ed, as I have
heard him do, some course of sermons that he was giving, and described
the queue which formed in the street, and the aisles and gangways
crowded with people standing to hear him, that he did so more
impersonally than anyone I had ever heard, as though it were a
delightful adventure, and more a piece of good luck than a testimony to
his own powers.

[Illustration: ROBERT HUGH BENSON

IN 1912. AGED 40]

It was the same with his books; he wished them to succeed and enjoyed
their success, while it was an infinite delight to him to write them.
But he had no egotism of a commonplace sort about him, and he never
consciously tried to succeed. Success was just the reverberating echo of
his own delight.

And thus I do not look upon him as one who had bent and curbed his
nature by stern self-discipline to do work of a heavy and distasteful
kind; nor do I think that his dangerous devotion to work was the fierce
effort of a man who would have wished to rest, yet felt that the time
was too short for all that he desired to do. I think it was rather the
far more fruitful energy of one who exulted in expressing himself, in
giving a brilliant and attractive shape to his ideas, and who loved,
too, the varieties and tendencies of human nature, enjoyed moulding and
directing them, and flung himself with an intense joy of creation into
all the work which he found ready to his hand.

XXI

TEMPERAMENT

Hugh never seemed to me to treat life in the spirit of a mystic or a
dreamer, with unshared and secret experiences, withdrawing into his own
ecstasy, half afraid of life, rapt away into interior visions. Though he
had a deep curiosity about mystical experiences, he was never a mystic
in the sense that he had, as great mystics seem to have had, one shell
less, so to speak, between him and the unseen. He lived in the visible
and tangible world, loving beautiful secrets; and he was a mystic only
in the sense that he had an hourly and daily sense of the presence of
God. He wished to share his dreams and to make known his visions, to
declare the glory of God and to show His handiwork. He found the world
more and more interesting, as he came to know it, and in the light of
the warm welcome it gave him. He had a keen and delicate apprehension of
spiritual beauty, and the Mass became to him a consummation of all that
he held most holy and dear. He had recognised a mystical presence in the
Church of England, but he found a