MEMORIALS OP 
 
 HUGH 
 BENSON 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 
 
 3 1822017194069
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CAI.lv -RNlA 
 
 SAN UIEGO 
 
 J
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGC 
 
 3 1822017194069 
 
 Central University Library 
 
 University of California, San Diego 
 Please Note: This item is subject to recall. 
 
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 MEMORIALS OF ROBERT 
 HUGH BENSON BY BLANCHE 
 WARRE CORNISH, SHANE 
 LESLIE y OTHER FRIENDS
 
 MEMORIALS OF 
 
 ROBERT HUGH 
 
 BENSON 
 
 COltyQSH 
 
 2 
 
 r 
 
 LesLie & OTHSR OF 
 HIS 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 New 
 P. J, KENEDY & SONS 
 
 44 Barclay Street
 
 HUNTED IN ENGLAND
 
 THE 
 
 ROBERT HUGH BENSON. BY BLANCHE WARRE 
 
 CORNISH: P. I. 
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE APOSTOLATE. BY SHANE 
 
 LESLIE.- P. 47. 
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH BENSON. BY RICHARD 
 
 HOW DEN: P. 71. 
 
 NOTES : P. 84. 
 
 A PORTRAIT IN COLOURS : FRONTISPIECE. 
 
 ROBERT HUGH BENSON IN 1906 ! P. 9. 
 
 A. C. BENSON, R. H. BENSON, AND E. F. BENSON, 
 
 1907 : P. 17. 
 
 AT HARE STREET HOUSE, 1909 ! P. 25. 
 
 IN HIS GARDEN, 191 1 ! P. 33. 
 
 HARE STREET HOUSE, BUNTINGFORD : P. 41. 
 
 ROBERT HUGH BENSON IN 1907 : P. 49. 
 
 AN OPEN AIR SERMON AT BUNTINGFORD : 
 
 PP. 56, 57. 
 
 H. E. CARDINAL BOURNE GIVES THE LAST BLESS- 
 ING : P. 65. 
 
 THE FUNERAL : PP. 88, 89. 
 
 Mrs. Warre Cornish's contribution is reprinted, -with revision, from 
 the " Dublin Rcvietv."
 
 ROBERT HUGH BENSON 
 
 <BT 'BLANCHE WARRE CORNISH 
 
 A the death of Robert Hugh Benson, 
 in October 1914, the personal char- 
 acter of the sorrow for his loss was 
 very manifest. It was towards the 
 close of the month, in the hour of dread- 
 ful suspense when the long battle for Calais 
 was beginning ; preoccupation was intense, 
 and English hearts were absorbed by our 
 soldiers in the field. Little appeared in 
 the papers about the young dignitary of 
 the Church who had passed so suddenly 
 away. And yet it was remarked that 
 thousands who had never spoken to him 
 mourned for him as for a relation. 
 
 Outside his own fold, brethren and friends 
 of University life or of an early and suc- 
 cessful Anglican pastorate were drawn to 
 him by his courageous death in full con- 
 sciousness or by the amenities, and in 
 
 A
 
 1(OSERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 the case of his brothers the comradeship, 
 of the very last years. " He was always 
 a modest man, the Monsignor," said an 
 impartial and gracious Cambridge voice in 
 my hearing at the time ; and an attractive 
 writer in the Cornhill Magazine bears 
 witness to friendship deepening with 
 Robert Hugh Benson in latter years, in spite 
 of divergent ways of thought. It appeared 
 that old self-assertion had softened the 
 turgid waters of extreme opinion ran 
 clearer. 
 
 Personal, too, was the nature of the regret 
 in the Catholic world ; it was not merely 
 that Monsignor Benson had revived the 
 great tradition of the pulpit the success 
 almost of Pere Ravignan and Pre Felix 
 in France, witnessed by the crowds who 
 waited to see the boy-like form and fair 
 head appear in the pulpit ; nor was it this 
 book or that amid the marvel of his literary 
 accomplishment : these counted for little 
 at the hour of his death in comparison to 
 the memory of his faith. No, something 
 intimate, something consoling, was in the 
 mind of each, at the passing of the great 
 little priest. The spur of the Invisible was 
 upon him in his death and in his life. There- 
 fore he interpreted to men their own 
 sorrow. He was a mystic : he taught that 
 2
 
 IIOBERT HUGH <BENSON 
 mysticism, the vision and experience which 
 comes in passivity and by silence " a 
 silence more articulate than words " as he 
 wrote was in the reach of the humblest. 
 And a steady look at the man was needed. 
 All that he gave to his contemporaries was 
 the history of his conversion, that it might 
 be useful to them. But there was never a 
 word about his early life in the world, about 
 his life as an artist in fiction. Soon we shall 
 have many side-lights upon him, and 
 ultimately the biography and letters 
 promised by Father Martindale. It is here 
 as a mystic, an Englishman who will take 
 his place amongst the true mystics of the 
 Church, that a few facts and souvenirs are 
 put together with a permitted narrative of 
 his life at home.
 
 II 
 
 HUGH BENSON, as he was always for- 
 merly called, owed the name to his 
 birthplace. His father was Chancellor of 
 the Cathedral at Lincoln and lived in its 
 splendid precincts, where his youngest child 
 was born. The sanctity of St. Hugh of 
 Lincoln inspired the father long before the 
 son wrote his life and spread the fame of 
 the Carthusian Order that he adorned. 
 His first name of Robert was used by him 
 when he first began to publish. From 
 Lincoln the future Archbishop passed to 
 Truro, where as Bishop he built the fine 
 modern cathedral. Devoted to the wild 
 Cornish country-side, where the Bishop's 
 family made Kenwyn Vicarage their home, 
 Hugh always Hugh, as we have said, in his 
 home, and Hugh for us in this narrative 
 first became known to me as the sheltered 
 boy of a dignified and simple little ecclesi- 
 astical court within the walls of a country 
 vicarage. It was much enlarged by, and re- 
 ceived the name of Lis Escop from, Arch- 
 4
 
 <HOBERT: HUGH <BENSON 
 bishop Benson, whose episcopal life there 
 reminded his successor of ideal primitive 
 Christian days. At Lambeth Palace and 
 Addington Park, the ancient houses of the 
 English primates, the character of the 
 family life changed little. A taste for the 
 wild country found in Cornwall expanded 
 into riding and shooting and wandering 
 tastes at Addington ; and the delicious 
 topography of By What Authority owes its 
 colour to an early acquaintance with his- 
 torical country-sides between Tonbridge 
 and Canterbury. 
 
 He went to Eton at thirteen as a scholar 
 on the Foundation, easily winning the 
 scholarship, but not following it up with any 
 great University prize at Trinity, Cambridge, 
 where he graduated. He lived for his 
 friends, who looked upon him with great 
 affection, and for no particular reason with 
 great surprise. " When I was with him," 
 explained one of them, " I felt that every- 
 thing was touched with romance and im- 
 portance." Nobody then had any idea of 
 his gifts or of his power of work. It was 
 only known vaguely that he had written an 
 unpublished novel, and that he was en- 
 thusiastic. Also that he was devoted to 
 music, and much occupied with the future 
 of opera. He wrote a libretto which was 
 
 5
 
 1(OBERT HUGH BENSON 
 to transform the art with a friend, but it 
 was never finished. His virtues and his 
 shortcomings at that time were those of all 
 young men of the upper classes who live in 
 the open air and abhor pretensions to 
 originality. But soon he was to find his 
 vocation at Trinity. He had read rather 
 desultorily for the Indian Civil Service, but 
 he failed in the first part of the examination, 
 and could not stand another year of cram- 
 ming. Contrary to his family's expecta- 
 tions, he decided to read for Orders in the 
 Church of England. After a year with the 
 inspiring leader Dr. Vaughan, at the theo- 
 logical college of Llandaff, he was ordained 
 Deacon by his father in 1894. He was 
 drawn to the pastorate, and became at once 
 known as a promising preacher in the 
 famous Eton Mission of the East End of 
 London : then he received his full English 
 orders whilst still curate of the Mission, 
 living in its settlement. So for two years 
 the boyish form of Hugh Benson disap- 
 pears into mean streets, crowded rooms, 
 jam factories, amid a nomad population of 
 8000 souls ; the population of the Eton 
 Mission was said at that time to change 
 every three years. 
 
 The whole tenor of mind of the young 
 University man in his first pastorate after 
 6
 
 1(pBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 theological reading is represented by the 
 verses called " Christian Evidences " : 
 
 NOW God forbid that Faith be built on dates, 
 Cursive or uncial letters, scribe or gloss, 
 What one conjectures, proves, or demonstrates : 
 
 This were the loss 
 
 Of all to which God bids that man aspire, 
 This were the death of life, quenching of fire. 
 
 Nay, but with Faith I see. Not even Hope, 
 
 Her glorious sister, stands so high as she. 
 For this but stands expectant on the slope 
 
 That leads where He 
 
 Her source and consummation sets His seat, 
 Where Faith dwells always to caress His Feet. 
 
 Nay, but with Faith I marked my Saviour go, 
 
 One August noonday, down the stifling street, 
 That reeked with filth and man ; marked from 
 Him flow 
 
 Radiance so sweet, 
 
 The man ceased cursing, laughter lit the child, 
 The woman hoped again, as Jesus smiled. 
 
 Two years and a half of the strain of East 
 End work brought about Hugh Benson's 
 first attack from overwork. Archbishop 
 Benson died in 1896, and Hugh joined his 
 family in Egypt, where they spent a winter 
 for the health of a cherished sister. Of this 
 stay Hugh recorded in the Confessions of a 
 Convert that he received his first vivid 
 impression of the visible Church. 
 
 7
 
 HUGH <BENSON 
 He returned to England to take up 
 pastorate work in the country, in a new 
 curacy at Kemsing, Kent ; here he became 
 closely in touch with village people, and 
 taught them to take great pleasure in the 
 performance of religious plays. Then sud- 
 denly, in 1898, at the age of twenty-seven, 
 the popular, the intensely English, the 
 eager and excitable Hugh Benson entered 
 the contemplative life at Mirfield with the 
 Anglican " Community of the Resurrec- 
 tion." It was founded within the discipline 
 of the Church of England by the present 
 Bishop of Oxford, then Canon Gore. He was 
 very happy there, though not, we understood, 
 particularly disciplined, and with a humorous 
 pencil drew pictures of minute monks of 
 Mirfield with all the gestures of their well- 
 ordered day. 
 
 I shall never forget, however, my surprise 
 at learning that Hugh Benson was a monk. 
 That he should have left the line of pro- 
 motion with his East-End or his Kentish 
 curacy had no share in the surprise, because 
 the purity of his spiritual life was manifest 
 in his preaching, and ambition had not been 
 a motive power in any of his name. But I 
 had absolutely no clue to his choice of the 
 contemplative life in a community. He 
 came into the room one day, about this time, 
 8
 
 1(0 BERT HUGH <BENSON IN
 
 1(OBERT HUGH <BENSON 
 unexpectedly, and threw himself into a chair 
 with the exclamation, " Oh ! how is H. ? " 
 He was living in the memory of Cambridge 
 days, and " H." embodied them. Mirfield 
 he quickly brought before my eyes, hill-top 
 buildings, from the windows of which was 
 generally to be seen a pall of smoke. Below 
 the pall was occasionally discovered, he said, 
 a manufacturing town of the North. He 
 did not help me to understand why he had 
 chosen the hill-top. I had no knowledge 
 then of the influence of men bound by the 
 vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, 
 upon the toiling masses. I had heard 
 wonders of his preaching and his young 
 pastorate. Now he was spending three 
 years and a half of the very strength of 
 youth in preaching without any special call 
 to the masses. He was thirty, and had not 
 uttered any original thought. 
 
 With many others, I was at this point of 
 nescience about the use of the contem- 
 plative Orders when I learnt about Hugh 
 Benson's conversion in September 1903. 
 In the following year I read the first utter- 
 ance of his creative thought. It was in the 
 form of an old priest's narrative of super- 
 natural influences. And the book was to 
 touch hearts. It was to reveal his art, and 
 make men want to verify the life described. 
 10
 
 1(0 BERT HUGH <BENSON 
 
 But if I had had The Light Invisible in my 
 hands at that time, I should not yet have 
 understood his need for solitude, his in- 
 dividual vision ; it was only later, and with 
 her who was " the heart and hinge " of all 
 her son's love of home, that I learnt to know 
 more of his and of his mother's sympathy 
 with the contemplative life. It is necessary 
 to speak of her. 
 
 It is well known that Monsignor Benson's 
 mother received, in earliest girlhood, the 
 education of a man, and that she was the 
 only sister of a brilliant band of brothers, 
 of whom Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Moral 
 Philosophy at Cambridge, had lasting fame. 
 With a great household to care for, from 
 very young married days, she taught her 
 own clever sons. When Mrs. Benson lost 
 her finely endowed eldest son at seventeen, 
 already a great scholar at Winchester, she 
 was drawn very near to the Unseen. She 
 had ever been her husband's adviser ; in 
 the hour of trial she was the inspiration of 
 the mourning home. 
 
 Her firm Christian faith had not been 
 formed without deep inquiry. The most 
 intellectual age of the world and its philo- 
 sophic influences had affected her in youth. 
 But in a difficult time she preserved a 
 dogmatic faith which was whole-hearted, 
 
 II
 
 1(pSERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 and therefore useful to others as well as to 
 herself. Mrs. Benson never wrote. Her 
 gifts of converse and sympathy were fed by 
 a great power of inward silence. She set 
 much store on meditation, and practised it 
 all through her active life at Lambeth. 
 Her youngest son's first call to the contem- 
 plative life did not surprise his mother, 
 ohe personally knew its worth. 
 
 In the secluded home in Sussex, which 
 was hers after the Archbishop's death, an 
 expanded view of Catholic devotion was 
 welcomed by her. Monsignor Benson has 
 related the story of his conversion. I am 
 writing without any book, but I think his 
 first words following on his discovery of 
 Truth were : " I went to my mother." 
 
 In her house, and at her side, the inter- 
 vening time was spent which elapsed be- 
 tween his farewell to Mirfield and his 
 reception into the Church, which was 
 quickly followed by his novitiate for the 
 priesthood in Rome. The interval was 
 about six months. And the young preacher, 
 already known to the world as one of the best 
 in the Church of England, spent a time of 
 silence. There is a path in his mother's 
 garden at Tremans known as the Priest's 
 Walk. An ancient wooden crucifix is set 
 there by the owner of the house, amid many 
 
 12
 
 1(pSERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 sheltering yews. The Breviary was said 
 here, and certain of the Poems written, 
 the simple overflowings of a full heart. 
 This was in 1903, when he decided not to 
 renew his vows at Mirfield.
 
 Ill 
 
 AT Tremans, in the whole vision of the 
 -**> Catholic Church and its impress from 
 its Founder, in undisturbed silence, and 
 with the fertilising influence of sympathy 
 in his home, he began to produce with 
 extraordinary fertility. He was thirty-two 
 when he wrote The Light Invisible. He had 
 broken from controversy like a young lion, 
 and henceforth stood for all that was 
 positive in spiritual teaching. 
 
 The historical novel, By What Authority, 
 was written there almost without books. 
 The Great Keynes of the story, which is full 
 of the charm of Sussex names and roads of 
 fame in Tudor days, when Linfield was a 
 deer forest, is the pleasant group of farm cot- 
 tages and the church and the green within 
 sight of the South Downs to-day. It was 
 once a bustling village filled with news of 
 the Great Armada. Tremans is the Dower 
 House of the story, where the noble priest 
 hero came to his vocation. 
 
 But the quiet catechumen days gave place 
 H
 
 1(OBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 to a long novitiate in the burning heats of 
 Rome, where no seclusion could be found 
 from fashionable society. The cynic that 
 Hugh Benson might very easily have be- 
 come in his hatred of social banalite was 
 here tested. But we need not dwell on what 
 is so evident to students of his novels : in 
 that respect he never quite attained the 
 " wise indifference of the wise " or learnt 
 the " scorn of scorn " of the greatest 
 natures. At the time, I was more conscious 
 of another lack indifference to the great 
 arts of painting and sculpture at their 
 highest. Music was the only art he 
 recognised. How well I remember the 
 answer to my first eager question about the 
 Italian stay. " Were not Rome and Italy 
 a perfect delight ? " No, indeed ! he was 
 only impatient to escape and get back to 
 England. I recalled to him, a thorough 
 Englishman from boyhood, his delight in 
 John Inglesant when at Eton. That in- 
 conclusive romance took the reader to Italy, 
 and found the counterpart to its aspiration 
 in the churches and art of Italy. I did not 
 anticipate what a John Bull he was to remain. 
 The Religion of a Plain Man and The 
 Letters of a Pariah give us the exact value 
 set by Hugh on forms, ceremonies, and 
 the outward things of the Church. " They 
 
 15
 
 1(OBERT HUGH BENSON 
 are just nothing at all," said an Irish 
 nun to me once. She also was a true 
 mystic. To Robert Hugh Benson the 
 visible forms, of course, were essential as 
 soon as the inner life was grasped, and they 
 were also a strong help to the inner life : 
 but he was too much of an Englishman, and 
 he understood the thoughts and ways of 
 Englishmen too well, ever to confuse Truth 
 with aesthetic contemplation. His novi- 
 tiate in Rome lasted, I think, a year, and 
 then in the Spring, 1904, began his life of 
 ever-increasing energy preaching, writing 
 without pause for measuring his success, 
 neglecting effect " he was not out for 
 fame but for souls," wrote of him a Francis- 
 can monk. He interviewed and directed his 
 countrymen and Americans. His American 
 tours should make a chapter in themselves. 
 I hope we shall learn much of them. 
 
 The editing and prefacing of books which 
 he thought useful to souls was a work 
 charged with his message. To take one 
 instance, his Preface to the Modern Pilgrim's 
 Progress, the book of a convert who died in 
 the same month as himself. It sent her 
 highly philosophical message, so well 
 pointed and carefully fashioned, like an arrow 
 from the bow when it is directed by a 
 powerful hand. Then his lecturing must 
 16
 
 C. 'BENSON, 5^. H. 'BENSON, AND 
 E. F. 'BENSON, 1907
 
 1(OBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 
 also be passed over with only one mention. 
 The lecture on Lourdes, delivered in 1914, 
 so memorable for all who heard it, was no 
 mere outcome of vivid impressions gathered 
 at the Grotto, but the result of long balanc- 
 ing and undoing of prejudice created by his 
 horror that men should become Catholics 
 for the sake of regaining their health ; fears 
 clearly expressed to me in 1906, but after- 
 wards dropped when he had himself visited 
 Lourdes and seen how the Church safe- 
 guards it from such abuse. 
 
 18
 
 IV 
 
 TN 1907 Monsignor Benson made at Hare 
 -* Street, Hertfordshire, a retreat for him- 
 self. The ancient house and village stand 
 within one hour of London by rail, thirty- 
 miles by the old posting roads of Bishops- 
 gate and Ware. We have his own descrip- 
 tion of it in Oddsfish : 
 
 The house without was of timber and plaster, 
 very solidly built, but in no way pretentious. 
 There was a little passage as we came in, and to 
 right and left lay the Great Chamber (as it was 
 called) and the dining-room. It is strange how 
 some houses, upon a first acquaintance with them, 
 seem like old friends ; and how others, though one 
 may have lived in them fifty years, are never 
 familiar to those who live in them. Now Hare 
 Street House was one of the first kind. This very 
 day that I first set eyes on it, it was as if I had 
 lived there as a child. The sunlight streamed into 
 the Great Chamber, and past the yews into the 
 parlour ; and upon the lawns outside ; and the 
 noise of the bees in the limes was as if an organ 
 played softly ; and it was all to me as if I had 
 known it a hundred years. 
 
 19
 
 HUGH 'BENSON 
 And so it was chosen as a country house 
 to be enjoyed for a few days in the week, 
 when every week-end was given to preach- 
 ing in all parts of Great Britain, chiefly in 
 the North ; and week days were devoted to 
 missions and to the direction of souls. 1 For 
 some years the house was shared with a 
 doctor friend, a Catholic who was much 
 interested in modern psychical healing. A 
 house was built for Miss Lyall, the daughter 
 of Sir Alfred Lyall, who was a useful critic 
 of the historical novels written at Hare 
 Street. 
 
 The chapel of the house was an old brew- 
 house ; its crucifix was carved in the house 
 by the owner. It was possible for the two 
 busy men at Hare Street to escape the 
 obsession of detail which is such a snare to 
 the novelist and to the man of science. 
 There was work in the gardens and the 
 orchard it is a largish demesne, about four 
 or five acres. There was wholesome manual 
 work in the carving shop, which enriched 
 the chapel with carvings : when was the 
 contemplative life not safeguarded by the 
 labour of the hands ? Music was never 
 neglected by Monsignor Benson ; his writings 
 
 1 Monsignor Benson's excellent factotum at Hare 
 Street gives the average of days spent by his master 
 there as two or three in the week ; he was once at Hare 
 Street for three weeks. 
 20
 
 HUGH <BENSON 
 are full of it. But it is touching to learn that 
 it was in the hour of pain and exhaustion 
 from ceaseless work and long overstrain that 
 he made choice of a Bechstein grand piano. 
 A pianist friend was to bring Mozart, 
 Beethoven, and Bach into his home. Nor 
 was private correspondence with friends 
 always brief but eager wanting. " Such 
 various friendships such evidences of zest 
 and interest and fun on his side, and of 
 gratitude and affection on the part of the 
 recipients, short little correspondences, too, 
 opening away like corridors. . . ." Such 
 was the description of Hugh's correspond- 
 ence given me by his eldest brother and 
 most faithful executor. 
 
 My own share of it was in connection with 
 the work of Hugh Benson's dear friend, 
 Norman Potter, whose Boys' Homes had 
 grown up since their first friendship when 
 they were converts of the same year 
 they were led to the goal by totally opposite 
 ways. We were selling books and authors' 
 autographs for the Homes, but oddly 
 enough he gave us no books and was very 
 chary of his autograph. I had read poems 
 of his at Tremans, written in the interval 
 of 1903 The Halt names that period in 
 one poem ; and I asked if the Tremans 
 poems, as they always were named by me 
 
 21
 
 1(0 BERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 breathing the peace of the place could be 
 printed for the benefit of the Homes. The 
 answer was almost a cry from Hugh Benson, 
 to the effect that poetry seemed a far-off 
 thing in his present busy life : he should 
 never write any more : Norman Potter was 
 welcome to any that his mother could find 
 at Tremans, but he was not to be consulted 
 about their publication the urgent business 
 of his days made poetry seem remote from 
 him. With what fine literary welcome, and 
 with what generous issue for the Homes, 
 the poems have been published, is manifest 
 in England and in America. 
 
 22
 
 AS[D then, in the very thick of the 
 warm charities of life, a sudden silence 
 made itself around him who had ever taught 
 the lessons of solitude. In a densely popu- 
 lated city, on a mission to thousands of poor 
 Irish Catholics, the sudden final silence 
 came. The Church received, in the first 
 bereft and sorrowing hour, the restrained 
 and impressive narrative of Monsignor 
 Benson's death from the priest who attended 
 him. But we must go a little further back 
 in the summer of unparalleled events before 
 we come to the narrative of Canon Sharrock 
 of Salford, the town in which Monsignor 
 Benson died. Hugh Benson spent the first 
 week of August after the declaration of war 
 with his mother and with his two brothers 
 and Miss Tait, their great friend, in the 
 peace of Tremans. A feature of the house 
 should be mentioned here, with the last 
 meeting of mother and son. Mrs. Benson 
 had, in the early days of her son's Roman 
 orders, devoted a room to his use as a 
 
 2 3
 
 1(OBERT HUGH <BENSON 
 
 chapel. Here, with the permission of her 
 own ecclesiastical authorities and his, an 
 altar was brought, and Mass said when he 
 was in the house. (It was not said at 
 Tremans in his absence.) The young men 
 associated with Hugh Benson generally 
 found Mass at Tremans at the great feasts, 
 and a kind welcome from the owner of the 
 house. It is of the Christmas morning of 
 1904, when a friend riding or driving over 
 from Ashdown Forest saw the lights of the 
 chapel shining across the deep lane, and 
 heard Mass, and afterwards received that 
 kind welcome, that I have the most vivid 
 .impression. Surely the last Mass said there 
 in August 1914 will have brought a blessing 
 on the house which was the last meeting 
 place of mother and priest-son. 
 
 In the end of August, absorbed by the 
 suspense before Mons, and then the stu- 
 pendous news of ceaseless fighting, and 
 stirred to the depths by his country's unity 
 and heroism, Monsignor Benson began to 
 compile the little volume named Vexilla 
 Regis. The ancient hymn had furnished 
 a noble title The Standard of the King. 
 The volume contains devotions for each 
 day of the week, following the ecclesiastical 
 order ; and the choice of daily chapters 
 shows Monsignor Benson's affinity with the 
 24
 
 AT HARE STREET HOUSE, 1909
 
 <HOBERT HUGH <BENSON 
 prophetic character of the sublime Scrip- 
 tures, which possibly never have sounded 
 so solemnly and consolingly as in the most 
 modern and most terrible war of the world. 
 But he was not to correct the proofs of 
 Vexilla Regis ; he was not to know the 
 issue of the battle for Calais. He was to 
 leave the world of strife : the world of 
 peace was to come suddenly in sight. 
 
 Hugh Benson, according to the testi- 
 mony of the one who knew him the best, 
 had always wished to die young, and " to 
 pass swiftly after living intensely." But 
 when illness came, he resisted it. In early 
 September came the alarm. Attacks of 
 violent neuralgia of the heart made his 
 family anxious : consultations were held 
 with doctors at the evidence of overwork. 
 He was ordered to rest, and agreed to go 
 abroad in late autumn. But meanwhile 
 he worked. And he had at heart to preach 
 ^two more Missions, one in a very humble 
 church. At the obscure Ulverstone, a 
 suburb of Manchester, from October 5th to 
 nth, he preached between the attacks of pain 
 and once in acute pain, so that there were 
 pauses in the sermon and the congregation 
 waited motionless. The Mission at Salford 
 followed, and of this attempt, and of the 
 noble struggle with pain, Canon Sharrock of 
 26
 
 %)BERT HUGH BENSON 
 Salford Cathedral is the witness in a widely 
 known narrative. Monsignor Benson sud- 
 denly recognised himself to be very ill : 
 characteristically he threw himself into a 
 motor car, ostensibly to seek further advice 
 in London from doctors, but with a strong 
 instinct, all who knew him may imagine, to 
 reach his brethren and his home. 
 
 But it was not to be. Pain pursued. 
 He was brought back and laid in the Bishop's 
 library on his return to Bishop's House at 
 Salford, where he was to die. Here Canon 
 Sharrock relates how pneumonia supervened, 
 and how, on Saturday, October 17, 1914, he 
 warned Monsignor Benson of his danger : 
 
 He received the last rites with great devotion, 
 and all unbidden made his profession of faith with 
 marked strength and vivacity. Sunday morning 
 saw a change, after a restless night which had tried 
 the endurance of both doctor and nurse. He was 
 never delirious, but his restlessness was acute. On 
 Sunday morning I gave him Holy Viaticum. His 
 piety and devotion were most touching. He made 
 all the responses, even correcting me when my 
 emotion caused me to stumble at the Mmreatur. 
 On Sunday morning he received a visit from his 
 brother (Mr. Arthur C. Benson), which gave him 
 great pleasure. He even then informed me that 
 he would be quite well by Tuesday, "though," 
 he added, " this hard breathing is a terrible bore." 
 His mental faculties were as keenly active as ever, 
 and no tendency to mental exhaustion was observ- 
 
 27
 
 TtOBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 
 able. His strength appeared good, but it was only 
 too evident that the terrible strain on the heart 
 from pneumonia was beginning to tell. Later on, 
 in the evening, for the first time, I abandoned 
 hope. He spoke continuously to me of his friends, 
 and gave me his many messages. 
 
 At one o'clock on Monday morning, having left 
 him for a short time, I was hastily summoned by 
 the nurse, at his request. Entering the sick room, 
 I saw that the last call had come. He told me so 
 himself, with the words, " God's will be done." 
 He bade me summon his brother, who was in the 
 adjoining apartment. The prayers for the dying 
 were recited, and again he joined in the responses, 
 clearly and distinctly. Once, when I paused, he 
 bade me in God's name to go on. He stopped the 
 prayers twice or thrice to give some instructions to 
 his brother. He asked once for guidance as to the 
 right attitude towards death. Once, as I paused, 
 he uttered the prayer, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, 
 I give you my heart and my soul," and joined with 
 us in its completion. Conscious almost to the last 
 moment, seemingly without pain, he breathed forth 
 his soul without struggle at 1.30 A.M. on Monday 
 morning. With his eyes fixed on the priest he 
 died ; it was just as if he had gone to sleep. 
 
 Who but a faithful priest could express 
 for us the final solitude, which the true 
 mystic is ever prepared for ; 
 
 In such an hour 
 
 Of visitation from the living God 
 Sound was there none, nor any sense of joy ; 
 Thought was not, with enjoyment it expired. 
 28
 
 HUGH 'BENSON 
 
 But perfect consciousness was left, and no 
 dying act of faith more precious in the 
 sight of God than the transports of the 
 soul was omitted. 
 
 Mr. Arthur Benson wrote to me of those 
 moments. His letter breathes lofty sym- 
 pathy with all who strain loving eyes to 
 follow a leader to the verge of the far 
 horizons, and he has permitted me to quote 
 what he wrote shortly after : 
 
 His death was very wonderful. He was con- 
 scious till within a few minutes of the end indeed, 
 from the time I came to him (on being summoned) 
 to the last breath was only a few minutes he 
 spoke several times and joined eagerly in the 
 prayers but the thing for which I am most 
 thankful is that he was so entirely and wholly 
 himself- brave, considerate and, I might say, adven- 
 turous. It was simply as though he had left the 
 room, when he died no sense of death, only of 
 life passing on. 
 
 Some day I shall hope to tell you more, but 
 I cannot do more now ; I felt you would like just 
 to know this. 
 
 It is the voice of a sincere and individual 
 interpreter of life that speaks to us in this 
 letter. Mr. Arthur Benson fitly closes our 
 retrospect. He is qualified to interpret the 
 original movements, the elemental character, 
 the himself of that burning soul. 
 
 29
 
 <HpBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 And Mr. Arthur Benson has given us a 
 word that lifts up. " He was entirely and 
 wholly himself" Yes, individuality is a 
 link with the world beyond the grave. And 
 when was Hugh Benson not true to himself ? 
 " To thine own self be true " is a high 
 command. A change of religion implies 
 no remoulding of our faculties and reflected 
 impulses. There are converts who would 
 make us think otherwise. But he was so 
 much himself that the religious biographer 
 will find his task unusually difficult. His 
 was the nature that cracks and breaks the 
 mould that would enclose it stamped with 
 a known pattern. True, his whole Catholic 
 life was the logical response to a strong ob- 
 jective without. But he has verified his 
 great word in Nature and in the super- 
 natural what came to him as Truth. In his 
 death this true mystic tt>uchingly verified 
 the struggle between them of which he so 
 often wrote.
 
 VI 
 
 TT is not our purpose to speak of Mon- 
 * signor Benson's books as a whole. We 
 cannot attempt to estimate the strength of 
 the cairn of historical novels which we have 
 from his hand dealing with the history of 
 Recusancy in England, the top stone of 
 which is Oddsfish. Sufficient to remember 
 in passing that Robert Hugh Benson con- 
 quered The Times, To our astonishment 
 we read in its review of Come Rack, Come 
 Rope, in the autumn of 1912, the words, 
 " Why do Englishmen ignore the history of 
 Catholic Recusancy in their near past ? It is 
 such a noble page of the history of England." 
 As to the novels dealing with our own day, 
 we have even less power of judging their 
 durability. He wrote them for his own 
 times and his own people. Many a man in 
 society has said to himself in reading his 
 portraits of Conventionalists, Sentimentalists 
 or Cowards, " This is me," and has directed 
 his life afresh. But we are looking for 
 instances to illustrate what we have seen 
 
 31
 
 1(OBERT HUGH <BENSON 
 
 of a deep and true, though plain and un- 
 exaggerated, mystic. We must leave aside 
 Richard Raynal, which is the most 
 artistic of all Monsignor Benson's books. 
 It has suggestions penetrating and suave, 
 like the hints of an invisible world in the 
 pilgrimage of Bunyan. But it is so mediaeval 
 that it might have been written with a 
 purely artistic purpose. He was, as a fact, 
 full of his message. But he was apt at 
 seizing many forms equally well suited to 
 deliver it. In the Papers of a Pariah he 
 speaks as a child of Nature about to be 
 reconciled to the Church. We choose the 
 following passages, because they show us a 
 soul very attentive to Nature at the outset 
 in searching for an interpretation of life and 
 death. Nature was the schoolmaster to 
 bring him to the Church. 
 
 We take a realistic description of a poor 
 paralytic's sordid death chamber : 
 
 Here was a chess-board of black and white, of 
 suffering and sweetness, the dying man and the 
 windless morning and the air like warm wine, 
 soft and invigorating, and over all the tender vault 
 of blue skeined with clouds. And what right have 
 I to say that the board is essentially white and only 
 accidentally black ? If it were I who were dying, 
 should I not feel that agony was the truth of it all 
 and peace no more than an occasional incident ? 
 
 32
 
 IN HIS GARDEN, jgu 
 Photograph by Miss C. Chichcstcr
 
 1(OBERT HUGH 'SENSON 
 
 But the dying man was a Catholic, and 
 the poor soul with scarce a glimmer of sense 
 received the last Sacraments at the hands 
 of the Priest, and the witness, who was not 
 yet reconciled to the Church, wrote : 
 
 It appears to me that my first reflections on the 
 tragedy and heartlessness of death were those 
 of a stupid savage. . . . Death now no longer 
 seemed to me a sickening horror. ... It was as if, 
 after a couple of harsh notes had been struck on some 
 instrument, notes of brutal irreconcilable contrasts, 
 another had been added to them which resulted in 
 a solemn sweet chord. There was no longer that 
 shrieking inconsistency between the mellow day 
 outside and the death-sweat pains within ; it was 
 no longer true that a Lord of Love held Himself 
 apart in some sunny Heaven and tossed this heart- 
 breaking problem down into a venomously cruel 
 world ; it was all one now : He held both in the 
 hollow of His Arms against His quiet Heart, in 
 a span so vast that I could not follow it, but in an 
 embrace so warm that I was no longer chilled. 
 
 In None Other Gods we have the mature 
 expression of Monsignor Benson's individual 
 beliefs ; we may sum them up thus. First, 
 in the silent inward revelation ; secondly, 
 in supernatural influences veiled by, though 
 latent in, Nature ; finally, in the power of 
 the forms of the Church to bring not 
 aesthetes but sinners and sufferers to free- 
 dom, because they are divinely instituted. 
 
 34
 
 1(OBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 The story is of a typical undergraduate of 
 Trinity, Cambridge, who is the eldest son 
 and takes his father's threat of disinheriting 
 him for a change of religion, literally, by 
 simplifying himself like the Russian nihi- 
 lists, and, half gipsy, half ascetic, takes to 
 a wandering life. He adopts an English 
 major who has fallen from respectability, 
 and the young woman adopted by the major, 
 and for good English humour this sketch is 
 worthy of Stevenson. The wanderers, who 
 get their livelihood on farms, find them- 
 selves in the laboratory of a scientist, a 
 dogmatic materialist, who believes in nothing 
 but toxins. Toxin can do everything, said 
 this enthusiast, and, sure enough, it cures the 
 Poverello as Frank Guiseley has by this 
 time become of tetanus. 
 
 Here is a problem not known in the 
 Fioretti. But we are reminded of the spirit 
 of St. Francis. The ardour of love that was 
 in Frank was manifested first to the doctor's 
 manservant and then to the doctor in a 
 mysterious effluence from the patient. He 
 worked upon them. One enthusiast had 
 met another : the doctor had found a 
 positive opposing power in his patient : a 
 sense of intimacy unparalleled in the 
 scientist's life was felt for Frank : he had 
 met a human soul, an indestructible spirit. 
 
 35
 
 <I(OBERT HUGH <BENSON 
 The views of the mystics on Nature are 
 defined : they give up the pagan joy in 
 Nature, to receive Nature back again in the 
 sense of underlying spirit. No theory comes 
 from Robert Hugh Benson. But here is a 
 description which must appeal to all who 
 feel the objective truth and reality behind 
 Nature. 
 
 Frank slept deeply and well, half waking once, 
 however, at that strange moment of the night when 
 the earth turns and sighs in her sleep, when every 
 cow gets up and lies down again. He was con- 
 scious of a shrill crowing, thin as a bugle, from 
 some farmyard out of sight ; then he turned over 
 and slept again. 
 
 When he awoke it was dawn. . . . Certainly he 
 was a little stiff when he moved, but there was 
 a kind of interior contentment . . . that caused 
 that not to matter. 
 
 After a minute or two he sat up, felt about for 
 his shoes and slipped them on. Then he unwound 
 the wrapping about his neck, and crept out of the 
 shelter. 
 
 It was that strange pause before the dawn when 
 the light has broadened so far as to extinguish the 
 stars. . . . Everything was absolutely motionless 
 about him. . . . The dew lay soaking and thick 
 on the grass slopes. . . . The silence and the 
 solemnity of the whole seemed to him extraordinary. 
 There was not a leaf that stirred each hung as if 
 cut of steel ; there was not a bird which chirped 
 nor a distant cock that crew ; rabbits eyed him not 
 twenty yards away, unafraid in this hour of truce. 
 
 36
 
 1(OBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 
 It seemed to him like some vast stage on to 
 which he had wandered unexpectedly. The per- 
 formance of the day before had been played to an 
 end, the night scene-shifting was finished, and the 
 players of the new eternal drama were not yet 
 come. An hour hence they would be all about : 
 the sounds would begin again ; men would cross 
 the field-paths. . . . But at present the stage was 
 clear swept, washed, clean and silent. 
 
 It was the solemnity then that impressed him 
 most solemnity and an air of expectation. Yet it 
 was not mere expectation. There was a suggestion 
 of the fundamental and the normal, as if perhaps 
 movement and sound were, after all, no better 
 than interruptions ; as if there were some great 
 secret actually present and displayed in dead silence 
 and invisibility, before those only who possessed 
 the senses necessary to perceive it. 
 
 We follow the wanderers to a farm, a 
 prison, and then to a great Benedictine 
 monastery of forty men on All Hallows' 
 E'en. The outcome was : 
 
 . . . an extract, taken by permission, from a few 
 pages of Frank Guiseley's diary. These pages were 
 written with the encouragement of Dom Hildebrand 
 Maple, O.S.B., and were sent to him later at his own 
 request. 
 
 "... He told me a great many things that 
 surprised me. For instance, he seemed to know 
 all about certain ideas that I had. . . . 
 
 " I went to confession to him on Friday morning, 
 in the church. He did not say a great deal then, 
 but he asked if I would care to talk to him after- 
 
 37
 
 I^OBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 
 wards. I said I would, and went to him in the 
 parlour after dinner. The first thing that happened 
 was that he asked me to tell him as plainly as I 
 could anything that had happened to me in my 
 soul, I mean since I had left Cambridge. So I 
 tried to describe it. 
 
 " I said that at first things went pretty well in 
 my soul, and that it was only bodily things that 
 troubled me getting fearfully tired and stiff, being 
 uncomfortable, the food, the sleeping, and so on. 
 Then, as soon as this wore off I met the Major 
 and Gertie. I was rather afraid of saying all that 
 I felt about these ; but he made me, and I told 
 him how extraordinarily I seemed to hate them . . . 
 how I felt almost sick now and then when the Major 
 talked to me and told me stories. . . . The only 
 relief was that I knew that I could, as a matter of 
 fact, chuck them whenever I wanted and go home 
 again. But this relief was taken away from me as 
 soon as I understood that I had to keep with them, 
 and do my best somehow to separate them. Of 
 course, I must get Gertie back to her people some 
 time, and till that's done it's no good thinking 
 about anything else. 
 
 " After a while, however I think it was just 
 before I got into trouble with the police I began 
 to see that I was a conceited ass for hating the 
 Major so much. It was absurd for me, I said, to 
 put on airs, when the difference between him and 
 me was just that he had been brought up in one 
 way and I in another. . . . 
 
 " Then I began to see that I had done absolutely 
 nothing of any good whatever that nothing had 
 really cost me anything ; and that the things I 
 
 38
 
 ROBERT HUGH <BENSON 
 
 was proud of were simply self-will my leaving 
 Cambridge, and all the rest. They were theatrical, 
 or romantic, or egotistical ; there was no real sacri- 
 fice. I should have minded much more not doing 
 them. I began to feel extraordinarily small. . . . 
 
 "I was getting all wrong with regard to the 
 Major and myself, and I had just begun to see that 
 I must do something that my whole soul hated if 
 it was to be of any use. Then there came that 
 minute in the barn when I heard the police were 
 after us. , . ." [Frank went to prison for the 
 Major.] "I couldn't be proud of it ever because 
 the whole thing was so mean and second-rate. . . ." 
 [The girl to whom Frank was engaged took ex- 
 ception to the prison and threw him over.] . . . 
 Simply everything was altered. Religion, of course, 
 seemed no good at all. I don't understand quite 
 what people mean by * consolations ' of religion. 
 Religion doesn't seem to me a thing like Art or 
 Music, in which you can take refuge. It either 
 covers everything, or it isn't religion. Religion 
 never has seemed to me (I don't know if I'm 
 wrong) one thing, like other things, so that you 
 change about and back again. . . . It's either the 
 background and foreground all in one, or it's a kind 
 of game. It's either true, or it's a pretence. 
 
 " Well, all this, in a way, taught me it was ab- 
 solutely true. Things wouldn't have held together 
 at all unless it was true. But it was no sort of 
 satisfaction. It seemed to me for a while that it 
 was horrible that it was true ; that it was frightful 
 to think that God could be like that since this 
 Jenny-business had really happened. . . . One 
 thing, however, Father Hildebrand thought very 
 
 39
 
 1(0 BERT HUGH WENS ON 
 
 important (he asked me about it particularly) was 
 that I honestly did not feel any resentment what- 
 ever against either God or Jenny. ... I just had 
 to lie still inside and look at it. He tells me that 
 this shows that the first part of the ' process,' as he 
 called it, was finished (he called it the * Purgative 
 Way '). And I must say that what happened next 
 seems to fit in rather well. 
 
 " The new * process ' began quite suddenly when 
 I awoke in the shepherd's hut one morning at 
 Ripon. ... I saw suddenly that what had been 
 wrong in me was that I had made myself the 
 centre of things, and God a kind of circumference. 
 When He did or allowed things, I said, *Why 
 does He ? ' -from my point of view. That is to say, 
 I set up my ideas of justice and love and so forth, 
 and then compared His with mine, not mine with 
 His. And I suddenly saw or, rather, I knew 
 already when I awoke that this was simply stupid. 
 Even now I cannot imagine why I didn't see it 
 before : I had heard people say it, of course in 
 sermons and books but I suppose it had meant 
 nothing to me. (Father Hildebrand tells me that 
 I had seen it intellectually, but had never embraced 
 it with my will.) Because when one once really 
 sees that, there's no longer any puzzle about any- 
 thing. One can simply never say * Why ?' again. 
 The thing's finished. 
 
 " Now this ' process ' (as Father H. calls it) has 
 gone on in a most extraordinary manner ever since. 
 That beginning near Ripon was like opening a 
 door into another country, and I've been walking 
 ever since and seeing new things. All sorts of 
 things that I had believed as a Catholic things, 
 4
 
 <HpBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 
 I mean, which I assented to simply because the 
 Church said so have, so to speak, come up and 
 tnrncd themselves inside out. I couldn't write 
 them down, because you can't write these things 
 down, or even put them intelligibly to yourself. 
 You just see that they are so. . . . Well, all this is 
 what Father H. calls the 'Illuminative Way,' 
 and I think I understand what he means. It came 
 to a sort of point on All Souls' Eve at the monastery. 
 I saw the whole thing then for a moment or two, 
 and not only Purgatory. . . . And Father H. tells 
 me that I must begin to look forward to a new 
 * process* what he calls the 'Way of Union.' 
 I don't understand much what he means by that ; 
 I don't see that more could happen to me ; there 
 has seemed a sort of lull for the last day or two 
 ever since All Souls' Day, in fact." 
 
 All Souls' Vigil in the Benedictine mon- 
 astery revealed to Frank the use of the 
 ceremonies of the Church. 
 
 " We're singing Matins of the Dead, presently," 
 Father Hildebrand said in a low voice. " It's All 
 Souls' Eve. Will you stay, or shall I take you to 
 your room ? " 
 
 " I'll stay, if I may," said Frank. 
 
 Half an hour later the ceremony began. 
 
 Here, I simply despair of description. I know 
 something of what Frank witnessed and perceived, 
 for I have been present myself at this affair in 
 a religious house ; but I do not pretend to be able 
 to write it down. 
 
 First, however, there was the external, visible, 
 
 42
 
 1(OBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 
 audible service : the catafalque, a bier-like erection, 
 all black and yellow, guarded by yellow flames on 
 yellow candles the grave movements, the almost 
 monstrous figures, the rhythm of the ceremonies, 
 and the wail of the music of forty voices singing as 
 one all that I understood. . . . 
 
 But the inner side of these things the reverse 
 of which these things are but a coarse lining, the 
 substance of which is a shadow, that is what passes 
 words and transcends impressions. 
 
 It seemed to Frank that one section, at any rate, 
 of that enormous truth at which he had clutched 
 almost blindly when he had first made his submission 
 to the Church one chamber in that House of Life 
 was not flung open before him. . . . 
 
 It was the catafalque that seemed to him the 
 veiled door to that other world that so manifested 
 itself seen as he saw it in the light of the yellow 
 candles it was as the awful portal of death itself ; 
 beneath that heavy mantle lay not so much a Body 
 of Humanity still in death, as a Soul of Humanity 
 alive beyond death, quick and yet motionless with 
 pain. And those figures that moved about it, with 
 censor and aspersorium, were as angels for tenderness 
 and dignity and undoubted power. They were 
 men like himself, yet they were far more ; and 
 they, too, one day, like himself would pass beneath 
 that pall and need the help of others that should 
 follow them. . . . 
 
 Something of this is but a hint of what Frank 
 experienced ; it came and went, no doubt, in gusts, 
 yet all through he seems to have felt that here was 
 a door into that great watching world beyond 
 that here, in what is supposed by the world to be 
 
 43
 
 ROBERT HUGH 'BENSON 
 the narrow constraint of religion, was a liberty and 
 an outlook into realities such as the open road and 
 nature can but seldom give. 
 
 We have chosen the above passages 
 because they are most typical of a creative 
 mind which never came to its expression 
 at all till the sense within of mysterious 
 grace was met, as in Frank's case, by a 
 strong objective without. 
 
 AT Hare Street, on his death, were 
 found Monsignor Benson's wishes 
 about the burial of his body. The grave 
 is in the orchard at Hare Street. On 
 October 23, the day of the burial, was the 
 Requiem, and the most exquisite art of 
 the sixteenth century was heard in the 
 Mission Chapel of the old house near 
 Buntingford Palestrina and his contem- 
 poraries sung by the great choir of our choir- 
 loving age. The music of the Requiem 
 echoed over the lime-bordered lawn, where 
 a large group of friends stood, unable to 
 find places in the chapel. The words of 
 one very near to him describe the rite 
 within : " You can't think how sustaining 
 we found those great and simple Rites with 
 which he was committed to God." 
 
 44
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE cAPOSTOLATE
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE APOSTOLATE 
 'BT SHANE LESLIE 
 
 A~ONG the few though pathetic refer- 
 ences to Robert Hugh Benson in 
 the well-stored biography of his 
 father, the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, is an account of his once walking 
 with a friend from Cambridge to Lambeth 
 in the course of a single day. The return 
 journey, back from Lambeth to Cambridge, 
 via Rome, proved a longer and a lonelier 
 progress. Nevertheless, after many toils and 
 travels, he found himself in Cambridge 
 again, by the Pope's favour a fully-fledged 
 priest as early as 1904, but without " the 
 faculties," which his rapid advance in 
 ecclesiastical Orders did not permit in the 
 eyes of his Diocesan. As in the celebrated 
 case of Cardinal Manning, the first and 
 necessary step after the Ordination was to 
 take up his theological studies. Accord- 
 
 47
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 ingly, he had obtained Archbishop Bourne's 
 permission to spend the next year of his 
 life, not in a seminary, but under the 
 congenial roof of Monsignor Barnes, an- 
 tiquary, ex-artillery officer, convert, and 
 chaplain to Catholic undergraduates at 
 Cambridge. 
 
 The three silent terms which he spent 
 at Llandaff House the ancient Cambridge 
 residence of an absentee Bishop of that 
 See were not the least strenuous of his life, 
 though he was comparatively unknown . The 
 splash of his conversion no longer eddied 
 the Church Times. A first rumour, that 
 he had been sent by the Inquisition to 
 Cambridge ostensibly for his holidays but 
 intentionally to pervert the evangelic youth, 
 died down, for he loyally obeyed his Arch- 
 bishop's injunction not to practise the 
 pastoral side of theology before he had 
 acquired the doctrinal. He did no more 
 than rejoin old College societies like the 
 Decemviri a species of Club for male 
 " blue-stockings " but he seemed to afford 
 only another instance of the pious obscurity 
 to which Rome relegates her newly initiated. 
 Still he was testing and perfecting himself 
 all the while. At 8.30 every morning he 
 said his Mass in the old ballroom of the 
 Bishop of Llandaff a situation that was not 
 48
 
 1(0 BERT HUGH "BENSON IN 7907 
 Photograph by Basei>i
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 lost on his sense of humour. The re- 
 mainder of the day he spent reading theo- 
 logy and laboriously compiling his early 
 books. The Light Invisible was already on 
 many Anglican shelves. He was now en- 
 grossed in writing The Queen's Tragedy and 
 The Mirror of Shalott, though they were 
 not published till later. The Catholic 
 ghost stories of The Mirror of Shalott were 
 read when written to the superintendent 
 of his studies, who declined to offer en- 
 couragement. But when he retailed them 
 by firelight in the rooms of undergraduates, 
 his success was enormous. His only rival 
 was the Provost of King's, whose Ghost 
 Stories of an Antiquary were being read to 
 nervous listeners at the time. During the 
 daylight he made no appearances except for 
 meals, which he ate in self-imposed silence. 
 In the evenings he used to discuss his past 
 and probe wonderingly into the future. 
 For regular parish combat he felt no par- 
 ticular ability. The Battle of Books lured 
 him. 
 
 He had not yet developed the literary 
 powers which he hoped some original- 
 minded Ordinary would allow him to exert 
 as a free-lance. In one of his most sanguine 
 moments, he designed a kind of religious 
 Hostel for cranks of every religious and 
 
 50
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 
 artistic tendency, for nothing less than the 
 great Order of the Misunderstood. His 
 associates in this enterprise were to live a 
 semi-Carthusian existence, each writing or 
 painting in his proper cell, and only meeting 
 in the chapel or the central hall, which, for 
 the benefit of the weaker brethren, was to 
 be furnished with a music gallery. His 
 chief reason for taking so feverishly to 
 literature was in order to raise the necessary 
 funds for this scheme. " For I am thirty- 
 three already," he used to say, " and nobody 
 writes anything after he is forty " an 
 opinion which his host controverted, but 
 in vain. Hugh Benson knew that his life's 
 work would be largely finished by the time 
 he was forty. It was the span of life he 
 had set himself to live.
 
 II 
 
 A YEAR of hard work and of dreaming 
 came to an end, and Father Benson 
 offered himself to the Rector of Cambridge 
 in the capacity of a new Curate. With 
 Monsignor Scott must always lie the credit 
 of launching him as a preacher and mis- 
 sioner. He had the foresight to see in 
 the applicant a valuable link between the 
 University and the Mission ; and, in spite 
 of the flutter of surprise which was felt in 
 the Diocese, he accepted him. The local 
 objections were twofold : on the part of the 
 Catholics, who felt certain that Father 
 Benson could not know enough theology, 
 and on the part of Anglicans, who were 
 afraid he knew too much. It was queried 
 whether Monsignor Scott had shown a 
 laudable taste in accepting the service of 
 one who had preached as a parson in 
 Cambridge a bare two years previously. 
 But the kindly old man knew his choice, 
 and right well was his paternal care repaid 
 in the years to come. On one occasion
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOL4TE 
 only had he cause to point out a dubious 
 point of theology in one of his protege's 
 sermons, for he always made a point of 
 hearing and enjoying them himself. " Then 
 I will never preach theological sermons 
 again," cried Benson ; and he never did. 
 It was in October 1905 that he launched 
 himself on the mission he had carefully 
 planned during his year of study and 
 reflection. He had become convinced of 
 the irreligious and materialistic atmosphere 
 of Cambridge, which, he used to com- 
 plain, weighed upon him like lead, and he 
 had made up his mind to lift his thin but 
 denunciatory voice at the gates of that 
 mathematical city. To association and atmos- 
 phere he was always as sensitive as an artist 
 to line and colour, and he used to say that 
 it was the unseen pressure of materialism 
 which finally drove him out of Cambridge. 
 
 Nevertheless he did stout battle against 
 her fogs while he was there. His berth 
 resembled that of a consul in foreign parts 
 who is suspected of trying to naturalise 
 the natives surreptitiously. He was not 
 recognised properly by Town or by Gown, 
 though he stood in relations to both. He 
 was as far removed from the broad spirit 
 of University thought as from the petty 
 parochialism of the locality. As the self- 
 
 53
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 appointed champion, though not the official 
 representative, of Rome in the capital of 
 East Anglican Puritanism, his position be- 
 came naturally isolated. It was a pity that 
 his literary wrestlings with Tudorism never 
 allowed him to deal historically with the 
 Cromwellianism of which Cambridge was 
 the cradle. Nevertheless he scented the old 
 Round-headed and Iron-sided mysticism in 
 the watered form of a Christianity which 
 was alternately " revivalist " or " muscular." 
 It was the conviction that he was up 
 against the ramparts of English Protest- 
 antism that lent his early sermons their 
 vim and, it must be added, their vindic- 
 tiveness. Suddenly, and without warning, 
 a quavering but fearless voice was heard 
 crying in the Cambridge desert, criticising 
 every chink in the Anglican armour and 
 testifying most whole-heartedly to the 
 supreme excellences of the Bishop of 
 Rome. The situation was sufficiently 
 piquant to send ripples down the stationary 
 backwaters of collegial existence. 
 
 The religion of the normal undergradu- 
 ate at that date was exactly hit off by 
 him when he wrote : " To be a professed 
 unbeliever was bad form it was like being 
 a little Englander or a Radical ; to be pious 
 was equally bad form it resembled a 
 54
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 violent devotion to the Union Jack." On 
 the whole, he probably acted as much as 
 a tonic as an antidote to the Established 
 Creed. Certainly, when he left Cambridge, 
 Anglican lethargy was a thing of the past. 
 His sermons lay under two categories 
 the mystical and the controversial. The 
 former were certainly the more soothing, 
 especially his wonderful treatment of the 
 Water and Wine at Cana, which lingered 
 in the memory long after his Petrine shafts 
 had broken against each other. Not that 
 he failed to be effective after the manner of 
 any bold bowman, but that he more often 
 left the sting of exasperation than the 
 wound of conviction amongst his Anglican 
 hearers. Doubtless it was intensely annoy- 
 ing to be told that if St. Peter did not wear 
 a tiara, it was equally difficult to imagine 
 Titus singing evensong in G in Ely Cathe- 
 dral. At a first hearing, many were in- 
 clined to sum him up in the single word 
 " Hysterics ! " but a closer following showed 
 an earnestness and a consistency in his 
 apparently ex-tempore invective. What it 
 came to was, that his emotional idiosyn- 
 crasy and personality had become wholly 
 and entirely steeped in the most unique 
 religious system that is known to man. 
 The beauty of Rome had eaten him up. 
 
 55
 
 AN OPEN AIR SERfl 
 The occasion -was the laying of the Foundat
 
 ' AT WUNTINGFORD 
 
 ttone of the nrw Church, May 16,
 
 Ill 
 
 DURING this time he lived in the 
 Catholic Rectory, behind the great 
 cedar tree that grows at the nave of the 
 immense Gothic edifice which every traveller 
 passes on his way from the station. Like 
 a mighty riddle in stone, that church con- 
 fronts each arriving freshman, and when 
 he departs, forms his last glimpse of Cam- 
 bridge. In this cathedral setting, Father 
 Benson said his lonely Mass every day. 
 His parochial work was confined to a few 
 poor folk whom he visited and consoled in 
 emergency, but his whole strength went 
 into his fingers as a writer and into his 
 tongue as a preacher. His mercurial de- 
 velopment was fostered by alternate 
 bursts of writing and of preaching. At 
 times he became so possessed by his literary 
 work that his characters were often more 
 vivid to him than the men who lived in the 
 house. Once he came downstairs in the 
 greatest agitation, saying : " I am so 
 frightened. There's a man committing 
 58
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 suicide in my room ! " His imaginative 
 power was constantly on the qui vive. 
 Colour could produce the greatest effect 
 upon him, not so much as colour, but as 
 part of the general mysticism of things. 
 He used to explain that the beauty of a 
 cardinal's crimson did not lie in its 
 imperial rouge, but in that " it repre- 
 sented the b-b-blood royal of Christ." 
 Once after a Requiem service, at which a 
 pall of black and yellow had been used, he 
 was unable to say anything except, " Black 
 and yellow black and yellow," and from 
 that impression his liturgico-mystical 
 Papers of a Pariah had birth. He re- 
 tired immediately to his room, and wrote 
 the first chapter, which begins : " This 
 morning I assisted at one of the most 
 impressive dramas in the world I mean the 
 solemn Requiem Mass." And it was with 
 the real impressions of the morning still in 
 his mind that he wrote a few pages 
 further on : "I despair of making clear, to 
 those who cannot see it for themselves, the 
 indescribably terrible combination of the 
 colours of yellow and black, the deathliness 
 of the contrast between flames and the 
 unbleached wax from which they rise. . . ." 
 It was in his evenings that he could 
 be generally found by inquirers. One 
 
 59
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 passage in The Sentimentalists memorises 
 the echo of those moments : "A tram a 
 hundred yards away boomed up from St. 
 Andrew's Street, grew yet more resonant, 
 punctuated by the horses' hoofs, and died 
 away again up the Hill's Road. The clock 
 chimed out its little plain-song melody. . . ." 
 Anybody who ever visited Father Benson 
 by night to discuss the immortality of the 
 soul, or the liturgical colour of trout-flies, 
 must remember the half-hourly tram and 
 the quarterly chime. The horse-teams of 
 Cambridge are already a thing of the past ; 
 but the peal of the bells in the Catholic 
 Church will long ring as exquisitely as when 
 they helped Father Benson to write his 
 paragraphs against time. The room in 
 which he worked finds its description, even 
 unto minuti<z, in that occupied by Monsignor 
 Yolland in The Sentimentalists : " A Louis 
 Quinze table, two pairs of antlers over the 
 fire, a Khalim hearth-rug, a grave leather- 
 fringed bookshelf, filled with miscellaneous 
 books Stevenson, Henry Kingsley, some 
 suspiciously clean editions of the Fathers 
 of the Church, works on travel and sport 
 a pair of silver candle-sticks on a carved 
 coffin-stool." 
 
 As he called it himself, it was " a palimp- 
 sest." 
 60
 
 IV 
 
 IN these marked surroundings he re- 
 ceived the worshipping and worshipful 
 company of " Bensonians." Here they were 
 guided spiritually and entertained mentally. 
 Here they were themselves observed and 
 sometimes reduced to literary shapes, which, 
 whether composite or individual, by the 
 time they reached his pages, were not 
 without certain touches and changes, which 
 it must be agreed always erred on the side 
 of the benevolent as well as of the pictur- 
 esque. But his Cambridge characters were 
 nevertheless recognisable. " Algy Banister," 
 the convert hero in The Conventionalists, 
 wore in real life a Trinity Hall and not " a 
 Third Trinity scarf." Benson had discovered 
 in him that rara avis of the soul's flights 
 a Carthusian vocation and compared him 
 delightfully to " a delicate child that, un- 
 known to himself, is heir to a dukedom." 
 Though the story is imaginative, it may 
 be added as a grain of fact that the hero 
 did find the grace of conversion, though 
 
 61
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLA7E 
 not that of his spiritual dukedom. Of the 
 identity of " Christopher Dell " in The 
 Sentimentalists, there was never any doubt at 
 Cambridge, for some of the familiar con- 
 versation of the prototype found its way, 
 like hothouse flowers, between the pages. 
 The setting was a figment, and there were 
 intentional strokes in the draughtsmanship 
 sufficient to place it outside stark photog- 
 raphy and within the kinder sphere of 
 caricature. The Sentimentalists was a care- 
 fully broidered book, but The Convention- 
 alists and The Necromancers were painted at 
 full gallop. 
 
 The Necromancers represented a very vivid 
 and deliberate side in Father Benson's out- 
 look on the supernatural. His acceptance 
 of the mystery of an unseen world com- 
 prised a frank admission of the unplea- 
 santest truths of Spiritualism. He believed 
 when he wrote " Evil spirits are at us all 
 the time, trying to get in at any crack 
 they can find." His own experiences of 
 psychical research were limited to the 
 profitless seances he had attended as an 
 undergraduate. As a Catholic he re- 
 nounced Spiritualism, among other works 
 of the Evil One, but his interest in its 
 working did not cease, but culminated in 
 the most gruesome of his novels. Psychical 
 62
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 research was to a large extent a Cambridge 
 product. It represented a kind of per- 
 verted reaction from the atheistic physics 
 which saturate so many of the best brains 
 in the University. It was an attempt to 
 probe the supernatural through other 
 mediums than the theological. Had Father 
 Benson gone on the Oxford Mission, he 
 would probably have written The Philo- 
 sophers instead, and The Ritualists in place 
 of The Conventionalists. But Cambridge 
 and Oxford are always poles apart. The 
 former is the home of discovered causes, as 
 the latter houses those that are lost. To 
 Father Benson psychical research was asso- 
 ciated, like Darwinism and Puritanism, with 
 the Cambridge mentality. He was fond 
 of stating in childlike tones the contrast 
 between the two Universities : " It was 
 Cambridge that produced the Reformers, 
 and Oxford that b-b-burnt them ! "
 
 BATHER BENSON was never sorry to 
 * see agnostics and materialists take to 
 psychical research as a hobby, in the hope 
 that they would some time stumble against 
 the supernatural. It was like blind men 
 playing with fire. It was true that they 
 might be burnt, but it was also possible 
 that indirectly they might glimpse the 
 light. Spiritualism offered a more exciting 
 field to his pen than Anglican Orders. 
 Anglican controversy became absurdly like 
 peashooting an old lady who had lost her 
 way, but to attack Spiritualism was to close 
 with the Devil in person. For some time 
 young dons and younger undergraduates had 
 turned tables and twirled planchettes to- 
 gether. But it chanced that a climax was 
 reached in October 1904, when a venerable 
 college ghost was actually evoked and exor- 
 cised. For nine days the University gasped. 
 Father Benson's subsequent interest in the 
 matter was only equalled by his merriment 
 on hearing that holy water blessed by 
 the Anglican Vicar of St. C had been
 
 \ 
 
 H. E. CARDINAL 'BOURNE 
 GIVES THE LAST 'BLESSING, OCT. 23, 1914
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 
 used, but had not prevailed against the 
 apparition. Panic-stricken youths after- 
 wards supplied him with matter which 
 developed into The Necromancers. Never 
 were the symptoms of Spiritualism better de- 
 scribed the seeking for the sign the grisly 
 " watcher on the threshold," and the rest. 
 " Cathcart," the advanced spiritualist, in 
 his pages, who becomes a Catholic after ten 
 years of " devilling," was no figment, but 
 incidentally the only one of Benson's 
 originals to be found in a current Catholic 
 Who's Who. " He believes in the devil in 
 quite an extraordinary way," was Benson's 
 summing. What he realised was that the 
 type of man who takes to Spiritualism is 
 often religious, and spoils his chances of 
 Catholicisation thereby. In a famous sen- 
 tence he wrote : " To go to seances with 
 good intentions is like holding a smoking 
 concert in a powder-magazine on behalf of 
 an orphan asylum." 
 
 The novels of the Cambridge period were 
 successively directed against ^Estheticism, 
 Conventionalism, Spiritualism, and Material- 
 ism. These were the modern sins which 
 seemed to cry for special castigation. In 
 what may be held to be his masterpiece, 
 None Other Gods, he made light work of this 
 world's Positions and Possessions, written as 
 66
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 
 such with capitals. The book opens with 
 one of those atmospheric vignettes of which 
 he was a master, describing the great court 
 of Trinity when " the fitful splash and 
 trickle of the fountain asserts itself clearly 
 above the gentle rumble of Trinity Street." 
 Frank Guiseley, the strangest and appar- 
 ently most unmeaning character in the Ben- 
 sonian gallery, successively undergraduate, 
 convert, tramp, and mystic, whose life 
 was only lived to complete his Failure (a 
 word Benson could also write in capitals), 
 was a composite in which loomed several men 
 whose academical floruit was about 1905. 
 Everybody who was at Cambridge that year 
 will remember " the affair of the German 
 prince travelling incognito, in which the 
 mayor himself had been drawn," though it 
 was actually Zanzibar's Sultan, who was then 
 personated by a rollicking Trinity man. 
 But the popular oarsman who suddenly 
 announced his conversion to his startled 
 friends was not, like Guiseley, at Trinity, 
 but at the college next door. The inter- 
 view with the Dean under circumstances 
 of rigid politeness, the dislike for con- 
 ventional or high-placed people, the total 
 carelessness for success and the camaraderie 
 for life's castaways, were all drawn from a 
 unique and unforgettable personality.
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 
 When pressed, Father Benson would 
 never admit that he purposely studied 
 his friends, but his vivid subconsciousness 
 reflected them whether he intended it or 
 not. He never managed to describe himself, 
 though he startled the critics of The Con- 
 ventionalists by jumping into the book as a 
 practical joke on them, and converting the 
 hero in person ! Perhaps Monsignor Dick 
 Yolland, in the same book, was an approach 
 to his real or imaginary self. His con- 
 verse with Christopher Dell was not un- 
 like Benson's with difficult undergraduates. 
 Certainly his chivalrous defence and help 
 of his wretched friend was typical of the 
 human love and sympathy which went 
 out so readily to all " Bensonians," con- 
 ventional or the reverse, won or lost to 
 Holy Church. 
 
 It was true that he did not attract the in- 
 tellect or satisfy the common sense of the 
 University, though The Religion of the Plain 
 Man was a passionate plea addressed to a 
 type which he seldom touched. However, 
 he was not the first teacher who gathered 
 the wayward and wandering rather than 
 the self-satisfied about him. The folk who 
 composed his coterie were roving Ritualists, 
 aesthetes with or without a moral sense, 
 reformers of Church and State in fact, all 
 68
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE JPOSTOLATE 
 the budding brotherhood of cranks, for each 
 of whom he sought his proper niche within 
 the multi-moulded fabric of the Church. 
 Even the crazy King's-man who interrupted 
 Benediction in the Catholic Church one 
 evening with an appeal for brotherhood 
 among Churches received more sympathy 
 from Father Benson than from some of 
 the Protestant pastors, whose flocks he had 
 attempted to address on the same evening. 
 " Peace, brother ! " said Father Benson as 
 he laid his hand on the shoulder of that 
 talented fanatic, whom he only believed 
 to be suffering from unconscious vocation 
 to the Carmelite Order. All who were 
 striving, if not for a new Heaven at least 
 for a new Earth, found themselves in accord 
 with Benson's working motto, that " Uncon- 
 ventionality is the spice of life." Certainly, 
 whether he aroused antagonism or devotion 
 during his second coming to Cambridge, it 
 may be said that, of all prophets and re- 
 formers who have ever preached to her, no 
 one individual ever covered a more meteoric 
 and ecstatic career in so short a time. He 
 was there four years only. And now he has 
 become a legend among some who were old 
 when he came up. But for many whom he 
 first met as undergraduates,he remains always 
 the symbol of their spiritual youth and his.
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH BENSON
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH BENSON 
 <BT RICHARD HOfTDEN 
 
 A THOUGH in conversation Hugh 
 Benson had a stammer, yet in the 
 pulpit he had not the slightest 
 hesitation ; in fact, his eloquence 
 was so tremendous and his flow of perfect 
 language so continuous, that his listeners 
 came away overwhelmed by the torrent 
 of words. He always spoke and preached 
 extemporarily, although he made copious 
 and profuse notes of his sermons and 
 speeches beforehand. On only one occasion, 
 so he told me, did his eloquence fail him. 
 He was preaching, as an Anglican, in some 
 church, I think in Brighton, at the time of 
 the fatal illness of his father, the Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury. In the middle of 
 his sermon, he felt himself entirely unable 
 to proceed ; all thread of his discourse had 
 gone, and after a few stammered sentences 
 
 73
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH <BENSON 
 he was forced to leave the pulpit, as he was 
 quite incapable of finishing. He was amazed 
 to find that the moment the power of 
 speech left him was the moment his father 
 died. One day, after I had been present 
 in Westminster Cathedral, where thousands 
 had listened to him spell-bound, I asked 
 him what it felt like to stand up in the 
 pulpit and face that sea of eager, upturned 
 faces, knowing it was because he was preach- 
 ing that this enormous crowd had collected. 
 He answered with characteristic curtness, 
 " Oh ! all right ; I was in an awful funk, and 
 I preached a rotten sermon. Let's go to 
 lunch ! " 
 
 74
 
 II 
 
 HE was his greatest critic of all he did, 
 and I think the only work accom- 
 plished by him which really satisfied him, 
 was his book, Richard Raynal, Solitary. He 
 considered it his finest work ; he wrote it 
 in three weeks ; and, with his love for the 
 mystical, he was convinced he wrote it 
 under inspiration. He wrote his books, 
 pamphlets, and lectures with extraordinary 
 rapidity, and with amazing concentration. 
 Entering his room with some message while 
 he was engaged in writing, I have had to 
 call him several times before I was able to 
 elicit an answer. He was very fond of 
 reading aloud to any friend some part of 
 whatever he was composing a chapter 
 from a new book, or some article and 
 always begged for a frank criticism. I can 
 see him now, legs crossed under a rather 
 ancient cassock, stammering out a story, 
 interjected with puffs of cigarette smoke, 
 and finishing up with his enthusiastic : " It 
 isn't bad, is it ? " or, " My dear, what do 
 
 75
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH BENSON 
 you think of this ? This is r-rather r-rip- 
 ping." In other respects, too, he was 
 really like an enthusiastic schoolboy. I 
 remember he lunched with me on his 
 return from his first American tour, where 
 his ardent American admirers presented 
 him with a gold watch and chain, gold 
 cigarette-case, and some other gifts of 
 appreciation. These he produced one after 
 the other, with the air of a delighted boy 
 showing you his presents from a rich 
 uncle ! 
 
 He was so utterly devoid of any kind of 
 " side." He would work in his garden at 
 Hare Street, in grey flannel trousers and 
 the striped cricket shirt he had won for 
 " College " when at Eton ; and whoever 
 came, be it cardinal, lady, or layman, all 
 were received then and there, and car- 
 ried off in enthusiastic haste to be shown 
 the latest improvements to the chapel, or 
 house, or garden. The Hare Street house 
 was entirely like him and of him. Every 
 corner showed his versatility. Here was a 
 bedroom, the walls hung with fantastic 
 weird tapestry, which he had designed and 
 made and put up with his own hands. 
 Again, some carved oaken panels which he 
 himself had carved. His bed was Jacobean, 
 with blue hangings and the emblems of
 
 the Passion on the four posts ; the stair- 
 case panelled and carved with heraldic and 
 sacred designs ; the chapel the Mecca of 
 his love overflowing with carvings, statues, 
 fashioned by his own hands. The rather 
 rough screen, and choir stalls, made out of 
 odd pieces of oak he had picked up, the 
 organ loft, containing the harmonium pre- 
 sented to him by an eminent English 
 comedian (one of his many converts), all 
 were fashioned and erected with the help 
 of his wonderful man of all work, and of 
 any friend who was staying with him. He 
 who never knew what it was to have an 
 idle moment pressed into service of some 
 kind all who were with him. I have known 
 him in one day write a score of letters, 
 finish a novel, shoot with a neighbouring 
 squire, carve a panel, play the piano, and 
 smoke well, how many cigarettes ! he 
 smoked feverishly and incessantly and yet, 
 with all this, he placed the exact perform- 
 ance of his religious duties before every- 
 thing else. 
 
 His Mass he said at eight ; breakfast in 
 silence was at nine, after which he dealt 
 with his correspondence, which was tre- 
 mendous : I have known him to have 
 fifty letters by the morning post. This 
 task accomplished, he would write at some 
 
 77
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH 'BENSON 
 novel or article, then go into the chapel to 
 say the Little Hours before luncheon at one. 
 Luncheon was usually taken in silence 
 unless there was some stranger whose pres- 
 ence needed the relaxation of this rule. 
 After luncheon, manual labour in the garden 
 or about the house, and the carving, paint- 
 ing or tapestry-making was done. Tea at 
 four, and then writing again until dinner 
 at eight, which was not taken in silence. 
 That over, all would adjourn to the delight- 
 ful oak-floored parlour, where, amid cigarette 
 smoke, he would read either extracts from 
 the novel he was working at, or from some 
 other book, or perhaps talk in his entrancing 
 manner about some psychic problem which 
 was interesting him. Then the chapel bell 
 would ring, and all would go and thank God 
 for a day so happily spent. I can see him 
 now, kneeling very erect and intent, read- 
 ing with extraordinary rapidity the Night 
 Prayers, his only light a wooden standard 
 candlestick placed close to him on the red- 
 tiled uneven floor. The Prayers finished, 
 he would kneel on, his eyes fixed on the 
 Tabernacle, and you could positively feel 
 him beseeching Heaven on behalf of the 
 many souls under his care, and imploring 
 help to carry out to the uttermost his 
 spiritual motto : " God's Holy Will be 
 
 78
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH BENSON 
 
 done." He certainly practised what he 
 preached. The keynote, so to speak, of his 
 life was his favourite expression, " Nothing 
 matters in this world, my dear, except the 
 doing of God's Will," and he most willingly 
 and humbly resigned himself to whatever 
 he felt was the Divine Will for him. 
 
 79
 
 Ill 
 
 Ar the beginning of the European War, 
 he offered his services to the War 
 Office as an army chaplain. To his un- 
 usually highly strung and nervous tempera- 
 ment there was nothing more repugnant to 
 him, or terrifying, than having to face the 
 horrors of the battlefield. " I had a beastly 
 day," he wrote to me. " I volunteered, 
 heard nothing, then suddenly had a wire 
 asking me where I was, and where a letter 
 would find me ; and I was convinced it 
 was from the War Office. Well, it was ; 
 but it wasn't about that. But for twenty- 
 four hours I was terrified, made my last 
 testament, wrote letters. But I didn't 
 really mind, because I willed to go." 
 And so it was all through his life ; he 
 indeed might be called the Apostle of the 
 Will. 
 
 He loved all religious, but especially the 
 Carthusians ; he made many retreats at the 
 Charterhouse at Parkminster in Sussex, 
 and several of his spiritual children have 
 80
 
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH BENSON 
 
 tried their vocations at that haven of 
 rest. His own house at Hare Street was 
 chaffingly termed by some of his friends 
 " The halfway house to Parkminster," 
 several men who had lived with him having 
 gone on to test their vocation for self- 
 oblivion among the followers of St. Bruno. 
 Some accused him, inevitably, but unjustly, 
 of being too much of an idealist in dealing 
 with the spiritual life of others. If he put 
 before his spiritual children the great 
 heights attainable by the soul even whilst 
 under the bondage of the flesh, he tempered 
 these aspirations both for himself and for 
 them with healthy and practical common 
 sense. He had that entirely delightful yet un- 
 common combination of the practical man of 
 the world and the dreamer of dreams. When 
 he stayed at Cambridge he joined the under- 
 graduates at the bathing place, swimming 
 and diving like an exultant boy ; or, again, 
 on his holiday he would intrepidly climb a 
 Swiss mountain and an hour later would 
 be weaving a romance with picturesque 
 phrase and mystical expression. He preached 
 his famous course of sermons " The Re- 
 ligion of the Plain Man " at the Sunday 
 evening service at Cambridge, and crowds 
 of members of the University came to 
 hear him. He was a favourite guest in 
 F 81
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH 'BENSON 
 
 College Common Rooms among the dons, 
 and also an ever welcomed partaker of under- 
 graduate hospitality, quite as happy to be 
 discussing the relative values of motor cars 
 with an exquisite in Trinity, as in arguing 
 some historical problem with some eminent 
 professor, or, again, convincing an aspiring 
 senior wrangler that there was something 
 higher and more important than higher 
 mathematics. 
 
 Then and always Robert Hugh Benson's 
 manners were delightfully free, charming 
 and courteous. He had that rare gift of 
 making you feel in conversation that what 
 you were saying was of real moment to 
 him ; so he gave you his full attention, 
 and his kind and constant " How interest- 
 ing " put you at your ease. Yet he did not 
 suffer fools gladly, if he felt they were foolish 
 through their own wilful stupidity or conceit. 
 He loathed " side " in any form, especially 
 what he termed " spiritual side." I can 
 honestly and truthfully say I never heard 
 him say an unkind word about anyone ; it 
 was always " A nice man that." At the 
 children's parties held at Hare Street his 
 delight was to invent some new kind of 
 game for them. Well I remember the 
 merriest of Christmas teas he arranged for 
 his little ward, with candles, Christmas 
 82
 
 
 ANECDOTES OF HUGH <BENSON 
 cake, and Santa Claus impersonated by his 
 dear friend and secretary, Dr. Sessions. 
 Animals he loved. He was a good rider, 
 and an excellent shot, and, of course, he 
 enjoyed to its full a motor ride. For what- 
 ever he did, he did with extraordinary 
 keenness and pleasure, doing all things for 
 the greater glory of God.
 
 NOTES 
 
 MR. SHANE LESLIE, whose per- 
 sonal memories of Mgr. Benson's 
 Cambridge Apostolate are here 
 first printed, contributed to the 
 Tablet (3ist October, 1914), anonymously, 
 an article from which we quote these 
 passages : 
 
 WE cannot imagine he was not glad and inter- 
 ested at the prospect of death, though he 
 may have suffered a slight regret (shared by all his 
 readers) that it was not granted to him to describe 
 the supreme experience which biology calls death, 
 but theology speaks of only in terms of life. 
 
 AT Eton he won the prize for a poem on 
 Father Damien. It was his only achieve- 
 ment at the school where his name, cut on the 
 Fourth Form panels, was until recently pointed 
 out to American visitors with the mysterious ex- 
 planation, " The Priest ! " At Eton he ambitioned 
 to enter the Indian Civil. The Xavier lay buried 
 in the Clive the missionary in the adventurer. 
 When the Divine Adventure offered itself later, all 
 his desires were fulfilled.
 
 SUMMARY and parallels fail in the case of 
 Robert Hugh Benson. He stood in religious 
 symbolism to his time. He could not have been 
 a Victorian. He was of the commencement de sihle, 
 and nothing else. He was an ecclesiastical Winston 
 Churchill, to whom he was curiously comparable, 
 even to the stutter, commanding and conquering 
 men's attention against their will. In each case a 
 father's son made his father memorable for his son. 
 Both Archbishop Benson and Lord Randolph 
 Churchill had given the systems with which their 
 names arc perpetuated their most famous mots ; 
 and the sons reversed their utterances by their 
 personal achievement. By a supreme peripateia 
 both passed over to the rival camps, and both 
 claimed in their writings that in doing what they 
 ought not to have done as sons, they as heirs had 
 found the only use and outlet for their fathers' 
 legacies. 
 
 II 
 
 WHEN photography was a newer art, the 
 unused sitter might be pardoned a 
 self-consciousness which familiarity with the 
 camera has dispelled. Cardinal Manning 
 used to say that the time when the cap of 
 the camera was removed was the only time 
 when a man (with an emphasis on the 
 sitter's musculinity) felt a fool. Of the 
 later generation of men, who perhaps feel 
 less foolish than bored, Monsignor Benson 
 made a good sitter, perfectly natural in his 
 
 85
 
 3^0 TES 
 
 expression, neither inanely smiling nor of so 
 unwonted a gravity as to be enjoined to 
 say, like Little Dorrit, " Papa, potatoes, 
 prunes, and prison," in order to give the 
 mouth a sweet and smiling version. These 
 photographs recall in some particulars an 
 even more meticulous portrait that of 
 Father Campion in The Guide Book and the 
 Star : 
 
 WELL, first, he's a most boyish-looking 
 person for his age he's thirty-nine, Dick 
 told me so but he looks about twenty-two. He's 
 medium height, and blond, with straight butter- 
 coloured hair (no doubt his mother calls it golden) 
 which needs cutting. His face is rather full and 
 more oval than square. There's no loose skin on 
 it. He has light blue, shining eyes, badly shaped, 
 and with no depth in them. They are a little 
 prominent. His nose makes his whole face 
 youthful. It's short, aquiline, and has arched 
 nostrils. His mouth is confusing a fascinating 
 mouth. It's tender and dogged ; sensitive and yet 
 shapeless ; emotional but rigid. The upper-lip is 
 like that of a shy child ; the under-lip suggests an 
 aggressive despot. It juts out a little, as if there 
 were a lump of sugar between it and the gum. 
 It's the mouth of a man who could bite ; but he'd 
 bite with tears in his eyes. 
 
 THE expression of the whole face is odd. You 
 know what importance I attach to ex- 
 pression. His is a kind of suppressed eagerness 
 86
 
 which seems to vary either to suppression minus 
 the eagerness, when his face becomes mask-like, or 
 to eagerness minus the suppression, when he lights 
 up with a white-hot keenness that arouses atten- 
 tion. However, the normal expression strikes a 
 happy mean ; neither cold nor hot, but a kind of 
 pink temperature. 
 
 HE has a habit of thrusting out his chin, and 
 he stammers a little : not apologetically or 
 painfully, as most people do, but quite cheerfully. 
 He doesn't mind at all. "Let the conversation 
 w-w-wait until he's g-got the w-word out." 
 
 TN the same brilliant and Bensonian little 
 * book, Mrs. Lindsay's heroine brings 
 against an imaginary author (" D. L. 
 Lawley ") the charges pressed home, on 
 occasion, to the author of The Sentimen- 
 talists ; and what makes these charges 
 most noticeable here her " Father Cam- 
 pion " is himself heard in reply : 
 
 A 5 I came home, I overtook Father Campion. 
 He was leaning on a gate, staring out over 
 a wilderness of ploughed fields which stretched 
 away to the horizon like a crinkled brown sea. 
 He turned when I came up to him, and we walked 
 back together. I told him that I had been reading 
 The Fishermen, and he asked me what I thought of 
 it. I said what I have said to you. He listened 
 with a curious little air of intense interest which 
 
 87
 
 FUNERAL,
 
 VDBER 23, 1914.
 
 he always wears when anybody is talking to him. 
 It makes one expand like a sponge. When I said 
 that I thought there was something horribly off 
 the straight line in the way Sidney Fairfax was 
 deliberately marked down and inveigled and coerced, 
 he said that he quite agreed with me, which com- 
 pletely threw me off my bearings. As he was 
 looking at me just then he saw it, and asked 
 whether that surprised me. I said that it did : 
 that, considering he was a Roman Catholic priest 
 it sounded disloyal ; and then it was his turn to 
 look surprised, and he asked me what on earth I 
 meant, and disloyal to whom or to what ? 
 
 HE thought I was mixing up two separate 
 ideas ; the Catholic Church and the people 
 in it ; and, although Catholics owed the most 
 absolute loyalty to the Church, he wasn't aware 
 that they owed any special loyalty to each other, 
 beyond a natural loyalty if they happened to be 
 personal friends. He added that there was every 
 distinction between the Church and the people in 
 it. It was by no means one and the same thing. 
 
 FATHER CAMPION said one thing just 
 before we got home that struck me as very 
 true. He said that if there was one thing he dis- 
 believed in, it was controversy on subjects of re- 
 ligion. That if people were interested and wanted 
 to know things they could always find a way for 
 themselves : they would either read or ask ; and if 
 they were not interested, then it was just con- 
 founded impertinence to cram such very personal 
 matters down their throats. 
 9
 
 3^0 TES 
 III 
 
 / TpHE allusion made to Monsignor Benson 
 * as an apostle of the Will of Man may 
 be further illustrated in his own Preface to 
 Miss Mary Samuel Daniel's intimate story, 
 Choice : 
 
 THE most inalienable gift that the rational 
 soul possesses is that of Choice. All other 
 faculties may wax and wane ; the intellect may 
 be now illuminated, now obscured ; there are 
 moments when it thinks itself capable of solving 
 all mysteries ; there are moments when it cannot 
 grasp even a truism. So with the emotions the 
 tide of feeling rises and falls with health, circum- 
 stances, companionships ; it runs dry in the presence 
 of those whom it loves ; it rises to the brim in 
 solitude. But the will is always itself acting and 
 choosing and cannot cease : there is no such 
 thing as indecisiveness in reality it is no less than 
 a rapid alternation of decisions. Ultimately, there- 
 fore, the rational soul becomes, not what it neces- 
 sarily understands, nor what it superficially loves 
 but that which it chooses. 
 
 CONFRONTED by that Phenomenon which 
 confronts always, sooner or later, in our 
 own country and generation, all who are fearlessly 
 searching for truth the Phenomenon of Catholi- 
 cism. At first she is attracted by it ; she has 
 escaped the entanglements of controversy, and the 
 persuasion of relatives, and the drag of old pre- 
 judice ; and she becomes aware, directly and over- 
 
 91
 
 whelmingly, that its very overpoweringness is to 
 her an argument against its truth. How can such 
 things be true ? ... As she proceeds further she 
 finds much in the system that repels her ; truth, if 
 this is truth, presents to her brutal, fantastic and 
 even childishly ugly aspects. Neither head nor 
 heart seem consistent with themselves ; now she 
 thinks she understands ; now she knows she does 
 not : now she almost hates the Christian Creed ; 
 now she thinks that the sorrow of the Cross and 
 the broken Body of Christ alone promise help and 
 consolation. Yet all the while, it is in her Will, 
 though she does not know it not in her head or 
 heart that the scene of conflict lies. She believes 
 that she must be " true to herself," and does not 
 understand that she must " deny herself," if she 
 would be true to God. To and fro, then, she 
 moves, till it seems as if there were no possibility 
 of decision. Then she decides. Her whole char- 
 acter moveSy and not a part of it only. 
 
 IV 
 
 MONSIGNOR BENSON had a hand- 
 writing as proper to himself as was 
 Dickens's handwriting to Dickens. Both 
 avoided the slovenliness to which Bulwer 
 Lytton long ago lamented that novelists 
 must descend. Shakespeare, we are now 
 assured by all uncured Baconians, could 
 not, as a mere matter of mechanism, have 
 written all his plays, so laborious was his cal- 
 92
 
 ligraphy ; and similarly Monsignor Benson's 
 inevitable flourishes might be urged against 
 the possibilities of that unfailing pile of 
 manuscript on manuscript. 
 
 ^0ri 
 
 **' JwaJM^, 
 
 tjjjdwgw- 
 
 ****** 
 
 The sentence here reproduced (a little 
 " smaller than life ") is taken from a 
 letter written about a year ago : " I am 
 being obliged to draw in my horns, and 
 economise time and everything else just 
 now, as I am on the very edge of my 
 capacities." At unbroken speed he re- 
 mained at that perilous pitch until the 
 inevitable catastrophe came which was by 
 only him undreaded. 
 
 93
 
 AZOTES 
 
 V 
 
 WHEN, in 1890, Robert Hugh Benson 
 entered Trinity College, Cambridge, 
 there entered also another future novelist, 
 Mr. Archibald Marshall, whose memories of 
 his old friend, published in the Cornbill 
 Magazine, include a little passage of colour 
 even the red of Rome. The freshman, 
 who still looked like a schoolboy, with " a 
 tangled mop of fair hair, quick stammering 
 speech, and a shy but attractive manner," 
 and who " always walked very fast and 
 appeared to be busy," thought even then 
 that " it would be nice to write stories and 
 get money for them " ; but " he said that 
 what he would really like to be was a 
 Cardinal." 
 
 T TE thought, too, even then, about 
 psychic phenomena, purposely oc- 
 cupying rooms in which a demented man 
 had shot himself, in the hope that he might 
 see his ghost. Once, when riding with 
 his friend through Vauxhall, " Hugh dis- 
 covered himself to be on fire from a pipe 
 he had put alight into his pocket " an 
 almost Francis-Thompsonian reminiscence. 
 But if he had his absent-mindednesses, he 
 
 94
 
 had also his intentnesses. He argued hotly. 
 In the smoking-room at Addington " some- 
 times the discussion waxed rather warm. 
 Hugh and one of the chaplains once ended 
 by falling out rather seriously. The next 
 day Hugh went away for a few days with 
 the breach still unhealed." When he re- 
 turned, the chaplain admitted his own 
 wrongness, and said he had bought Hugh 
 a box of beautiful cigarettes to make up. 
 Then a repentant smile broke out over the 
 chaplain's face as he added, " But they were 
 so good that I'm afraid I have smoked 
 them all " not the only occasion when 
 Hugh learned the useful lesson to take the 
 will for the deed. 
 
 MR. MARSHALL bears an outsider's 
 witness to the benignant develop- 
 ment of his friend when and after he 
 reached the home of his soul. The dis- 
 putant in him, fortunately, did not die ; 
 but it was mellowed, and, being ripened, 
 also sweetened. One of the last letters 
 Mr. Marshall had from him, not many 
 months before his death, was in acknow- 
 ledgment of a story of religious experience, 
 alien to his own. " His letter began, 
 ' Your book has come, and I like it enor- 
 mously. It is gentle and Christian and 
 
 95
 
 ^Co TES 
 
 interesting and happy.' I am quite sure 
 that fifteen years ago he would have argued 
 hotly with me about it." In recent inter- 
 course, therefore, the friends became 
 nearer : " I found him an even more 
 delightful companion than he was during 
 the years of which I have written," and 
 what had vanished with his Anglicanism 
 was " a certain friction that made itself 
 felt before Hugh finally found what I 
 believe to have been his true vocation in 
 life. He had a very dominating will, and 
 had not always been easy to live with ; 
 but he seemed to me to have acquired, of 
 late years, a self-reliance that was very 
 different in its effects from the opinionative- 
 ness that had stood in its place before. He 
 had the most lovable qualities, and they 
 seemed to shine out in him more and more 
 each time that we came together." 
 
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