has done it thoroughly well. To write the Life of an Arch-

bishop of Canterbury in these days is to be tempted to write the ecclesiastical history of England during his Primacy. The fault of such a book is that the man would be lost in his work,—the human interest would pale in the stronger light of the public interest. For such an undertaking as this Mr. Benson has happily had neither leisure nor inclina- tion. Under no circumstances could it have been done well, because it would have dealt at every turn with people who are still living and controversies which are still in progress. The reticence which must necessarily have been observed would have made it little more than a series of chapters from an ecclesiastical "Annual Register." What he has preferred to attempt is to sketch " in broad outlines and rapid strokes, with as mach living detail as possible, a biographical por- trait to touch on events through the medium of personality rather than reveal personality through events." The second volume, indeed, deals largely with Church matters. That was inevitable in writing the Life of a man who, first or last, as originator or as judge, was necessarily concerned with whatever went on in the Church. But in all of them the Archbishop is the principal figure, and the reader feels that the events in which he played a part are only valuable to the biographer for the light they throw on the Archbishop's character. Moreover, they are all in the second volume, and as regards biographical interest it may almost be said that the second volume is little more than an appendix to the first.

The future Archbishop was a quick, excitable child, with a strong love of reading, and an early developed taste for devotion and for the aesthetic side of things liturgical. He made a disused room in his mother's house into an oratory. "There was a table rudely draped, and stools for kneeling. The walls were hung with rubbings of brasses from neigh- bouring churches ; on the table stood a plain wooden Cross made by an old carpenter, and paid for out of the boy's

scanty pocket-money And here he said the canonical hours daily, alone, or with some school friend—and he had several—of like tastes." But what redeems this story, adds Mr. Benson, "from the domain of precocious _sentiment," is that when "annoyed by surreptitious visits made to his private chapel by his sisters during his enforced absence at school, he made an ingenious device which automatically both recorded and avenged the advent of any intruding worshipper." The love that he had for the chapels at Wellington, at Lambeth, at Addington, and his interest in every detail connected with the!Bishop of Lincoln's trial, were thus early foreshadowed. But his first teacher, whose in- fluence remained with him to the end, was not a High Churchman. The ill-success of James Prince Lee as Bishop has thrown into the shade his extraordinary ability as a schoolmaster. Benson entered King Edward's School, Bir- mingham, in 1840, and remained there till 1848, and for nearly the whole of that time Lee was Head-Master. His • The Life of Eduard White Benson, some time Archbishop of Canterbury. By his Son, Arthur Christopher Benson. S vols. London : Macmillan and Co. [36s. net.]

exquisite scholarship, his intense desire to impart information to, and to stimulate intellectual tastes in, his "best" boys, the intensity of his religious convictions,—took possession of

Benson's schoolboy mind, and led him to declare thirty years later, "Lee was the greatest man I have ever come

within the influence of,—the greatest and the best I owe to him all that I ever was, or am, or shall be." Next to the Master came the friend. Lightfoot, afterwards Bishop of Durham, was a year older than Benson, and a close intimacy soon grew up between the two. Throughout their lives they were constant correspondents, and, next to his own diaries, Benson's letters to Lightfoot supply the richest materials for this biography. It is interesting to note that as a very young man Lightfoot was much the higher, Churchman of the two. "If you turn Tractarian again," writes Benson in 1848, "after having been Tractarian once before, and Arnoldine once or twice, why then I do not think we shall stand much chance of working together in after life." For the time, at all events, even this prospect did not move Lightfoot, for we have him writing, two months later, "High Churchmen seem to be the great regenerating element among us," and complaining that people "never dream that whether right or wrong, it [Puseyism] was the faith held by the confessors and martyrs of old." The narrowness of Benson's circumstances made his time at Cambridge one of real suffering. He got through his first year for something over £90, and this, of course, put hospitality—with the exception of breakfasting with Lightfoot every Sunday on a veal and ham pie—and recreations of every kind, except bathing and walking, out of the question. But his friends were many and most of them afterwards distinguished, and his popularity among them was great. His liturgical tastes continued, and in 1849 he sends to his friend Wickenden two sets of Prayers for the Dead, translated from the Alexandrine Liturgy of St. Basil, and the Liturgy of Severna, Patriarch of Antioch. In the middle of his time at Cambridge came the terrible shock of his favourite sister's death, followed two days later by that of his mother, and by the

discovers that almost her whole income was an annuity,

and that a sum of rather over £100 was all that the whole family had to depend upon. This sudden sobering of his life left lasting traces in terrible fits of depression, and in the almost Puritan severity with which he long viewed the lighter side of life. But he rose at once to the level of his new duties. He was helped to perform them by relatives— though he declined a good offer from one of them for his youngest brother, lest living with Unitarians should make it difficult for the child to grow up a Churchman—and by Martin, then Bursar, and afterwards Vice-Master, of Trinity His career as an undergraduate ended in his coming out Senior Optime and Eighth Classic. The last place was a

bitter disappointment, but it was redeemed by the Senior

Chancellor's Medal. The news of this last distinction was brought to him—by the Bursar himself—as he was sitting at a family dinner party at Clifton at his aunt's, Mrs. Sedg- wick's ; and in the entry in his diary which describes his cousin and future wife, then a child of ten, "now with one, now with both arms round my neck, stroking my hair, patting my forehead," we have the first glimpse of her who eight years later was to make the great happiness of his life.

The two leading incidents of the Archbishop's earlier career were his appointment, first, to the Head-Mastership of Wellington College, and next, to the Bishopric of Truro-

The chapters which describe his fifteen years at Wellington are in some respects the most interesting in the book. Of

episcopal duty there is more than one reading, and by conse- quence there is more than one standard of episcopal success. But of a Head-Master's duty there can be but one reading.

He has to rule the boys so as to bring out of them all that is best in them, and he has to train his assistant-masters so as to make them in the fullest sense of the word his fellow- workers. No eminence in scholarship or in school adminis-

tration will make up for failure in the faculty of government. This was a faculty which Benson pre-eminently possessed. The recollections of masters and boys which his son has brought together in chaps. 5-10 of the first volume leave us in no doubt upon this point. What will perhaps surprise those who only knew the Archbishop is the extreme severity of the Head-Master

"He was one of the sternest and severest disciplinarians that ever ruled a school ; he could inspire devoted admiration—it was admiration even more than love—but he could and largely did rule through fear. There is no exaggeration in saying that boys, and even masters, were greatly afraid of him, feared his censure, and consequently set great store by his praise It is a curious thing that he who was extraordinarily sensitive to the sight of suffering, especially in animals, to whom cruelty was so odious a vice, and who did not like to see plants struck with a stick, could have been so firm an advocate of punishment, and so stern in the infliction of it. Some old pupil has said that it was an awful sight to see the Head-Master fold his gown round him and cane a liar before the school."

Benson never punished his own children ; but there was no need for him to do so :—

" His displeasure was frightful to bear. I shall never forget," says Mr. Benson, "how when once as children we were in his study, waiting while he finished a letter before he showed us pictures, my eldest brother, whom my father idolised, knocked down and broke a large ivory handled seal. All that my father said was, `Martin, you naughty boy, you must forfeit your allow- ance to pay for mending that.' Apart from the consequences of the deed—for the seal appeared to us of priceless value, and my own idea was that my brother would sink into an indigent old age with his allowance still going to pay for the damage—the terror of the incident is indelibly stamped on my memory..

The father I knew in later years—sympathetic, patient, de- votedly affectionate, outspoken, and valuing frankness in sug- gestion or criticism—seems to me a different person from the stately severe father of my youth, whom it was almost a relief to see departing in cap and swelling silk gown down the drive."

On the other hand, hie kindness fully equalled his severity.

Dr. Verrall, who was at Wellingt.in from 1865 to 1869, writes :—

" He saved my health and my sense ; I believe that he saved my life. At fifteen I was a sensitive, fanciful, anaemic creature to whom something of home life was almost as necessary as bread and butter. But what could the Head-Master do ? I hardly expect to be believed when I say that from the end of my first term in the sixth to the day when I left the school, I went to tea at his house—a free informal nursery' tea which he took with all his family—whenever I liked, that is to say, about twice in every week, and it might be oftener:' Mr. Benson has wisely placed at the end of the first volume two chapters on the Archbishop's life at Addington and Lambeth. At the former what may be called his home-life was almost wholly spent. When he was staying there in Archbishop Tait's last illness, he had told his son that the house was too much in the style of the grand seigneur, and that no future Archbishop could ever live there. But "later on it became to him a most beloved home." He liked the scenery, "the steep gravel hills, the shoals of some ancient sea, over which the woodland extends " ; the historical bouquet that hung about a site of ancient British dwellings, of a hunting lodge of Henry VIII., of the Leighs and Trewthicks, to whom it had once belonged ; the chapel, " which out of a bare room he had made into a very seemly sanctuary" ; the very bedrooms, to which he "was for ever adding pictures and having them hung under his per- sonal superintendence." Addington was his home, which Lambeth—though Mr. Benson says that it has never been his own lot to live in such an agreeable house—was not. The only associations the Archbishop had with it were of " hard unrelieved work " or " anxious interviews." But even here he did much in the way of improvement. He "routed about in cupboards and garrets and dragged to light innumerable old chairs, chests, and settees of beautiful and costly design." He discovered and had cleaned and displayed " a rusty bundle of the pikes which were anciently carried before the Archbishop." He found a piece of the old tapes- tries of the palace which had been given away in Archbishop Cornwallis's time to an old woman and had been used by her descendants first as a coverlet and then as a carpet. And here, too, he spent much time, thought, and money over the chapel. "The mother of magnificence is frugality" was a saying of his, and he exemplified it by combining with immense liberality in great things a carious economy, almost parsimony, in small things. He saved bits of string and the gummed paper off the edge of stamps. He could not bear to throw away old almanacs. He would defeat the object of a considerable outlay by some small saving at the end. His industry was remarkable, and was greatly helped by his need- ing only about five hours' sleep. Till the doctors forbade it be was always up at 5.30 and got through a good deal of work before breakfast. Chapel followed, and then the morning was given up to correspondence. He was extraordinarily, and as his son thinks needlessly, exact about the precise wording of his letters. He was a passionately interested talker, but— "He was too eager to argue patiently, explained too much and refined upon the lucidity of what was already clear ...... Be was quick to resent any monopolising of the conversation by others in subjects with which he was imperfectly acquainted. He had not the art of eliciting information on subjects which were strange to him by questions, and was apt to deflect on to subjects which he knew. Argument with him always engendered heat, and he was apt to express himself too vehemently to be agreeable. Thus he did not in later life make many equal friends among men."

To this last characteristic must in part be attributed the absence of any really good understanding between him and the High Church party. He had not been much in contact with them, to some of their views he was strongly and almost constitutionally opposed, and he had, unfortunately, a very real dislike and distrust of Liddon, at that time their most active leader. Greater patience and more willingness to listen might have mended matters, but at this time these held but a subordinate place in the Archbishop's list of virtues. One of the schemes he had at heart was the revival of the Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, and to this Liddon was strongly, and having regard to its previous history naturally, opposed. Benson took his own course, and, but for the irritation and mis- understanding it caused them, the High Church leaders might have found in it a very serviceable opportunity. If they had co-operated with the Archbishop, they might have greatly strengthened the rather feeble precautions taken against proselytism from the Greek Church, and possibly have replaced the agents of the Church Missionary Society in Palestine by more friendly instruments. They made a similar mistake, though in this case it was shared by many who were not High Churchmen, in the position they took up in opposition to the trial of the Bishop of Lincoln. In this, the most important chapter of his Primacy, the Archbishop is seen to great advantage. If he was indisposed to listen, be was not at all indisposed to read, and every argument that could be alleged against his jurisdiction he seems to have weighed with the most scrupulous industry. The result of the trial was a decided gain to the High Church party, but undoubtedly they put that gain in peril by their efforts to prevent the case from coming to a hearing.

There are many aspects of Archbishop Benson's character of which we should like to speak did space permit. As it is, we take leave of a book of remarkable interest with sincere gratitude to Mr. Benson for the way in which he has executed a very difficult task, and brought us face to face with a singularly lovable character. One small suggestion we must make for future editions. It is that the pages comprised in each chapter should be indicated in the " contents."