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But there is more than I can see,
And what I see I leave unsaid,
Nor speak it, knowing Death has made
His darkness beautiful with thee.

HUGH

MEMOIRS OF A BROTHER

BY
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON

FIFTH IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
1916

From Copyrighted Photo by Sarony, Inc., New York
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
IN 1912. AGED 40
In the robes of a Papal Chamberlain.

PREFACE

This book was begun with no hope or intention of making a formal and finished biography, but only to place on record some of my brother's sayings and doings, to fix scenes and memories before they suffered from any dim obliteration of time, to catch, if I could, for my own comfort and delight, the tone and sense of that vivid and animated atmosphere which Hugh always created about him. His arrival upon any scene was never in the smallest degree uproarious, and still less was it in the least mild or serene; yet he came into a settled circle like a freshet of tumbling water into a still pool!

I knew all along that I could not attempt any account of what may be called his public life, which all happened since he became a Roman Catholic. He passed through many circles—in England, in Rome, in America—of which I knew nothing. I never heard him make a public speech, and I only once heard him preach since he ceased to be an Anglican. This was not because I thought he would convert me, nor because I shrank from hearing him preach a doctrine to which I did not adhere, nor for any sectarian reason. Indeed, I regret not having heard him preach and speak oftener; it would have interested me, and it would have been kinder and more brotherly; but one is apt not to do the things which one thinks one can always do, and the fact that I did not hear him was due to a mixture of shyness and laziness, which I now regret in vain.

But I think that his life as a Roman Catholic ought to be written fully and carefully, because there were many people who trusted and admired and loved him as a priest who would wish to have some record of his days. He left me, by a will, which we are carrying out, though it was not duly executed, all his letters, papers, and manuscripts, and we have arranged to have an official biography of him written, and have placed all his papers in the hands of a Catholic biographer, Father C. C. Martindale, S.J.

Since Hugh died I have read a good many notices of him, which have appeared mostly in Roman Catholic organs. These were, as a rule, written by people who had only known him as a Catholic, and gave an obviously incomplete view of his character and temperament. It could not well have been otherwise, but the result was that only one side of a very varied and full life was presented. He was depicted in a particular office and in a specific mood. This was certainly his most real and eager mood, and deserves to be emphasized. But he had other moods and other sides, and his life before he became a Catholic had a charm and vigour of its own.

Moreover, his family affection was very strong; when he became a Catholic, we all of us felt, including himself, that there might be a certain separation, not of affection, but of occupations and interests; and he himself took very great care to avoid this, with the happy result that we saw him, I truly believe, more often and more intimately than ever before. Indeed, my own close companionship with him really began when he came first as a Roman Catholic to Cambridge.

And so I have thought it well to draw in broad strokes and simple outlines a picture of his personality as we, his family, knew and loved it. It is only a study, so to speak, and is written very informally and directly. Formal biographies, as I know from experience, must emphasise a different aspect. They deal, as they are bound to do, with public work and official activities; and the personal atmosphere often vanishes in the process—that subtle essence of quality, the effect of a man's talk and habits and prejudices and predispositions, which comes out freely in private life, and is even suspended in his public ministrations. It would be impossible, I believe, to make a presentment of Hugh which could be either dull or conventional. But, on the other hand, his life as a priest, a writer, a teacher, a controversialist, was to a certain extent governed and conditioned by circumstances; and I can see, from many accounts of him, that the more intimate and unrestrained side of him can only be partially discerned by those who knew him merely in an official capacity.

That, then, is the history of this brief Memoir. It is just an attempt to show Hugh as he showed himself, freely and unaffectedly, to his own circle; and I am sure that this deserves to be told, for the one characteristic which emerges whenever I think of him is that of a beautiful charm, not without a touch of wilfulness and even petulance about it, which gave him a childlike freshness, a sparkling zest, that aerated and enlivened all that he did or said. It was a charm which made itself instantly felt, and yet it could be hardly imitated or adopted, because it was so entirely unconscious and unaffected. He enjoyed enacting his part, and he was as instinctively and whole-heartedly a priest as another man is a soldier or a lawyer. But his function did not wholly occupy and dominate his life; and, true priest though he was, the force and energy of his priesthood came at least in part from the fact that he was entirely and delightfully human, and I deeply desire that this should not be overlooked or forgotten.

A. C. B.

Tremans, Horsted Keynes,

December 26, 1914.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Then said Great-heart to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, Thou hast worthily behaved thyself. Let me see thy Sword. So he shewed it him. When he had taken it in his hand, and looked thereon a while, he said, Ha, it is a right Jerusalem Blade!"

The Pilgrim's Progress.

HUGH

I

HARE STREET

How loudly and boisterously the wind roared to-day across the low-hung, cloud-smeared sky, driving the broken rack before it, warm and wet out of the south! What a wintry landscape! leafless trees bending beneath the onset of the wind, bare and streaming hedges, pale close-reaped wheat-fields, brown ploughland, spare pastures stretching away to left and right, softly rising and falling to the horizon; nothing visible but distant belts of trees and coverts, with here and there the tower of a hidden church overtopping them, and a windmill or two; on the left, long lines of willows marking the course of a stream. The road soaked with rain, the grasses heavy with it, hardly a human being to be seen.

I came at last to a village straggling along each side of the road; to the right, a fantastic-looking white villa, with many bow-windows, and an orchard behind it. Then on the left, a great row of beeches on the edge of a pasture; and then, over the barns and ricks of a farm, rose the clustered chimneys of an old house; and soon we drew up at a big iron gate between tall red-brick gateposts; beyond it a paling, with a row of high lime trees bordering a garden lawn, and on beyond that the irregular village street.

From the gate a little flagged pathway leads up to the front of a long, low house, of mellow brick, with a solid cornice and parapet, over which the tiled roof is visible: a door in the centre, with two windows on each side and five windows above—just the sort of house that you find in a cathedral close. To the left of the iron gate are two other tall gateposts, with a road leading up to the side of the house, and a yard with a row of stables behind.

Let me describe the garden first. All along the front and south side of the house runs a flagged pathway, a low brick wall dividing it from the lawn, with plants in rough red pots on little pilasters at intervals. To the right, as we face the door, the lawn runs along the road, and stretches back into the garden. There are tall, lopped lime-trees all round the lawn, in the summer making a high screen of foliage, but now bare. If we take the flagged path round the house, turn the corner, and go towards the garden, the yew trees grow thick and close, forming an arched walk at the corner, half screening an old irregular building of woodwork and plaster, weather-boarded in places, with a tiled roof, connected with the house by a little covered cloister with wooden pillars. If we pass that by, pursuing the path among the yew trees, we come out on a pleasant orchard, with a few flower-beds, thickly encircled by shrubs, beyond which, towards the main road, lies a comfortable-looking old red-brick cottage, with a big barn and a long garden, which evidently belongs to the larger house, because a gate in the paling stands open. Then there is another little tiled building behind the shrubs, where you can hear an engine at work, for electric light and water-pumping, and beyond that again, but still connected with the main house, stands another house among trees, of rough-cast and tiles, with an open wooden gallery, in a garden of its own.

Photo by Bishop, Barkway
HARE STREET HOUSE
FROM THE FRONT 1914

In the orchard itself is a large grass-grown mound, with a rough wooden cross on the top; and down below that, in the orchard, is a newly-made grave, still covered, as I saw it to-day, with wreaths of leaves and moss, tied some of them with stained purple ribbons. The edge of the grave-mound is turfed, but the bare and trodden grass shows that many feet have crossed and recrossed the ground.

The orchard is divided on the left from a further and larger garden by a dense growth of old hazels; and passing through an alley you see that a broad path runs concealed among the hazels, a pleasant shady walk in summer heat. Then the larger garden stretches in front of you; it is a big place, with rows of vegetables, fruit-trees, and flower-borders, screened to the east by a row of elms and dense shrubberies of laurel. Along the north runs a high red-brick wall, with a big old-fashioned vine-house in the centre, of careful design. In the corner nearest the house is a large rose-garden, with a brick pedestal in the centre, behind which rises the back of the stable, also of old red brick.

Photo by Bishop, Barkway
HARE STREET HOUSE
FROM THE GARDEN 1914
The timbered building on the left is the Chapel; in the foreground is the unfinished rose-garden.

But now there is a surprise; the back of the house is much older than the front. You see that it is a venerable Tudor building, with pretty panels of plaster embossed with a rough pattern. The moulded brick chimney-stacks are Tudor too, while the high gables cluster and lean together with a picturesque outline. The back of the house forms a little court, with the cloister of which I spoke before running round two sides of it. Another great yew tree stands there: while a doorway going into the timber and plaster building which I mentioned before has a rough device on it of a papal tiara and keys, carved in low relief and silvered.

A friendly black collie comes out of a kennel and desires a little attention. He licks my hand and looks at me with melting brown eyes, but has an air of expecting to see someone else as well. A black cat comes out of a door, runs beside us, and when picked up, clasps my shoulder contentedly and purrs in my ear.

The house seen from the back looks exactly what it is, a little old family mansion of a line of small squires, who farmed their own land, and lived on their own produce, though the barns and rick-yard belong to the house no longer. The red-brick front is just an addition made for the sake of stateliness at some time of prosperity. It is a charming self-contained little place, with a forgotten family tradition of its own, a place which could twine itself about the heart, and be loved and remembered by children brought up there, when far away. There is no sign of wealth about it, but every sign of ease and comfort and simple dignity.

Now we will go back to the front door and go through the house itself. The door opens into a tiny hall lighted by the glass panes of the door, and bright with pictures—oil paintings and engravings. The furniture old and sturdy, and a few curiosities about—carvings, weapons, horns of beasts. To the left a door opens into a pleasant dining-room, with two windows looking out in front, dark as dining-rooms may well be. It is hung with panels of green cloth, it has a big open Tudor fireplace, with a big oak settle, some china on an old dresser, a solid table and chairs, and a hatch in the corner through which dishes can be handed.

Opposite, on the other side of the hall, a door opens into a long low library, with books all round in white shelves. There is a big grand piano here, a very solid narrow oak table with a chest below, a bureau, and some comfortable chintz-covered chairs with a deep sofa. A perfect room to read or to hear music in, with its two windows to the front, and a long window opening down to the ground at the south end. All the books here are catalogued, and each has its place. If you go out into the hall again and pass through, a staircase goes up into the house, the walls of it panelled, and hung with engravings; some of the panels are carved with holy emblems. At the foot of the stairs a door on the right takes you into a small sitting-room, with a huge stone fireplace; a big window looks south, past the dark yew trees, on to the lawn. There are little devices in the quarries of the window, and a deep window-seat. The room is hung with a curious tapestry, brightly coloured mediæval figures standing out from a dark background. There is not room for much furniture here; a square oak stand for books, a chair or two by the fire. Parallel to the wall, with a chair behind it filling up much of the space, is a long, solid old oak table, set out for writing. It is a perfect study for quiet work, warm in winter with its log fire, and cool in summer heat.

To the left of the staircase a door goes into a roughly panelled ante-room which leads out on to the cloister, and beyond that a large stone-flagged kitchen, with offices beyond.

If you go upstairs, you find a panelled corridor with bedrooms. The one over the study is small and dark, and said to be haunted. That over the library is a big pleasant room with a fine marble fireplace—a boudoir once, I should think. Over the hall is another dark panelled room with a four-post bed, the walls hung with a most singular and rather terrible tapestry, representing a dance of death.

Beyond that, over the dining-room, is a beautiful panelled room, with a Tudor fireplace, and a bed enclosed by blue curtains. This was Hugh's own room. Out of it opens a tiny dressing-room. Beyond that is another large low room over the kitchen, which has been half-study, half-bedroom, out of which opens a little stairway going to some little rooms beyond over the offices.

Above that again are some quaint white-washed attics with dormers and leaning walls; one or two of these are bedrooms. One, very large and long, runs along most of the front, and has a curious leaden channel in it a foot above the floor to take the rain-water off the leads of the roof. Out of another comes a sweet smell of stored apples, which revives the memory of childish visits to farm storerooms—and here stands a pretty and quaint old pipe-organ awaiting renovation.

We must retrace our steps to the building at the back to which the cloister leads. We enter a little sacristy and vestry, and beyond is a dark chapel, with a side-chapel opening out of it. It was originally an old brew-house, with a timbered roof. The sanctuary is now divided off by a high open screen, of old oak, reaching nearly to the roof. The whole place is full of statues, carved and painted, embroidered hangings, stained glass, pendent lamps, emblems; there is a gallery over the sacristy, with an organ, and a fine piece of old embroidery displayed on the gallery front.

This is the house in which for seven years my brother Hugh lived. Let me recall how he first came to see it. He was at Cambridge then, working as an assistant priest. He became aware that his work lay rather in the direction of speaking, preaching, and writing, and resolved to establish himself in some quiet country retreat. One summer I visited several houses in Hertfordshire with him, but they proved unsuitable. One of these possessed an extraordinary attraction for him. It was in a bleak remote village, and it was a fine old house which had fallen from its high estate. It stood on the road and was used as a grocer's shop. It was much dilapidated, and there was little ground about it, but inside there were old frescoes and pictures, strange plaster friezes and moulded ceilings, which had once been brightly coloured. But nothing would have made it a really attractive house, in spite of the curious beauty of its adornment.

One day I was returning alone from an excursion, and passed by what we call accident through Hare Street, the village which I have described. I caught a glimpse of the house through the iron gates, and saw that there was a board up saying it was for sale. A few days later I went there with Hugh. It was all extremely desolate, but we found a friendly caretaker who led us round. The shrubberies had grown into dense plantations, the orchard was a tangled waste of grass, the garden was covered with weeds. I remember Hugh's exclamation of regret that we had visited the place. "It is exactly what I want," he said, "but it is far too expensive. I wish I had never set eyes on it!" However, he found that it had long been unlet, and that no one would buy it. He might have had the pasture-land and the farm-buildings as well, and he afterwards regretted that he had not bought them, but his income from writing was still small. However, he offered what seems to me now an extraordinarily low sum for the house and garden; it was to his astonishment at once accepted. It was all going to ruin, and the owner was glad to get rid of it on any terms. He established himself there with great expedition, and set to work to renovate the place. At a later date he bought the adjacent cottage, and the paddock in which he built the other house, and he also purchased some outlying fields, one a charming spot on the road to Buntingford, with some fine old trees, where he had an idea of building a church.

Everything in the little domain took shape under his skilful hand and ingenious brain. He made most of the tapestries in the house with his own fingers, working with his friend Mr. Gabriel Pippet the artist. He carved much of the panelling—he was extraordinarily clever with his hands. He painted many of the pictures which hang on the walls, he catalogued the library; he worked day after day in the garden, weeding, rowing, and planting. In all this he had the advantage of the skill, capacity, and invention of his factotum and friend, Mr. Joseph Reeman, who could turn his hand to anything and everything with equal energy and taste; and so the whole place grew and expanded in his hands, until there is hardly a detail, indoors or out-of-doors, which does not show some trace of his fancy and his touch.

There were some strange old traditions about the house; it was said to be haunted, and more than one of his guests had inexplicable experiences there. It was also said that there was a hidden treasure concealed in or about it. That treasure Hugh certainly discovered, in the delight which he took in restoring, adorning, and laying it all out. It was a source of constant joy to him in his life. And there, in the midst of it all, his body lies.

II

CHILDHOOD

I very well remember the sudden appearance of Hugh in the nursery world, and being conducted into a secluded dressing-room, adjacent to the nursery, where the tiny creature lay, lost in contented dreams, in a big, white-draped, white-hooded cradle. It was just a rather pleasing and exciting event to us children, not particularly wonderful or remarkable. It was at Wellington College that he was born, in the Master's Lodge, in a sunny bedroom, in the south-east corner of the house; one of its windows looking to the south front of the college and the chapel with its slender spire; the other window looking over the garden and a waste of heather beyond, to the fir-crowned hill of Ambarrow. My father had been Headmaster for twelve years and was nearing the end of his time there; and I was myself nine years old, and shortly to go to a private school, where my elder brother Martin already was. My two sisters, Nelly and Maggie, were respectively eight and six, and my brother, Fred, was four—six in all.

And by a freak of memory I recollect, too, that at breakfast on the following morning my father—half-shyly, half-proudly, I thought—announced the fact of Hugh's birth to the boys whom he had asked in, as his custom was, to breakfast, and how they offered embarrassed congratulations, not being sure, I suppose, exactly what the right phrase was.

Then came the christening, which took place at Sandhurst Church, a mile or two away, to which we walked by the pine-clad hill of Edgebarrow and the heathery moorland known as Cock-a-Dobbie. Mr. Parsons was the clergyman—a little handsome old man, like an abbé, with a clear-cut face and thick white hair. I am afraid that the ceremony had no religious significance for me at that time, but I was deeply interested, thought it rather cruel, and was shocked at Hugh's indecorous outcry. He was called Robert, an old family name, and Hugh, in honour of St. Hugh of Lincoln, where my father was a Prebendary, and because he was born on the day before St. Hugh's Feast. And then I really remember nothing more of him for a time, except for a scene in the nursery on some wet afternoon when the baby—Robin as he was at first called—insisted on being included in some game of tents made by pinning shawls over the tops of chairs, he being then, as always, perfectly clear what his wishes were, and equally clear that they were worth attending to and carrying out.

Photo by Hills & Saunders
THE MASTER'S LODGE, WELLINGTON COLLEGE, 1868
The room to the left of the porch is the study. In the room above it Hugh was born.

Then I vividly recall how in 1875, when we were all returning en famille from a long summer holiday spent at Torquay in a pleasant house lent us in Meadfoot Bay, we all travelled together in a third-class carriage; how it fell to my lot to have the amusing of Hugh, and how difficult he was to amuse, because he wished to look out of the window the whole time, and to make remarks on everything. But at Lincoln I hardly remember anything of him at all, because I was at school with my elder brother, and only came back for the holidays; and we two had moreover a little sanctum of our own, a small sitting-room named Bec by my father, who had a taste for pleasant traditions, after Anthony Bec, the warlike Bishop of Durham, who had once been Chancellor of Lincoln. Here we arranged our collections and attended to our own concerns, hardly having anything to do with the nursery life, except to go to tea there and to play games in the evening. The one thing I do remember is that Hugh would under no circumstances and for no considerations ever consent to go into a room in the dark by himself, being extremely imaginative and nervous; and that on one occasion when he was asked what he expected to befall him, he said with a shudder and a stammer: "To fall over a mangled corpse, squish! into a pool of gore!"

When he was between four and five years old, at Lincoln, one of his godfathers, Mr. Penny, an old friend and colleague of my father's at Wellington College, came to stay at the Chancery, and brought Hugh a Bible. My mother was sitting with Mr. Penny in the drawing-room after luncheon, when Hugh, in a little black velvet suit, his flaxen hair brushed till it gleamed with radiance, his face the picture of innocence, bearing the Bible, a very image of early piety, entered the room, and going up to his godfather, said with his little stammer: "Tha-a-ank you, Godpapa, for this beautiful Bible! will you read me some of it?"

Mr. Penny beamed with delight, and took the Bible. My mother rose to leave the room, feeling almost unworthy of being present at so sacred an interview, but as she reached the door, she heard Mr. Penny say: "And what shall I read about?" "The De-e-evil!" said Hugh without the least hesitation. My mother closed the door and came back.

There was one member of our family circle for whom Hugh did undoubtedly cherish a very deep and tender affection from the time when his affections first awoke—this was for the beloved Beth, the old family nurse. Beth became nurse-maid to my grandmother, Mrs. Sidgwick, as a young girl; and the first of her nurslings, whom she tended through an attack of smallpox, catching the complaint herself, was my uncle, William Sidgwick, still alive as a vigorous octogenarian. Henry Sidgwick, Arthur Sidgwick, and my mother were all under Beth's care. Then she came on with my mother to Wellington College and nursed us all with the simplest and sweetest goodness and devotion. For Hugh, as the last of her "children," she had the tenderest love, and lavished her care, and indeed her money, on him. When we were all dispersed for a time after my father's death, Beth went to her Yorkshire relations, and pined away in separation from her dear ones. Hugh returned alone and earlier than the rest, and Beth could bear it no longer, but came up from Yorkshire just to get a glimpse of Hugh at a station in London as he passed through, had a few words with him and a kiss, and gave him some little presents which she thought he might like, returning to Yorkshire tired out but comforted. I have always thought that little journey one of the most touching and beautiful acts of love and service I have ever heard of. She was nearly eighty at the time.

Photo by R. Slingsby, Lincoln
ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND BETH
AT THE CHANCERY, LINCOLN
IN 1876. AGED 5

In early days she watched over Hugh, did anything and everything for him; when he got older she used to delight to wait on him, to pack and unpack for him, to call him in the mornings, and secretly to purchase clothes and toilet articles to replace anything worn out or lost. In later days the thought that he was coming home used to make her radiant for days before. She used to come tapping at my door before dinner, and sit down for a little talk. "I know what you are thinking about, Beth!" "What is it, dear?" "Why, about Hugh, of course! You don't care for anyone else when he is coming." "No, don't say that, dear—but I am pleased to think that Master Hugh is coming home for a bit—I hope he won't be very tired!" And she used to smooth down her apron with her toil-worn hands and beam to herself at the prospect. He always went and sat with her for a little in the evenings, in her room full of all the old nursery treasures, and imitated her smilingly. "Nay, now, child! I've spoken, and that is enough!" he used to say, while she laughed for delight. She used to say farewell to him with tears, and wave her handkerchief at the window till the carriage was out of sight. Even in her last long illness, as she faded out of life, at over ninety years of age, she was made perfectly happy by the thought that he was in the house, and only sorry that she could not look after his things.

Beth had had but little education; she could read a little in a well-known book, but writing was always a slow and difficult business; but she used slowly to compile a little letter from time to time to Hugh, and I find the following put away among the papers of his Eton days and schoolboy correspondence:

Addington Park,

[? Nov. 1887] Tuesday.

Dearest,—One line to tell you I am sending your Box to-morrow Wednesday. I hope you will get it before tea-time. I know you will like something for tea, you can keep your cake for your Birthday. I shall think about you on Friday. Everybody has gone away, so I had no one to write for me. I thought you would not mind me writing to you.—Dearest love from your dear

Beth.

The dear Beth lived wholly in love and service; she loved just as she worked, endlessly and ungrudgingly; wherever Beth is, she will find service to render and children to love; and I cannot think that she has not found the way to her darling, and he to her.

III

TRURO

We all went off again to Truro in 1877, when my father was made Bishop. The tradition was that as the train, leaving Lincoln, drew up after five minutes at the first small station on the line, perhaps Navenby, a little voice in the corner said: "Is this Truro?" A journey by train was for many years a great difficulty for Hugh, as it always made him ill, owing to the motion of the carriage.

At Truro he becomes a much more definite figure in my recollections. He was a delicately made, light-haired, blue-eyed child, looking rather angelic in a velvet suit, and with small, neat feet, of which he was supposed to be unduly aware. He had at that time all sorts of odd tricks, winkings and twitchings; and one very aggravating habit, in walking, of putting his feet together suddenly, stopping and looking down at them, while he muttered to himself the mystic formula, "Knuck, Nunks." But one thing about him was very distinct indeed, that he was entirely impervious to the public opinion of the nursery, and could neither be ridiculed nor cajoled out of continuing to do anything he chose to do. He did not care the least what was said, nor had he any morbid fears, as I certainly had as a child, of being disliked or mocked at. He went his own way, knew what he wanted to do, and did it.

My recollections of him are mainly of his extreme love of argument and the adroitness with which he conducted it. He did not intend to be put upon as the youngest, and it was supposed that if he was ever told to do anything, he always replied: "Why shouldn't Fred?" He invented an ingenious device which he once, and once only, practised with success, of goading my brother Fred by petty shafts of domestic insult into pursuing him, bent on vengeance. Hugh had prepared some small pieces of folded paper with a view to this contingency, and as Fred gave chase, Hugh flung two of his papers on the ground, being sure that Fred would stop to examine them. The ruse was quite successful, and while Fred was opening the papers, Hugh sought sanctuary in the nursery. Sometimes my sisters were deputed to do a lesson with him. My elder sister Nelly had a motherly instinct, and enjoyed a small responsibility. She would explain a rule of arithmetic to Hugh. He would assume an expression of despair: "I don't understand a word of it—you go so quick." Then it would be explained again: "Now do you understand?" "Of course I understand that." "Very well, do a sum." The sum would begin: "Oh, don't push me—don't come so near—I don't like having my face blown on." Presently my sister with angelic patience would show him a mistake. "Oh, don't interfere—you make it all mixed up in my head." Then he would be let alone for a little. Then he would put the slate down with an expression of despair and resignation; if my sister took no notice he would say: "I thought Mamma told you to help me in my sums? How can I understand without having it explained to me?" It was impossible to get the last word; indeed he used to give my sister Maggie, when she taught him, what he called "Temper-tickets," at the end of the lesson; and on one occasion, when he was to repeat a Sunday collect to her, he was at last reported to my mother, as being wholly intractable. This was deeply resented; and after my sister had gone to bed, a small piece of paper was pushed in beneath her door, on which was written: "The most unhappiest Sunday I ever spent in my life. Whose fault?"

Again, when Maggie had found him extremely cross and tiresome one morning in the lessons she was taking, she discovered, when Hugh at last escaped, a piece of paper on the schoolroom table, on which he had written

"Passionate Magey
Toodle Ha! Ha!
The old gose."

There was another story of how he was asked to write out a list of the things he wanted, with a view to a birthday that was coming. The list ended:

"A little compenshion goat, and
A tiny-winy train, and
A nice little pen."

The diminutives were evidently intended to give the requirements a modest air. As for "compenshion," he had asked what some nursery animal was made of, a fracture having displayed a sort of tough fibrous plaster. He was told that it was made of "a composition."

We used to play many rhyming games at that time; and Hugh at the age of eight wrote a poem about a swarm of gnats dancing in the sun, which ended:

"And when they see their comrades laid
In thousands round the garden glade,
They know they were not really made
To live for evermore."

In one of these games, each player wrote a question which was to be answered by some other player in a poem; Hugh, who had been talked to about the necessity of overcoming some besetting sin in Lent, wrote with perfect good faith as his question, "What is your sin for Lent?"

As a child, and always throughout his life, he was absolutely free from any touch of priggishness or precocious piety. He complained once to my sister that when he was taken out walks by his elders, he heard about nothing but "poetry and civilisation." In a friendly little memoir of him, which I have been sent, I find the following passage: "In his early childhood, when reason was just beginning to ponder over the meaning of things, he was so won to enthusiastic admiration of the heroes and heroines of the Catholic Church that he decided he would probe for himself the Catholic claims, and the child would say to the father, 'Father, if there be such a sacrament as Penance, can I go?' And the good Archbishop, being evasive in his answers, the young boy found himself emerging more and more in a woeful Nemesis of faith." It would be literally impossible, I think, to construct a story less characteristic both of Hugh's own attitude of mind as well as of the atmosphere of our family and household life than this!

He was always very sensitive to pain and discomfort. On one occasion, when his hair was going to be cut, he said to my mother: "Mayn't I have chloroform for it?"

And my mother has described to me a journey which she once took with him abroad when he was a small boy. He was very ill on the crossing, and they had only just time to catch the train. She had some luncheon with her, but he said that the very mention of food made him sick. She suggested that she should sit at the far end of the carriage and eat her own lunch, while he shut his eyes; but he said that the mere sound of crumpled paper made him ill, and then that the very idea that there was food in the carriage upset him; so that my mother had to get out on the first stop and bolt her food on the platform.

One feat of Hugh's I well remember. Sir James McGarel Hogg, afterwards Lord Magheramorne, was at the time member for Truro. He was a stately and kindly old gentleman, pale-faced and white-bearded, with formal and dignified manners. He was lunching with us one day, and gave his arm to my mother to conduct her to the dining-room. Hugh, for some reason best known to himself, selected that day to secrete himself in the dining-room beforehand, and burst out upon Sir James with a wild howl, intended to create consternation. Neither then nor ever was he embarrassed by inconvenient shyness.

The Bishop's house at Truro, Lis Escop, had been the rectory of the rich living of Kenwyn; it was bought for the see and added to. It was a charming house about a mile out of Truro above a sequestered valley, with a far-off view of the little town lying among hills, with the smoke going up, and the gleaming waters of the estuary enfolded in the uplands beyond. The house had some acres of pasture-land about it and some fine trees; with a big garden and shrubberies, an orchard and a wood. We were all very happy there, save for the shadow of my eldest brother's death as a Winchester boy in 1878. I was an Eton boy myself and thus was only there in the holidays; we lived a very quiet life, with few visitors; and my recollection of the time there is one of endless games and schemes and amusements. We had writing games and drawing games, and acted little plays.

We children had a mysterious secret society, with titles and offices and ceremonies: an old alcoved arbour in the garden, with a seat running round it, and rough panelling behind, was the chapter-house of the order. There were robes and initiations and a book of proceedings. Hugh held the undistinguished office of Servitor, and his duties were mainly those of a kind of acolyte. I think he somewhat enjoyed the meetings, though the difficulty was always to discover any purpose for which the society existed. There were subscriptions and salaries; and to his latest day it delighted him to talk of the society, and to point out that his salary had never equalled his subscription.

There were three or four young clergy, Arthur Mason, now Canon of Canterbury, G. H. Whitaker, since Canon of Hereford, John Reeve, late Rector of Lambeth, G. H. S. Walpole, now Bishop of Edinburgh, who had come down with my father, and they were much in the house. My father Himself was full of energy and hopefulness, and loved Cornwall with an almost romantic love. But in all of this Hugh was too young to take much part. Apart from school hours he was a quick, bright, clever child, wanting to take his part in everything. My brother Fred and I were away at school, or later at the University; and the home circle, except for the holidays, consisted of my father and mother, my two sisters, and Hugh. My father had been really prostrated with grief at the death of my eldest brother, who was a boy of quite extraordinary promise and maturity of mind. My father was of a deeply affectionate and at the same time anxious disposition; he loved family life, but he had an almost tremulous sense of his parental responsibility. I have never known anyone in my life whose personality was so strongly marked as my father's. He had a superhuman activity, and cared about everything to which he put his hand with an intensity and an enthusiasm that was almost overwhelming. At the same time he was extremely sensitive; and this affected him in a curious way. A careless word from one of us, some tiny instance of childish selfishness or lack of affection, might distress him out of all proportion. He would brood over such things, make himself unhappy, and at the same time feel it his duty to correct what he felt to be a dangerous tendency. He could not think lightly of a trifle or deal with it lightly; and he would appeal, I now think, to motives more exalted than the occasion justified. A little heedless utterance would be met by him not by a half-humourous word, but by a grave and solemn remonstrance. We feared his displeasure very much, but we could never be quite sure what would provoke it. If he was in a cheerful mood, he might pass over with a laugh or an ironical word what in a sad or anxious mood would evoke an indignant and weighty censure. I was much with him at this time, and was growing to understand him better; but even so, I could hardly say that I was at ease in his presence. I did not talk of the things that were in my mind, but of the things which I thought would please him; and when he was pleased, his delight was evident and richly rewarding.

But in these days he began to have a peculiar and touching affection for Hugh, and hoped that he would prove the beloved companion of his age. Hugh used to trot about with him, spudding up weeds from the lawn. He used, when at home, to take Hugh's Latin lessons, and threw himself into the congenial task of teaching with all his force and interest. Yet I have often heard Hugh say that these lessons were seldom free from a sense of strain. He never knew what he might not be expected to know or to respond to with eager interest. My father had a habit, in teaching, of over-emphasising minute details and nuances of words, insisting upon derivations and tenses, packing into language a mass of suggestions and associations which could never have entered into the mind of the writer. Language ought to be treated sympathetically, as the not over-precise expression of human emotion and wonder; but my father made it of a half-scientific, half-fanciful analysis. This might prove suggestive and enriching to more mature minds. But Hugh once said to me that he used to feel day after day like a small china mug being filled out of a waterfall. Moreover Hugh's mind was lively and imaginative, but fitful and impatient; and the process both daunted and wearied him.

I have lately been looking through a number of letters from my father to Hugh in his schooldays. Reading between the lines, and knowing the passionate affection in the background, these are beautiful and pathetic documents. But they are over-full of advice, suggestion, criticism, anxious inquiries about work and religion, thought and character. This was all a part of the strain and tension at which my father lived. He was so absorbed in his work, found life such a tremendous business, was so deeply in earnest, that he could not relax, could not often enjoy a perfectly idle, leisurely, amused mood. Hugh himself was the exact opposite. He could work, in later days, with fierce concentration and immense energy; but he also could enjoy, almost more than anyone I have ever seen, rambling, inconsequent, easy talk, consisting of stories, arguments, and ideas just as they came into his head; this had no counterpart in my father, who was always purposeful.

But it was a happy time at Truro for Hugh. Speaking generally, I should call him in those days a quick, inventive, active-minded child, entirely unsentimental; he was fond of trying his hand at various things, but he was impatient and volatile, would never take trouble, and as a consequence never did anything well. One would never have supposed, in those early days, that he was going to be so hard a worker, and still less such a worker as he afterwards became, who perfected his gifts by such continuous, prolonged, and constantly renewed labour. I recollect his giving a little conjuring entertainment as a boy, but he had practised none of his tricks, and the result was a fiasco, which had to be covered up by lavish and undeserved applause; a little later, too, at Addington, he gave an exhibition of marionettes, which illustrated historical scenes. The puppets were dressed by Beth, our old nurse, and my sisters, and Hugh was the showman behind the scenes. The little curtains were drawn up for a tableau which was supposed to represent an episode in the life of Thomas à Becket. Hugh's voice enunciated, "Scene, an a-arid waste!" Then came a silence, and then Hugh was heard to say to his assistant in a loud, agitated whisper, "Where is the Archbishop?" But the puppet had been mislaid, and he had to go on to the next tableau. The most remarkable thing about him was a real independence of character, with an entire disregard of other people's opinion. What he liked, what he felt, what he decided, was the important thing to him, and so long as he could get his way, I do not think that he troubled his head about what other people might think or wish; he did not want to earn good opinions, nor did he care for disapproval or approval; people in fact were to him at that time more or less favourable channels for him to follow his own designs, more or less stubborn obstacles to his attaining his wishes. He was not at all a sensitive or shrinking child. He was quite capable of holding his own, full of spirit and fearless, though quiet enough, and not in the least interfering, except when his rights were menaced.

IV

BOYHOOD

He went to school at Clevedon, in Somersetshire, in 1882, at Walton House, then presided over by Mr. Cornish. It was a well-managed place, and the teaching was good. I suppose that all boys of an independent mind dislike the first breaking-in to the ways of the world, and the exchanging of the freedom of home for the barrack-life of school, the absence of privacy, and the sense of being continually under the magnifying-glass which school gives. It was dreadful to Hugh to have to account for himself at all times, to justify his ways and tastes, his fancies and even his appearance, to boys and masters alike. Bullying is indeed practically extinct in well-managed schools; but small boys are inquisitive, observant, extremely conventional, almost like savages in their inventiveness of prohibitions and taboos, and perfectly merciless in criticism. The instinct for power is shown by small boys in the desire to make themselves felt, which is most easily accomplished by minute ridicule. Hugh made friends there, but he never really enjoyed the life of the place. The boys who get on well at school from the first are robust, normal boys, without any inconvenient originality, who enjoy games and the good-natured rough and tumble of school life. But Hugh was not a boy of that kind; he was small, not good at games, and had plenty of private fancies and ideas of his own. He was ill at ease, and he never liked the town of straggling modern houses on the low sea-front, with the hills and ports of Wales rising shadowy across the mud-stained tide.

He was quick and clever, and had been well taught; so that in 1885 he won a scholarship at Eton, and entered college there, to my great delight, in the September of that year. I had just returned to Eton as a master, and was living with Edward Lyttelton in a quaint, white-gabled house called Baldwin's Shore, which commanded a view of Windsor Castle, and overlooked the little, brick-parapeted, shallow pond known as Barnes' Pool, which, with the sluggish stream that feeds it, separates the college from the town, and is crossed by the main London road. It was a quaint little house, which had long ago been a boarding-house, and contained many low-coiled, odd-shaped rooms. Hugh was Edward Lyttelton's private pupil, so that he was often in and out of the place. But I did not see very much of him. He was a small, ingenuous-looking creature in those days, light-haired and blue-eyed; and when a little later he became a steerer of one of the boats, he looked very attractive in his Fourth of June dress, as a middy, with a dirk and white duck trousers, dangling an enormous bouquet from his neck. At Eton he did very little in the way of work, and his intellect must have been much in abeyance; because so poor was his performance, that it became a matter of surprise among his companions that he had ever won a scholarship at all.

Photo by Elliott & Fry
THE THREE BROTHERS, 1882
E. F. Benson at Marlborough. Aged 15.
A. C. Benson at Cambridge. Aged 21.
R. H. Benson at Mr. Cornish's School at Clevedon. Aged 11.

I have said that I did not know very much about Hugh at Eton; this was the result of the fact that several of the boys of his set were my private pupils. It was absolutely necessary that a master in that position should avoid any possibility of collusion with a younger brother, whose friends were that master's pupils. If it had been supposed that I questioned Hugh about my pupils and their private lives, or if he had been thought likely to tell me tales, we should both of us have been branded. But as he had no wish to confide, and indeed little enough to consult anyone about, and as I had no wish for sidelights, we did not talk about his school life at all. The set of boys in which he lived was a curious one; they were fairly clever, but they must have been, I gathered afterwards, quite extraordinarily critical and quarrelsome. There was one boy in particular, a caustic, spiteful, and extremely mischief-making creature, who turned the set into a series of cliques and parties. Hugh used to say afterwards that he had never known anyone in his life with such an eye for other people's weaknesses, or with such a talent for putting them in the most disagreeable light. Hugh once nearly got into serious trouble; a small boy in the set was remorselessly and disgracefully bullied; it came out, and Hugh was involved—I remember that Dr. Warre spoke to me about it with much concern—but a searching investigation revealed that Hugh had really had nothing to do with it, and the victim of the bullying spoke insistently in Hugh's favour.

Hugh describes how the facts became known in the holidays, and how my father in his extreme indignation at what he supposed to be proved, so paralysed Hugh that he had no opportunity of clearing himself. But anyone who had ever known Hugh would have felt that it was the last thing he would have done. He was tenacious enough of his own rights, and argumentative enough; but he never had the faintest touch of the savagery that amuses itself at the sight of another's sufferings. "I hate cruelty more than anything in the whole world," he wrote later; "the existence of it is the only thing which reconciles my conscience to the necessity of Hell."

Hugh speaks in his book, The Confession of a Convert, about the extremely negative character of his religious impressions at school. I think it is wholly accurate. Living as we did in an ecclesiastical household, and with a father who took singular delight in ceremonial and liturgical devotion, I think that religion did impress itself rather too much as a matter of solemn and dignified occupation than as a matter of feeling and conduct. It was not that my father ever forgot the latter; indeed, behind his love for symbolical worship lay a passionate and almost Puritan evangelicalism. But he did not speak easily and openly of spiritual experience. I was myself profoundly attracted as a boy by the æsthetic side of religion, and loved its solemnities with all my heart; but it was not till I made friends with Bishop Wilkinson at the age of seventeen that I had any idea of spiritual religion and the practice of friendship with God. Certainly Hugh missed it, in spite of very loving and earnest talks and deeply touching letters from my father on the subject. I suppose that there must come for most people a spiritual awakening; and until that happens, all talk of emotional religion and the love of God is a thing submissively accepted, and simply not understood or realised as an actual thing.

Hugh was not at Eton very long—not more than three or four years. He never became in any way a typical Etonian. If I am asked to say what that is, I should say that it is the imbibing instinctively of what is eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon—modesty entirely forbids that—but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the book of Job, when the patriarch says to the elders, "No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." It is a tacit belief that all has been done for one that the world can do, and that one's standing is so assured that it need never be even claimed or paraded.

Photo by Hills & Saunders
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
IN 1889. AGE 17
As Steerer of the St. George, at Eton.

Still less was Hugh a typical Colleger. College at Eton, where the seventy boys who get scholarships are boarded, is a school within a school. The Collegers wear gowns and surplices in public, they have their own customs and traditions and games. It is a small, close, clever society, and produces a tough kind of self-confidence, together with a devotion to a particular tradition which is almost like a religious initiation. Perhaps if the typical Etonian is conscious of a certain absolute rightness in the eyes of the world, the typical Colleger has a sense almost of absolute righteousness, which does not need even to be endorsed by the world. The danger of both is that the process is completed at perhaps too early a date, and that the product is too consciously a finished one, needing to be enlarged and modified by contact with the world.

But Hugh did not stay at Eton long enough for this process to complete itself. He decided that he wished to compete for the Indian Civil Service; and as it was clear that he could not do this successfully at Eton, my father most reluctantly allowed him to leave.

I find among the little scraps which survive from his schoolboy days, the following note. It was written on his last night at Eton. He says: "I write this on Thursday evening after ten. Peel keeping passage." "Peel" is Sidney Peel, the Speaker's son. The passages are patrolled by the Sixth Form from ten to half-past, to see that no boy leaves his room without permission. Then follows:

My feelings on leaving are—
Excitement.
Foreboding of Wren's and fellows there.
Sorrow at leaving Eton.
Pride as being an old Etonian.
Certain pleasure in leaving for many trivial matters.
Feeling of importance.
Frightful longing for India.
Homesickness.
DEAR ME!

It was characteristic of Hugh that he should wish both to analyse his feelings on such an occasion, and to give expression to them.

V

AT WREN'S

Hugh accordingly went to Mr. Wren's coaching establishment in London, living partly at Lambeth, when my family were in town, and partly as a boarder with a clergyman. It was a time of hard work; and I really retain very few recollections of him at all at this date. I was myself very busy at Eton, and spent the holidays to a great extent in travelling and paying visits; and I think that Christmas, when we used to write, rehearse, and act a family play, was probably the only time at which I saw him.

Hugh went abroad for a short time to learn French, with a party of Indian Civil Service candidates, and no doubt forgot to write home, for I find the following characteristic letter of my father's to him:

Lambeth Palace, S.E., 30th June 1889.

My dearest Hughie,—We have been rather mourning about not hearing one word from you. We supposed all would be right as you were a large party. But one word would be so easy to those who love you so, who have done all they could to enable you to follow your own line, against their own wishes and affection!

We hope at any rate you are writing to-day. And we have sent off "Pioneers and Founders," which we hope will both give you happy and interesting Sunday reading, and remind you of us.

Mr. Spiers writes that you are backward in French but getting on rather fast.

I want you now at the beginning of this cramming year to make two or three Resolutions, besides those which you know and have thought of often and practised:

1. To determine never to do any secular examination work on Sundays—to keep all reading that day as fitting "The Lord's Day" and the "Day of Rest."

I had a poor friend who would have done very well at Oxford, but he would make no difference between Sunday and other days. He worked on just the same and in the Examination itself, just as the goal was reached, he broke down and took no degree. The doctors said it was all owing to the continuous nervous strain. If he had taken the Sundays it would just have saved him.

Lord Selborne was once telling me of his tremendous work at one time, and he said, "I never could have done it, but that I took my Sundays. I never would work on them."

2. We have arranged for you to go over to the Holy Communion one day at Dinan. Perhaps some nice fellow will go with you—Mr. Spiers will anyhow. Tell us which Sunday, so that we may all be with you εν πνευματι.

Last night we dined at the Speaker's to meet, the Prince and Princess of Wales. It was very interesting. The Terrace of the House of Commons was lighted with electric light. A steamer went by and cheered!

The Shah will fill London with grand spectacles, and I suppose his coming will have much effect on politics—perhaps on India too.

All are well.—Ever your most loving father,

Edw. Cantuar.

I am going to preach at the Abbey to-night.

Hugh failed, however, to secure a place in the Indian Civil Service, and it was decided that he should go up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and read for classical honours.

Up to this date I do not think that anything very conscious or definite had been going on in Hugh's mind or heart. He always said himself that it astonished him on looking back to think how purely negative and undeveloped his early life had been, and how it had been lived on entirely superficial lines, without plans or ambitions, simply taking things as they came.

I think it was quite true that it was so; his emotions were dormant, his powers were dormant. I do not think he had either great affections or great friendships. He liked companionship and amusement, he avoided what bored him; he had no inclinations to evil, but neither had he any marked inclinations to what was good. Neither had any of his many and varied gifts and accomplishments showed themselves. I used to think latterly that he was one of the most gifted people I had ever seen in all artistic ways. Whatever he took up he seemed able to do, without any apprenticeship or drudgery. Music, painting, drawing, carving, designing—he took them all up in turn; and I used to feel that if he had devoted himself to any one of them he could have reached a high excellence. Even his literary gifts, so various and admirable, showed but few signs of their presence in the early days; he was not in the least precocious. I think that on the whole it was beneficial to him that his energies all lay fallow. My father, stern as his conception of duty was, had a horror of applying any intellectual pressure to us. I myself must confess that I was distinctly idle and dilettante both as a boy at Eton and as a Cambridge undergraduate. But much as my father appreciated and applauded any little successes, I was often surprised that I was never taken to task for my poor performances in work and scholarship. The truth was that my eldest brother's death at Winchester was supposed partly to have been due to his extraordinary intellectual and mental development, and I am sure that my father was afraid of over-stimulating our mental energies. I feel certain that what was going on in Hugh's case all the time was a keen exercise of observation. I have no doubt that his brain was receiving and gaining impressions of every kind, and that his mind was not really inactive—it was only unconsciously amassing material. He had a very quick and delighted perception of human temperament, of the looks, gestures, words, mannerisms, habits, and oddities of human beings. If Hugh had been born in a household professionally artistic, and had been trained in art of any kind, I think he would very likely have become an accomplished artist or musician, and probably have shown great precocity. But he was never an artist in the sense that art was a torment to him, or that he made any sacrifice of other aims to it. It was always just a part of existence to him, and of the nature of an amusement, though in so far as it represented the need of self-expression in forms of beauty, it underlay and permeated the whole of his life.

The first sign of his artistic enthusiasm awakening was during his time in London, when he conceived an intense admiration for the music and ceremony of St. Paul's. Sir George Martin, on whom my father had conferred a musical degree, was very kind to him, and allowed Hugh to frequent the organ-loft. "To me," Hugh once wrote, "music is the great reservoir of emotion from which flow out streams of salvation." But this was not only a musical devotion. I believe that he now conceived, or rather perhaps developed, a sense of the symbolical poetry of religious rites and ceremonies which remained with him to the end. It is true to say that the force and quality of ritual, as a province of art, has been greatly neglected and overlooked. It is not for a moment to be regarded as a purely artistic thing; but it most undoubtedly has an attraction and a fascination as clear and as sharply defined as the attraction of music, poetry, painting or drama. All art is an attempt to express a sense of the overwhelming power of beauty. It is hard to say what beauty is, but it seems to be one of the inherent qualities of the Unknown, an essential part of the Divine mind. In England we are so stupid and so concrete that we are apt to think of a musician as one who arranges chords, and of a painter as one who copies natural effects. It is not really that at all. The artist is in reality struggling with an idea, which idea is a consciousness of an amazing and adorable quality in things, which affects him passionately and to which he must give expression. The form which his expression takes is conditioned by the sharpness of his perception in some direction or other. To the musician, notes and intervals and vibrations are just the fairy flights and dances of forms audible to the ear; to the painter, it is a question of shapes and colours perceptible to the eye. The dramatist sees the same beauty in the interplay of human emotion; while it may be maintained that holiness itself is a passionate perception of moral beauty, and that the saint is attracted by purity and compassion, and repelled by sin, disorder, and selfishness, in the same way as the artist is attracted and repelled by visible charm and ugliness.

Ritual has been as a rule so closely annexed to religion—though all spectacular delights and ceremonies have the same quality—that it has never been reckoned among artistic predilections. The aim of ritual is, I believe, a high poetry of which the essence is symbolism and mystery. The movement of forms solemnly vested, and with a background of architecture and music, produces an emotion quite distinct from other artistic emotions. It is a method, like all other arts, through which a human being arrives at a sense of mysterious beauty, and it evokes in mystical minds a passion to express themselves in just that way and no other, and to celebrate thus their sense of the unknown.

But there has always been a natural terror in the religious mind of laying too much stress on this, or of seeming to encourage too much an æsthetic emotion. If the first business of religion is to purify life, there will always be a suspicion of idolatry about ritual, a fear of substituting a vague desire for beauty for a practical devotion to right conduct.

Hugh wrote to me some years later what he felt about it all:

"... Liturgy, to my mind, is nothing more than a very fine and splendid art, conveying things, to people who possess the liturgical faculty, in an extraordinarily dramatic and vivid way. I further believe that this is an art which has been gradually brought nearer and nearer perfection by being tested and developed through nineteen centuries, by every kind of mind and nationality. The way in which it does, indisputably, appeal to such very different kinds of people, and unite them, does, quite apart from other things, give it a place with music and painting.

"I do frankly acknowledge Liturgy to be no more than an art—and therefore not in the least generally necessary to salvation; and I do not in the least 'condemn' people who do not appreciate it. It is only a way of presenting facts—and, in the case of Holy Week Ceremonies, these facts are such as those of the Passion of Christ, the sins of men, the Resurrection and the Sovereignty of Christ."

I have laid stress upon all this, because I believe that from this time the poetry and beauty of ritual had a deep and increasing fascination for Hugh. But it is a thing about which it is so easy for the enemy to blaspheme, to ridicule ceremonial in religion as a mere species of entertainment, that religious minds have always been inclined to disclaim the strength of its influence. Hugh certainly inherited this particular perception from my father. I should doubt if anyone ever knew so much about religious ceremonial as he did, or perceived so clearly the force of it. "I am almost ashamed to seem to know so much about these things," I have often heard him say; and again, "I don't ever seem able to forget the smallest detail of ritual." My father had a very strong artistic nature—poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture, scenery, were all full of fascination to him—for music alone of the arts he had but little taste; and I think that it ought to be realised that Hugh's nature was an artistic one through and through. He had the most lively and passionate sensibility to the appeal of art. He had, too, behind the outer sensitiveness, the inner toughness of the artist. It is often mistakenly thought that the artist is sensitive through and through. In my experience, this is not the case. The artist has to be protected against the overwhelming onset of emotions and perceptions by a strong interior fortress of emotional calm and serenity. It is certain that this was the case with Hugh. He was not in the least sentimental, he was not really very emotional. He was essentially solitary within; he attracted friendship and love more than he gave them. I do not think that he ever suffered very acutely through his personal emotions. His energy of output was so tremendous, his power of concentration so great, that he found a security here from the more ravaging emotions of the heart. Not often did he give his heart away; he admired greatly, he sympathised freely; but I never saw him desolated or stricken by any bereavement or loss. I used to think sometimes that he never needed anyone. I never saw him exhibit the smallest trace of jealousy, nor did he ever desire to possess anyone's entire affection. He recognised any sign of affection generously and eagerly; but he never claimed to keep it exclusively as his own.

VI

CAMBRIDGE

Hugh went then to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890. He often talked to me in later days about his time there as an undergraduate. He found a number of his Eton contemporaries up there, and he had a very sociable time. A friend and contemporary of his at Trinity describes him as small, light, and boyish-looking. "He walked fast, and always appeared to be busy." He never cared much about athletics, but he was an excellent steerer. He steered the third Trinity boat all the time he was at Cambridge, and was a member of the Leander club. He was always perfectly cool, and not in the smallest degree nervous. He was, moreover, an excellent walker and mountain-climber. He once walked up to London from Cambridge; I have climbed mountains with him, and he was very agile, quick, surefooted, and entirely intrepid. Let me interpolate a little anecdote of an accident at Pontresina, which might have been serious. Hugh and I, with a practised Alpine climber, Dr. Leith, left Pontresina early one morning to climb a rock-peak. We were in a light carriage with a guide and porter. The young horse which drew us, as we were rattling down the high embanked road leading to Samaden, took a sharp turn to the right, where a road branched off. He was sharply checked by the guide, with the result that the carriage collided with a stone post, and we were all flung out down the embankment, a living cataract of men, ice-axes, haversacks, and wraps. The horse fortunately stopped. We picked ourselves ruefully up and resumed our places. Not until we reached our destination did we become aware that the whole incident had passed in silence. Not one word of advice or recrimination or even of surprise had passed anyone's lips!

But Hugh's climbing was put a stop to by a sharp attack of heart-failure on the Piz Palù. He was with my brother Fred, and after a long climb through heavy snow, he collapsed and was with difficulty carried down. He believed himself to be on the point of death, and records in one of his books that the prospect aroused no emotion whatever in his mind either of fear or excitement, only of deep curiosity.

While he was an undergraduate, he and I had a sudden and overwhelming interest in family history and genealogy. We went up to Yorkshire for a few days one winter, stayed at Pateley Bridge, Ripon, Bolton Abbey, Ripley, and finally York. At Pateley Bridge we found the parish registers very ancient and complete, and by the aid of them, together with the printed register of Fountains Abbey, we traced a family tree back as far as to the fourteenth century, with ever-increasing evidence of the poverty and mean condition of our ancestral stock. We visited the houses and cradles of the race, and from comfortable granges and farmsteads we declined, as the record conducted us back, to hovels and huts of quite conspicuous humility and squalor. The thermometer fell lower and lower every day, in sympathy with our researches. I remember a night when we slept in a neglected assembly-room tacked on to a country inn, on hastily improvised and scantily covered beds, when the water froze in the ewers; and an attempt to walk over the moors one afternoon from Masham into Nidderdale, when the springs by the roadside froze into lumpy congealments, like guttering candles, and we were obliged to turn back; and how we beguiled a ten-mile walk to Ripon, the last train having gone, by telling an enormous improvised story, each taking an alternate chapter, and each leaving the knots to be untied by the next narrator. Hugh was very lively and ingenious in this, and proved the most delightful of companions, though we had to admit as we returned together that we had ruined the romance of our family history beyond repair.

Photo by Elliott & Fry
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
IN 1893. AGED 21
As an Undergraduate at Cambridge.

Hugh did very little work at Cambridge; he had given up classics, and was working at theology, with a view to taking Orders. He managed to secure a Third in the Tripos; he showed no intellectual promise whatever; he was a very lively and amusing companion and a keen debater; I think he wrote a little poetry; but he had no very pronounced tastes. I remember his pointing out to me the windows of an extremely unattractive set of ground-floor rooms in Whewell's Court as those which he had occupied till he migrated to the Bishop's Hostel, eventually moving to the Great Court. They look down Jesus Lane, and the long, sombre wall of Sidney Sussex Garden. A flagged passage runs down to the right of them, and the sitting-room is on the street. They were dark, stuffy, and extremely noisy. The windows were high up, and splashed with mud by the vehicles in the street, while it was necessary to keep them shut, because otherwise conversation was wholly inaudible. "What did you do there?" I said. "Heaven knows!" he answered. "As far as I can remember, I mostly sat up late at night and played cards!" He certainly spent a great deal of money. He had a good allowance, but he had so much exceeded it at the end of his first year, that a financial crisis followed, and my mother paid his debts for him. He had kept no accounts, and he had entertained profusely.

The following letter from my father to him refers to one of Hugh's attempts to economise. He caught a bad feverish cold at Cambridge as a result of sleeping in a damp room, and was carried off to be nursed by my uncle, Henry Sidgwick:

Addington Park, Croydon,

26th Jan. 1891.

Dearest Hughie,—I was rather disturbed to hear that you imagined that what I said in October about not needlessly indulging was held by you to forbid your having a fire in your bedroom on the ground floor in the depth of such a winter as we have had!

You ought to have a fire lighted at such a season at 8 o'clock so as to warm and dry the room, and all in it, nearly every evening—and whenever the room seems damp, have a fire just lighted to go out when it will. It's not wholesome to sleep in heated rooms, but they must be dry. A bed slept in every night keeps so, if the room is not damp; but the room must not be damp, and when it is unoccupied for two or three days it is sure to get so.

Be sure that there is a good fire in it all day, and all your bed things, mattress and all, kept well before it for at least a whole day before you go back from Uncle Henry's.

How was it your bed-maker had not your room well warmed and dried, mattress dry, etc., before you went up this time? She ought to have had, and should be spoken to about it—i.e. unless you told her not to! in which case it would be very like having no breakfast!

It has been a horrid interruption in the beginning of term—and you'll have difficulty with the loss of time. Besides which I have no doubt you have been very uncomfortable.

But I don't understand why you should have "nothing to write about" because you have been in bed. Surely you must have accumulated all sorts of reflective and imaginative stories there.

It is most kind of Aunt Nora and Uncle Henry—give my love and thanks to both.

I grieve to say that many many more fish are found dead since the thaw melted the banks of swept snow off the sides of the ice. It is most piteous; the poor things seem to have come to the edge where the water is shallowest—there is a shoal where we generally feed the swans.

I am happy to say the goldfish seem all alive and merry. The continual dropping of fresh water has no doubt saved them—they were never hermetically sealed in like the other poor things.

Yesterday I was at Ringwould, near Dover. The farmers had been up all night saving their cattle in the stalls from the sudden floods.

Here we have not had any, though the earth is washed very much from the hills in streaks.

We are—at least I am—dreadfully sorry to go to London—though the house is very dull without "the boys."

All right about the books.—Ever your loving father,

Edw. Cantuar.

Hugh was much taken up with experiments in hypnotism as an undergraduate, and found that he had a real power of inducing hypnotic sleep, and even of curing small ailments. He told my mother all about his experiments, and she wrote to him at once that he must either leave this off while he was at Cambridge, or that my father must be told. Hugh at once gave up his experiments, and escaped an unpleasant contretemps, as the authorities discovered what was going on, and actually, I believe, sent some of the offenders down.

Hugh says that he drifted into the idea of taking Orders as the line of least resistance, though when he began the study of theology he said that he had found the one subject he really cared for. But he had derived a very strong half-religious, half-artistic impression from reading John Inglesant just before he came up to Cambridge. He could long after repeat many passages by heart, and he says that a half-mystical, half-emotional devotion to the Person of Our Lord, which he derived from the book, seemed to him to focus and concentrate all his vague religious emotions. He attended the services at King's Chapel regularly, but he says that he had no real religious life, and only looked forward to being a country clergyman with a beautiful garden, an exquisite choir, and a sober bachelor existence.

It was on an evening walk at Addington with my mother that he told her of his intention to take Orders. They had gone together to evensong at a neighbouring church, Shirley, and as they came back in the dusk through the silent woods of the park, he said he believed he had received the call, and had answered, "Here am I, send me!" My mother had the words engraved on the inside of a ring, which Hugh wore for many years.

By far the closest and dearest of all the ties which bound Hugh to another was his love for my mother. Though she still lives to bless us, I may say this, that never did a mother give to her children a larger and a wiser love than she gave to us; she was our playmate and companion, but we always gave her a perfectly trustful and unquestioning obedience. Yet it was always a reasonable and critical obedience. She never exacted silent submission, but gave us her reasons readily. She never curtailed our independence, or oppressed us with a sense of over-anxiety. She never demanded confidence, but welcomed it with perfect, understanding.

The result, of this with Hugh was that he came to consult her about everything, about his plans, his schemes, his books, his beliefs. He read all his writings aloud to her, and deferred much to her frankly critical mind and her deeply human insight. At the time when he was tending towards Rome, she accompanied him every step of the way, though never disguising from him her own differences of opinion and belief. It was due to her that he suspended his decision, read books, consulted friends, gave the old tradition full weight; he never had the misery of feeling that she was overcome by a helpless distress, because she never attempted to influence any one of us away from any course we thought it right to pursue. She did not conceal her opinion, but wished Hugh to make up his own mind, believing that everyone must do that, and that the only chance of happiness lies there.

Photo by H. Walter Barnett, 12 Knightsbridge, S.W.
MRS. BENSON
MAY, 1910

There was no one in the world whom he so regarded and admired and loved; but yet it was not merely a tender and deferential sentiment. He laid his mind open before her, and it was safe to do that, because my mother never had any wish to prevail by sentiment or by claiming loyalty. He knew that she would be perfectly candid too, with love waiting behind all conflict of opinion. And thus their relation was the most perfect that could be imagined, because he knew that he could speak and act with entire freedom, while he recognised the breadth and strength of her mind, and the insight of her love. No one can really understand Hugh's life without a knowledge of what my mother was to him—an equal friend, a trusted adviser, a candid critic, and a tender mother as well. And even when he went his own way, as he did about health and work, though she foresaw only too clearly what the end might be, and indeed what it actually was, she always recognised that he had a right to live as he chose and to work as he desired. She was not in the least blind to his lesser faults of temperament, nor did she ever construct an artificial image of him. My family has, I have no doubt, an unusual freedom of mutual criticism. I do not think we have ever felt it to be disloyal to see each other in a clear light. But I am inclined to believe that the affection which subsists without the necessity of cherishing illusions, has a solidity about it which more purely sentimental loyalties do not always possess. And I have known few relations so perfect as those between Hugh and my mother, because they were absolutely tender and chivalrous, and at the same time wholly candid, natural, and open-eyed.

It was at this time that my eldest sister died quite suddenly of diphtheria. I have told something of her life elsewhere. She had considerable artistic gifts, in music, painting, and writing. She had written a novel, and left unpublished a beautiful little book of her own experiences among the poor, called Streets and Lanes of the City. It was privately printed, and is full of charming humour and delicate observation, together with a real insight into vital needs. I always believe that my sister would have done a great work if she had lived. She had strong practical powers and a very large heart. She had been drawn more and more into social work at Lambeth, and I think would have eventually given herself up to such work. She had a wonderful power of establishing a special personal relation with those whom she loved, and I remember realising after her death that each of her family felt that they were in a peculiar and individual relation to her of intimacy and confidence. She had sent Hugh from her deathbed a special message of love and hope; and this had affected him very much.

We were not allowed to go back at once to our work, Fred, Hugh, and myself, because of the possibility of infection; and we went off to Seaford together for a few days, where we read, walked, wrote letters, and talked. It was a strange time; but Hugh, I recollect, got suddenly weary of it, and with the same decision which always characterised him, said that he must go to London in order to be near St. Paul's. He went off at once and stayed with Arthur Mason. I was struck with this at the time; he did not think it necessary to offer any explanations or reasons. He simply said he could not stand it, quite frankly and ingenuously, and promptly disappeared.

VII

LLANDAFF

In 1892 Hugh went to read for Orders, with Dean Vaughan, who held the Deanery of Llandaff together with the Mastership of the Temple. The Dean had been a successful Headmaster of Harrow, and for a time Vicar of Doncaster. He was an Evangelical by training and temperament. My father had a high admiration for him as a great headmaster, a profound and accomplished scholar, and most of all as a man of deep and fervent piety. I remember Vaughan's visits to Lambeth. He had the air, I used to think, rather of an old-fashioned and highly-bred country clergyman than of a headmaster and a Church dignitary. With his rather long hair, brushed back, his large, pale face, with its meek and smiling air, and his thin, clear, and deliberate voice, he gave the impression of a much-disciplined, self-restrained, and chastened man. He had none of the brisk effectiveness or mundane radiance of a successful man of affairs. But this was a superficial view, because, if he became moved or interested, he revealed a critical incisiveness of speech and judgment, as well as a profound and delicate humour.

He had collected about himself an informal band of young men who read theology under his direction. He used to give a daily lecture, but there was no college or regular discipline. The men lived in lodgings, attended the cathedral service, arranged their own amusements and occupations. But Vaughan had a stimulating and magnetic effect over his pupils, many of whom have risen to high eminence in the Church.

They were constantly invited to meals at the deanery, where Mrs. Vaughan, a sister of Dean Stanley, and as brilliant, vivacious, and witty a talker as her brother, kept the circle entranced and delighted by her suggestive and humorous talk. My brother tells the story of how, in one of the Dean's long and serious illnesses, from which he eventually recovered, Mrs. Vaughan absented herself one day on a mysterious errand, and the Dean subsequently discovered, with intense amusement and pleasure, that she had gone to inspect a house in which she intended to spend her widowhood. The Dean told the whole story in her presence to some of the young men who were dining there, and sympathised with her on the suspension of her plans. I remember, too, that my brother described to me how, in the course of the same illness, Mrs. Vaughan, who was greatly interested in some question of the Higher Criticism, had gone to the Dean's room to read to him, and had suggested that they should consider and discuss some disputed passage of the Old Testament. The Dean gently but firmly declined. Mrs. Vaughan coming downstairs, Bible in hand, found a caller in the drawing-room who inquired after the Dean. "I have just come from him," said Mrs. Vaughan, "and it is naturally a melancholy thought, but he seems to have entirely lost his faith. He would not let me read the Bible with him; he practically said that he had no further interest in the Bible!"

Hugh was very happy at Llandaff. He says that he began to read John Inglesant again, and explored the surrounding country to see if he could find a suitable place to set up a small community house, on the lines of Nicholas Ferrar's Little Gidding. This idea was thenceforth much in his mind. At this time his day-dream was that it should be not an ascetic order, but rather devotional and mystical. It was, I expect, mainly an æsthetic idea at present. The setting, the ceremonial, the order of the whole was prominent, with the contemplation of spiritual beauty as the central principle. The various strains which went to suggest such a scheme are easy to unravel. Hugh says frankly that marriage and domesticity always appeared to him inconceivable, but at the same time he was sociable, and had the strong creative desire to forth and express a definite conception of life. He had always the artistic impulse to translate an idea into visible and tangible shape. He had, I think, little real pastoral impulse at this, if indeed at any time, and his view was individualistic. The community, in his mind, was to exist not, I believe, for discipline or extension of thought, or even for solidarity of action; it was rather to be a fortress of quiet for the encouragement of similar individual impulses. He used to talk a good deal about his plans for the community in these days—and it is interesting to compare with this the fact that I had already written a book, never published, about a literary community on the same sort of lines, while to go a little further back, it may be remembered that at one time my father and Westcott used to entertain themselves with schemes for what they called a Cœnobium, which was to be an institution in which married priests with their families were to lead a common life with common devotions.

But I used to be reminded, in hearing Hugh detail his plans, of the case of a friend of ours, whom I will call Lestrange, who had at one time entered a Benedictine monastery as a novice. Lestrange used to talk about himself in an engaging way in the third person, and I remember him saying that the reason why he left the monastery was "because Lestrange found that he could only be an inmate of a monastery in which Lestrange was also Abbot!" I did not feel that in Hugh's community there would be much chance of the independent expression of the individualities of his associates!

He was ordained deacon in 1894 at Addington, or rather in Croydon parish church, by my father, whose joy in admitting his beloved son to the Anglican ministry was very great indeed.

Before the ordination Hugh decided to go into solitary retreat. He took two rooms in the lodge-cottage of Burton Park, two or three miles out of Lincoln. I suppose he selected Lincoln as a scene endeared to him by childish memories.

He divided the day up for prayer, meditation, and solitary walks, and often went in to service in the cathedral. He says that he was in a state of tense excitement, and the solitude and introspection had an alarmingly depressing effect upon him. He says that the result of this was an appalling mental agony: "It seemed to me after a day or two that there was no truth in religion, that Jesus Christ was not God, that the whole of life was an empty sham, and that I was, if not the chiefest of sinners, at any rate the most monumental of fools." He went to the Advent services feeling, he says, like a soul in hell. But matters mended after that, and the ordination itself seemed to him a true consecration. He read the Gospel, and he remembered gratefully the sermon of Canon Mason, my father's beloved friend and chaplain.

VIII

THE ETON MISSION

There were many reasons why Hugh should begin his clerical work at Hackney Wick, though I suspect it was mainly my father's choice. It was a large, uniformly poor district, which had been adopted by Eton in about 1880 as the scene of its Mission. There were certain disadvantages attending the choice of that particular district. The real raison d'être of a School Mission is educative rather than philanthropic, in order to bring boys into touch with social problems, and to give them some idea that the way of the world is not the way of a prosperous and sheltered home. It is open to doubt whether it is possible to touch boys' hearts and sympathies much except by linking a School Mission on to some institution for the care of boys—an orphan school or a training ship. Only the most sensitive are shocked and distressed by the sight of hard conditions of life it all, and as a rule boys have an extraordinarily unimaginative way of taking things as they see them, and not thinking much or anxiously about mending them.

In any case the one aim ought to be to give boys a personal interest in such problems, and put them in personal touch with them. But the Eton Mission was planted in a district which it was very hard to reach from Eton, so that few of the boys were ever able to make a personal acquaintance with the hard and bare conditions of life in the crowded industrial region which their Mission was doing so much to help and uplift, or to realise the urgency of the needs of a district which most of them had never visited.

But if the Mission did not touch the imagination of the boys, yet, on the other hand, it became a very well-managed parish, with ample resources to draw upon; and it certainly attracted the services of a number of old Etonians, who had reached a stage of thought at which the problem of industrial poverty became an interesting one.

Money was poured out upon the parish; a magnificent church was built, a clergy-house was established, curates were subsidised, clubs were established, and excellent work was done there. The vicar at this time was a friend and contemporary of my own at Eton, St. Clair Donaldson, now Archbishop of Brisbane. He had lived with us as my father's chaplain for a time, but his mind was set on parish work rather than administration. He knew Hugh well, and Hugh was an Etonian himself. Moreover, my father was glad that Hugh should be with a trusted friend, and so he went there. St. Clair Donaldson was a clergyman of an Evangelical type, though the Mission had been previously conducted by a very High Churchman, William Carter, the present Archbishop of Capetown. But now distinctive High Church practices were given up, and the parish was run on moderate, kindly, and sensible lines. Whether such an institution is primarily and distinctively religious may be questioned. Such work is centred rather upon friendly and helpful relations, and religion becomes one of a number of active forces, rather than the force upon which all depends. High-minded, duty-loving, transparently good and cheerful as the tone of the clergy was, it was, no doubt, tentative rather than authoritative.

Hugh's work there lay a good deal in the direction of the boys' clubs; he used to go down to the clubs, play and talk with the boys, and go out with them on Saturday afternoons to football and cricket. But he never found it a congenial occupation, and I cannot help feeling that it was rather a case of putting a very delicate and subtle instrument to do a rough sort of work. What was needed was a hearty, kindly, elder-brotherly relation, and the men who did this best were the good-natured and robust men with a generic interest in the young, who could set a clean-minded, wholesome, and hearty example. But Hugh was not of this type. His mind was full of mystical and poetical ideas of religion, and his artistic nature was intent upon expressing them. He was successful in a way, because he had by this time a great charm of frankness and simplicity; he never had the least temptation to draw social distinctions, but he desired to find people personally interesting. He used to say afterwards that he did not really believe in what involved a sort of social condescension, and, like another incisive missioner, he thought that the giving up a few evenings a week by wealthy and even fashionable young-men, however good-hearted and earnest, to sharing the amusements of the boys of a parish, was only a very uncomfortable way of showing the poor how the rich lived! There is no sort of doubt about the usefulness and kindliness of such work, and it obviously is one of the experiments which may tend to create social sympathy: but Hugh came increasingly to believe that the way to lead boys to religion was not through social gatherings, but by creating a strong central nucleus of Christian instruction and worship; his heart was certainly not in his work at this time, though there was much that appealed to him particularly to his sense of humour, which was always strongly developed.

There was an account he gave of a funeral he had to conduct in the early days of his work, where, after a large congregation had assembled in the church, the arrival of the coffin itself was delayed, and he was asked to keep things going. He gave out hymns, he read collects, he made a short address, and still the undertaker at the door shook his head. At last he gave out a hymn that was not very well known, and found that the organist had left his post, whereupon he sang it alone, as an unsustained solo.

He told me, too, that after preaching written sermons, he resolved to try an extempore one. He did so with much nervousness and hesitation. The same evening St. Clair Donaldson said to him kindly but firmly that preachers were of two kinds—the kind that could write a fairly coherent discourse and deliver it more or less impressively, and the kind that might venture, after careful preparation, to speak extempore; and that he felt bound to tell Hugh that he belonged undoubtedly to the first kind. This was curious, because Hugh afterwards became, by dint of trouble and practice, a quite remarkably distinguished and impressive preacher. Indeed, even before he left the Church of England, the late Lord Stanmore, who was an old friend of my father's, said to me that he had heard all the great Anglican preachers for many years, and that he had no hesitation in putting my brother in the very first rank.

However his time was very full; the parish was magnificently organised; besides the clubs there were meetings of all sorts, very systematic visiting, a ladies' settlement, plays acted by children, in which Hugh took a prominent part both in composing the libretto and rehearsing the performances, coaching as many as seventy children at a time.

He went to a retreat given by a Cowley Father in the course of his time at the Eton Mission, and heard Father Maturin unfold, with profound enthusiasm and inspiring eloquence, a scheme of Catholic doctrine, worship, and practice, laying especial stress on Confession. These ideas began to take shape in Hugh's mind, and he came to the conclusion that it was necessary in a place like London, and working among the harassed and ill-educated poor, to materialise religion—that is to say, to fit some definite form, rite, symbol, and practice to religious emotion. He thought that the bright, dignified, and stately adjuncts of worship, such as they had at the Eton Mission, were not adequate to awaken the sense of the personal and intimate relation between man and God.

In this belief he was very possibly right. Of course the dangers of the theory are obvious. There is the ultimate danger of what can fairly be called superstition, that is to say giving to religion a magical kind of influence over the material side of life. Rites, relics, images tend to become, in irrational minds, invested with an inherent and mechanical sanctity, instead of being the symbols of grace. But it is necessary to risk something; and though the risk of what may be called a sort of idolatry is great, the risk of not arousing the sense of personal religion at all is greater still.

Hugh's ordination as a priest followed in 1895; and he then made a full confession before a clergyman.

In 1896, in October, my father, who had paid a state visit to Ireland, on his return went to stay with Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden, and died there in church on a Sunday morning.

I can never forget the events of that terrible day. I received a telegram at Eton which summoned me to Hawarden, but did not state explicitly that my father was dead. I met Hugh at Euston, who told me the fact, and I can recollect walking up and down the half-deserted station with him, in a state of deep and bewildered grief. The days which followed were so crowded with business and arrangements, that even the sight of my father's body, lying robed and still, and palely smiling, in the great library of the rectory failed to bring home to me the sense that his fiery, eager, strenuous life was over. I remember that Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came to the church with us, and that Hugh celebrated and gave us the Communion. But the day when we travelled south with the coffin, the great pomp at Canterbury, which was attended by our present King and the present King of Norway, when we laid him to rest in a vault under the north-western tower, and the days of hurried and crowded business at Addington are still faint and dream-like to me.

My mother and sister went out to Egypt for the winter; Hugh's health broke down; he was threatened with rheumatic fever, and was ordered to go out with them. It was here that he formed a very close and intimate companionship with my sister Maggie, and came to rely much on her tender sympathy and wise advice. He never returned to the Eton Mission.

IX

KEMSING AND MIRFIELD

The change proved very beneficial to Hugh; but it was then, with returning health and leisure for reflection, that he began to consider the whole question of Anglicanism and Catholicism. He describes some of the little experiences which turned his mind in this direction. He became aware of the isolation and what he calls the "provincialism" of the Anglican Church. He saw many kinds of churches and varieties of worship. He went on through the Holy Land, and at Jerusalem celebrated the Communion in the Chapel of Abraham; at Damascus he heard with a sort of horror of the submission of Father Maturin to Rome. In all this his scheme of a religious community revived. The ceremonial was to be Caroline. "We were to wear no eucharistic vestments, but full surplices and black scarves, and were to do nothing in particular."

When he returned, he went as curate to Kemsing, a village in Kent. It was decided that for the sake of his health his work must be light. The Rector, Mr. Skarratt, was a wealthy man; he had restored the church beautifully, and had organised a very dignified and careful musical service. Hugh lived with him at the vicarage, a big, comfortable house, with a succession of interesting guests. He had a very happy year, devoting much attention to preaching, and doing a great deal of work among the children, for which he had a quite singular gift. He had a simple and direct way with them, equally removed from both petting and authoritativeness. His own natural childlikeness came out—and indeed all his life he preserved the innocence, the impulsiveness, the mingled impatience and docility of a child more than any man I ever saw.

I remember a conversation I had with Hugh about this time. An offer had been made to him, through me, of an important country living. He said that he was extraordinarily happy at Kemsing but that he was too comfortable—he needed more discipline. He said further that he was beginning to find that he had the power of preaching, and that it was in this direction rather than in the direction of pastoral activity that his life was going to lie.

It was rather a pettish conversation. I asked him whether he might not perhaps find the discipline he needed in doing the pastoral work which did not interest him, rather than in developing his life on lines which he preferred. I confess that it was rather a priggish line to take; and in any case it did not come well from me because as a schoolmaster I think I always pursued an individualistic line, and worked hard on my own private basis of preferences rather than on the established system of the school. But I did not understand Hugh at this date. It is always a strain to find one whom one has always regarded as a boy, almost as a child, holding strong and definitely matured views. I thought him self-absorbed and wilful—as indeed he was—but he was pursuing a true instinct and finding his real life.

He then received an invitation to become a mission preacher, and went to consult Archbishop Temple about it. The Archbishop told him, bluffly and decisively, that he was far too young, and that before he took it upon himself to preach to men and women he ought to have more experience of their ways and hearts.

But Hugh with his usual independence was not in the least daunted. He had an interview with Dr. Gore, now Bishop of Oxford, who was then Head of the House of the Resurrection at Mirfield, and was accepted by him as a probationer in the Community. Hugh went to ask leave of Archbishop Maclagan, and having failed with one Primate succeeded with another.

The Community of the Resurrection was established by Bishop Gore as an Anglican house more or less on Benedictine lines. It acquired a big house among gardens, built, I believe, by a wealthy manufacturer. It has since been altered and enlarged, but Hugh drew an amusing set of sketches to illustrate the life there, in which it appears a rueful and rather tawdry building, of yellow stone and blue slate, of a shallow and falsetto Gothic, or with what maybe called Gothic sympathies. It is at Mirfield, near Bradford, in the Calder valley; the country round full of high chimneys, and the sky much blurred with smoke, but the grounds and gardens were large, and suited to a spacious sort of retirement. From the same pictures I gather that the house was very bare within and decidedly unpleasing, with no atmosphere except that of a denuded Victorian domesticity.

Some of the Brothers were occupied in definitely erudite work, editing liturgical, expository, and devotional works; and for these there was a large and learned library. The rest were engaged in evangelistic mission work with long spaces of study and devotion, six months roughly being assigned to outside activities, and six to Community life. The day began early, the Hours were duly recited. There was work in the morning and after tea, with exercise in the afternoon. On Saturday a chapter was held, with public confession, made kneeling, of external breaches of the rule. Silence was kept from Compline, at ten o'clock, until the next day's midday meal; there was manual work, wood-chopping, coal-breaking, boot-cleaning and room-dusting. For a long time Hugh worked at step-cutting in the quarry near the house, which was being made into a garden. The members wore cassocks with a leather belt. They were called "Father" and the head of the house was "Senior" or "Superior."

The vows were simple, of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but were renewed annually for a period of thirteen months, accompanied by an expression of an intention, only, to remain in the community for life. As far as I remember, if a Brother had private means, he was bound to hand over his income but not his capital, while he was a member, and the copyright of all books written during membership belonged absolutely to the Community. Hugh wrote the book of mystical stories, The Light Invisible, at this time; it had a continuous sale, and he used humorously to lament the necessity of handing over the profits to the Order, long after he had left it and joined the Church of Rome. The Brothers were not allowed, I think, to possess any personal property, and received clothing and small luxuries either as gifts, or purchased them through orders from the Bursar. Our dear old family nurse, Beth, to whom Hugh was as the apple of her eye, used to make him little presents of things that he needed—his wardrobe was always scanty and threadbare—and would at intervals lament his state of destitution. "I can't bear to think of the greedy creatures taking away all the gentlemen's things!"

There was a chapel in the house, of a High Anglican kind, where vestments and incense were used, and plainsong sung. There were about fourteen Brothers.

Hugh was obviously and delightfully happy at Mirfield. I remember well how he used to describe the pleasure of returning to it from a Mission, the silence, the simplicity of the life, the liberty underlying the order and discipline. The tone of the house was admirably friendly and kindly, without gossip, bickering or bitterness, and Hugh found himself among cheerful and sympathetic companions, with the almost childlike mirthfulness which comes of a life, strict, ascetic, united, and free from worldly cares. He spent his first two years in study mainly, and extended his probation. It illustrates the fact that he was acquainting himself strangely little with current theological thought that the cause of his delay was that he was entirely taken aback by a sermon of Dr. Gore's on the Higher Criticism. The whole idea of it was completely novel to Hugh, and upset him terribly, so that he thought he could hardly recover his balance. Neither then nor later had he the smallest sympathy with or interest in Modernism. Finally he took the vows in 1901; my mother was present. He was installed, his hand kissed by the Brethren, and he received the Communion in entire hopefulness and happiness. I was always conscious, in those days, that Hugh radiated an atmosphere of intense rapture and ecstasy about him: the only drawback was that, in his rare visits to home, he was obviously pining to be back at Mirfield.

Then his work began; and he says that refreshed and reinvigorated as they were before going on a Mission, by long, quiet, and careful preparation, they used to plunge into their work with ardent and eager enthusiasm. The actual mission work was hard. Hugh records that once after a Mission in London they spent four days in interviewing people and hearing confessions for eleven hours a day, with occasional sermons interspersed.

At times some of the Brothers went into residence at Westminster, in Dr. Gore's house—he was a Canon of the Abbey—and there Hugh preached his only sermon in the Abbey. But he was now devoting himself to Mission preaching, and perfecting his system. He never thought very highly of his gift of exposition. "I have a certain facility in preaching, but not much," he once said, adding, "I have far more in writing." And I have heard him say often that, if he let himself go in preaching, his tendency was to become vulgar. I have in my possession hundreds of his skeleton notes. They consist of the main points of his argument, written out clearly and underlined, with a certain amount of the texture indicated, sentence-summaries, epigrammatic statements, dicta, emphatic conclusions. He attained his remarkable facility by persistent, continuous, and patient toil; and a glance at his notebooks and fly-leaves would be the best of lessons for anyone who was tempted to depend upon fluid and easy volubility. He used to say that, after long practice, a sermon would fall into shape in a very few moments; and I remember his once taking carefully written address of my own, summarising and denuding it, and presenting me with a little skeleton of its essence, which he implored me to use; though I had not the courage to do so. He said, too, that he believed that he could teach anyone of ordinary brain-power and choice of language to preach extempore on these lines in six months, if only he would rigidly follow his method. His arguments, in the course of his sermons, did not always seem to me very cogent; but his application of them was always most clear and effective. You always knew exactly what he was driving at, and what point he had reached; if it was not good logic, it was extremely effective logic, and you seemed to run hand in hand with him. I remember a quite admirable sermon he preached at Eton at this date—it was most simple and moving. But at the same time the effect largely depended upon a grace of which he was unconscious—quaint, naive, and beautiful phrasing, a fine poetical imagination, tiny word-pictures, and a youthful and impetuous charm. His gestures at that time were free and unconstrained, his voice resonant, appealing, and clear.

He used to tell innumerable stories of his sermon adventures. There was a story of a Harvest Festival sermon near Kemsing, in the days when he used a manuscript; he found on arriving at the church that he had left it behind him, and was allowed to remain in the vestry during the service, writing out notes on the inside of envelopes torn open, with the stump of a pencil which would only make marks at a certain angle. The service proceeded with a shocking rapidity, and when he got to the pulpit, spread out his envelopes, and addressed himself to the consideration of the blessings of the Harvest, he found on drawing to an end that he had only consumed about four minutes. He went through the whole again, slightly varying the phraseology, and yet again repeated the performance; only to find, on putting on his coat, that the manuscript was in his pocket all the time.

He used to say that the most nervous experience in the world was to go into a street or market-place of a town where he was to hold a Mission with open-air sermons, and there, without accompaniment, and with such scanty adherents as he could muster, strike up a hymn. By-standers would shrug their shoulders and go away smiling. Windows would be opened, figures would lean out, and presently withdraw again, slamming the casement.

Hugh was always extremely nervous before a sermon. He told me that when he was about to preach, he did not generally go in for the service, but remained in the vestry until the sermon; and that he would lie on a sofa or sit in a chair, in agonies of nervousness, with actual attacks of nausea, and even sickness at times, until he was summoned, feeling that he could not possibly get through. This left him after speaking a few words: but he also maintained that on the rare occasions when he felt quite confident and free from nervousness, the result was a failure: he said that a real anxiety as to the effect of the sermon was a necessary stimulus, and evoked a mental power which confidence was apt to leave dormant.

X

THE CHANGE

Hugh has himself traced in full detail, in his book The Confessions of a Convert, how he gradually became convinced that it was his duty to make his submission to the Church of Rome; and I will not repeat the story here. But I can recall very distinctly the period during which he was making up his mind. He left Mirfield in the early summer of 1903, so that when I came home for the summer holidays, he was living there. I had myself just accepted from King Edward the task of editing Queen Victoria's letters, and had resigned my Eton mastership. Hugh was then engaged in writing his book By What Authority with inconceivable energy and the keenest possible enjoyment. His absorption in the work was extraordinary. He was reading historical books and any books bearing on the history of the period, taking notes, transcribing. I have before me a large folio sheet of paper on which he has written very minutely hundreds of picturesque words and phrases of the time, to be worked into the book. He certainly soaked himself in the atmosphere of the time, and I imagine that the details are correct, though as he had never studied history scientifically, I expect he is right in saying that the mental atmosphere which he represented as existing in Elizabethan times was really characteristic of a later date. He said of the book: "I fear it is the kind of book which anyone acquainted with the history, manners, and customs of the Elizabethan age should find no difficulty in writing." He found many faults subsequently with the volume, but he convinced himself at the time that the Anglican post-Reformation Church had no identity or even continuity with the pre-Reformation Church.

He speaks of himself as undergoing an experience of great unhappiness and unrest. Undoubtedly leaving the Mirfield Community was a painful severance. He valued a friendly and sympathetic atmosphere very much, and he was going to migrate from it into an unknown society, leaving his friends behind, with a possibility of suspicion, coldness, and misunderstanding. It was naturally made worse by the fact that all my father's best and oldest friends were Anglicans, who by position and tradition would be likely to disapprove most strongly of the step, and even feel it, if not an aspersion on my father's memory, at all events a disloyal and unfilial act—as indeed proved to be the case. But I doubt if these considerations weighed very much with Hugh. He was always extremely independent of criticism and disapproval, and though he knew many of my father's friends, through their visits to our house, he had not made friends with them on his own account—and indeed he had always been so intent on the life he was himself leading, that he had never been, so to speak, one of the Nethinims of the sanctuary; nor had the dependent and discipular attitude, the reverential attachment to venerable persons, been in the least congenial to him. He had always rather effaced himself in the presence of our ecclesiastical visitors, and had avoided the constraint of their dignity. Indeed, up to this time he had not much gone in search of personal relationships at all except with equals and contemporaries.

But the ignorance of the world he was about to enter upon was a more serious factor in his outlook. He knew that he would have to enter submissively and humbly an entirely strange domain, that he would have to join a chilly and even suspicious circle—for I suppose a convert to any new faith is apt to be regarded, until he is fully known, as possibly weak, indeterminate, and fluctuating, and to be treated with compassion rather than admiration. With every desire to be sympathetic, people in conscious possession of security and certainty are naturally inclined to regard a claimant as bent on acquisition rather than as a hero eager for self-sacrifice.

Certainly Hugh's dejection, which I think was reserved for his tired moments, was not apparent. To me, indeed, he appeared in the light of one intent on a great adventure, with all the rapture of confidence and excitement about him. As my mother said, he went to the shelter of his new belief as a lover might run to the arms of his beloved. Like the soldier in the old song, he did not linger, but "gave the bridle-reins a shake." He was not either melancholy or brooding. He looked very well, he was extremely active in mind and in body.

I find the following extract from my diary of August:

"August 1903.—In the afternoon walked with Hugh the Paxhill round. Hugh is in very good cheerful spirits, steering in a high wind straight to Rome, writing a historical novel, full of life and jests and laughter and cheerfulness; not creeping in, under the shadow of a wall, sobbing as the old cords break; but excited, eager, jubilant, enjoying."

His room was piled with books and papers; he used to rush into meals with the glow of suspended energy, eat rapidly and with appetite—I have never seen a human being who ate so fast and with so little preference as to the nature of what he ate—then he would sit absorbed for a moment, and ask to be excused, using the old childish formula: "May I get down?" Sometimes he would come speeding out of his room, to read aloud a passage he had written to my mother, or to play a few chords on the piano. He would not as a rule join in games or walks—he went out for a short, rapid walk by himself, a little measured round, and flew back to his work. He generally, I should think, worked about eight hours a day at this time. In the evening he would play a game of cards after dinner, and would sit talking in the smoking-room, rapidly consuming cigarettes and flicking the ash off with his forefinger. He was also, I remember, very argumentative. He said once of himself that he was perpetually quarrelling with his best friends. He was a most experienced coat-trailer! My mother, my sister, my brother, Miss Lucy Tait who lives with us, and myself would find ourselves engaged in heated arguments, the disputants breathing quickly, muttering unheeded phrases, seeking in vain for a loophole or a pause. It generally ended by Hugh saying with mournful pathos that he could not understand why everyone set on him—that he never argued in any other circle, and he could only entreat to be let alone. It is true that we were accustomed to argue questions of every kind with tenacity and even with invective. But the fact that these particular arguments always dealt with the inconsistencies and difficulties of ecclesiastical institutions revealed their origin. The fact was that at this time Hugh was accustomed to assert with much emphasis some extremely provocative and controversial position. He was markedly scornful of Anglican faults and mannerisms, and behaved both then and later as if no Anglicans could have any real and vital belief in their principles, but must be secretly ashamed of them. Yet he was acutely sensitive himself, and resented similar comments; he used to remind me of the priest who said to Stevenson "Your sect—for it would be doing it too much honour to call it a religion," and was then pained to be thought discourteous or inconsiderate.

Discourteous, indeed, Hugh was not. I have known few people who could argue so fiercely without personal innuendo. But, on the other hand, he was both triumphant and sarcastic. There was an occasion at a later date when he advanced some highly contestable points as assumptions, and my aunt, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, in an agony of rationality, said to him, "But these things are surely matters of argument, Hugh?" To which Hugh replied, "Well, you see, I have the misfortune, as you regard it, of belonging to a Church which happens to know."

Here is another extract from my diary at this time:

"August 1903.—At dinner Hugh and I fell into a fierce argument, which became painful, mainly, I think, because of Hugh's vehemence and what I can only call violence. He reiterates his consciousness of his own stupidity in an irritating way. The point was this. He maintained that it was uncharitable to say, 'What a bad sermon So-and-so preached,' and not uncharitable to say, 'Well, it is better than the sickening stuff one generally hears'; uncharitable to say, 'What nasty soup this is!' and not uncharitable to say, 'Well, it is better than the filthy pigwash generally called soup.' I maintained that to say that, one must have particular soups in one's mind; and that it was abusing more sermons and soups, and abusing them more severely, than if one found fault with one soup or one sermon.

"But it was all no use. He was very impatient if one joined issue at any point, and said that he was interrupted. He dragged all sorts of red herrings over the course, the opinions of Roman theologians, and differences between mortal and venial sin, &c. I don't think he even tried to apprehend my point of view, but went off into a long rigmarole about distinguishing between the sin and the sinner; and said that it was the sin one ought to blame, not the sinner. I maintained that the consent of the sinner's will was of the essence of the sin, and that the consent of the will of the sinner to what was not in itself wrong was the essence of sin—e.g. not sinful to drink a glass of wine, but, sinful if you had already had enough.

"It was rather disagreeable; but I get so used to arguing with absolute frankness with people at Eton that I forget how unpleasant it may sound to hearers—and it all subsided very quickly, like a boiling pot."

I remember, too, at a later date, that he produced some photographs of groups of, I think, Indian converts at a Roman Catholic Mission, and stated that anyone who had eyes to see could detect which of them had been baptized by the expression of their faces. It was, of course, a matter which it was impossible to bring to the test; but he would not even admit that catechumens who were just about to be baptized could share the same expression as those who actually had been baptized. This was a good instance of his provocative style. But it was always done like a game. He argued deftly, swiftly, and inconclusively, but the fault generally lay in his premisses, which were often wild assumptions; not in his subsequent argument, which was cogent, logical, and admirably quick at finding weak points in his adversary's armour. At the same time he was wholly placable. No one could so banish and obliterate from his mind the impression of the harshest and fiercest arguments. The effervescence of his mind subsided as quickly as it arose. And my whole recollection of the period is that he was in a state of great mental and spiritual excitement, and that he was experiencing to the full the joys of combat and action.

While the interest of composition lasted, he remained at home, but the book was soon done. He was still using the oratory in the house for celebrations, and I believe that he occasionally helped in the services of the parish church. The last time I actually heard him preach was at the previous Christmas, when the sermon seemed to me both tired and hard, as of one whose emotions were strained by an interior strife.

Among his diversions at this time he painted, on the casement windows of the oratory, some figures of saints in water-colour. The designs were quaint, but in execution they were the least successful things he ever did; while the medium he employed was more apt to exclude light than to tinge it.

These strange figures became known in the village as "Mrs. Benson's dolls." They were far more visible from outside than from within, and they looked like fantastic puppets leaning against the panes. What use my mother was supposed to make of them, or why she piled her dolls, tier above tier, in an upper window was never explained. Hugh was very indignant when their artistic merit was called in question, but later on he silently effaced them.

The curious intensity and limitation of Hugh's affections were never more exemplified than in his devotion to a charming collie, Roddy, belonging to my sister, the most engaging dog I have ever known. Roddy was a great truant, and went away sometimes for days and even weeks. Game is carefully preserved on the surrounding estates, and we were always afraid that Roddy, in his private hunting expeditions, might fall a victim to a conscientious keeper's gun, which, alas, was doubtless the cause of his final and deeply lamented disappearance. Hugh had a great affection for Roddy, and showed it, when he came to Tremans, by keeping Roddy constantly at his heels, having him to sleep in his room, and never allowing him out of his sight. For the first day or two Roddy enjoyed these attentions, but gradually, as the visit lasted, became more and more restive, and was for ever trying to give Hugh the slip; moreover, as soon as Hugh went away, Roddy always disappeared for a few days to recover his sense of independence and liberty. I can see Hugh now walking about in his cassock, with Roddy at his heels; then they would join a circle on the lawn, and Roddy would attach himself to some other member of the family for a little, but was always sternly whistled away by Hugh, when he went back to his room. Moreover, instead of going back to the stable to sleep snugly in the straw, which Roddy loved best, he had to come to the smoking-room, and then go back to sleep in a basket chair in Hugh's bedroom. I can remember Hugh departing at the end of his visit, and saying to me, "I know it's no use asking you—but do try to keep an eye on Roddy! It makes me miserable to think of his getting into the woods and being shot." But he did not think much about Roddy in his absence, never asked to take Roddy to Hare Street; nor did he manifest deep emotion when he finally disappeared, nor make long lamentation for him. Hugh never wasted any time in vain regrets or unavailing pathos.

He paid visits to certain friends of my mother's to consult about his position. He did this solely out of deference to her wishes, but not, I think, with any hope that his purpose would be changed. They were, I believe, John Reeve, Rector of Lambeth, a very old and dear friend of our family, Bishop Wilkinson, and Lord Halifax. The latter stated his position clearly, that the Pope was Vicar of Christ jure ecclesiastico but not jure divino, and that it was better to remain an Anglican and promote unity so. Hugh had also a painful correspondence with John Wordsworth, late Bishop of Salisbury, a very old friend of my father's. The Bishop wrote affectionately at first, but eventually became somewhat indignant, and told Hugh plainly that a few months' work in a slum parish would clear his mind of doubt; the correspondence ended by his saying emphatically that he regarded conversion almost as a loss of sanity. No doubt it was difficult for one of immense patristic and theological learning, who was well versed in the historical aspect of the affair as well as profoundly conscious of the reality of his own episcopal commission, to enter the lists with a son of his old friend. But neither sympathy nor harshness could have affected Hugh at this time, any more than advice to return could alter the position of a man who had taken a leap and was actually flying through the air.

Hugh then went off on a long bicycle tour by himself, dressed as a layman. He visited the Carthusian Monastery of St Hugh, near West Grinstead, which I afterwards visited in his company. He spent a night or two at Chichester, where he received the Communion in the cathedral; but he was in an unhappy frame of mind, probably made more acute by solitude.

XI

THE DECISION

By this time we all knew what was about to happen. "When a man's mind is made up," says the old Irish proverb, "his feet must set out on the way."

Just before my brother made his profession as a Brother of the Mirfield Community, he was asked by Bishop Gore whether he was in any danger of becoming a Roman Catholic. My brother said honestly, "Not so far as I can see." This was in July 1901. In September 1903 he was received into the Church of Rome. What was it which had caused the change? It is very difficult to say, and though I have carefully read my brother's book, the Confessions of a Convert, I find it hard to give a decisive answer. I have no intention of taking up a controversial attitude, and indeed I am little equipped for doing so. It is clear that my brother was, and had for some time been, searching for something, let us call it a certainty, which he did not find in the Church of England. The surprise to me is that one whose religion, I have always thought, ran upon such personal and individualistic lines, should not have found in Anglicanism the very liberty he most desired. The distinguishing feature of Anglicanism is that it allows the largest amount of personal liberty, both as regards opinion and also as regards the use of Catholic traditions, which is permitted by an ecclesiastical body in the world. The Anglican Church claims and exercises very little authority at all. Each individual Bishop has a considerable discretionary power, and some allow a far wider liberty of action than others. In all cases, divergences of doctrine and practice are dealt with by personal influence, tact, and compromise, and force majeure is invoked as little as possible. In the last hundred years, during which there have been strong and active movements in various directions in the Church of England both towards Catholic doctrine and Latitudinarianism, such synodical and legal action as has been taken has generally proved to be a mistake. It is hard to justify the system logically and theoretically, but it may be said that the methods of the Church have at least been national, in the sense that they have suited the national temperament, which is independent and averse to coercive discipline. It may, I believe, be truly asserted that in England any Church which attempted any inquisition into the precise doctrine held by its lay members would lose adherents in large numbers. Of late the influence of the English Church has been mainly exerted in the cause of social reform, and her tendency is more and more to condone divergences of doctrine and opinion in the case of her ministers when they are accompanied by spiritual fervour and practical activity. The result has certainly been to pacify the intellectual revolt against religious opinion which was in full progress some forty years ago. When I myself was at the university some thirty years ago, the attitude of pronounced intellectuals against religious opinion was contemptuous and even derisive. That is not the case now. The instinct for religion is recognised as a vital part of the human mind, and though intellectual young men are apt at times to tilt against the travesty of orthodoxy which they propound for their own satisfaction, there is a far deeper and wider tolerance and even sympathy for every form of religious belief. Religion is recognised as a matter of personal preference, and the agnostic creed has lost much of its aggressive definiteness.

It appears to me that, so far as I can measure the movement of my brother's mind, when he decided first to take Orders his religion was of a mystical and æsthetic kind; and I do not think that there is any evidence that he really examined the scientific and agnostic position at all. His heart and his sense of beauty were already engaged, and life without religion would have scented an impossibility to him. When he took Orders, his experience was threefold. At the Eton Mission he was confronted by an Anglicanism of a devout and simple kind, which concentrated itself almost entirely on the social aspect of Christianity, on the love of God and the brotherhood of man. The object of the workers there was to create comradeship, and to meet the problems of conduct which arose by a faith in the cleansing and uplifting power of God. Brotherly love was its first aim.

I do not think that Hugh had ever any real interest in social reform, in politics, in causes, in the institutions which aim at the consolidation of human endeavour and sympathy. He had no philosophic grasp of history, nor was he a student of the psychology of religion. His instincts were all individualistic and personal; and indeed I believe that all his life he was an artist in the largest sense, in the fact that his work was the embodiment of dreams, the expression of the beauty which he constantly perceived. His ideal was in one sense a larger one than the technically artistic ideal, because it embraced the conception of moral beauty even more ardently than mere external beauty. The mystical element in him was for ever reaching out in search of some Divine essence in the world. He was not in search at any time of personal relations. He attracted more affection than he ever gave; he rejoiced its sympathy and kindred companionship as a flower rejoices in sunshine; but I think he had little taste of the baffled suffering which accompanies all deep human passion. He once wrote "God has preserved me extraordinarily from intimacies with others. He has done this, not I. I have longed for intimacies and failed to win them." He had little of the pastoral spirit; I do not think that he yearned over unshepherded souls, or primarily desired to seek and save the lost. On the other hand he responded eagerly to any claim made to himself for help and guidance, and he was always eager not to chill or disappoint people who seemed to need him. But he found little satisfaction in his work at the Eton Mission, and I do not think he would ever have been at home there.

At Kemsing, on the other hand, he had an experience of what I may fairly call the epicureanism of religion. The influences there were mainly æsthetic; the creation of a circle like that at Kemsing would have been impossible without wealth. Beautiful worship, refined enjoyment, cultivated companionship were all lavished upon him. But he soon tired of this, because it was an exotic thing. It was a little paradise of a very innocent kind, from which all harsh and contradictory elements had been excluded. But this mere sipping of exquisite flavours became to him a very objectless thing, because it corresponded to no real need. I believe that if at this time he had discovered his literary gifts, and had begun seriously to write, he might have been content to remain under such conditions, at all events for a time. But he had as yet no audience, and had not begun to exercise his creative imagination. Moreover, to a nature like Hugh's, naturally temperate and ardent, and with no gross or sensuous fibre of any kind, there was a real craving for the bareness and cleanness of self-discipline and asceticism. There is a high and noble pleasure in some natures towards the reduction and disregard of all material claims and limitations, by which a freedom and expansiveness of the spirit can be won. Such self-denial gives to the soul a freshness and buoyancy which, for those who can pursue it, is in itself an ecstasy of delight. And thus Hugh found it impossible to stay in an atmosphere which, though exquisitely refined and quiet, yet hampered the energy of aspiration and adventure.

And so he came to the Mirfield Community, and for a time found exactly what he wanted. The Brotherhood did not mainly concern itself with the organisation of social reform, while it reduced the complications of life to a spare and rigorous simplicity. The question is, why this life, which allowed him to apply all his gifts and powers to the work which still, I think, was the embodiment of his visions, did not completely satisfy him?

I think, in the first place, that it is probable that, though he was not conscious of it, the discipline and the subordination of the society did not really quite give him enough personal freedom. He continued for a time to hanker after community life; he used to say, when he first joined the Church of Rome, that he thought he might end as a Carthusian, or later on as a Benedictine. But he spoke less and less of this as the years went on, and latterly I believe that he ceased to contemplate it, except as a possibility in case his powers of speech and writing should fail him. I believe that he really, thought perhaps unconsciously, desired a freer hand, and that he found that the community life on the whole cramped his individuality. His later life was indeed a complete contrast to anything resembling community life; his constant restlessness of motion, his travels, his succession of engagements both in all parts of England as well as in Rome and America, were really, I do not doubt, more congenial to him; while his home life ultimately became only his opportunity for intense and concentrated literary work.

But beyond and above that lay the doctrinal question. He sums up what he came to believe in a few words, that the Church of Rome was "the divinely appointed centre of unity," and he felt the "absolute need of a Teaching Church to preserve and to interpret the truths of Christianity to each succeeding generation." Once convinced of this, argument mattered little. Hugh was entirely fearless, adventurous, and independent; he had no ambitions in the ordinary sense of the word; that is to say he made no frontal attack upon promotion or respect. He was not what is called a "safe" man; he had neither caution or prudence, nor any regard for average opinion. I do not think he ever gave allegiance to any personality, nor took any direct influence from anyone. The various attempts he made to consult people of different schools of thought, all carefully recorded in his Confessions, were made courteously and deferentially; but it seems to me that any opposition or argument that he encountered only added fuel to the fire, and aroused his reason only to combat the suggestions with which he did not instinctively agree. Indeed I believe that it was his very isolation, his independence, his lack of any real deference to personal authority, which carried him into the Church of Rome. One who knew Hugh well and indeed loved him said to me a little bitterly that he had become a Roman Catholic not because his faith was strong, but because it was weak. There was a touch of truth in this. Hugh did with all his heart desire to base his life upon some impersonal unquestionable certainty; and where a more submissive mind might have reposed, as a disciple, upon the strength of a master, Hugh required to repose upon something august, age-long, overpowering, a great moving force which could not be too closely or precisely interrogated, but which was a living and breathing reality, a mass of corporate experience, in spite of the inconsistencies and irrationalities which must beset any system which has built up a logical and scientific creed in eras when neither logic nor science were fully understood.

The fundamental difference between Catholicism and Protestantism lies ultimately in the old conflict between liberty and discipline, or rather in the degree to which each is valued. The most ardent lover of liberty has to admit that his own personal inclinations cannot form a satisfactory standard of conduct. He must in certain matters subjugate his will and his inclination to the prevailing laws and principles and beliefs, and he must sacrifice his private aims and desires to the common interest, even when his reason and will may not be convinced. That is a simple matter of compromise, and the sacrifice is made as a matter of expediency and duty rather than as a matter of emotion. But there are other natures to whom it is essential to live by emotion, and to whom it is a relief and delight to submerge their private inclinations in some larger national or religious emotion. We have seen of late, in the case of Germany, what tremendous strength is generated in a nation which can adore a national ideal so passionately that they can only believe it to be a blessing to other nations to have the chance given them, through devastation and defeat, of contributing to the triumph of German ideals. I do not mean that Catholicism is prepared to adopt similarly aggressive methods. But what Hugh did not find in Anglicanism was a sense of united conviction, a world-policy, a faith in ultimate triumph, all of which he found in Catholicism. The Catholic believes that God is on his side; the Anglican hopes that he is on the side of God. Among Anglicans, Hugh was fretted by having to find out how much or how little each believed. Among Catholics, that can be taken for granted. They are indeed two different qualities and types of faith, and produce, or perhaps express, different types of character. Hugh found in the Roman Church the comfort of corporate ideals and corporate beliefs; and I frankly admit that the more we became acquainted with Catholicism the more did we recognise the strong and simple core of evangelicalism within it, the mutual help and counsel, the insistence on reparation as the proof of penitence, the insight into simple human needs, the paternal indulgence combined with gentle authoritativeness. All this is eminently and profoundly Christian. It is not necessary here to say what the Anglican does not find in it or at what point it seems to become inconsistent with reason and liberty. But I desire to make it clear that what Hugh needed was an emotional surrender and a sense of corporate activity, and that his conversion was not a logical one, but the discovery of a force with which his spirit was in unison, and of a system which gave him exactly the impetus and the discipline which he required.

It is curious to note that Father Tyrell, whom Hugh consulted, said to him that he could not receive officially any convert into the Church except on terms which were impossible to persons of reason; and this is so far true that I do not believe that Hugh's conversion was a process of either intellect or reason. I believe that it was a deep instinctive and emotional need for a basis of thought so strong and vivid that he need not question it. I believe he had long been seeking for such a basis, and that he was right to accept it, because he did so in entire simplicity and genuineness. My brother was not sceptical nor analytic; he needed the repose of a large submission, of obedience to an impersonal ideal. His work lay in the presentment of religious emotion, and for this he needed a definite and specific confidence. In no other Church, and least of all in Anglicanism, could this be obtained. I do not mean for a moment that Hugh accepted the Catholic faith simply as a conscious relief; he was convinced frankly and fully that the Church of Christ could not be a divided society, but must have a continuity of doctrine and tradition. He believed that to be the Divine plan and method. Having done this, his duty and his delight were one. He tasted the full joy of obedience, the relief of not having to test, to question, to decide; and thus his loyalty was complete, because his heart was satisfied, and it was easier to him to mistrust his reason rather than to mistrust his heart. He had been swayed to and fro by many interests and ardours and influences; he had wandered far afield, and had found no peace in symbolism uncertain of what it symbolised, or in reason struggling to reconcile infinite contradictions. Now he rowed no more against the stream; he had found no human master to serve, and now he had found a great ancient and living force which could bear him on. That was, I think, the history of his spiritual change; and of one I am sure, that no surrender was ever made so guilelessly, so disinterestedly, and in so pure and simple a mood.

He has told the story of his own reception very simply and impressively. He wrote to my mother, "It has happened," and I see that he wrote also just before it to me. I quote from my diary:

"September 9, 1903.—Also a note from Hugh, from the Woodchester Dominican Convent, saying that he thinks he will be received this week, very short but affectionate. He says he won't attempt to say all that is in his mind. I replied, saying that I could not wish, knowing how he felt, the he should do otherwise—and I blessed him in a form of words."

It, may be frankly said that however much we regretted his choice, we none of us had the slightest wish to fetter it, or to discourage Hugh from following his true and conscientious convictions. One must recognise that the sunshine and the rain of God fall in different ways and at different times upon those who desire to find Him. I do not wholly understand in my mind how Hugh came to make the change, but Carlyle speaks truly when he says that there is one moral and spiritual law for all, which is that whatever is honestly incredible to a man that he may only at his direst peril profess or pretend to believe. And I understand in my heart that Hugh had hitherto felt like one out on the hillside, with wind and mist about him, and with whispers and voices calling out of the mist; and that here he found a fold and a comradeship such as he desired to find, and was never in any doubt again. And I am sure that he soon began to feel the tranquillity which comes from having taken, after much restlessness and anxiety, a hard course and made a painful choice.

At first, however, he was deeply conscious of the strain through which he had passed. He wrote to me in answer to the letter mentioned above:

Sept. 23, '03.

... Thank you so very much for your letter. It was delightful to get it. I can't tell you what happiness it has been through everything to know that you, as well as the others, felt as you did: and now your letter comes to confirm it.

There is surprisingly little to say about myself; since you ask—

I have nothing more than the deepest possible conviction—no emotionalism or sense of relief or anything of the kind.

As regards my plans—they too are tolerably vague.... All the first week I was with the Dominicans—who, I imagine, will be my final destination after two or three years.

... I imagine that I shall begin to read Theology again, in view of future Ordination: and either I shall go to Rome at the beginning of November; or possibly to Prior Park, near Bath—a school, where I shall teach an hour a day, and read Theology.

Mamma and I are meeting in London next week. She really has been good to me beyond all words. Her patience and kindness have been unimaginable.

Well—this is a dreary and egotistical letter. But you asked me to write about myself.

Well—I must thank you again for your extreme kindness—I really am grateful: though I am always dumb about such things when I meet people.

I remember taking a walk with Provost Hornby at Eton at this date. My diary says:

"October 1903.—We talked of Hugh. The Provost was very kind and wise. He said, 'Such a change is a testimony of sincerity and earnestness'; he went on to tell a story which Jowett told him of Dr. Johnson, who said, when a husband and wife of his acquaintance went over to Rome, 'God bless them both.' At the end of the walk he said to me, 'When you write to your brother, remember me very kindly to him, and give him, as a message from me, what Johnson said.' This I thought was beautiful—more than courteous."