Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

by E. F. Benson

I wonder if it could have been otherwise, and with regret I do not see how it could. As his own childish records show, my father at my age then was a zealous ecclesiastic, for did he not when ripely eleven obtain the use in his mother’s house of an empty room, which he converted into an oratory? There was an altar there, and it was hung with rubbings he had made from brasses in churches. This piece of childish piety was certainly natural to him, and as certainly there was no kind of priggishness in it, for he set a booby-trap over the door, so that his sisters should not be able to enter “his” oratory in his absence without being detected. He did not want his sisters praying there: and the booby-trap over the chapel door was certainly an admirable device to keep them out. But in none of us, nor indeed in my mother, was there implanted an ecclesiastical mind, not even in Hugh. He took orders it is true, in the English Church, and subsequently the Catholic Church claimed him, and to it and its service he gave his whole love and energy. But the ecclesiastical mind in him was a later development, for it must be remembered that before taking orders at all he had tried and failed to get into the Indian Civil Service. (He and I, at that time, used to dress up in nightshirts, with trousers over our shoulders to represent stoles, and celebrate the “rite of the Silver Cow” in our sitting-room at Addington. I feel sure that there was not any solid profanity in it: we but parodied, and that with great amusement, the genuflexions, the bobbings and bowings, the waving of a censer, considered merely as ridiculous pieces of ritual, but such a rite could not be held indicative of a reverent attitude towards ritual as such.) But my father’s mind, even as a child, was strongly ecclesiastical; only his children did not share it, nor did my mother. Of all men and women that I have ever known, she was the most deeply religious in her realization of the pervading presence of God, but the garb, the habiliments of her religion were not the same as my father’s. To him the Church and its ceremonies were a natural self-expression, and in that he gorgeously clothed his love of God. To none of us was such expression natural, and thus his enthusiasms though they infected us to some extent were things caught from him, not cathedraically developed. That he missed this in all of us, I think could not be helped, but I do not think, at that time at any rate, that he missed it much, for he was Elijah in the whirlwind of his enthusiasms, and caught us all up, as in the fringes of a dust-cloud, to subside again when he had passed.

What estranged was my continued fear of him, which now yields easily to analysis and dispersal, but was in those days regarded by me merely as an instinct, as natural and as incontrovertible as hunger or thirst. I understood neither him nor any part of him. I did not grasp the fact that the root in him as regards his children was his love for them, and that it was his love and nothing else that, at bottom, was accountable for his quickness in putting his finger on a fault and his sternness in rebuke. It was out of his love that he regarded himself so strictly as responsible for our mental and moral education, and what I thought his readiness to blame was only the watchfulness of it. For instance, if, as I so well specifically remember, I appeared with an umbrella huddled up anyhow in its confining elastic, he saw in that a tendency towards slovenliness, and he made, in the fervency of his wish that I should not grow up to be of slovenly habit, no allowance for the natural frailty of tender years. Trivial carelessness and unpunctuality in the same way were pounced upon with a severity that altogether over-brimmed the cup of the occasion; he saw in them (and his love hastened to correct) instances of a dangerous tendency. In consequence he brought great and formidable guns to bear on small faults, which could just as efficiently have been visited with a light instead of a heavy hand. Sometimes, too, he was utterly wrong in his interpretation of our motives, and this gave us a sense of injustice; etchingly recorded on my memory, for instance, is a Sunday afternoon walk when Maggie and I pranced and ran ahead, from the mere exuberance, as far as I can judge, produced by a heavy meal and a fine day. But my father put the gloomiest interpretation on our antics, telling us that we were behaving thus in order to excite the admiration of passers-by at our agility. “You are saying to yourselves, ‘I am Hercules, I am Diana,’” he witheringly observed; whereas, nothing was farther from our thoughts. But it was unthinkable to argue the point, to assure him that no similitude of that kind had ever suggested itself. The only course was to walk soberly and sedately instead of running. And since the lives of young children, especially if they are at all vividly inclined, are a chessboard of small faults, this fear of the rebuke, in the absence of comprehension of its root-cause, became a constant anxiety to us, making us mere smooth-faced, blue-eyed dolls in his presence, with set fixed movements and expressions; and when released from it, we scampered off as if from an examination under a magnifying-glass.

I do not mean to convey the idea that my father was continually pulling us up, for nothing is further from the truth. Continually we played to him, and he danced the most fascinating measure; continually he played to us, and our dancing strove to keep time with his enchanting airs. He could render us speechless with laughter at his inimitable mirth, or breathless with suspense at his stories. But all the time there was this sense that at any moment the mirth might cease, and that a formidable rebuke might be visited on an offence that we had no idea we had committed. But it was never any joy in fault-finding that prompted it: the real cause was the watchfulness and responsibility of his love. How often our fear was ill-founded, passes enumeration, but one way or another, it had become a habit with all of us, except perhaps Nellie, for she, out of a remarkable faculty of not knowing at all what fear meant (except when playing Pirates) arrived at a much completer comprehension of my father than any of us.

Still less did the rest of us understand those fits of black depression which from time to time assailed and overwhelmed my father, not grasping the fact that when they were on him, he really ceased to be himself, and was under a sort of obsession. They were, I imagine, as purely physical as a cold in the head or an ache of indigestion, but during the two or three days that they lasted he was utterly unapproachable. He would sit through a meal, or take us out for a walk in a silence which if broken at all, was broken only by blame or irony. If we spoke to him, there would be no reply; if, under the intolerable heaviness we were silent, he would ask if there was nothing that interested us which he was worthy of hearing.... And all the time, as we knew later, he was struggling with this demoniacal load, longing to be rid of it, yearning to burst out of it, but possessed by it to the point of helplessness. While the fit was on him, and he was in this abnormal state, the most innocent of words and actions would evoke a formidable censure, and I suspect that three-quarters of our fear for him were derived from our belief that these attacks were a part of him, always there, and always liable to come into play. That was an entire mistake, though it was a natural one. As it was, these black fits were not incapsulated by us, but suffered to mingle with and make part of our estimate of him. That we should so have feared him, that we should so have made ourselves unnatural and formal with him, when all the time his love was streaming out towards us, makes a pathos so pitiful that I cannot bear to think of it. But there it was, and long it lasted, and all the time I never got a true perspective of him. We saw ourselves as a nervous row of pupils before a schoolmaster, and all the time it was his very strictness which was a manifestation of his love, and his love hungered for ours. Our troubles and our joys, the worst of us and the best of us, went like homing pigeons to my mother, and she gave the same welcome to the one and to the other, and for ever treasured both.

The relationship of each one of us to her was unique as regards any other of us, for each of us found exactly and precisely what we desired, though how often we did not know what we desired till she gave it us! All her life she was wiser and younger than anybody else, limpid and bubbling, and from the first days when any of us began to understand what she was, she never had any blank surprises in store, for it was always quite obvious that she would understand and appreciate, and would never condone but always forgive. Never from first to last did I repent having opened my heart to her; never did I not repent having shut it. I do not think she ever asked any of us for a confidence, but the knowledge, conveyed in the very atmosphere of her, that she was ready, toeing the mark, so to speak, to run to us when the pistol fired, gave her that particular precision of sympathy. Did she scold us? Why, of course; but how her precious balms healed our heads!

Love is a stern business, and about hers there was never the faintest trace of sentimentality. She loved with a swift eagerness, and she had no warm slops to comfort us. But there was always the compliment of consultation. “Now you’ve behaved very badly indeed,” she would say, “Don’t you think the first thing to do is to say you’re sorry?”... And then with that inimitable breaking of her smile, “Oh, my dear, I am glad you told me.”... And did ever any other mother at the age of forty run so violently in playing that strenuous game called, “Three knights a-riding,” that she broke a sinew in her leg? Mine did. And did ever a mother so encourage an extremely naughty boy of thirteen after a really dreadful interview with his father, as by giving him a prayer book and saying, “I shall write in it ‘Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his ways?’” Being called a young man at the age of thirteen was enough in itself to make him realize what an exceedingly tiresome child he had been. Tact! Beth used to call it “tac,” and when I got my shoes wet through three times a day, or fell backwards into one of those Cornish streams she said, “Eh, Master Fred, but you’ve got no tac’!” No more I had.

CHAPTER VI
THE DUNCE’S PROGRESS

AFTER that first brilliant year at school, when I got so many prizes without taking any trouble, there ensued two extremely lean years, during which I took just as much trouble as before, and got nothing at all. For just as, physically, growing children spurt and are quiescent again, storing force for the next expansion, so mentally they have in the intervals of development periods of utter stagnation. I had swept, a prodigious infant, through all the other forms, leaving Geege and Davy and Daubeny mere dim fixed stars across the path of the comet, and then the unfortunate comet gave one faint “pop” and went completely out. Other boys straggled and struggled up to the first form, which I had so easily stormed, and I continued sinking through them, like a drowned rag, to my appointed place at the bottom. Agitated letters were exchanged between Waterfield and my father, of which I found the other day several of Waterfield’s; he clung to a certain forlorn optimism about me, but seemed puzzled to know why without positively neglecting my work I invariably did it worse than anybody in the form. He still believed me not to be stupid. In that quiescent period I could not assimilate any more; all that I was fed with merely gave me indigestion, and the mental stuffing was liberally supplied to the poor goose, for at the end of that year I was to try for an Eton scholarship, with regard to which my prospects grew ever less encouraging. A drawer in Waterfield’s study adjoining the room where the first class was tutored was entirely devoted to the dreadful copies of Greek and Latin prose and Latin elegiacs which I produced. Week after week these grew and collected there, each of them thickly scored by Waterfield’s red ink. Of one of them I can recall the image now; scarcely a word remained that was not underscored in red. But I gather that Waterfield must have concluded that some blight other than carelessness and inattention was responsible for my failures, for he never threatened me with rulers or birchings for them. Mentally, during those three atrocious terms, the only thing in which I can remember taking the slightest interest was hearing him read out the piece of English verse which it was our task to turn into Latin elegiacs. His reading was altogether beautiful; often his voice broke, as when he read us “Home they brought her warrior dead,” and, though he quite failed to instil in me the desire to put such verses into beautiful Latin, he intensely kindled my love of beautiful English. Similarly, when the Sunday divinity lesson was over and such storms as had raged round St. Paul’s missionary journey were stilled, he would tell us all to make ourselves comfortable, and for the rest of the hour entranced us with The Pilgrim’s Progress. His delightful voice melodiously rose and fell; he asked us no inconvenient questions to probe the measure of our attention; his object, in which he strikingly succeeded, was to let us hear magnificent English magnificently read, and to leave us to gather our own honey.

A great event of the summer term was Waterfield’s birthday. The whole school subscribed to give him a birthday present, which must have been of some value, for the sum of five shillings or ten shillings (I forget which) was charged up to every boy’s bill. But we certainly got that back again, for the birthday, kept as a whole holiday, was celebrated by everybody being taken to the Crystal Palace for the day and furnished with half a crown to spend as he pleased, so decidedly Waterfield was not “up” on the transaction. A few of the more favoured were invited to spend the day on the Thames with him and his family; they embarked on a steam launch at Richmond and had luncheon in some riverside wood. Now, above all things in the world I longed to see the Crystal Palace, of which I had formed the image as of some ineffable glittering constellation, a piece of real fairyland fallen from the sky and now at rest on Sydenham Hill, and it was with a black despair that I received the distinction of being bidden to the family picnic instead. But a dea ex machina came to the rescue in the person of Mrs. Waterfield, who quite ironically said to me, “I suppose you would much sooner go to the Crystal Palace?” Throwing “tac” and politeness to the winds, I unhesitatingly told her that I certainly would, and I was given my half-crown and joined the proletariat.... Or was Mrs. Waterfield’s enquiry not ironical at all, but a piece of supreme “tac”? Had some hint reached her that I really wanted to go to the Crystal Palace? I cannot decide. In any case, that kind-hearted woman would have been rewarded for making the suggestion, could she have realized with what rapture I beheld that amazing edifice glittering in the sun, and went through its Palm Court and its Egyptian Court and its Assyrian Court, and beheld all that the Prince Consort had done to educate the love of beauty in these barbarous islanders. All day I wandered enchanted, and laid out most of the half-crown in a glass paper-weight with a picture of the Crystal Palace below, and the remainder in a small nickel ornament in the shape of an ewer, undoubtedly made in Germany. Indeed, I was wise to fasten on the opportunity given me by Mrs. Waterfield, for thus I secured the wonderful experience of being absolutely bowled over by the beauty of the Crystal Palace, which has not happened to everybody. All the same, I suffered a few years later a crushing and double disillusionment, for I was taken there again to hear Israel in Egypt at the Handel Festival. On that occasion my main impression was that I thought the Crystal Palace a very suitable place for that monstrous performance. The scale on which the one was built and on which the other was performed served not to conceal but to accentuate the essential meanness of each....

I weave this into a digression not unconnected with the first of these lean years. Though mentally, as regards the metres of foreign verse and the inexorable grammar of Greek and Latin, I was as idle “as a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” I gorged myself not only on the readings of Waterfield, but on music. That frail widow, Mrs. Russell, is probably unknown to fame as a teacher of the piano, but I owe her an undying debt of gratitude. I begged to be released from the study of such works as those of Mr. Diabelli, whom I had long ago judged and found wanting, and from “arrangements” of the Barber of Seville, and even from the sugared melodies of “Songs without Words” (over which, especially No. 8, an occasional tear used to drop from Mrs. Russell’s eyes), and to be allowed to entrap my awkward fingers in Bach, whom I had heard rendered by the “Farmer Society” at Lincoln. My request was granted, and I was permitted to make a rapturous hash of slow Sarabands and more rapid Gavottes and Minuets out of the Suites Anglaises. Never was there so enthralled a bungler; for I could hear (this I positively affirm), through the crash of my awkwardness, what was meant. Bach then and there and ever afterwards was my gold standard in the innumerable coinage of music. There was good silver, there was good copper, there was promissory paper. All these, in a loose metaphor, might temporarily be depreciated in the exchange of my mind, or might have a rise, but Bach remained gold. Out of my “taste,” whatever that was, I was quite prepared to put Beethoven (in slow movements) in his place, and to give Mozart, as judged by his “Variations on a Theme in A,” a very distinguished position, and to concede a neatness to “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” Brahms I had never heard of. But all these, then as now, were, at the most, distinguished gentlemen, equerries or grooms or chamberlains in attendance round about the court, and having speech with the King.