He was very careful to keep up with his home and his family ties. He used to pay regular visits to Tremans, my mother's house, and was generally there at Christmas or thereabouts. Latterly he had a Christmas festival of his own at Hare Street, with special services in the chapel, with games and medals for the children, and with presents for all alike—children, tenants, servants, neighbours, and friends. My sister, who lately spent a Christmas with him, says that it was more like an ideal Christmas than anything she had ever seen, and that he himself, full of eagerness and kindness and laughter, was the centre and mainspring of it all. He used to invite himself over to Cambridge not infrequently for a night or two; and I used to run over for a day to Hare Street to see his improvements and to look round. I remember once going there for an afternoon and suggesting a stroll. We walked to a hamlet a little way off, but to my surprise he did not know the name of it, and said he had never been there. I discovered that he hardly ever left his own little domain, but took all his exercise in gardening or working with his hands. He had a regular workroom at one time in the house, where he carved, painted, or stitched tapestries—but it was all intent work. When he came to Cambridge for a day, he would collect books from all parts of the house, read them furiously, "tearing the heart out of them" like Dr. Johnson. Everything was done thus, at top speed. His correspondence was enormous; he seldom failed to acknowledge a letter, and if his advice were asked he would write at great length, quite ungrudgingly; but his constant writing told on his script. Ten years ago it was a very distinctive, artistic, finely formed hand, very much like my father's, but latterly it grew cramped and even illegible, though it always had a peculiar character, and, as is often the case with very marked hand-writings, it tended to be unconsciously imitated by his friends.
Copyright, C. Chichester
HARE STREET, IN THE GARDEN
JULY 1911
R. H. Benson. Dr. F. L. Sessions.
I used to wonder, in talk with him, how he found it possible to stay about so much in all sorts of houses, and see so many strange people. "Oh, one gets used to it," he said, adding: "besides, I am quite shameless now—I say that I must have a room to myself where I can work and smoke, and people are very good about that."
XIV
AUTHORSHIP
As to Hugh's books, I will here say a few words about them, because they were a marked part of himself; he put much skill and care into making them, and took fully as much rapture away. When he was writing a book, he was like a man galloping across country in a fresh sunny morning, and shouting aloud for joy. But I do not intend to make what is called an appreciation of them, and indeed am little competent to do so. I do not know the conventions of the art or the conditions of it. "Oh, I see," said a critical friend to me not long ago in much disgust, "you read a novel for the ideas and the people and the story." "What do you read it for?" I said. "Why, to see how it is done, of course," he replied. Personally I have never read a book in my life to see how it is done, and what interests me, apart from the book, is the person behind it—and that is very elementary. Moreover, I have a particular dislike of all historical novels. Fact is interesting and imagination is interesting; but I do not care for webs of imagination hung on pegs of fact. Historical novels ought to be like memoirs, and they are never in the least like memoirs; in fact they are like nothing at all, except each other.
The Light Invisible always seemed to me a beautiful book. It was in 1902 that Hugh began to write it, at Mirfield. He says that a book of stories of my own, The Hill of Trouble, put the idea into his head—but his stories have no resemblance to mine. Mine were archaic little romances, written in a style which a not unfriendly reviewer called "painfully kind," an epigram which always gave Hugh extreme amusement. His were modern, semi-mystical tales; he says that he personally came to dislike the book intensely from the spiritual point of view, as being feverish and sentimental, and designed unconsciously to quicken his own spiritual temperature. He adds that he thought the book mischievous, as laying stress on mystical intuition rather than Divine authority, and because it substituted the imagination for the soul. That is a dogmatic objection rather than a literary objection; and I suppose he really disliked it because it reminded him later on of a time when he was moving among shadows. But it was the first book in which he spread his wings, and there is, I think, a fresh and ingenuous beauty about it, as of a delighted adventure among new faculties and powers.