First serialized in The Graphic November 1894
Published in full 1895
24,405 words
A very posh portrait-painter paints a self-portrait, neurotically.
When you boil all the rotting flesh off this bloated carcass of a story, that's all you're left with.
Even if Benson had told it at his customary short-story length (5-6,000 words), it would still have been vastly overlong.
The author doesn't blush to mention that he's been inspired by (voir plagiarized) Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); what he singularly does fail to mention is that the yarn owes as much to Wilde's Dorian Gray (1890/91). At the exact time The Judgment Books was being published in full, Wilde was engaged in his idiotic trials. So that might have had something to do with the omission.
A truly mind-blowingly atrocious piece of writing.
QUOTABLES
There's one very brief interlude in all the tedium. Our toff hero and his toff wife have invited the vicar and his wife to dinner ~ for no reason other than to have a break in the tedium, it seems. The vicar's wife, Mrs Greenock, is ceaselessly inquisitive:
[Asking questions of everyone], she was persuaded, was the best way of improving an
already superior intellect, as hers admittedly was. There is a great deal to be said for
her view—there always was a great deal to be said for her views, and she usually said
most of it herself.
Now that you've read the one good line in this yarn, please forget about it. Under no circumstances should you attempt to read it.
THE CRITICS
An
odd, suggestive story … The tale is well told, the conceit a
striking one.
~Hartford
Courant, quoted in front endpapers of The Vintage
Mr.
Benson is at his best thus far, in this new book rather than in Dodo,
and that best is excellent.
~Boston
Advertiser, quoted in front endpapers of The Vintage
The
new work of the author of Dodo is much less ambitious and
somewhat better written than that amusing story. It is hardly long
enough to be called a novel, and treats of a single episode in the
life of a portrait-painter. This gentleman, who is not very strong
in the mind, reads Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde whilst he is casting
about for a new piece of work, and it fires his imagination to “put
his Jekyll and Hyde on the canvas for men to wonder at and be silent
before.” He would paint himself, he decided, “as the husband and
lover of Margery, the Jekyll of himself who had known and knew the
best capabilities for loving in his nature; and he would paint his
Hyde, the man who had lived as other men live in Paris, a Bohemian,
careless, worthless, finding this thing and that honey in the mouth,
but to the soul wormwood and bitterness.” Unfortunately Margery,
who was not only his wife, but his backbone, went away on a visit,
and the consequence was that Hyde got the upper hand on the canvas.
One is then led to expect a sort of Dorian Gray
transformation, but nothing comes of it. The wife returns home, the
picture is destroyed, and everything goes on as before. There is a
good deal of moralising about the immortality of all our deeds, and
how they are inscribed in the 'judgment books', but it is not
particularly new. One is left with a distinct feeling that in this
little work Mr Benson, to use an expressive American phrase, “has
bitten off more than he can chew.”
~The
Glasgow Herald, 18/07/1895
The
Judgment Books, by E. F. Benson,
tells the story of an artist who painted himself as he was,
influenced by the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
It is rather horrible, but the conception is well carried out.
Frank Trevor had “lived the life of a man,” in Paris too, and his
wife accepted him, declining to hear his story. She was consistent,
however, and when he had painted a terrible picture of himself as he
was (or, rather, of the 'Mr Hyde' part of him), she saved him by her
love from madness, and accepted him as he was, good and bad. A book
like this cannot be read without one gaining an impression not merely
of its cleverness; the brief, concentrated story is one that haunts
the imagination and awakens thoughts which the best of men would
willingly let die out of his memory.
~The
Leeds Mercury, 31/07/1895
A
curious, imaginative, introspective study of character. An artist of
singularly sensitive temperament paints a portrait of himself, and
knowing of certain dark passages in his life is driven to express
them in his picture. The result is a 'horror' that terrifies his
wife and well-nigh deprives him of reason. How he is saved by her
courage and devotion must be learnt from the book itself, which is
well worth reading from more than one point of view.
~The
Liverpool Mercury, 28/08/1895
The
Judgement Books [sic] is Fred's
attempt to emulate Dorian Gray,
and was published in the year of Wilde's disgrace (1895 also saw The
Importance of Being Earnest).
The hero, Frank, is an artist who believes that each time he paints
he loses part of himself which is, as it were, kidnapped and absorbed
by the picture in hand. He is now embarked upon a self-portrait, but
is frightened by the prospect that he may paint himself as he really
is ~ dissolute and depraved ~ and not as the good and decent man his
loving wife Margery sees. For Frank, before he married, had been
rather a cad and risks raising the ghost of that past life. Indeed,
as the picture progresses, it grows more vicious and reveals a
loathsome personality, which Margery flees from in fear. Eventually,
Frank persuades Margery to help him, to rescue him from himself, and
the painting is dramatically ripped to pieces.
Not
only is the theme Wildean, but there is a Wildean principle at stake
which Fred seems to question. The preface to The Picture
of Dorian Gray makes the famous
claim, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written.” Benson has Frank make
an analogous point about art:
You
call one thing pretty, another ugly. Believe me, art knows no such
terms. A
thing
is true, or it is false; and the cruelty of it is, that if we have as
much as grain
of
falsehood in our measure of truth, the thing is worthless.
Therefore, in the
picture
I am now painting, I have tried to be absolutely truthful; as you
said at
dinner,
I have tried to paint what I am, without extenuation or concealment.
Would
you
like to see it? You would probably call it a hideous caricature,
because in this
terrible,
cruel human life, no man knows what is good in him, but only what is
bad.
It
is those who love us only, who know if there is any good in us.
In
other words, a portrait may be well-painted (honest) or ill-painted
(deceitfully), but it cannot be accused of evil. It can only depict
what is, and not be blamed for failing to depict what ought to be.
With the denouement of the story, however, it is clear that Benson is
challenging this view. He does not believe the artist has a
responsibility towards his audience as well as towards his art, that
there is evil in the world and the artist must neither glamorise nor
excuse it. Fred's moral view is simple, and it occurs again and
again in his work. It is this: evil can be banished by good, and
salvation is always possible, but the struggle, the conflict, are
unceasing. In The Judgement Books
it is Margery who saves Frank. […] Since many of Fred's books are
made of incidents in his life, stitched together in varying ways, or
reflect moments in his intellectual and moral development, we are
bound to ask, who was it who saved Fred from himself.
The
Judgement Books was a dismal
flop …
~Brian
Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson,
1991
