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R.H. Benson: Unsung Genius
by JOSEPH PEARCE
Hugh Benson was lauded in his
own day as one of the leading figures in English literature,
yet today he is almost completely forgotten outside Catholic
circles and is sadly neglected even among Catholics. Few stars
of the literary firmament, either before or since, have shone
quite so brightly in their own time before being eclipsed quite
so inexplicably in posterity. Almost a century after his conversion,
Benson has become the unsung genius of the Catholic Literary
Revival.
It was not always so.
Benson was the youngest son
of E. W. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, who, as head of the
Anglican Church, was the upholder of the Protestant establishment
in England. As such, his son's conversion to Roman Catholicism
in 1903, and his subsequent ordination, caused a sensation. Not
since Newman's conversion almost 60 years earlier had the reception
of a convert into the Church caused such a commotion. Shudders
of shock shook the Anglican establishment, whereas many Catholics
rejoiced at the news of such a high-profile coup with unrestrained
triumphalism.
There is no doubt that the
new convert belonged to a remarkable family. Apart from his father's
rise to ecclesiastical prominence as head of the Church of England,
both of Benson's brothers became leading members of the Edwardian
literati. A.C. Benson, his eldest brother, was master of Magdalene
College, Cambridge, and built a reputation as a fine biographer,
diarist, and literary critic, writing acclaimed studies of Rossetti,
Fitzgerald, Pater, Tennyson, and Ruskin. The other brother, E.F.
Benson, wrote prolifically and is best known to posterity for
his satirical Mapp and Lucia novels which have been successfully
adapted for television. Yet R.H. Benson was not to be outshone
by his older siblings. Before his untimely death in 1914 at the
age of 43, he would write 15 highly successful novels.
The first of Benson's novels,
and the only one written while he was still an Anglican, was
The Light Invisible, published in 1903 and written
when he was in the midst of the convulsive throes of spiritual
conversion. The book is awash with a veritable confusion of emotive
mysticism - a confession of faith amidst the confusion of doubt.
Once he had gained the clarity of Catholic perception, Benson
looked upon his first novel with a degree of scepticism. In 1912,
he commented that its subsequent popularity appeared to be determined
by the religious denomination of those who read it. It was "rather
significant" that it was popular among Anglicans whereas
Catholics appreciated it to "a very much lesser degree":
"most Catholics, and myself among them, think that Richard
Raynal, Solitary is very much better written and very
much more religious."
Richard Raynal, Solitary evokes with beguiling beauty the spiritual
depth of English life prior to the rupture of the Reformation,
as Benson seamlessly weaves the modern storyteller's art with
the chivalrous charm of the Middle Ages. Resembling a modern
equivalent of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis,
this genial and ingenious mingling of the modern and the medieval
produces a hero who combines courage and sanctity in equal measure.
Hilaire Belloc was so impressed
by Benson's historical novels that he wrote enthusiastically
of him to A.C. Benson in 1907 that it was "quite on the
cards that he will be the man to write some day a book to give
us some sort of idea what happened in England between 1520 and
1560." In fact, prompted by his anger and frustration at
the Protestant bias of the Whig historians, Belloc would write
several books of his own on this subject, including studies of
key 16th and 17th century figures such as Wolsey, Cromwell, James
I, Charles II, and Cranmer. Belloc's How the Reformation
Happened, published in 1928, was an endeavour to put the
whole period into context.
Benson, however, achieved in
his fiction what Belloc was striving to achieve in his non-fiction.
In Come Rack! Come Rope!, possibly the finest of
Benson's historical novels, the whole period of the Reformation
is brought to blood-curdling life. With a meticulous approach
to period detail, Come Rack! Come Rope! leaps from
the page with historical realism. The reader is transported to
the time of persecution in England when priests were put to a
slow and tortuous death. The terror and tension of the tale grips
the reader as tightly as it grips the leading characters who
courageously witness to their faith in a hostile and deadly environment.
Few novels have so successfully brought the past so potently
to life.
Perhaps the clearest evidence
of Benson's genius is to be found in the ease with which he crossed
literary genres. Aside from his historical romances, he was equally
at home with novels with a contemporary setting, such as The
Necromancers, a cautionary tale about the dangers of spiritualism,
or with futuristic fantasies, such as Lord of the World.
The latter novel is truly remarkable and deserves to stand beside
Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four as a classic of dystopian fiction. In fact,
though Huxley's and Orwell's modern masterpieces may merit equal
praise as works of literature, they are clearly inferior as works
of prophecy. The political dictatorships that gave Orwell's novel-nightmare
an ominous potency have had their day. Today, his cautionary
fable serves merely as a timely reminder of what has been and
what may be again if the warnings of history are not heeded.
Benson's novel-nightmare, on the other hand, is coming true before
our very eyes.
The world depicted in Lord
of the World is one where creeping secularism and Godless
humanism have triumphed over religion and traditional morality.
It is a world where philosophical relativism has triumphed over
objectivity; a world where, in the name of tolerance, religious
doctrine is not tolerated. It is a world where euthanasia is
practiced widely and religion hardly practiced at all. The lord
of this nightmare world is a benign-looking politician intent
on power in the name of "peace," and intent on the
destruction of religion in the name of "truth." In
such a world, only a small and shrinking Church stands resolutely
against the demonic "Lord of the World."
If Benson's literary output
encompassed multifarious fictional themes - historical, contemporary,
and futuristic - he also strayed into other areas with consummate
ease. His Poems, published posthumously, display a deep and dry
spirituality, expressed formally in a firmly-rooted, if sometimes
desiccate, faith. The same deep and dry spirituality was evident
in Spiritual Letters to one of his Converts, also
published posthumously, which offers a tantalizing insight into
a profound intellect. A series of sermons, preached in Rome at
Easter 1913 and later published as The Paradoxes of Catholicism,
illustrates why Benson was so popular as a public preacher, attracting
large audiences wherever he spoke. Particularly remarkable is
Benson's masterly Confessions of a Convert which
stands beside John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua
and Ronald Knox's A Spiritual Aeneid as a timeless
classic in the literature of conversion.
In A Spiritual Aeneid,
Knox confessed candidly that Benson's influence was crucial to
his own conversion: "I always looked on him as the guide
who had led me to Catholic truth - I did not know then that he
used to pray for my conversion." The other great influence
on Knox's conversion was G.K. Chesterton and it is perhaps no
surprise that Benson was a great admirer of Chesterton. Benson's
biographer, the Jesuit C.C. Martindale, who was himself a convert,
wrote that Benson's Papers of a Pariah were "noticeable"
for their "Chestertonian quality": "Mr. G.K. Chesterton
is never tired of telling us that we do not see what we look
at - the one undiscovered planet is our Earth . . . And Benson
read much of Mr. Chesterton, and liked him in a qualified way."
Further evidence of Chesterton's
influence on Benson is provided by Benson's admiration of Chesterton's
Heretics. "Have you read," he enquired
of a correspondent in 1905, "a book by G.K. Chesterton called
"Heretics"? If not, do see what you think of it. It
seems to me that the spirit underneath it is splendid. He is
not a Catholic, but he has the spirit . . . I have not been so
much moved for a long time . . . He is a real mystic of an odd
kind." Chesterton was not a Catholic in 1905 but Heretics
was the first evidence that, as Benson put it, he "had the
spirit." Chesterton's "spirit," every bit as influential
as Benson's during the early days of the Catholic Literary Revival,
is the subject of the next article in this column. Chesterton,
however, is enjoying a great revival of interest, whereas Benson
is still sadly neglected. It is high time that Msgr. Robert Hugh
Benson, the unsung genius of the Catholic Literary Revival, experiences
a revival of his own.
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This article is reprinted with permission from Lay
Witness magazine. Lay
Witness is a publication of Catholic United for the Faith,
Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968 to support,
defend, and advance the efforts of the teaching Church.
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