The Babe, B.A.

Subtitled: Being the Uneventful History of a Young Gentleman at Cambridge University
Fiction ~ novel (kind of)
Published in the UK 15th January 1897¹
Approx. 53,000 words
(First read 03/10/2014)

Having read a good few reviews of this 'novel', I have to admit I approached it with a fair amount of dread.  And after the first few pages I did think to myself, "Well, I'm just going to have to read the rest through gritted teeth."  But then a curious thing happened: the further I got into it, the more I began to enjoy it.  That's not to say I loved it; rather, I somehow managed to get into it ~ to inhabit that bizarre long-long-long-dead world of Cambridge in the 1880s/90s.
I use the term 'novel' rather than novel because there's virtually no plot to it ~ it's very largely dialogue with a few bits of narrative stuff thrown in here and there; also oddly, given that I'm generally rather particular about 'structure'², after a while I ceased to care about this.  'The Babe' (real name Arbuthnot: he doesn't appear to have a first name) is, in a very weird way, quite delightful: he's good-but-not-brilliant at

his Greek and Latin stuff, and he's good-but-not-brilliant at sports; his chief talent is talking the kind of inconsequential babble that Dodo specialized in, the all-important difference being that she was a rancid heartless hag while the Babe is a complete and utter innocent.
In fact it's the innocence of the whole thing that got to me, that drew me in.  The most awful thing that happens in it is a chap cheating at cards³, and that's all sorted in the most amicable and gentlemanly fashion.  All these young chaps do is play football (by which they mean rugby), croquet and cricket, eat muffins, jabber, put on amateur productions of Greek tragedies, eat muffins, punt, and sing in chapel.

Kings College Chapel, with punter

Okay I could've well lived without the blow-by-blow descriptions of the sports fixtures ~ especially the cricket, which was like reading something in Chinese ~ and I did occasionally find myself wondering if there were going to be any shower scenes⁴.  But on balance the whole was so fresh, so youthful, so innocent that I thoroughly enjoyed it⁵.
Well anyway, you can judge for yourself: it's available online here.

¹ It appears to have been published in the United States in the Autumn [Fall] of 1896.
² ... and having loathed EFB's The Book of Months (1903) and A Reaping (1909), which had much the same format.
³ See Mammon & Co. (1899).  The game in question is one called 'marmara', which EFB either invented exclusively for The Babe or ... has never been heard of since The Babe.  It's insane.
⁴ I can't help it: I'm a product of my age, despite everything you read here.
⁵ I certainly enjoyed it more than David of King's (1924) in which Benson, approaching pretty much exactly the same subject nearly 30 years later, had to try that much harder to recreate that world ~ and ended up overdoing it somewhat.


THE AUTHOR

For the life of me, I cannot now, reading [the critics' opinions of The Rubicon] over again, determine whether I could have gained anything by paying the smallest attention to them. Logically, it was impossible to do so, for they clearly were directed, as I have said, not against this wretched old Rubicon, but against the person who had dared to capture success with Dodo. Rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me that vituperation so violent could not be regarded as other than comic. If I was a nursery-governess and a man-milliner and a gentleman's gentleman it was all very sad, but I was less overwhelmed because I was already terribly interested in The Babe, B.A. and not at all interested in the St. James's Budget, except as a humorous publication, which The Babe, B.A. tried to be, too.

~E. F. Benson in Our Family Affairs 1867-1896 (1920)

THE CRITICS

It would be interesting to know when as well as why Mr. 'Dodo' Benson (as he is called to distinguish him from his poet brother, Mr. A. C. Benson) wrote the book that has just appeared. It seems hardly possible that, after having demonstrated through Dodo and The Rubicon that he could do extraordinary things, even though he might not be able to make literature, he should give himself to anything so utterly aimless, so meaningless, so indescribably dull as this. There is, indeed, a certain amateurish air about the work, an actually infantile manner, that would seem to make its writing antedate anything else from the author. And yet, on the other hand, there runs between the lines a decadent suggestiveness — making its foolish feebleness evil—that seems eminently up to date. On one page we have this kind of inanity:

The Babe was continuing to eat strawberries with a pensive air; and having finished the dish, he looked round pensively, and Reggie caught his eye. 'You mustn't eat any more, Babe,'he said; 'it's after twelve, and we're going out at eight to-morrow, and we have to get back to Prince's Gate.' The Babe sighed. 'Mr. Sylies will be waiting up for us,' he said; 'I suppose we ought to go. He will lose his beauty sleep.'

On another page we have another kind less innocent, and not more interesting:

'It is quite true,' said the Babe in a hollow voice. 'I have tried to go to the devil, and I can't. It is the most tedious process. Virtue and simplicity are stamped on my face and my nature. I am like Queen Elizabeth. I was really cut out to be a milkmaid. I don't want to get drunk, nor to cultivate the lower female. The more wine I drink, the sleepier I get; I have to pinch myself to keep awake, and I should be sleeping like a dead pig long before I got the least intoxicated. . . . We are going to call on obscure dons every afternoon and speak to them of the loveliness of life, for the majority of them have no conception of it. Their lives are bounded by narrow horizons, and the only glimpse they catch of the great world is their bed-maker as she carries out their slop-pail from their bedroom.'

But faugh! why quote more of the revolting twaddle? It is not likely to do any harm. Its very dulness will be a protection from its depravity.

~The Bookman (US), 09/1896

 

THE BABE, BY HIMSELF

If the Babe had written his own undergraduate memoirs, he would have done them just in Mr Benson's spirit and style. “Remarkable and stirring events,” Mr Benson observes, “do not befall the undergraduate.” They do not. Some are 'bloods', some are 'smugs', some, if they happen to be at Oxford, are 'toshers'; some are Union orators. But for picturesque purposes, as for most others, these are of no account. We prefer the more characteristic “futility of mind,” as Mr Benson puts it, “girt about with that flippant atmosphere, in which the truly heroic chokes and stifles.” Of such was the Babe, who lived in a land wherein it seemed always afternoon, largely no doubt because of the good wholesome hour at which he rose. There is no story in Mr Benson's little volume; he just slings together “a cricket-ball, a canoe, a football, a tripos, a don, a croquet-mallet, a few undergraduates, a Greek play, some work, and so forth.” The result is a pleasingly futile string of sketches, whose local colour and faith unfaithful to the happy-go-lucky inconsequence of one in statu pupillari will please any one who is now or ever has been there. Only, for general working purposes, here, as in Dodo, Mr Benson is too smart to last. By which we mean not merely that the book tails off towards the finish, as it most certainly does, but that Mr Benson's high pressure cannot be lived up to throughout his 310 pages, short as they are. Butterflies and champagne and fireworks are delightful in their way; but Mr Benson gives you so much of them that it is well to take him in short stretches and with considerable intervals. He is too conscientiously funny, in short.

[...] Excellent fooling, but, as has been said, you must take your Babe in homœpathic doses. Mr Benson's cap and bells are too persistently noisy. As a minor point, is it humorous to mix up the index of your illustrations in no sort of order, and always to write “could n't” and “would n't” in two words and “onto” in one?

~Pall Mall Gazette, 25/01/1897

Mr E. F. Benson has a manner and a vast but not unpleasant audacity of his own. He is, moreover, firmly persuaded that the world at large takes an unfailing interest in Cambridge Undergraduates. But, if this vanity is amusing, so are the books that result from it, especially his latest one, The Babe, B.A., which professes to be 'The uneventful history of a young gentleman at Cambridge University' […]. For, though a fair half of it may be skipped by older folk, the other half contains some excellent comedy ~ only once, in a scene which would have been much better omitted, degenerating into farce ~ good humour, excellent criticism, occasional wit, and a few grains of common-sense. Cambridge is described with unflinching accuracy, names are thinly disguised, or not disguised at all, and we are, besides, treated to all manner of surprisingly frank remarks and observations.

[...] the book is redeemed by the hero, an irresponsible masculine Dodo, whom everybody likes and humours. When it is added that he is well-placed, well off, healthy, and no fool, in spite of some appearances, it is not surprising that he finds life an excellent amusement, especially, it should be added, as he has a faultless temper, takes all things leisurely, and none very seriously ~ in which apparently he resembles Mr Benson.

[...] We follow this promising youth through the various excitements that usually beset the way to the Tripos with a good deal of interest and some liking. Taking the book as a whole, there is one scene ~ that of the Babe's interview with Feltham, after the cheating at cards ~ that is almost masterly; and most of it will, no doubt, be interesting to Cambridge Undergraduates, especially to King's men; even those to whom the University is now a very old story may like it a good deal; the rest of the world will skip some scnes, and be amused at others. The Babe will not enhance Mr Benson's reputation as a novelist, but, in spite of its carelessness, it confirms the impressions he had already given his readers. Some day he will grow serious, which will be a pity; but we shall not be surprised if he then writes a brilliant book, which, after all, will be some compensation.

~The Standard [London], 15/02/1897, abridged

The Babe, B.A. […] is the development of a view already sketched by its author, Mr Edward F Benson, in his Limitations, namely, that the exciting, romantic, or sensational features of university life found in fiction are to be found in fiction alone. He tells, in the dedication to his present 'Uneventful History of a Young Gentleman at Cambridge University', how he and a friend with some solemnity ~

procured a large sheet of foolscap paper and a blue pencil, and then and there

set ourselves to put down all the remarkable and stirring events which

happened to us in those four years we spent together at Cambridge.

How they “drew blank” in respect of their acquaintances as well of themselves, until ~

The uncomfortable conviction dawned on us … that in the majority of cases

remarkable and stirring events do not befall the undergraduate, and that if

the book was to be made at all it must be made of homely, and I hope whole-

some, ingredients, a cricket ball, a canoe, a football, a tripos, a don, a

croquet mallet, a few undergraduates, a Greek play, some work, and so forth.

The ingredients certainly fulfil the promise of wholesomeness, and are not ill-mixed. But the salad lacks flavour. The truth is that Mr Benson has too conscientiously set himself to show that university life lacks interest for outsiders, and refrained from supplying what is essentially wanting. That some dons are commonplace [ganders] and some undergraduates are commonplace goslings needs no more proof than that a university is more than superficially unlike the rest of the world. Perhaps Mr Stewart, the don who spoke of the German Emperor as “the nicest Emperor he had ever known,” is scarcely to be regarded as typical; for the rest, Mr Benson keeps uncompromisingly to mild types which readily lend themselves to mild satire. Most Cambridge men will find his volume amusing for its subject's sake, especially if they be of a recent generation.

~The Graphic [London], 10/04/1897

Mr Benson's delightful book is rife with clever definitions as well as graphic character sketches.

~The Daily Telegraph, quoted in newspaper ad of 26/01/1897

A bright and humorous picture of University life.

~The Scotsman, quoted in newspaper ad of 26/01/1897

Mr Benson's wit and easy delineation of character fully atone for lack of plot. The lightsome chronicle goes gaily one, sufficiently rich in incident unfailingly rich in bright ideas, and in happy turns of expression, which provoke the reader to smiles.

~The Daily Mail, quoted in newspaper ad of 26/01/1897

Mr Benson's novel is a photograph of everyday life at Cambridge. His undergraduates play football and cricket, act in the Greek play, converse on intimate terms with dons, and occasionally manage to get through a little reading.

~The Daily News, quoted in newspaper ad of 26/01/1897

The book is indeed by 'Verdant Green' out of Alice in Wonderland; and it is as delightful as a book so bred could not fail to be.

~Vanity Fair, quoted in newspaper ad of 26/01/1897

Several attempts have already been made to write what Mr Benson's sub-title calls the 'History of a Young Gentleman at Cambridge University', but none of them all has succeeded in approaching the merits of the very amusing adventures of Mr Verdant Green at Oxford. There was an air of farcical unreality, however, about the work of 'Cuthbert Bede', for which even the inimitable portrait of Mr Bouncer could not wholly atone. Mr Benson has succeeded, where so many have failed, in painting with much happiness the lighter side of Cambridge life. His 'Babe' occasionally speaks with the voice of Dodo, but on the whole he is a very agreeable and amusing new acquaintance. He was not really a babe, of course; his real name was Artbuthnot, and he was “a cynical old gentleman of twenty years of age, who played the banjo charmingly. In his less genial moments he spoke querulously of the monotony of the services of the Church of England, and of the hopeless respectability of M. Zola. His particular forte was dinner parties for six, skirt-dancing and acting, and the performances of the duties of half-back at Rugby football.” Mr Benson's humour will not appeal to everybody, but those who can taste it will think it delicious. The long vacation croquet-match is specially realistic and funny. An added charm is given to the book by the delightful pictures of Cambridge scenes (apparently from photographs) which adorn its pages. One hopes it is only the printer who chooses to speak of Butler' Analogies, but Mr Benson should have known better than to suggest that Ranjitsinhji earned his fame whilst 'Stoddard' was still playing football.

~The Glasgow Herald, 01/02/1897

The Babe, B.A. […] is also set in Cambridge against a background of flippant undergraduate repartee. It is full of froth signifying nothing, bright inconsequential chatter at the Pitt Club wrapped in compulsive cheerfulness. There is a nice buoyancy about the book, but not the smallest attempt to delve into character. Fred admitted it had been written piece-meal, and it shows, each chapter independent of its predecessor and the whole devoid of plot. […] the book looks as if it was written over a glass of whisky in the early evening, and within a couple of weeks.

~Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991

Our Family Affairs 1867-1896

The Benson family, circa 1866*

Non-fiction ~ memoirs
First published October 1920
Approx. 98,000 words
(First read 19/06/2014)

[written 03/10/14] I'm afraid I completely forgot to review this at the time of reading.  Like EFB's other books of memoirs (Mother and Final Edition), this first instalment is beautifully written and consistently interesting.  It's also extremely gossipy.
Anyway, it's available online here.  Oh and it has a nice handy index too. 

*See that twinkle in Edward White Benson's eye? ~ that's Fred.  The photo, by the way, is from Arthur's reminiscences of his father, published as The Trefoil (1924).


QUOTABLES
Our Family Affairs is ram-full of quotables ~ here are just a few things I noted down:

EFB's childhood infatuation with a chorister in Lincoln Cathedral:

That emotion […] touched such religion as I had ecstasy, and I added to my prayers the following petition, which I said night and morning.

“O God, let me enter into Lincoln Cathedral choir, and abide there in happiness evermore with Thee!”

Who 'Thee' was I cannot determine: I believe it to have been a mixture of God and the chorister, and, I think, chiefly the chorister.

EFB on EWB [his dad]:

I do not mean to convey the idea that my father was continually pulling us up, for nothing is further from the truth. Continually we played to him, and he danced the most fascinating measure; continually he played to us, and our dancing strove to keep time with his enchanting airs. He could render us speechless with laughter at his inimitable mirth, or breathless with suspense at his stories. But all the time there was this sense that at any moment the mirth might cease, and that a formidable rebuke might be visited on an offence that we had no idea we had committed.

EFB on music:

[…] all my life music has been to me as a celestial light, shining in dark places for the mitigation of their blackness, and flooding the serene and sunlit with its especial gold, but [as regards my own budding ~ and thwarted ~ musical talent] from that soil there withered a little herb that once grew there, a nest with incubated eggs was despoiled, and the bird came not back.

A touching father/son moment. Young EFB has been dreading another paternal chastisement for some bizarrely trivial misdemeanour:

[…] I went stiff and resigned, not knowing whether there was not to be some renewal of his anger …. Instead, he put me in an arm-chair close by the fire and wrapped a rug round my knees, and asked if I was quite comfortable, and shared with me the tea that had been brought in for him, since he was too busy to come into the nursery as usual and have it with the rest of us. And then he somehow gave me a glimpse, sitting tucked up by the fire, of the love that was at the base of his severity. How, precisely, he conveyed that I cannot tell, but there was no more doubt about it than there was about the heaviness of his displeasure.

O. Browning (1837-1923)

EFB on Oscar Browning, whom he also portrayed in The Babe, B.A. (I think) and David of King's (I think):

[…] he wandered from room to room, bald and stout and short yet imperial with his huge Neronian head, and his endless capacity for adolescent enjoyment. Age could not wither him any more than Cleopatra; he was a great joyous ridiculous Pagan, with a genius for geniality, remarkable generosity and kindliness, a good-humoured contempt for his enemies, of whom he had cohorts, a first-rate intellect and memory, and about as much stability of purpose as a starling. His extraordinary vitality, his serene imperviousness to hostility, his abandoned youthfulness were the ingredients which made him perennially explosive. Everyone laughed at him, many disapproved of him, but for years he serenely remained the most outstanding and prominent personality in Cambridge. Had he had a little more wisdom to leaven the dough of his colossal cleverness, a little more principled belief to give ballast to his friskiness, he would have been as essentially great as he was superficially grotesque.

After sending Henry James (a family acquaintance/friend) his manuscript ~ handwritten, no less! ~ of Dodo, EFB received a reply couched in typically Henry-James-ian terms:

In case the reader has given a glance to Dodo, can he imagine a more wiself expressed opinion, that opinion, in fact, being no opinion at all? Never by any possibility could that MS. have seemed to him worth the paper it was written on, or two minutes of his own time. With what a sigh of relief he must have bundled it into its wrapper again!

Mother

Non-fiction ~ memoirs
Published 1925
Approx. 62,000 words
(First read 20/03/2014)

Mother is the highly enjoyable sequel to Our Family Affairs: 1867-1896 (1920).  I presume the only reason Fred didn't call it Our Family Affairs: 1896-1918 is that he wanted to leave an enduring tribute to his much-loved mother.  Yes, Mary (Sidgwick) Benson (1841-1918) is the focus of the book but she's far from being the exclusive focus.  A good two-thirds of it is devoted to other family members, in this order: EFB himself, his doomed sister Maggie (1865-1916), brother Hugh (1871-1914), the family nurse Beth (1819-1911), and, somewhat bringing up the rear, brother Arthur (1862-1925). 
Rather than whiffling on endlessly I'll just pick out a few highlights.

George I of Greece

EFB, after performing relief work in Greece following some kind of war they had there in the 1890s¹:

When I got home I was told by Lord Wantage, the head of the Red Cross, that King George of Greece had expressed an amiable desire to decorate with the Order of the Redeemer two of those who had been engaged in this relief work, and that my name had been recommended.  But from that day to this I never heard a word more about it, and the mystery as to whether the Order of the Redeemer was lost in the post, or whether King George, on second thoughts, considered that it would be too much pleasure, remains unsolved.

 EFB on Oscar Wilde in his prime²:

[...] Oscar Wilde was producing the plays which, however artificial they may seem now, sent his audiences reeling into the street, intoxicated by epigram and paradox.  None of them had the smallest spark of immortality, except possibly The Importance of Being Earnest, but they were very new, and their audacious nonsense was very like wit.

No comment.

My and EFB's sentiments on this subject tally exactly:

[...] the greatest wizard of all was Emily Brontë: how many times I have read Wuthering Heights I have no idea, but never, in spite of the clumsiness of its narration, have I laid it down without the firm conviction that it stands alone at the head of all novels in the English language.

(Rather like Mother, EFB's Charlotte Brontë (1932) is as much ~ if not actually more ~ about the other members of the family, especially Emily.)
EFB on what his mother thought of the Benson brothers' books, particularly Fred's, circa 1905:

Mary Benson at 19

[...] it was becoming common knowledge between her and me that she found the sort of book that I was writing now quite intolerable, [...] none of us yet had written anything that gave her any sense of personal pride. [...]  Some struck her as too quietist for the world [Arthur's], and some too worldly for her own quietism [Fred's]; some were propagandist of beliefs she did not share [Hugh's], and some were sentimental, and some were crude, and I feel convinced that she never read twice anything that any of us had written, nor indeed would have read much of it all once, if it had not been we who had written it.  She liked "bits" in most [of them], but not one spark of inspiration, not one crumb of the bread of life, did she find in any of them.³

Francis Yeats Brown

The section in which EFB talks about his close friendship with the young Francis Yeats Brown⁴ is interesting and ~ possibly ~ more revealing than he intended.  FYB was about 20 years younger than EFB and, at the start of their friendship, which apparently lasted several years, aged about 20.  And oh my! do those holidays they spent together in Italy ever sound idyllic under Fred's pen!

[...] the love of the sea and the swimming and the basking, and presently we spent inseparable days among rocks and sea-caves, or climbed, perspiring, through the woods of chestnut and laburnum to the Portofino Kulm [...]  another summer I settled down with him from May to August in that enchanted castle of Portofino.  [They slept in hammocks side by side in the garden]  And as long as I live I shall bear in my inward heart of happiness that nightly falling to sleep in the open, with the scent of stocks, and the drowsy pulse of the sea below, and the stars burning in the boughs of the stone-pine, and the black shadow of the castello lying across the white, moonstruck garden, and the sense of a drowsy friend in the hammock close by.

Now I ask you, Gentle Reader, if that isn't Love, what is?  (By contrast, there's none of this kind of rapture ~ in fact, there's no rapture at all ~ when he talks about his dealings with John Ellingham Brooks, the shirt-lifting pal he shared a house with on Capri ...)
The section in which the author recounts the final decline and death of the family nursemaid Beth, who served the Sidgwicks and the Bensons faithfully and with love for 77 years, is pretty well guaranteed to have you reaching for a hanky.  It did me.  [For more on Beth, see Across the Stream.]
Gaaah! this is going on forever! ~ okay, I'm going to wrap it up here.  I highly recommend Mother for anyone who has the least interest in the Benson family, Fred in particular: the book is ram-full of goodies, far too many to mention.

¹ "Don't blind us with details, Ewie!"
² Benson returned to the subject of Wilde ~ and was slightly less dismissive ~ in As We Were (1930).
³ For the happy ending to this subject see under David Blaize.
⁴ (1886-1944); author of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1930). 

STOP PRESS:
A certain Mr Rodney Bolt has produced a biography of Mary Benson, the splendidly titled As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson, published by Atlantic Books in 2011. 

A Reaping

Fiction ~ novel (kind of)
Published 1909
Approx. 72,000 words
(First read 21/01/2014)

... is the sequel to The Book of Months and is really just more of the same, only longer: it's no better, no worse, just more.

The 'action' picks up two or three years later: our faceless, originless, characterless, surnameless author-hero has now been married two years to the woman (Helen) he selected at the end of Months and Months for pretty well the sole reason that she was the dead spit of the departed Margery.  The couple mooch about between London and their house in the country (mostly the latter), often accompanied by Jack's cousin 'Legs', a kind of elongated 20-year-old puppychap, very likeable.  Jack has lost none of his chronic habit of tedious maundering.  I won't bore the pants off everyone by recounting any of the 'plot', just give selected 'highlights':
(1) September¹: Jack and Legs ~ and the dog Fifi² ~ have a mildly supernatural experience involving a so-called revenant.  It's a lot less interesting than it might sound.

(2) October: Jack and Helen do some gardening.
(3) November: Jack and Helen do some more gardening.  Legs nearly gets engaged.  And ... into this teeth-grindingly dull farrago of dusty drivel EFB sees fit to drop A Comic Character, in the shape of Mr Holmes, one of their neighbours in the country.

"He is a kind little gentleman, about forty-five years old, who lives with his sister, and does not do anything whatever³.  He is generally known as the Bun-hander, because no tea-party has ever been known to take place for miles round at which Mr. Holmes was not handing refreshments to the ladies.  That is his strength, his forte.  His weakness is just as amiable ~ though, perhaps, hardly so useful ~ for his weakness is Rank."

Before anyone gets excited at the prospect of an undiscovered Bensonian comic hero, I hasten to point out that Mr H isn't actually all that funny: as with the character of Mrs Murchison in Mammon & Co., EFB describes with glee everyone's (especially Legs') reaction to him without bothering to make the character himself especially comic.  Oh and he's gone in a flash.

(4) February: Edward Frederic Benson murders Legs for no reason whatsoever.
(5) April: Jack and Helen, but mainly Jack, goes on holiday to Greece and bores us rigid with that for what feels like 300 pages but is in fact only 14.  As an example of how supremely turgid the Benson prose gets when he's waxing lyrical about the ancient world, I'll quote this stupefyingly bad sentence:

"Never, so we must believe, during that wonderful century and a half, when from the ground, maybe, of the lifeless hieratic Egyptian art there shot up that transcendant flower of loveliness, of which even the fragments that remain to us now, battered and disfigured as they are, are in another zone of beauty compared to all that went before or has come afterwards, was anything ugly produced at all, except as deliberate caricature."

I defy anyone not to turn blue with tedium reading this section.
Okay enough! ~ I've already wasted far more time than I intended to on this.
NOT RECOMMENDED, but if you're feeling very brave it's available online here.


¹ Like it's predecessor, A Reaping is divided into twelve month-long chapters.  But for no discernible reason it starts at June this time.
² Yes: Fifi.
³ Jack presumably hasn't heard the thing about casting the beam out of one's own eye ...

THE CRITICS

A Reaping (1909) is not a novel to shine.

~Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991 

There is nothing to hold against the Benson brothers but their unfailing industry. Nothing can swerve them from the path of producing a book or two a year. It remains, therefore, for their readers to accept the fact that the matter contained in the books must be slight. A Reaping, by E. F. Benson, is slighter than usual. It is unconventionally invented, the chapter headings bearing the names of the months and the structure being of a rather straggling and casual kind. The usual ingredients, however, are to hand; meditative à la A. C. Benson; the third brother's unfailing interest in the god Pan; also his lasting interest in women's hair, which the author brushes and describes much as he has done in The Climber and other volumes. There is also a ghost, a warning, reflections upon death, à la R. H. Benson, as well as a great deal of charming landscape and light laughter. The doctrine is Stevenson's of cheer and kindness at all costs; excellent doctrines, but not gripping nor vitalizing. It is sad, but somehow the ultimate amiability of all things was always and remains still a tepid inspiration. The book is very gentle, sweet-spirited and kindly, and if it were by a young and unknown author we should hail it with pleasure and delight; but Mr. Benson must submit to the criterion of his past. Our demand upon him is like that the little schoolgirl made of the readier elder sister who wrote her compositions for her week by week: "Now be sure and make me improve a little since last time," she would urge. We want Mr. Benson to improve a little each time. He is still quite young enough, and we recommend a stern experience of deprivation and misery or a very undermining course of reading; not so much that he may, as Nietzsche might say, hold more correct views, but that he should liberate himself from what is customary either successfully or disastrously. It is a great doctrine to set one's faith upon, that a big failure is better than a slight success.

~The North American Review, April 1910 (edited for crap spelling etc.)

The Luck of the Vails

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1901
Approx. 117,000 words
(First read 27/01/2013)

In his family memoir Mother (1925) Benson has this to say on the composition of The Luck of the Vails:

[...] I was deeply immersed in a sensational tale called The Luck of the Vails.  The germ of it was a story that [my brother] Arthur had told his boys at Eton: this he presented to me with the rhyming legend which ran round the rim of the jewelled cup which was the "Luck" and the clue of the tale:

  "When the Luck of the Vails is lost, / Fear not rain nor fire nor frost; / When the Luck is found again, / Fear both fire and frost and rain." 

That uncanny and suggestive rhyme fermented in my brain with yeasty bubblings, and I enjoyed for months the heavenly illusion which sometimes comes to scribblers that their puppets and the adventures of them have an existence more real than that of the folk among whom they live.  The great yew hedge in my tale became the real yew hedge, and the hedge at [my mother's house] Tremans from which I took it was but shadowy in comparison ... 

THE CRITICS

One might begin to read The Luck of the Vails lying back in a comfortable chair, and chuckling over the natural talk of Mr. Benson's pleasant people. But after an hour or so, assuming that it is a hot day, and that you turn the leaves without great energy, you find yourself sitting up and gripping the arms of the chair, and glancing uneasily over your shoulder at the sound of a step upon the gravel. For this is a really thrilling and exciting tale of crime and mystery that Mr. Benson has written. It is readable all through and full of entertainment.

 

~The Times, quoted in the endpapers of The Book of Months and Juggernaut

 

The book is very ingeniously constructed, and delightful reading, while the machinations of the septuagenarian villain, with his cheerful flute, his rosy cheeks, and his brisk enjoyment of life, are calculated to give a proper Christmas thrill on the hottest midsummer afternoon.

~The Spectator, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Sheaves

In his stories of English life Mr. Benson usually trusts more to manner than to plot for the amusement of his readers; but here he has got hold of a very pretty sensation, and treated it most effectively. It is something of a triumph to throw us off the scent so completely as he does with regard to Francis's character, which is treated throughout with a subtlety that is generally wanting in melodrama. For the most interesting portion of the book is melodrama. There is an ordinary pleasant love story, and there is some light, bantering dialogue, enough to give it the flavour of a society novel. But we pay little heed to these. The setting might just as well have been mediaeval, for it is the jewelled Luck, and the perils by fire and rain and frost of the young hero, and the creeping wiles of the crafty villain, and his dark exits and entrances by secret staircases, that hold us fast. But no doubt it gives a piquancy to hear the most up-to-date speech in the neighbourhood of jewelled Lucks and swinging panels and dogging murderers.

~The Bookman (US), 09/1901

Mr. Benson has given us an extremely interesting study of a criminal temperament, and has so arranged matters psychological as to prohibit us from fault-finding. The Luck of the Vails is melodrama on the higher plane, and we cordially congratulate Mr. Benson on having found and invented yet another genre for the exercise of his literary talent.

~The Daily Chronicle, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

Mr. E. F. Benson has a nice sense of humour. The dialogue is all through witty. The story holds us from the rising of the curtain to the going down of the same.

~Vanity Fair, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater