Hugh by Arthur Christopher Benson (good e books to read TXT) 📖

kind of tract," and though this is what the French call a _saugrenu_ criticism, which implies something dull, boorish, and provincial, yet it is easy to recognise what is meant. It is not unjust to resent the appearance of the cultivated and sensitive Anglican, highly bred and graceful, who is sure to turn out hard and hollow-hearted, or the shabby, trotting, tobacco-scented Roman Catholic priest, who is going to emerge at a crisis as a man of inspired dignity and solemnity. Sometimes, undoubtedly, the books are too intent upon expunging other forms of religious life, rather than in tracing the movements of the soul. Probably this was inseparable from the position Hugh had taken up, and there was not the slightest pose, or desire to improve the situation about his mind. The descriptions, the lightly-touched details, the naturalness and ease of the talk are wholly admirable. He must have been a very swift observer, both of nature and people, because he never gave the least impression of observing anything. I never saw him stop to look at a view, or go into raptures over anything beautiful or picturesque; in society he was either silent and absorbed, or more commonly extremely animated and expansive. But he never seemed to be on the look-out for any impressions at all, and still less to be recording them.

I believe that all his books, with the exception, perhaps, of _Richard Raynal_, can be called brilliant improvisations rather than deliberate works of art. "I write best," he once said, "when I rely most on imagination." The time which elapsed from his conception of an idea to the time when the book was completed was often incredibly short. I remember his telling me his first swift thought about _The Coward_; and when I next asked him about it, the book had gone to the publishers and he was writing another. When he was actually engaged in writing he was oblivious of all else, and lived in a sort of dream. I have several sketches of books which he made. He used to make a rough outline, a kind of _scenario_, indicating the gradual growth of the plot. That was done rapidly, and he always said that the moment his characters were conceived, they began to haunt his mind with emphatic vividness; but he wrote very fast, and a great quantity at a time. His life got fuller and fuller of engagements, but he would get back to Hare Street for a day or two, when he would write from morning to night with a brief interval for gardening or handicraft, and briefer intervals for meals. He was fond of reading aloud bits of the books, as they grew. He read all his books aloud to my mother in MS., and paid careful heed to her criticisms, particularly with reference to his female characters, though it has been truly said that the women in his novels are mostly regarded either as indirect obstacles or as direct aids to conversion.

Mr. Belloc once said, very wisely and truly, that inertia was the breeding-ground of inspiration. I think, on the whole, that the total and entire absence of any species of inertia in Hugh's temperament reacted in a way unfavourably on his books. I do not think they simmered in his mind, but were projected, hot and smoking, from the fiery crucible of thought. There seems to me a breathless quality about them. Moreover I do not think that there is much trace of the subtle chemistry of mutual relations about his characters. In life, people undergo gradual modifications, and other people exert psychological effects upon them. But in Hugh's books the characters are all fiercely occupied in being themselves from start to finish; they have exhausted moods, but they have not dull or vacant moods; they are always typical and emphatic. This is really to me the most interesting thing about his books, that they are all projections of his own personality into his characters. He is behind them all; and writing with Hugh was, like so many things that he did, a game which he played with all his might. I have spoken about this elsewhere, because it accounted for much in his life; and when he was engaged in writing, there was always the delicious sense of the child, furiously and absorbingly at play, about him.

It is said that no artist is ever really interested in another artist's work. My brothers, Fred and Hugh, my sister and myself would sometimes be at home together, and all writing books. Hugh was, I think, always the first inclined to produce his work for inspection; but we had a tacit convention which was not in the least unsympathetic, not to feel bound to be particularly interested in each other's books. My books, I felt, bored Hugh more than his bored me; but there was this advantage, that when we read each other's books, as we often did, any critical praise that we could offer was much more appreciated than if we had felt bound to proffer conventional admiration. Hugh once told me that he envied my _sostenuto_; but on another occasion, when I said I had nothing to write about, and feared I had written too many books, Hugh said: "Why not write a book about having nothing to write about?" It was good advice and I took it. I can remember his real and obvious pleasure when I once praised _Richard Raynal_ to him with all my might. But though he enjoyed praise, it was always rather because it confirmed his own belief that his work was worth doing. He did not depend in the smallest degree either upon applause or sympathy. Indeed, by the time that a book was out, he had generally got another on the stocks, and did not care about the previous one at all.

Neither do I think that his books emanated from a high artistic ideal. I do not believe that he was really much interested in his craft. Rather he visualised a story very vividly, and then it seemed to him the finest fun in the world to spin it all as rapidly as he could out of his brain, to make it all alert with glancing life. It was all a personal confession; his books bristle with his own dreams, his own dilemmas, his own social relations; and when he had once firmly realised the Catholic attitude, it seemed to him the one thing worth writing about.

While I write these pages I have been dipping into _The Conventionalists_. It is full of glow and drama, even melodrama; but somehow it does not recall Hugh to my mind. That seems strange to me, but I think of him as always larger than his books, less peremptory, more tolerant, more impatient of strain. The book is full of strain; but then I remember that in the old days, when he played games, he was a provoking and even derisive antagonist, and did not in the least resent his adversaries being both; and I come back to my belief in the game, and the excitement of the game. I do not, after all, believe that his true nature flowed quite equably into his books, as I think it did into _The Light Invisible_ and _Richard Raynal_. It was a demonstration, and he enjoyed using his skill and adroitness; he loved to present the smouldering and flashing of passions, the thrill and sting of which he had never known. Saved as he was by his temperament alike from deep suffering and tense emotion, and from any vital mingling either with the scum and foam or with the stagnancy and mire of life, the books remain as a brilliant illusion, with much of the shifting hues and changing glimmer of his own ardent and restless mind rippling over the surface of a depth which is always a little mysterious as to the secrets it actually holds.


XV


FAILING HEALTH

Hugh's health on the whole was good up to the year 1912, though he had a troublesome ailment, long ignored, which gave him a good deal of malaise. He very much disliked being spoken to about his health, and accepted no suggestions on the subject. But he determined at the end of 1912, after enduring great pain, to have an operation, which was quite successful, but the shock of which was considerable. He came down to Tremans just before, and it was clear that he suffered greatly; but so far from dreading the operation, he anticipated it with a sense of immense relief, and after it was over, though he was long unwell, he was in the highest spirits. But he said after he came back from Rome that he felt ten years older; and I can recall his coming down to Cambridge not long after and indulging one evening in an immense series of yawns, for which he apologised, saying, "I'm tired, I'm tired--not at the top, but deep down inside, don't you know?"

But it was not until 1914 that his health really declined. He came over to Cambridge at the beginning of August, when the war was impending. He stayed with me over the Sunday; he was tired and overstrained, complained that he felt unable to fix his mind upon anything, and he was in considerable depression about the possibility of war. I have never seen him so little able to throw off an anxiety; but he dined in Hall with me on the Sunday night, met some old friends, and was full of talk. He told me later in the evening that he was in much anxiety about some anonymous menace which he had received. He would not enter into details, but he spoke very gravely about it. However, later in the month, I went over with a friend to see him at Hare Street, and found him in cheerful spirits in spite of everything. He had just got the place, he said, into perfect order, and now all it wanted was to be left alone. It was a day of bright hot sunlight, and we lunched out of doors near the chapel under the shade of the yew trees. He produced a peculiar and pleasant wine, which he had made on the most scientific principles out of his own grapes. We went round and looked at everything, and he showed me the preparation for the last adornment, which was to be a rose garden near the chapel. We walked into the orchard and stood near the Calvary, little thinking that he would be laid to rest there hardly two months later.

The weeks passed on, and at the end of September I went to stay near Ambleside with some cousins, the Marshalls, in a beautiful house called Skelwith Fold, among lovely woodlands, with the mountains rising on every side, and a far-off view down Langdale. Here I found Hugh staying. He was writing some Collects for time of war, and read many of them aloud to me for criticism. He was also painting in oils, attempting very difficult landscapes with considerable success. They stood drying in the study, and he was much absorbed in them; he also was fishing keenly in a little trout lake near the house, and walking about with a gun. His spirits were very equable and good. But he told me that he had gone out shooting in September over some fields lent him by a neighbour, and had had to return owing to breathlessness; and he added that he suffered constantly from breathlessness and pain in the chest and arms, that he could only walk a few paces at a time, and then had to rest to recover his breath. He did not seem to be anxious about it, but he went down one morning to celebrate Mass at Ambleside, refusing