Arthur Christopher Benson

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50008097

Benson, Arthur Christopher (1862–1925), poet and college head, was born on 24 April 1862 at Wellington College, the son of Edward White Benson (1829–1896), first headmaster of the college and later archbishop of Canterbury, and his wife, Mary, née Sidgwick (1841–1918). He was the brother of Edward Frederic Benson, Robert Hugh Benson, Mary Eleanor Benson, and Margaret Benson. In 1874 he won a scholarship to Eton College from Temple Grove, a preparatory school in East Sheen; in 1881 he went on to King's College, Cambridge, where he was a scholar and took a first in the classical tripos in 1884.

The formative influences upon Benson were essentially ecclesiastical. Between the ages of ten and twenty-one his home was in the cathedral close, first at Lincoln and then at Truro. He retained a love of church music and ceremony, and although his Christianity became theologically liberal and distinctly unorthodox, he remained definitely ‘on the side of the things it stands for’ (Diary, ed. Lubbock, 1913, 139.52). Having an archbishop for a father sharpened the sense that he ought to achieve something in life. But what? He returned to Eton as a master in 1885, a post he was to hold for eighteen years, yet despite his obvious success at schoolmastering he had no real interest in it, and was largely bored by the grind of classical teaching and the dominance of the games ethos. Even the compensation that he found in being surrounded by attractive boys was marred by his consciousness of their propensity for masturbation: a dreaded and disastrous ‘moral evil’, deeply troubling to him, ‘the dark shadow on the life of a schoolmaster, his most anxious and saddest preoccupation’ (A. C. Benson, The Schoolmaster: a Commentary, 1902, 1908, 148–9).

Benson nurtured, however, a real ambition for a literary career, and began by writing poetry. He completed an impressive two-decker biography of his father in 1899, and throughout his life he wrote or edited upwards of sixty books. These included relatively serious literary studies of Rossetti, Fitzgerald, and Pater (between 1904 and 1906), but his output mostly consisted of essays, quietly reflective and homiletic, and quasi-autobiographical stories, popular with a genteel, middle-class readership. They were the kind of books which got bad reviews but made him a lot of money, books happily and obsessively churned out between tea and dinner—‘a thousand pages in his sight / were but an evening gone’ (Benson, Final Edition, 24). Such titles as The House of Quiet (1904), From a College Window (1906), and Beside Still Waters (1907) speak for themselves. Benson himself acknowledged their essential vapidity (‘sauce without meat’). The complacent fluency, daintiness, and over-written tepid sentiment lent themselves easily to parody, most notably in Max Beerbohm's ‘Out of Harm's Way’ (A Christmas Garland, 1912, 21–30); but At a Safe Distance was also tellingly suggested as a possible future title.

Meanwhile, as a result of Queen Victoria's understandable indifference to Alfred Austin, Benson became an unofficial laureate of the court at Windsor. This led to the writing of the famous words of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as a coronation ode for King Edward VII in 1902, fitted to what Benson called Elgar's ‘wizard-like music’ (Diary, ed. Lubbock, 1902, 19.157). He became a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1904, his court connections having enabled him to retire from Eton to Cambridge on appointment as joint editor (with the second Viscount Esher) of the first three volumes of The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1837–1861, which appeared in 1907.

In appearance Benson was a tall, upright figure of considerable bulk (weighing 16 stone when he was sixty), with shaggy fair hair going grey, a ruddy complexion, a heavy moustache, blue eyes, and bushy eyebrows. He was, in his own description, ‘like the cornet-player of a German Band’. Invariably he dressed in grey flannel with a double-breasted jacket. He loved to observe life, but was a reluctant participator. He could feel warm affection for boys and young men (among them George Mallory and Dadie Rylands), but was totally unable to come to terms with physical intimacy of any kind. This fastidious self-withholding apparently precipitated a nervous breakdown as an undergraduate (November 1882), when a chastely loved schoolfriend gave in to ‘immorality’ with someone else, and ruined Benson's relationship with him. He never married; in fact, he never even contemplated it. ‘My own emotions do not scorch,’ he wrote, ‘they merely shine and ripple like the waters of a lake’ (Diary, ed. Lubbock, 1907, 94.15–16). And: ‘I don't want to claim or to be claimed—I want nothing but a cordial camaraderie—and thus a whole range of [sexual] problems mean nothing to me’ (ibid., 1916, 159.45). In any case: ‘the Head of a College can hardly hope to inspire undergrads with romantic passion’ (ibid., 1924, 175.26). So he concentrated on entertaining the young men to lunch, talking amusingly, and perhaps taking them for a cycle ride afterwards.

The real love affair of Benson's life was with Magdalene College, where after eight years he became president in 1912 and master in December 1915, a post he held until his death. The college was at a very low ebb indeed when he joined it (at the invitation of his old colleague S. A. Donaldson, who had just been appointed master). But he rapidly supplied the courageous inspiration and the generous benefactions needed to brighten and improve it, to establish indeed a ‘New Magdalene’. ‘He built, he adorned, he financed and he reigned’ (Benson, Final Edition, 126). He was helped crucially by gifts totalling over £60,000 from an American admirer living in Switzerland, Mme de Nottbeck. Benson promoted lively and genial teaching, his most notable protégé being I. A. Richards. He encouraged ‘modern’ subjects, not only English and history, but science, archaeology, and music. He also widened the range of school connections, and supplied good sense and forward-looking understanding to governing body debate. Above all, he was friendly and helpful towards a large proportion of the undergraduates. As master he was kindly, benevolent, and richly humoured, certainly, but he was also radical, analytical, combative, egotistical, and despotic. In short, he was a figure quite unrecognizable from most of his writings. As he himself put it, ‘in my books I am solemn, sweet, refined; in real life I am rather vehement, sharp, contemptuous, a busy mocker’ (Diary, ed. Lubbock, 1913, 142.31).

If, on the whole, Benson could hold these two aspects of personality together—the quietistic scribbler and the activating leader, the generously companionable but finally unapproachable man—there was a price to pay. Twice (in 1907–8 and 1917–22) he descended into prolonged and terrible depression, diagnosed as neurasthenia. He struggled to make sense of it in his diary, but even his facility with words was eventually crushed by the enervating, baffling unintelligibility of it all (Diary, ed. Lubbock, 1917, 166.48).

Benson died in the Old Lodge at Magdalene on 17 June 1925 and was buried at St Giles's cemetery, Huntingdon Road, Cambridge. Of all of his writings, it is his diary which may give him enduring significance. Begun in 1897 when he was thirty-five years old, it is well over 4 million words long, and runs to 180 volumes. Two edited selections have appeared—Percy Lubbock's a year after Benson's death, and, more recently, David Newsome's in 1981. The diary remains an important document for understanding late Victorian (public) schoolmastering, the Edwardian literary scene, and Cambridge in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Benson was one of the most charismatic, intelligent, and culturally influential dons Cambridge has ever seen.

R. Hyam

Sources

D. Newsome, On the edge of paradise: A. C. Benson, the diarist (1980) · E. H. Ryle, Arthur Christopher Benson: as seen by some friends (1925) · P. Cunich and others, A history of Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1428–1988 (1994) · The diary of Arthur Christopher Benson, ed. P. Lubbock (1926) · F. McD. C. Turner, A. C. Benson (1992) · E. F. Benson, Final edition: informal autobiography (1940) · D. Newsome, ed., Edwardian excursions: from the diaries of A. C. Benson, 1898–1904 (1981) · R. Hyam, ‘A. C. Benson: on the edge of hell?’, Cambridge Review (5 Dec 1980), 56–9 [review article] · private information (2004) · DNB

Archives

Bodl. Oxf., corresp. and literary MSS · Borth. Inst., corresp. · CUL, corresp. and MSS · Eton College, scrapbooks and papers · Harvard U., Houghton L., corresp. and literary papers · Magd. Cam., diaries and MSS · Magd. Cam., corresp. · University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, special collections, corresp. and MSS :: BL, corresp. with Sir Sidney Cockerell, Add. MS 52705 · BL, letters to Mary Gladstone, Add. MS 46244 · BL, letters to W. E. Gladstone, Add. MSS 44502–44525 · BL, corresp. with Macmillans, Add. MSS 55021–55022 · BL, letters to Charles E. Sayle, Add. MS 51290 · Bodl. Oxf., letters to Lewis Harcourt · Borth. Inst., corresp. with Lord Halifax · CAC Cam., corresp. with Lord Esher · Elgar Birthplace Museum, Worcester, corresp. with Sir Edward Elgar · JRL, letters to Charles Fairfax Murray · King's AC Cam., letters to Oscar Browning · King's AC Cam., letters to G. H. W. Rylands · King's AC Cam., letters to W. J. H. Sprott, MAC · LPL, letters to E. W. Benson · LPL, corresp. with Randall Thomas Davidson · LPL, letters to J. A. L. Riley · LUL, letters to Austin Dobson · Magd. Cam., letters to Geoffrey Madan · NA Scot., corresp. with H. W. Hope · Ransom HRC, corresp. with John Lane · Royal Society of Literature, London, corresp. with Royal Society of Literature · Society for Psychical Research, London, corresp. with Sir Oliver Lodge · Trinity Cam., letters to Sir Henry Babington Smith · U. Durham L., archives and special collections, letters to Sir Harold MacMichael · U. Leeds, Brotherton L., letters to Edmund Gosse · U. Sussex Library, special collections, letters to Kingsley Martin · W. Sussex RO, letters to L. J. Maxse

Likenesses

M. Beerbohm, cartoon, 1908, Magd. Cam. · R. E. Fuller Maitland, oils, 1911, Magd. Cam. · Vandyk, photograph, c.1911, NPG · W. Nicholson, oils, 1924, FM Cam. [see illus.] · H. Abbot, group portrait, photograph (with his brothers Edward Frederic Benson and Robert Hugh Benson), NPG; see illus. in Benson, Robert Hugh (1871–1914) · Spy [L. Ward], lithograph caricature, NPG; repro. in VF (4 June 1903) · memorial roundel (south transept window), Rye parish church, East Sussex

Wealth at death

£112,440 10s. 7d.: probate, 11 July 1925, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

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R. Hyam, ‘Benson, Arthur Christopher (1862–1925)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2009 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/30712, accessed 5 Oct 2017]

Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30712