Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE
HOUSE OF QUIET” by A. C. Benson (first
published in 1904)
On the other hand, as Kay Redfield Jamison has
argued in Touched With Fire, manic-depression is often related to
enhanced creativity, and four of the archbishop’s children were very creative.
Two of the
children died young. A daughter, Margaret Benson, became an Egyptologist. The
fifth child was E.F. (Edward Frederic) Benson, best known now for his farcical Mapp and Lucia novels, written in the
1920s and 1930s and inhabiting the cheerful territory somewhere between P.G. Wodehouse
and high camp. The sixth child, widely regarded as the most brilliant of the
bunch, was Robert Hugh Benson, who converted to Catholicism, became a priest
and wrote a series of historical novels, as well as the admired dystopian novel
Lord of the World.
A.C. Benson’s
bibliography runs to over 50 books – novels, poetry, belles-lettres and collections of essays. Because he was a single,
celibate male, there has in recent decades been the predictable suggestion that
he, like his single, celibate brothers, was homosexual by inclination. While
this may be true, nobody has ever shown that the Benson brothers did anything
other than live and die virgins – not even E.F. Benson, the most overtly camp
of the siblings. (In my notice on A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo, you
will find comment on the possible, but unconsummated, relationship between
Robert Hugh Benson and Frederick William Rolfe).
Now why, you ask
with mounting impatience, am I giving you all this biographical detail? Because
I am once again about to follow my maddening habit of delivering you, in this
“Something Old” section, comments on a book you have probably never heard of
and will probably never read.
Two of A.C. Benson’s
books sit on my shelves. One is The
Silent Isle, a large and rambling collection of observations, editorials
and literary reviews. The other is The
House of Quiet, first published in 1904 (not 1907, as Wikipedia erroneously
claims, perhaps because Benson added a Preface in 1907 replying to critics).
Immensely popular in its day, The House
of Quiet went through seventeen printings between 1904 and the very
battered 1912 copy I own. It kept selling well into the 1930s. Thereafter it
fell out of favour and, like so many bestsellers, is now virtually forgotten.
So for me, it is yet another excuse to comment on the ideas it had, which once
appealed to a mass audience.
Subtitled “An
Autobiography”, The House of Quiet
purports to be a diary, written in the 1890s by somebody who died in 1900.
The question it
claims to pose is whether somebody of no great public note, who makes no
particular mark on the world, nevertheless contributes to life. The narrator (diarist)
had a private tutor, then went to a public school, and was studying at Cambridge
when he was told that he had a debilitating disease for which there was no
cure.
So he retires to
the country to ponder on Life’s Great Mysteries.
This, somewhat
inevitably, is all premise, for Benson’s real purpose is a series of
loosely-connected essays and observations. The narrator gives us tender
memories of his mother’s untutored natural goodness; examples of his own “sense of beauty”; and accounts of the
joy he got in childhood fishing expeditions on a millstream. He lectures on the
folly of teaching schoolboys classical grammar instead of more robustly
introducing them to the classics. He expresses a growing religious sense, but
he has crises of what appears to be melancholia (deep depression – part of the
Benson family curse).
In the country,
he devotes himself to philanthropy. He gets on well with the benevolent
Anglican parson, but not so well with the Anglo-Catholic parson who succeeds
him, who is too concerned with ritual and who is satirised by Benson.
(Obviously A.C. Benson had ecclesiastical views quite different from those of
his younger brothers.)
There is much
detailed description of the natural world, often charming but equally often
tipping over into purple prose, with Benson showing off words like “purpureal” and “ranunculus”.
And then there
is a totally unconvincing conclusion. The narrator at last finds true love (in
the last ten pages!), but resigns himself to death anyway, and duly dies. This
is so pat. We have a big tug at the heartstrings before the emotional finale
and the book’s closing sermon. In the final words of his diary, the narrator
faces his death thus:
“I lie now in my own room – it is evening;
through the open window I can see the dark-stemmed trees, the pigeon-cotes, the
shadowy shoulder of the barn, the soft ridges beyond, the little wood-end that
I saw once in the early dawn and thought so beautiful. When I saw it before it
seemed to me like the gate of the unknown country; will my hovering spirit pass
that way? I have lived my little life – and my heart goes out to all of every
tribe and nation under the sun who are still in the body. I would tell them
with my last breath that there is comfort to the end – that there is nothing
worth fretting over or being heavy-hearted about; that the Father’s arm is
strong, and that His heart is very wide.”
So,
appropriately on a serene evening, the Englishman passes away through English
countryside and into the arms of a loving God.
Dimly I perceive
a good idea here. A good life is not necessarily a life of great public
achievement. It can be a quiet life of friendship, goodwill and real help to
other people, simple pleasures and work. We don’t all have to win the first
prize, build the great building, write the great book or score the winning try
to general applause. Fair enough. Other people have expressed this philosophy
convincingly.
Alas, however,
over this book hang the dreadful hands of complacency and wish-fulfilment. It
is really escapism. Note that the diarist’s circumstances assume a large and
settled income and the easy acquisition of a nice country home. Note that love
arrives comfortably and without fuss (and is dealt with so briefly that it
hardly ruffles the diarist’s feathers). Note there is no real commitment to
another human being, and no anguish or real grief in the approach of death. And
– goodness – it is all so English – not that there’s anything wrong with being
English, except that in this context it takes for granted a huge cultural
superiority.
I give credit to
A.C. Benson for a couple of sallies of wit. I like his description of a
rambling path:
“A little vague lane led to it: a lane that
came from nowhere in particular and took you nowhere; rambling humbly among
that pastures wherever it was convenient to them to permit it, like a
faint-hearted Christian”. (Chapter 5)
Then there is
the following polished truism, which occurs when the narrator is saying how
difficult it is to talk about philanthropy:
“The difficulty in writing about it is to
abstain from platitudes; I can only say that it has revealed to me how much
more emotion and experience go to make up a platitude than I ever expected
before in my ambitious days.” (Chapter 16)
But such moments
are few. The House of Quiet would
have comforted or tickled some generations of well-bred English readers, who
took going to church as both inevitable and worthy. With its rambling sequence
of thoughts in a country setting it is in some respects, then, the Anglican and
churchy counterpart to the agnostic George Gissing’s The Private Papers of HenryRyecroft. But it does not have Gissing’s pungency and variety of
interest, and its views are even more dated.
I cannot see it
ever being “rediscovered” and regaining its bestseller status.