Piers Brendon at Literary Review:
Benson was acerbic and often hilarious about other authors. He describes Henry James’s talk as boring but ‘intricate, magniloquent, rhetorical, humorous’, and quotes him as saying that ‘the difference between being with [J M] Barrie & not being with him was infinitesimal’. Asked whether any of the actresses introduced to him by Ellen Terry were pretty, James replied, ‘I must not go so far as to deny that one poor wanton had some species of cadaverous charm.’ Immensely fat, G K Chesterton got so hot at a Magdalene dinner that the sweat ran down his cigar and ‘hissed at the point’. Hilaire Belloc was scintillating but frowsy and tipsy, living in something like a ‘gypsy encampment’, which, Benson thought, should be burned to the ground. Accompanied by Edmund Gosse, Benson visited Thomas Hardy, whose features were ‘curiously worn & blurred & ruinous’; they might have belonged to ‘a retired half-pay officer, from a not very smart regiment’. Although admiring H G Wells, Benson deprecated his ‘strong cockney accent’ and his ‘glorification of animalism’.
As this suggests, Benson shared many of the social prejudices of his day. He extolled gentlemanliness and his favourite term of abuse was ‘ill-bred’. Admitting to a personal deficiency, he disliked most women, excluding them from his public lectures and regarding them as ‘an inferior race’. Brought up to be ashamed of sex, he was revolted by ‘slobbering osculations’ and ‘dog-like & promiscuous amours’.
more here.
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