The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 1915. ROBERT HUGH BENSON

New Zealand Tablet, 21 January 1915, Page 33

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 1915. ROBERT HUGH BENSON

OMING, as it did, in the midst of our first news of the great European war, the death of Monsignor Benson scarcely fell upon our ears with its full sad significance. Sorrows and calamities have come thick upon us all in the last few months; the Empire, indeed the whole civilised world, lies in the shadow of a great peril and a great grief, and mercifully, individual misfortunes fall the lighter upon our hearts. But to the wide circle of his readers, the death of Monsignor Benson must have come with a very keen sense of personal loss. This almost worldwide company of warm and true friends which is surely one of the most precious prerogatives of a great writer, realised a few months ago, that never again would they lovingly handle ‘a new hook by Robert Hugh Benson,' with eager expectation of pleasure and profit to he derived

£ ■ ♦. ‘ - • • -j; r from its perusal. And now English, files have come to hand, with many interesting details of his last illness, death, and funeral ceremonies, and appreciations of his literary work, so that the present is a very ’fitting time to commemorate this famous Catholic writer in our columns. - , >.

One notices first, in reviewing, his life and, work, that he had been only ten years a Catholic priest, being received into the Church as late as 1903, and ordained nine months later. His life is indeed a striking instance of the possibility of' doing much in a short space of time. it is almost impossible to realise how much was compressed into the one short decade of his Catholic life and work. Robert Hugh Benson, the fourth 'son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was born in 1871, only forty-thiee years ago, so that he was in the prime , of life and in the fulness of his literary power when he died. He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and, judging from his own Confessions of a Convert, his spiritual possibilities seem to have lain more or less dormant during his school and college life. Music was the only agency, he records, which from time to time gave him a glimpse of the spiritual world. He found it to be, as Carlyle has termed it, ‘ a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads ns to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that.’ Despite his immaturity in spiritual things, the young man entered the Anglican ministry in good faith, and with the hope of doing useful work, and from that onwards he progressed rapidly. He became more and more attracted towards Ritualism, and after a tour on the Continent and in the Ea-st, where he saw the provincialism and unimportance of Anglicanism, he began to entertain serious doubts of the Anglican position. He tells us that he despaired of attaining to truth by means of his intellect alone, for where doctors disagreed, how could ho decide ? He soon perceived, as he says, that ‘ the puzzle which God had flung to me consisted of elements which needed for their solution not the head only, but the heart, the imagination, the intuitions; in fact, the entire human character had to deal with it.’ Here he gives.us the theme which is the undercurrent. of almost all his literary work. In all his books, it will be remembered, he lays great stress on the heart, the imagination, and ‘the intuitions’ of man. He is particularly fond of emphasising the value and importance of intuitions which wo cannot explain or systematise, but which he reckons to be part of God’s plan for our enlightenment. Supernatural apparitions and events constantly occur in his books, and he deprecates an incredulous attitude towards them, preaching always that the world of spirits, good and evil, is very close to us, and may come into touch with us when we least expect it. A writer in the London Tablet goes so far as to declare The Light Invisible to be Benson’s one great book; dealing as it did exclusively with the supernatural and inexplicable element in the universe. Remembering that Benson himself has expressed an intense aversion from this book of his, evidently thinking it crude, unreal, and in some measure insincere, we may bo permitted to disagree with the estimate which places it at the head of his books. But its title might certainly stand for the central theme of all his literary works, and in this sense it is his one book. It is the ‘ light invisible ’ which transfigures the lives of the English Catholics in his historical novels, and strengthens them to martyrdom, and it is this unearthly light which illumines perhaps the most beautiful of all his characters, the recluse Richard Raynal. It is this light which redeems from the commonplace his novels of present-day life, such as The Conventional and The Average Man , and it is this light, too, which irradiates his few doctrinal and controversial works, and makes them such pleasant and easy reading. With this * God’s lamp ’ pressed close to his breast, he feared no darkness in the world, nor any of its problems. As he expresses it in the concluding chapter of Confessions of a Convert ,

‘ there is nothing secular but sin/ and lie has certainly striven to show this in his books. Taking a wide range •><i; . O O or three centuries, he has painted for us dozens of men and women, exceptional in strength or weakness, or merely ‘ average ’■ men, and he has shown us the interior working of Christ and the Church in their souls. No book of his was written without a purpose, and a very definite purpose. Indeed it is probable, as the Manchester Guardian said, that 1 he might have been a considerable influence in literature had he been less concerned with literature as a means, and more concerned with literature as an end.’ Being, as he was, concerned only with literature as a means, he has succeeded in attaining a considerable influence in a higher sphere than that of literature. His pen was to him only the tool with which he could depict Christ- and Christianity to the world ; losing that power, one feels that it would have lost its attraction for its possessor. Yet his was the gift of an extraordinarily effective and vivid style; he was ultra-modern in his methods, terse, concise, pictorial, and powerful, and his hooks possess for us Catholics of to-day a unique charm, combining as they do the presentation of the ancient and well-loved ideals of our faith with all the attractions of the modern school of literature. Monsignor Benson was, like all our present-day writers, an impressionist: he wrote for a generation which has no time to study miniature paintings; his novels and even his more serious works grip the reader from the first page.

It is perhaps difficult for us, whose only acquaintance with the illustrious convert was through his books, to' realise that his literary work was only one department of a very busy life. For us, the author not unnaturally obscures the hard-worked parish priest, accessible to the least of* his flock, and the earnest preacher, well-known in English pulpits. But a contributor to the London Tablet pays him a graceful tribute of praise, and makes us realise the wide scope of his activities, when he says: —‘Failure of the heart was the one final paradox in the history of a man whose heart had never failed him before, were a soul to be healed, or even a trivial kindness to be done.’ And his last words emphasise the fact that this brilliant author of whom wo are proud, was essentially a childlike Catholic, removed from the average Catholic only in his more perfect and docile acceptance of Catholic faith and practice. lor his last words were but the words with which the little Catholic child lies down to sleep; ‘ Jesus, Mary, Joseph, I give you mv heart and my soul.’ It was thus that Robert Hugh Benson laid down to sleep. No wonder that Archbishop Vaughan declared a childlike simplicity to have been the characteristic which led him into the Church, and which had governed his life ever since. Simplicity, too, was the keynote, of his funeral ceremonies, for by Ins own request lie was buried in the orchard of his own house. The Requiem Mass was sung in his private chapel, adorned as it was by the work of his own hands in carved wood, and the music was rendered by the boys of the Westminster Cathedral Choir, in which he had taken a special interest. After Mass, the coffin was borne out of the little chapel into the loveliness of an autumn day, across the grass of his lawn, and past the rose-beds he had planned and tended, to the orchard where the open grave was ready. There the joyful song of the lark blended with the chanting of the"boy choristers, as his body was committed to the ground. Is it fanciful to detect in this simple, almost joyous interment, amid the fresh beauties of the garden, a symbol of that which lived and blossomed in Robert Hugh Benson? Surely he stood above all else, for the Catholic England of three centuries ago, for the ‘ Dowry of Mary,’ the England of simple Catholic piety and unprofaned altar-shrines. Newman spoke of the wonderful movement of his own day as ‘ The Second Spring of English Catholicism, and it was indeed marvellous with all the miraculous re-birth an inexplicable vitality of spring. But in Benson have not we of a later generation seen for the first time the beautiful summer-tide of English Catholicism? He has held up to his compatriots, as to the world, the picture of what they were

in the sixteenth century, before the breath of the Protestant Reformation swept over the land, withering the fair flowers of simplicity, spontaneity, and devotion. English Catholicism as a national religion is but approaching full flower in our own day, and producing again its ancient beauties.' For centuries the national flower has sheltered below the soil of England from the frosts of persecution, though its seeds have lived in the invincible faith of individual families. Benson has done very much to depict its former beauties, and to bring to-day’s blossom to perfection. Above all, he has made real to us what he writes of as ‘a matter of literal history,’ the personal love of Christ, ‘so deep in the better and unspoilt English nature,’ and evidenced still in non-Catholic England, despite the present English tradition of reticence and restraint, by ‘ the marked popularity of such hymns as “Jesu, Lover of My Soul” and Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” ’ His finest woman character is a young English girl, who plays a heroic part during the great darkness of the penal days, and whose inmost thoughts and motives are thus described by Benson: —‘It was the Person of Jesus Christ that was all her religion to her: it was for this that she was devout, that she went to Mass and the Sacraments when she could: . . . But the other talk that she had heard sometimes, —of the place of religion in politics, and the justification of this or that cause of public actionwell, she knew that these things must be so: yet it was not the manner of her own most intimate thought, and the language of it was not hers.’ Benson has given us a book of ancient English devotions, collected and arranged by himself, and all breathing this theme, and among his more serious works, his volume of sermons, entitled The Friendship of Christ, is admittedly unequalled for beauty of thought and expression. Through his own veins ran the warmth and joy of an English summer, and it is not unlikely that the future will declare this reversion to spontaneity and the enthusiasm of simple faith and piety to have been his message to his fellow countrymen.