The Upton Letters - Arthur Christopher Benson (learn to read books TXT) 📗

who keeps up an end and has something to say; and these must be the basis of most parties--the lettuce, so to speak, of the salad.

The thing to beware of is to assemble a purely youthful party, unless you know your men well; a shy, awkward young man, or a noisy, complacent young man, are each in their way distressing. But a mixture of youth and age will produce the happiest results, if only your luck does not desert you.

After all, the essence of the thing is to have simple, unaffected people; the poseur is the ruin of genial intercourse, unless he is a good fellow whose pose is harmless. Some of the best talks I have ever had have been in the company of sensible and good-natured men, of no particular brilliance, but with a sense of justice in the matter of talk and no taste for anecdote; just as some of the best meals I have ever had have been of the plainest, when good digestion waited upon appetite. And, on the other hand, some of the very saddest entertainments I have ever taken a hand in have been those conducted by a host bubbling with geniality, and with a stock of reminiscences, who turned the hose in the face of guest after guest till they writhed with boredom.

Bless me, it is midnight! The hour is pealed from innumerable towers; then comes a holy silence, while I hear the drip of the fountain in the court. This incomparable Oxford! I wish that fate or Providence would turn my steps this way!--Ever yours,

T. B.


PELHAM HOUSE, HAMMERSMITH, Dec. 28, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--Since I left Oxford, I have been staying in town. I can't remember if you ever came across my old friend Hardy--Augustus Hardy, the art critic--at all events you will know whom I mean. I have been very much interested and a good deal distressed by my visit. Hardy is an elderly man now, nearly sixty. He went through Oxford with a good deal of distinction, and his sketches were much admired. It was supposed that he had only to present himself at the doors of the Academy, and that it would surrender at discretion. His family were rich, and Hardy went up to town to practise art. He was a friend of my father's, and he was very kind to me as a boy. He was well off, and lived in a pleasant house of his own in Half Moon Street. He was a great hero of mine in those days; he had given up all idea of doing anything great as a painter, but turned his attention to art-criticism. He wrote an easy, interesting style, and he used to contribute to magazines on all kinds of aesthetic subjects; he belonged to several clubs, dined out a great deal, and used to give elaborate little dinners himself. He was fond of lecturing and speechifying generally; and he liked the society of young people, young men of an intelligent and progressive type. He was very free with his money--I suppose he had nearly three thousand a year--and spent it in a princely kind of way; when he travelled he travelled like a great gentleman, generally took a young artist or two with him in whom he was interested, and whose expenses he paid.

He was in those days an admirable talker, quick, suggestive, amusing, and with an indefinable charm. He was then a tall, thin, active man, with flashing eyes, a sanguine complexion, and a mobile face; he wore his hair rather luxuriantly, and had a picturesque, pointed beard. I shall never forget the delight of occasional visits to his house; he was extraordinarily kind and really sympathetic, and he had with young people a kind of caressing deference in his manner that used to give one an agreeable sense of dignity. I remember that he had a very deft way of giving one's halting remarks a kind of twist which used to make it appear that one had said something profound and poetical.

Well, about twenty years ago, all this came to an end very suddenly. Hardy lost the greater part of his money at one swoop; he had inherited, I think, a certain share in his father's business; he had one brother, older than himself, who carried the business on. Hardy never looked into money matters, but simply spent whatever came in; the business came to grief, and Hardy found himself pretty considerably in debt, with a few hundreds a year of his own. He had, fortunately for himself, never married; his friends came to his assistance, and arranged matters as comfortably as possible. Hardy settled in an old house in Hammersmith, and has lived there ever since. He belonged to several clubs; but he resigned his membership of all but one, where he now practically spends his day, and having been always accustomed to have his own way, and dominate the societies in which he found himself, took it for granted that he would be the chief person there. He was always an egoist, but his position, his generosity, and his own charm had rather tended to conceal the fact.

Well, he has found every one against him in his adversity, and has suffered from all the petty intrigues of a small and rather narrow-minded society. His suggestions have been scouted, he has been pointedly excluded from all share in the management of the club, and treated with scanty civility. I don't suppose that all this has given him as much pain as one would imagine, because he has all the impenetrability and want of perception of the real egoist. I am told that he used to be treated at one time in the club with indifference, hostility, and even brutality. But he is not a man to be suppressed--he works hard, writes reviews, articles, and books, and pays elaborate civilities to all new members. I have only seen him at long intervals of late years; but he has stayed with me once or twice, and has often pressed me to go and see him in town. I had some business to attend there this Christmas, and I proposed myself. He wrote a letter of cordial welcome, and I have now been his guest for four days.

I can't express to you the poignant distress which my visit has caused me; not exactly a personal distress, for Hardy is not a man to be directly pitied; but the pathos of the whole thing is very great. His house has large and beautiful rooms, and I recognised many of the little treasures--portraits, engravings, statuettes, busts, and books--which used to adorn the house in Half Moon Street. But the man himself! He has altered very little in personal appearance. He still moves briskly, and, except that his hair is nearly white, I could imagine him to be the same hero that I used to worship. But his egoism has grown upon him to such an extent that his mind is hardly recognisable. He still talks brilliantly and suggestively at times; and I find myself every now and then amazed by some stroke of genius in his talk, some familiar thing shown in a new and interesting light, some ray of poetry or emotion thrown on to some dusty and well-known subject. But he has become a man of grievances; he still has, at the beginning of a talk, some of the fine charm of sympathy. He will begin by saying that he wants to know what one thinks of a point, and he will smile in the old affectionate kind of way, as one might smile at a favourite child; but he will then plunge into a fiery monologue about his ambitions and his work. He declaims away, with magnificent gestures. He still interlards his talk with personal appeals for approbation, for concurrence, for encouragement; but it is clear he does not expect an answer, and his demands for sympathy have little more personal value than the reiterated statement in the Litany that we are miserable sinners has in the mouth of many respectable church-goers.

The result is that I find myself greatly fatigued by my visit. I have spent several hours of every day in his society, and I do not suppose that I have uttered a dozen consecutive words; yet many of his statements would be well worth discussing, if he were capable of discussion.

The burden of his song is the lack of that due recognition which he ought to receive; and this, paradoxical as it may appear, is combined with an intense and childish complacency in his own greatness, his position, his influence, his literary and artistic achievements.

He seems to live a very lonely life, though a full one; every hour of his day is methodically mapped out. He has a large correspondence, he reads the papers diligently, he talks, he writes; but he seems to have no friends and no associates. His criticisms upon art, which are suggestive enough, are regarded with undisguised contempt by professional critics; and I find that they are held to be vitiated by a certain want of balance and proportion, and a whimsical eclecticism of taste.

But the pathos of the situation is not the opinion which is held of him, for he is wholly unconscious of it, and he makes up for any lack of expressed approbation by the earnest and admiring approval of all he does, which he himself liberally supplies. It is rather a gnawing hunger of the soul from which he seems to suffer; he has a simply boundless appetite for the poor thing which he calls recognition--I shudder to think how often I have heard the word on his lips--and his own self-approbation is like a drug which he administers to still some fretting pain.

He has been telling me to-night a long story of machinations against him in the club; the perspicacity with which he detected them, the odious repartees he made, the effective counter-checks he applied. "I was always a combatant," he says, with a leering gaiety. Then the next moment he is girding at the whole crew for their stupidity, their ingratitude, their malignity; and it never seems to cross his mind that he can be, or has been in the smallest degree, to blame. It distressed me profoundly, and my mind and heart seemed to weep silent tears.

If he had shown tact, prudence, diligence, if he could have held his tongue when he first took a different place, he would have had a circle of many friends by now. Instead of this, I find him barely tolerated. He talks--he has plenty of courage, and no idea of being put down--but he is listened to with ill-concealed weariness, and, at best, with polite indifference. Yet every now and then the old spell falls on me, and I realise what a noble mind is overthrown. He ought to be at this time the centre of a set of attached friends, a man spoken of with reverence, believed in, revisited by grateful admirers--a man whom it would be an honour and a delight to a young man to know; and the setting in which he lives is precisely adapted to this role. Instead of which it may safely be said that, if he were to announce his departure from town, it would be received with general and cordial satisfaction by his fellow-clubmen.

Even if he had not his circle, he might live a quiet, tranquil, and laborious life in surroundings which are simple and yet dignified.

But the poison is in his system, and it afflicts me to think in how many systems the same poison is at work nowadays. One sees the frankest form of it in the