The Judgment Books

Fiction ~ novella
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