nds.

[Illustration: _Copyright, C. Chichester_

HARE STREET, IN THE GARDEN

JULY 1911

R. H. Benson. Dr. F. L. Sessions.]

I used to wonder, in talk with him, how he found it possible to stay
about so much in all sorts of houses, and see so many strange people.
"Oh, one gets used to it," he said, adding: "besides, I am quite
shameless now--I say that I must have a room to myself where I can work
and smoke, and people are very good about that."

XIV

AUTHORSHIP

As to Hugh's books, I will here say a few words about them, because they
were a marked part of himself; he put much skill and care into making
them, and took fully as much rapture away. When he was writing a book,
he was like a man galloping across country in a fresh sunny morning, and
shouting aloud for joy. But I do not intend to make what is called an
appreciation of them, and indeed am little competent to do so. I do not
know the conventions of the art or the conditions of it. "Oh, I see,"
said a critical friend to me not long ago in much disgust, "you read a
novel for the ideas and the people and the story." "What do you read it
for?" I said. "Why, to see how it is done, of course," he replied.
Personally I have never read a book in my life to see how it is done,
and what interests me, apart from the book, is the person behind it--and
that is very elementary. Moreover, I have a particular dislike of all
historical novels. Fact is interesting and imagination is interesting;
but I do not care for webs of imagination hung on pegs of fact.
Historical novels ought to be like memoirs, and they are never in the
least like memoirs; in fact they are like nothing at all, except each
other.

_The Light Invisible_ always seemed to me a beautiful book. It was in
1902 that Hugh began to write it, at Mirfield. He says that a book of
stories of my own, _The Hill of Trouble_, put the idea into his
head--but his stories have no resemblance to mine. Mine were archaic
little romances, written in a style which a not unfriendly reviewer
called "painfully kind," an epigram which always gave Hugh extreme
amusement. His were modern, semi-mystical tales; he says that he
personally came to dislike the book intensely from the spiritual point
of view, as being feverish and sentimental, and designed unconsciously
to quicken his own spiritual temperature. He adds that he thought the
book mischievous, as laying stress on mystical intuition rather than
Divine author