Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

by E. F. Benson

I wonder if children ever ran so breathless a race in pursuit of manifold interests and enjoyments as did we in those years when our ages ranged from the early twenties to the early teens, and the Christmas holidays in particular, brought us together. One year, about 1884, a snowfall was succeeded by a week’s frost, and that by another week of icy fog, and the foggy week I look back on as having given us the fullest scope of hazardous activity in hopeless circumstances, for shooting and riding were impossible. We made a toboggan-run which soon became unmitigated ice, down a steep hill in the park among Scotch firs that loomed dim and menacing through the mist. Half-way down the hill, just where the pace was swiftest, and the toboggan skidding most insanely, grew one of these firs close to the track, and on the other side was a bramble-bush. From the top you could not see this gut at all, and with eyes peering agonizedly through the thick air you waited for the appearance of this opening somewhere ahead. Sometimes you saw so late that the bramble-bush or the Scotch fir must inevitably receive you, and there was just time to slide off behind, be rolled on the hard glazed snow, and hear the plunge of the toboggan in the bramble-bush, or its crash against the Scotch fir. If you got through safely, a second and more open slope succeeded and you pursued your way across the path between the church and the house, and bumped into the kitchen-garden fence. Bruised and unwearied we took the injured toboggans to the estate carpenter, whose time at Christmas must have been chiefly occupied with repairing these fractures, and played golf over the nine holes which we had made along the slope in front of the house, on the snow and in a fog. The greens, which were about as large as tablecloths, had been swept, and the boy who had the honour whacked his ball in the conjectured direction, and ran like mad after it. When he had found it, he shouted and his opponent drove in the direction of his voice. If he sliced or pulled, he too ran like mad in the conjectured direction; if he drove straight his ball was probably marked by the first driver. The thrillingest excitement was when, driving first, you topped your ball or spouted it in the air, for then you crouched as you heard the crack of the second ball, which whizzed by you unseen. Football in the top passage with bedroom doors for goals ushered in lunch and after lunch we skated on dreadful skates called “Acmes” or “Caledonians,” which clipped themselves on to the heels and soles of the boot, and came off and slithered across the ice at the moment when you proposed to execute a turn. Hugh despised my figure-skating (and I’m sure I don’t wonder) and christened himself a speed skater. The pond was of no great extent and fringed on one side by tall rhododendron thickets, into which he crashed when unable to negotiate a corner.

The evening closing in early was the dawn of the intellectual labours of the day. The Saturday Magazine made frequent appearances, burgeoning like Aaron’s rod into miraculous blossom of prose and poetry: between-whiles Arthur composed voluntaries to be played on the organ in the chapel at prayers, Nellie studied the violin, Hugh produced a marionette theatre, and wrote a highly original play for it, called The Sandy Desert; or, Where is the Archbishop? and Maggie made oil pictures of her family of Persian cats. Once at least during Christmas holidays we all jointly wrote a play: it was The Spiritualist one year, in which there was a slashing exposure of mediums; another year we dramatized The Rose and the Ring in operatic form with original lyrics set to popular tunes. With the exception of Nellie, our voices were singularly inefficient and completely untrained, which was part of the fun of it. To these plays the neighbourhood was invited, and all the servants and lodge-keepers formed a solid mass at the back. At one of them, Arthur for some reason, must be disguised as a young woman, six feet two high, with a yard or so of trousers showing below the skirt. This impersonation made a kitchen-maid laugh so hysterically, that the play had to pause while she was taken out by two housemaids, and her yells died away as she retreated down the back-stairs.

Life in those holidays was an orgy, celebrated in an atmosphere of absolutely ceaseless argument and discussion. Every question rose to boiling-point: for while we regarded each other with strong and quite unsentimental affection we were violently critical of each other. We drew biting caricatures of my father going to sleep after tea, of my mother keenly observant above and not through her spectacles, of Hugh falling off Ajax, of any ludicrous and humorous posture. But above all it was writing that most enthralled us, and innumerable were the quires of sermon-paper that yielded up their fair white lives to our scribblings. These were now beginning to enter a more professional arena than the Saturday Magazine; Nellie, then at Lady Margaret’s Hall in Oxford, had, before she was twenty, published an article on Crabbe in Temple Bar; Arthur, a year or two older, had written his first book, Arthur Hamilton, in the form of an imaginary memoir, and Maggie and I were in the throes of a joint story, in which I can perceive the infancy of a novel called Dodo. This was abandoned before completion, but in a moraine of forgotten dustinesses, I came across some few pages of it the other day and really felt that there was some notion in it, some conscious attempt anyhow, to convey character by means of conversation rather than by analysis, an achievement in the direction of which, in spite of dispiriting results, I am still grubbing away. There certainly, in that heap of ancient manuscript fortuitously preserved, was the conscious striving after psychical dialogue, in which the interlocutors revealed themselves. Trivial as might be the personalities revealed, the idea of the excited authors was to avoid narrated analysis, and to convict and justify their characters out of their own mouths. There was a crisis of creativeness in the writing of it, for we firmly and designedly intended that a certain middle-aged lady, at whose feet everybody else fell flat in adoration of her tact and her sympathy and her comprehension, should “be” my mother. But, such is the waywardness of idealistic portraiture, we found, about Chapter VI, that though she was already supposedly installed on the throne of tact and comprehension, before which everybody else bowed the knee, she had not justified the part which we had cast for her, for she really had said little more than “I feel so deeply for you,” or “Pass the mustard.” We were determined that she should reveal her incomparable humanity by the sympathetic dialogues in which we engaged her, but she was so tactful that she never said anything at all that bore on the problems which were submitted to her. In the book to which I have alluded, she certainly appears as “Mrs. Vivian,” who, as may faintly be remembered, is supposed to be possessed of super-human tact and insight, taking painful situations with calming and yet exhilarating effect. For the satisfaction of the curious, it may be stated that Mrs. Vivian was the one live model in the book and was completely unrecognisable. When first we enthusiastically scribbled at its earlier incarnation, my sister and I were at the ages of nineteen and seventeen, and for the very reason, namely, that we thought of my mother in our adoring limning of her, the presentment is not only unlike her, but unlike anybody at all.

We went to Addington for a few weeks at Easter, and the sojourn then was, according to my mother, of the nature of a picnic. As a matter of fact there was not really anything very picnicky about it; the drawing-room, it is true, was not used, but we managed with the ante-room, the Chinese room, the schoolroom, my father’s study and her own room, by way of sitting-rooms, and perhaps part of the household remained at Lambeth. But to her vivid sense, to her delight of using all things to the utmost, this constituted a very informal way of life, for when she was running a house, everything must be, in its own scale, spick-and-span and complete. You might, for instance, dine on bread and cheese and a glass of beer, but the cheese must be the best cheese, the bread of the crispest, and the beer must be brimmed with froth. Short of completeness and perfection, whatever your scale was, you were roughing it, you were picnicking. She did not at all dislike picnicking, but It Was picnicking, and why not say so? For herself, with her passion for people (like Dr. Johnson she thought that one green field was like another green field, and would prefer a walk down Fleet Street) she would sooner have stopped in London, but my father needed this break in the six months of his busy London life. But to his volcanic energy and vitality, such a holiday was of the nature of a compulsion and a medicine rather than an enjoyment. In the long run he was refreshed by it, but the getting out of the shafts was always trying to him, and usually resulted in a fit of depression, such as I have described before. When he was very hard worked, he never suffered from this; it was when he was obliged to rest that these irritable glooms descended on him, and I particularly connect them, during these years, with the Easter holiday. All the time, as he once told me when talking of them, he would be struggling and agonizing to get his head out of those deep waters, but was unable to until the nervous reaction had spent itself, and the pendulum swung back again. By now we children had begun to understand that, and though this mood of his was a damper on mirth and generally an awful bore, we no longer feared him when he was like that but “carried on,” very sorry for him, and sincerely hoping he would be better next day. The person who felt it most was undoubtedly my mother: he was miserable and she knew it, and knew the pathos of his futile strivings to get rid of it, and her picnic was a melancholy and anxious one till that cloud lifted. Often, however, she and my father went to Florence for Easter, where they stayed with Lady Crawford at the Villa Palmieri, and of all the holiday sojournings it was that which he enjoyed most keenly. He was absolutely indefatigable where churches or sacred art were concerned, because of the cause which had inspired painter and architect. To him the achievement for which the architect builded, the sculptor chiselled, the musicians composed, and the artist painted, must be the palpable and direct service of God, and just as he would gaze in genuine rapture at a second-rate Madonna, whereas a portrait or even a Primavera would leave him cold, so, without any knowledge or appreciation of music he would listen to Handel’s Messiah, while a Wagner opera, or a symphony by Beethoven, had he ever listened or heard such, would have been meaningless to him. Of ecclesiastical architecture, again, its periods or its characteristics, he had a profound knowledge, but whether a house was Elizabethan or Georgian was a matter of much smaller interest to him. He did not truly care, to put it broadly, who built a column and when and how, or painted a picture and when and how, so long as those monuments of art were only directed towards human and æsthetic enjoyment. The natural works of God, the woods at Addington, the mountain ranges of Switzerland, he admiringly loved as being in themselves direct divine expressions, but if the work of man insinuated itself, he liked it in proportion as it was religious in its aims.

One exception he made, and that was in favour of Greek and Roman antiquities and the language of the classics, and I am sure he enjoyed making a translation of some English poem into Virgilian hexameters or Sophoclean iambics fully as much as he enjoyed the original version. Latin and Greek, especially Greek, were to him only a little below the Pentecostal tongues: of all human achievements they were the noblest flowers. To him a classical education was the only education: he rated a boy’s abilities largely by his power to translate and to imitate classical lore, and to wander himself in these fields was his chiefest intellectual recreation. He loved to unpack, so to speak, some Greek word compounded with prepositions, and insist on the value of each, overloading the dissected members of it with meanings that never conceivably entered into the mind of its author, and his own style in weighed and deliberate composition was founded on the model of these interpretations; the sentences were overloaded with meanings beyond what the language could bear; he packed his phrases till they creaked. But highest of all in the beloved language, with a great gulf fixed below it and above the masterpieces of classical literature, came the New Testament, which he studied and interpreted to us as under a microscope. That eager reverence was like a lover’s adoration: his interpretations might be fanciful, and such as he would never have made in any other commentings, but here his search for hidden meanings in simple phrases had just that quality of tender and exquisite scrutiny. The subject of this study was his life, and the smallest of its details must be searched out, and squeezed to yield a drop more of sacred essence.... On any other topic he would have criticized the Hellenistic Greek, as falling far below classical standards, but, as it was, he accepted it as verbally inspired, and no enquiry was too minute. Rather curiously, collations of differing texts did not engage him, nor did he touch on Higher Criticism. The text of his own Greek Testament was all that concerned him, there was the whole matter, and on to it he turned the full light of his intellect and his enthusiasm, without criticism but minutely and lovingly poring over it, as it actually and traditionally was.

From Monday morning until Saturday night these weeks at Addington, especially at Christmas, were to us a whirl of delightful activities from the moment that chapel service and Bible lesson were over in the morning, till evening service at ten o’clock at night. But Sunday was a day set so much apart from the rest that it hardly seemed to belong to Addington at all. There was early communion in the chapel, unless it was celebrated after the eleven o’clock service in church; morning service in church was succeeded by lunch, lunch by a slow family walk during which my father read George Herbert to us; the walk was succeeded by a Bible reading with him, and then came tea. After tea was evening service in church, and after Sunday supper, he read the Pilgrim’s Progress aloud until we had compline in chapel. To fill up intervals we might read certain Sunday books, the more mature successors of Bishop Heber and The Rocky Island and Agathos. No shoal of relaxation emerged from the roaring devotional flood; if at meals the conversation became too secular, it was brought back into appropriate channels; there was even a set of special graces before and after meals to be used on Sunday, consisting of short versicles and responses quite bewildering to any guest staying in the house. No games of any sort or kind were played, not even those which like lawn-tennis or golf entailed no labour on the part of servants. However fair a snow covered Fir Mount, no toboggan that day made its perilous descent, and though the pond might be spread with delectable ice no skates profaned its satin on the Day of Rest. The Day of Rest in fact, owing chiefly to this prohibition on reasonable relaxation, became a day of pitiless fatigue. We hopped, like “ducks and drakes,” from one religious exercise to another, relentlessly propelled.

To my father, I make no doubt, with his intensely devotional mind, this strenuous Sunday was a time of refreshment. It is perfectly true that he often went to sleep in church, and if on very hot Sundays, the walk was abandoned, and we read aloud in turns from some saintly chronicle, under the big cedar on the lawn, not only he, but every member of the family, except the reader (we read in turn), went to sleep too. But he dozed off to the chronicle of St. Francis and came back to it again; nothing jarred. Thus ordered, Sunday was a perfect day for one of his temperament; no work was done on it, no week-day breeze ruffled its devotional stillness, but his appreciation of it postulated that all of us should share to the full in its spiritual benefits. He did not believe that for himself Sunday could be spent more profitably, and so we were all swept, regardless of its private effect on us, into the tide. What he did not allow for was that on other temperaments, that which so aptly fulfilled the desires of his own produced a totally different impression. That day, for us, was one of crushing boredom and unutterable fatigue. Certain humorous gleams occasionally relieved the darkness, as when the devil entered into me on one occasion when Lives of the Saints came to me by rotation, for reading aloud. There was the serene sunlight outside the shade of the cedar, positively gilding the tennis court, there was the croquet lawn starving for the crack of balls, and there too, underneath the cedar was my somnolent family, Hugh with swoony eyes, laden with sleep, Nellie and Maggie primly and decorously listening, their eyelids closed, like Miss Matty’s, because they listened better so, and my father, for whom and by whom this treat was arranged, with head thrown back and mouth nakedly open.... And then came Satan, or at least Puck.... I read four lines of the page to which we had penetrated, then read a few sentences out of the page that had already been read. Deftly and silently, but keeping a prudent finger in the proper place, I turned over a hundred pages, and droned a paragraph about a perfectly different saint. Swiftly turning back I read some few lines out of the introduction to the whole volume, and then, sending prudence to the winds, found the end of the chapter on which we were engaged. I gave them a little more about St. Catherine of Siena, a little more from the introduction, then in case anyone happened to be awake read the concluding sentences of the chapter about St. Francis and stopped.

The cessation of voice caused Nellie to awake, and with an astounding hypocrisy, subsequently brought home to her, she exclaimed:

“Oh, how interesting!”

Her voice aroused my father. There we all were sitting under the cedar, reading about St. Francis. Hugh had awoke, Maggie had awoke: it was a peaceful devotional Sunday afternoon.