Scarlet and Hyssop

Fiction ~ novel
Published March 1902
73,800 words
(First read 03/06/2014)

Here's the basic plot: Lady Marie Alston and her husband Jack have been married several years ~ both are still fairly young (late 20s? early 30s? ~ I forget); they have no children; she has never loved him though he once loved her.  Shortly before their marriage Marie thought she might be in love with a chap named Jim Spencer, but didn't go through with it.  Jim went off to South Africa 'to forget', and has just come back a millionaire.  In the meantime Jack has been having an affair with a married woman named Mildred Brereton; he supposes he loves her; she loves him about as much as she loves the average footman, which is to say not one whiff.  Marie and Jack resume their 'friendship' and soon realize they're in love; but they're too noble to consummate their love.  Marie finds out about Jack's affair with Mildred; he breaks it off with Mildred and falls in love with his wife all over again.  (I may be getting some of this in the wrong order: the whole thing was instantly forgettable.)  Marie wants none of him but is persuaded to carry on with the marriage for appearances' sake.  Mildred goes, "Ho hum ~ next!"  Jack gets flattened by an omnibus.  Marie and Jim (and Mildred too, for that matter) live happily ever after.  The End.

Hyssop

I could list 101 reasons for disliking Scarlet and Hyssop but will limit myself to just four:
(1) The wild, glaring improbability at the heart of it: everyone on Earth (i.e. everyone in London Society, because nothing else exists) knows about Jack's affair with Mildred ... except Marie.  This is despite the fact that they all see each other 250 times a week and do nothing but gossip.
(2) None of the characters is in the least bit likeable, with the possible exception of Jack.  (I could add Jim to this except that he can hardly be called a 'character' ~ he's just a shadow.)  Benson's heroine, Marie, is a cold, condescending, snooty witch ~ and knows it.  At one point Jack says to her:

"You are a cold, passionless woman, and will not understand," he said.  Then he paused a moment, for a long sigh lay suspended in her breast.  "You object to my saying that?" he added.

"No; go on," said she.

It's no bleedin' wonder he went off and had an affair (though he could have chosen better), married to that sanctimonious icebox ~ he's just the average man.  And yet he's the one who, in order that a happy ending may take place, gets squashed by a bus.  Ah well.
Mildred is a piece of toxic waste: Dodo on acid.  She'd have to be buried underground for 40,000 years for me to go anywhere near her.

Bloody omnibuses! ~ they get everywhere

(3) If you've already read Daisy's Aunt and Mammon & Co. and umpteen of Fred's short stories that deal with adultery, there's no need to read this: it has absolutely nothing different to say.
(4) The supposedly comic relief, Lady Ardingly, who is another of EFB's preposterously-born-in-Russia Queens of London Society, isn't in the least bit funny.  She's a tedious old hag.  Still, she gets the best line in the book, which you have to wait till the last page of the epilogue for:

"Ah! my dear, we are lepers," said Lady Ardingly.  "We are all wrong and bad, and we roll over each other in the gutter [...].  We strive for one thing, which is wealth, and when we have got it we spend it on pleasure.  [...] and the odd thing is that the pleasure we get does not please us.  It is always something else we want.  I sit and I say 'What news?' and when I am told I say 'What else?' and still 'What else?' and I am not satisfied.  [...] we go after remedies for our ennui, for our leprosy, and there is no such remedy unless we become altogether different."

This pretty neatly sums up all the worst of the Edwardian period ... and of Scarlet and Hyssop. 
Okay, I think that's enough.  You can read the whole thing online here ... but I wouldn't bother.


THE CRITICS

In Scarlet and Hyssop […] Mr E. F. Benson has returned to his earlier manner. He opens by introducing us to a couple of ladies whose talk overflows with studied smartness in a way that may choke off some readers. But as many as persevere will not find their courage very well rewarded. Mr Benson's society ladies tire one very soon. Their affections and their affectations are equally a bore. We crave for something a little more natural, a little more healthy.

~The Yorkshire Post, 19/03/1902

All Mr E. F. Benson's stories may be said to make for righteousness, inasmuch as virtue always somehow finds its reward. But it must be frankly confessed that generally it is not the goal but the way we travel to it which interests his readers. Marie, Lady Alston, in [Scarlet and Hyssop] […] stands for right-doing, her friend Mildred, Mrs Brereton, for the opposite. Jim Spencer is the decent but poor young man who is sent out to South Africa to make his fortune. Like so many other young men in novels, he succeeds, and comes home to find Marie, whom he loves, married to Lord Alston, who loves Mrs Brereton. We sit at a game of whist, see the cards shuffled, cut, and dealt, note the mistakes made, and the cheating, and see how the wiles of the wicked are fruitless against the straight play and good cards of Marie and Jim. The best-drawn character in the book is Marie's husband Jack, Lord Alston, who wins popularity as a politician by preaching the doctrine of 'efficiency'. He finds, too late, that his mistress is not nearly so clever or beautiful a woman as his wife. His death was a necessity for Marie's reward on earth, and it comes about somewhat melodramatically, at the hands of Mildred, or rather at the feet of her horses. The characters all move in an atmosphere where the first law of life is apparently to be very amusing or very rich. Cleverness is pardoned if it can contrive to be interesting; stupidity is condoned if set in a gold frame. Men are apparently of little account except as counters in the game. That in spite of so much that is unreal, and our indifference as to the fate of the characters, we can enjoy the depiction of their little plots and counterplots, is the best testimony to the cleverness of the book.

~The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 29/03/1902

The author of Dodo gives us here another study of the decadent aspects of certain circles of London aristocratic and wealthy society. The book has not the dash and cleverness which inclined one to condone some of the disagreeable features of Dodo. On the other hand, it has a very plainly put moral; the only man and the only woman in the book who have strong and true characters are duly rewarded. Nevertheless and despite this fact, the presentation of vice, artificiality, and insincerity in modern society has a depressing rather than a tonic effect, and the whole leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

 

~The Outlook (US), 19/04/1902

Mr. Benson here plays the part of social satirist. He whips the manners and fashions of the smart set, not exactly with scorpions, but severely enough, and, we believe, in all sincerity of indignation. Through the mouth of his heroine, Lady Alston, he calls them vulgar, and he shows convincingly that their vulgarity does not even purchase enjoyment. “'Ah! my dear, we are lepers,' says one open-eyed old sinner. 'We are all wrong and bad, and we roll over each other in the gutter like these Arabs scrambling for backshish. We strive for one thing, which is wealth, and when we have got it, we spend it on pleasure . . . and the odd thing is that the pleasure we get does not please us. It is always something else we want. I sit and I say, "What news?" and when I am told, I say, "What else?" and still "What else?" and I am not satisfied.'" That is one of the mildest arraignments; Mr. Benson's favourite term of reproach for the vulgar woman of society, 'a cook,' is a slander on a highly respectable class, but at least he means to indicate unspeakable depths of stupidity and hopeless moral and mental obtuseness. It is some satisfaction to note also that, as none of the satirised are made to appear charming, their originals in real life are left with little consolation. A more brilliant exhibition of their weak wickedness might have tickled them; Mr. Benson's can hardly fail to annoy. So far good. But he has not chosen the most effective way of reform. To ignore entirely the stupid whirl after money and senseless pleasure is perhaps too slow, too doubtfully efficacious a method of showing contempt; but, at least some stalwarts might have been introduced into the story, uninfected by the general corruption and untempted by what the 'smart set' have to offer. Of course, there is Jim; but he is a shadow; and there is Lady Alston, but she is an abstraction, or little more than a mouthpiece for Mr. Benson's tirades of reproach. Contrast is wanted in the book—a picture of the other people. These need not have been saints, they might have filled their place admirably with a moderate amount of virtue, provided they were endowed with active brains, and were minded to demand from life some of its realities.

~The Bookman (UK), 05/1902

Scathing in satire and relentless in exposure. In point of construction, Scarlet and Hyssop seems to us to mark a distinct advance in the author's work. Nothing is out of place, nothing superfluous, but all is in due order and sequence, while the interest never flags for a moment. There are many pages of witty dialogue, and quite enough clever people who talk epigrams, and, on the whole, Scarlet and Hyssop must be accounted a really brilliant piece of work, unsurpassed by anything Mr. Benson has given us.

~The Pall Mall Gazette, quoted in endpapers of An Act in a Backwater and Juggernaut and in newspaper ad of 04/06/1902

Mr. Benson has returned to the field which he developed with such signal success in Dodo, and his new novel reveals a brilliancy, social knowledge, and worldly wisdom that show how much the author has grown in force and pungency since the appearance of his first book. This remarkable story of London society may or may not afford reasons for identifications. It is certain that the author's range of acquaintances and his knowledge of the subject are exceptional, and in this amusing and striking picture of life as it is lived in London he has utilized his opportunities to the full.

 

"Look out, luv ~ E. F. Benson's about!"

~Pittsburg Press, spliced together from quotes in endpapers to US editions of The House of Defence and An Act in a Backwater

There is much pleasure, as well as philosophy, in the book; its satire is pungent, the characters are well sketched, and it is certainly a book to read.

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

It is astonishingly up-to-date: it brims over with chatter, with Saturday-to-Monday parties, with Bridge ~ everlasting Bridge ~ flirtation, motor-cars, semi-detached husbands and wives, and the Boer War; in fact with everything in which London society of to-day interests itself. An admirable picture, witty, cynical and amusing. It is full of brilliant things.

~The Standard, quoted in endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Juggernaut

Daisy's Aunt

Fiction ~ novel
Published May, 1910
Approx 59,000 words
(First read 04/02/2014)

To describe Daisy's Aunt as 'slight' would be a massive understatement: it has all the substance of a soap bubble, albeit quite a fat soap bubble.
Once again Benson dabbles in the world of heterosexual love, with his usual complete lack of understanding of how people really work.  Over a trio of automata unlikely 'characters' he casts the flimsiest, cobwebbiest plot imaginable, which goes like this:
Daisy Hanbury is a society gel, aged 22; her favourite aunt, Jeannie Halton¹, aged 30, is a widow; both are ~ obviously ~ great beauties.  It turns out that Daisy's married elder sister (Diana), who everyone thought had died five years previously, hadn't: what had actually happened was that she 'fell', i.e. she failed to love her husband and ran off with another bloke ... who was followed by another ... etc. ... in fact her 'ruin' was so complete that she ended up living in a flat in Paris where, at the beginning of her (Jeannie's) widowhood a year previously, Jeannie rediscovered her just in time for her (Diana) to die in her (Jeannie's) arms.  [I'm sure there must be a more concise way of wording this ...]  Diana's dying wish was that Daisy never find out the depths of her (Diana's) depravity (nor, presumably, that she'd been playing possum for four years ~ EFB skims over this consideration).

Now it just so happens that the elderly (32!) society gent who's been dangling after Daisy, Lord Tom Lindfield by name², was Diana's Bloke No. 2 ... or was it 3? ... might even have been 4.  Okay, that's the background, now the plot: Jeannie decides that the only way to stop Daisy finding out her sister was a fallen woman is to prevent Lindfield from marrying her; and the best way to do that is to come between them; and the only way to do that is to make him fall in love with her (Jeannie).
All of which comes to pass, in scenes of excruciating triteness and fatuity.  This thin broth is beefed up³ ever so slightly by Daisy's actually falling in love with Lindfield and wondering WTF her belovèd auntie is up to, and by Jeannie's being engaged to a man she does love while all this has been going on.  But the worst is yet to come: In the end, for no especially good reason, Jeannie bleedin' tells everyone why she's inveigled a man she doesn't love into loving her; she tells Daisy about Diana ~ contrary to everyone's expectations, Daisy doesn't immediately drop down dead on the spot; ... and everyone lives happily ever after: Jeannie marries her fiancé and lives in bliss; Daisy ~ again inexplicably ~ falls instantly out of love with Lindfield and decides to marry the ever-faithful Willie⁴; and [I tremble to write it] Lindfield happily settles down to a life in which he's best mates with Jeannie and her new hubby and more than happy to go on loving her from a short distance.
I put the book down at the end and called out across the years to E F Benson, "Do me a favour, Fred! ~ people just don't work like this!"

STOP PRESS
Given the similarity in the names, and EFB's propensity for recycling his own material, it's entirely reasonable to assume that he based Daisy's Aunt on his unpublished play Aunt Jeannie, which ran on Broadway, starring Mrs Patrick Campbell, for about a month in the autumn of 1902, and which, according to Brian Masters, received 'a most frosty reception and was deemed neither amusing nor a suitable vehicle for the famous actress.'

A fair chunk of the 'action' takes place at a house party in Bray,
Berkshire, in a house rather like this one, at Bray, Berkshire.

P.S. A few hours later, around 4.30am, as I lay there racked with sleepless neuralgia, a theory came to me: EFB's persistent delusion that a heterosexual man can be content ~ even happy ~ to live in close proximity with the woman he loves, to carry on loving her despite her being in love with (married to, etc.) another man, is, either consciously or subconsciously, a metaphor [this is where the theory starts getting ropey] for his own experiences of loving other men unrequitedly: he had no choice but to love the men he loved from close proximity, in silence, suffering nobly, etc.  Then ~ luckily ~ I nodded off. 

¹ The novel was published in the USA as The Fascinating Mrs Halton, a rather better title, IMHO.
² Not to be confused with (e.g.) Lord Tony Limpsfield in Lucia in London.
³ I was going to say 'the plot is complicated' but that would be absurd: it's only my inexpert recounting that's making this sound like War and Peace.  I find retelling plots ~ even, or especially wafery asinine ones ~ consummately tedious.
⁴ Don't ask.

THE CRITICS

Daisy's Aunt is so cloying it is like having toffee stuck to every tooth.  It was after this book that the rival novelist Hugh Walpole, about twenty years Fred's junior [...], accused Fred of being a fraud.  'E. F. Benson is a charlatan in literature,' he said, 'and writes solely for money [...]' [Arthur Benson's retort was this] 'If I were to refuse to meet everyone who thought me a literary charlatan, I should dine alone constantly.'

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

For the sake of returning at one leap not merely to the centre of social life, but to that variety of it which is most insistently and fluffily feminine, it is profitable to take up next Mr. E. F. Benson's latest volume, The Fascinating Mrs. Halton. Now, there is no English writer, not even Anthony Hope himself, more expert in turning out idle little Dolly Dialogues that begin nowhere and end in the same place—feminine studies of the tinsel jewelry type, all sparkle and glitter but without the sterling mark. A generation has passed since he created the Dodo type, a perfectly good type so far as it goes, and one of which no intelligent student of human nature would venture to say that the Dodo of real life does not do such things. But here, at last, in The Fascinating Mrs. Halton, the author has failed to carry conviction with it. His heroine, to be sure, finds herself in a serious dilemma. Returning after a year of

widowhood upon the Continent, as the betrothed bride of another man, she discovers her favourite niece, Daisy, on the brink of accepting the proposal of a certain Lord Lindfield. Now, Mrs. Halton happens to know that the tragic death of Daisy's wayward and unhappy sister is mainly to be laid at Lord Lindfield's door. Daisy herself knows nothing of the matter, and even Lord Lindfield does not dream that there is any connection between a half-forgotten episode in Paris and the object of his present serious intentions. Now Mrs. Halton is represented to us as a woman of rather sterling qualities. Below a blithe and inconsequential surface, one feels that she is a woman who is distinctly worth while—and yet, in the face of this, what does the author ask us to believe her capable of doing? Why, here is the best way that this intelligent, warm-hearted, frank-natured woman can hit upon: she flings herself bodily at Lord Lindfield. She matches all of her maturer charms and finished arts against poor Daisy's youth and inexperience. With her own betrothed lover looking on and marvelling in patient and dumb trustfulness, she stoops to coquetries that are almost wanton in their boldness—and when finally Lord Lindfield falls into the snare and forgetful of Daisy offers himself, she assumes a sudden hauteur and becomes insulting in her attitude of disdainful and outraged dignity. Now it is obvious that Mr. Benson knew better; he felt that all this was preposterous—and the proof lies in the fact that despite the absurdity of this false position his people all act like sensible human beings; they get together, talk things over and refuse to have their lives wrecked by a bit of melodrama. Yet even here it is unnecessary to say that people don't do such things. If Mrs. Halton had not done this particular thing, Mr. Benson would have had no story to write. The real explanation is that Mrs.Halton was just a plain, garden variety of fool, and Mr. Benson was either not clever enough or not honest enough to tell us so.

~Frederic Taber Cooper in The Bookman (US)

Mr. Benson has an advantage over many current novelists in being sure of his métier. He never attempts too much. His plane is that of the social-humorous romance. He is content with few characters and simple plot. After a few of these pages, it is perfectly clear what the fascinating Mrs. Halton is going to do. Her task is an unusual one, though not unheard of: there is a very passable stage plot involved in the narrative. Mrs. Halton is a young and not over-mournful widow. She is, indeed, when the story opens,' already pledged to a second mate, and on the way to a first happiness. But an unpleasant duty intervenes. Returning to England from a season of mourning and recuperation abroad, she finds her favorite niece and companion almost engaged to be married to a certain young lord (of course a lord). He is a pretty fair sort of lord, but he has had his experiences, one of them connected with a lady in Paris, whom Mrs. Halton knows to have been the sister of Daisy, the girl. There is your situation. It is impossible for Mrs. Halton to tell Daisy, for the sake of her memory of the erring sister, who is now dead. And she cannot bring herself to tell the nobleman, since she regards him as a rascal. Evidently, there is only one thing to do. Mrs. Halton is almost as young and quite as beautiful as the fair Daisy. She determines to steal away Daisy's lover before Daisy actually promises herself to him. The thing is easily done: the gentleman is quite ready to change his objective. As soon as his fickleness is made clear to Daisy, Mrs. Halton's engagement to the other man is announced. Her game has been open, and both Daisy and his lordship demand an explanation—which the fascinating Mrs. Halton is forced to give. They agree that she has done right. Daisy promptly pairs off with her original second choice; milord is content to remain the adoring friend of the no longer Mrs. Halton. For her part, she has come to like and admire him very much: there is a touch of pure Briticism in the toleration with which she looks upon him as a man who has had a mistress, though the thought of his marrying the sister of that deceased mistress is a horror to her.

~The Nation (US), 02/06/1910