lly got another on the stocks, and did
not care about the previous one at all.

[Illustration: ROBERT HUGH BENSON

IN 1910. AGED 39]

Neither do I think that his books emanated from a high artistic ideal. I
do not believe that he was really much interested in his craft. Rather
he visualised a story very vividly, and then it seemed to him the finest
fun in the world to spin it all as rapidly as he could out of his
brain, to make it all alert with glancing life. It was all a personal
confession; his books bristle with his own dreams, his own dilemmas, his
own social relations; and when he had once firmly realised the Catholic
attitude, it seemed to him the one thing worth writing about.

While I write these pages I have been dipping into _The
Conventionalists_. It is full of glow and drama, even melodrama; but
somehow it does not recall Hugh to my mind. That seems strange to me,
but I think of him as always larger than his books, less peremptory,
more tolerant, more impatient of strain. The book is full of strain; but
then I remember that in the old days, when he played games, he was a
provoking and even derisive antagonist, and did not in the least resent
his adversaries being both; and I come back to my belief in the game,
and the excitement of the game. I do not, after all, believe that his
true nature flowed quite equably into his books, as I think it did into
_The Light Invisible_ and _Richard Raynal_. It was a demonstration, and
he enjoyed using his skill and adroitness; he loved to present the
smouldering and flashing of passions, the thrill and sting of which he
had never known. Saved as he was by his temperament alike from deep
suffering and tense emotion, and from any vital mingling either with the
scum and foam or with the stagnancy and mire of life, the books remain
as a brilliant illusion, with much of the shifting hues and changing
glimmer of his own ardent and restless mind rippling over the surface of
a depth which is always a little mysterious as to the secrets it
actually holds.

XV

FAILING HEALTH

Hugh's health on the whole was good up to the year 1912, though he had a
troublesome ailment, long ignored, which gave him a good deal of
malaise. He very much disliked being spoken to about his health, and
accepted no suggestions on the subject. But he determined at the end of
1912, after enduring great pain, to have an operation, which was quite
successful, but the shock of which was consid