Hugh: Memoirs of a Brother Part 3

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 cla.s.sical 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 ama.s.sing 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sionate perception of moral beauty, and that the saint is attracted by purity and compa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion 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 aesthetic emotion. If the first business of religion is to purify life, there will always be a suspicion of idolatry about ritual, a fear of subst.i.tuting 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 Pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sed in silence. Not one word of advice or recrimination or even of surprise had pa.s.sed anyone's lips!

But Hugh's climbing was put a stop to by a sharp attack of heart-failure on the Piz Palu. 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 a.s.sembly-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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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 cla.s.sics, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 Suss.e.x Garden. A flagged pa.s.sage 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 acc.u.mulated 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.