MOTHER Mother. By E. F. Benson. (Hodder and Stoughton. 10s.
6d.) MR. BENSON'S book about his mother—and himself—is as interesting as it is frank. Those who have read her sons' books already know a good deal about Mrs. Benson and the
Archbishop, and would like to know more. Readers of this new volume will see Mrs. Benson as a very young woman, one who " danced and sang into matrimony " at the age of eighteen. They will learn from her diary what was her relation in these early days to her stern and gloomy young husband of whom she stood in great fear. He had been in love with her since she was eleven but soon after her marriage she could but see " how evidently disappointed he was." To serve and please him became her one thought. Her failures and successes she records in her diary. The future great Arch- bishop was certainly at this time a most abominable prig.
Mr. Edgworth himself was not more determined to " form " his wife's character, and probably he had a good deal to do with the muscular development of a nature which in maturity proved stronger than his own. " This ought to be (and to all appearance will be) a time of great trouble and sorrow to me. I have most woefully neglected my bills," we read. " What he will say I scarcely dare think," continues the Vic- torian young girl who was to become so notable and strong a matron ; " it seems as though I had to go through the valley of the shadow of death but I have no hope without that of getting into the region of calm and peace beyond." He is, she writes very humbly, more sensitive than she. " Therefore I must not think of being at ease but of suiting my ways to his feelings." It was years before she lost her awe of him. It passed away during a spiritual crisis in which she did not invoke his aid, but during which his devoted idealism and the sort of passion for righteousness which was in him became revealed to her. Then, too, another side of her nature at once so taken up with the things of the spirit and the things of the world developed itself :—
" She loved and revelled in her responsibilities as mistress of the great house serenely dispensing its hospitalities and oiling all the machinery so that its wheels should run without grit or hitch. She loved entertaining on a great scale and being entertained ; to meet and to be in the midst of those who carried on the government of the Church and State was a rich pleasure to her. The sights and shows, the debates and ceremonials, the State functions and ecclesiastical occasions, bishops and princes and prime ministers, rulers and those in authority made a pomp and pageantry that stimulated and enchanted her."
Yet her son tells us she would have left it all if she could have served her husband better " in a remote and desolate fen." " Two things only remained to her of her own which were not his : these were her personal relation to God and her personal relation to her children and friends." Pretty big things after all !
On these middle years of joy and prosperity Mr. Benson touches shortly. It is of his mother's life as a ydung woman and as an old woman that he is telling us. With her husband's death " the old entrancing life " was at an end. In London " it still foamed and bubbled," but she had ." to stand behind the barrier which excluded the general public." " How I sicken," she wrote in her diary, " of all this everyday life." And again, " Oh, the awful backwater this is." As is obvious from her son's picture, Mrs. Benson was one of those rare intellectual women who are not bookish. " I- don't think," he writes, " she ever found inspiration or reality in any books."
She had almost a genius for friendship and the deepest interest
in her acquaintance, 'but " The better she loved the more critical she became." She turned a light on to the minds of
her friends which often revealed them to themselves, but always revealed them at their best so that no one seems ever to have feared this " analytical, critical, abounding love." In time, this pleasure in people replaced the pleasures of a fuller life, she "settled down," as the saying is ; alio she was getting old,
and the sad shadow of her daughter's insanity could not but sap in a measure her restless vitality. Even this tragic episode did not, however, break her down, she hoped against hope for a cure, and by a sort of miracle, as her beloved " Maggie " lay dying, her melancholia and her delusions passed away. She " came to herself " at the last.
It is not out of place that a son who played so large a part in Mrs. Benson's life, who lived at home till he was thirty, should devote a good many pages of his book about her to himself. The secret of autobiography has been with the Benson4 a family secret—perhaps the only one. They give the reader the sense that they are telling him everything, and whether he deprecates or admires their frankness, he is obliged to listen. The chapter in which Mr. Benson describes his first years of independent life, when far later than most men he left his mother's home, fills one with a sense of social happi- ness and well-being. We sniff once more the sweet Victorian atmosphere of an easier, calmer world. Indeed the whole book breathes this atmosphere. Mrs. Benson, despite her troubles, breathes it. " There was so much to do, so much ready toasted and buttered quite apart from the real business of my life." Yes, those were the halcyon days of the upper middle class and they have become history. Joy and tragedy are eternal, but for the professional class the days of toast and butter were short and are over.
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