Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
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Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896
Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
Benson family
builded, the sculptor chiselled, the musicians composed, and the artist
painted, must be the palpable and direct service of God, and just as he
would gaze in genuine rapture at a second-rate Madonna, whereas a
portrait or even a Primavera would leave him cold, so, without any
knowledge or appreciation of music he would listen to Handel’s
_Messiah_, while a Wagner opera, or a symphony by Beethoven, had he ever
listened or heard such, would have been meaningless to him. Of
ecclesiastical architecture, again, its periods or its characteristics,
he had a profound knowledge, but whether a house was Elizabethan or
Georgian was a matter of much smaller interest to him. He did not truly
care, to put it broadly, who built a column and when and how, or painted
a picture and when and how, so long as those monuments of art were only
directed towards human and æsthetic enjoyment. The natural works of God,
the woods at Addington, the mountain ranges of Switzerland, he
admiringly loved as being in themselves direct divine expressions, but
if the work of man insinuated itself, he liked it in proportion as it
was religious in its aims.
One exception he made, and that was in favour of Greek and Roman
antiquities and the language of the classics, and I am sure he enjoyed
making a translation of some English poem into Virgilian hexameters or
Sophoclean iambics fully as much as he enjoyed the original version.
Latin and Greek, especially Greek, were to him only a little below the
Pentecostal tongues: of all human achievements they were the noblest
flowers. To him a classical education was the only education: he rated a
boy’s abilities largely by his power to translate and to imitate
classical lore, and to wander himself in these fields was his chiefest
intellectual recreation. He loved to unpack, so to speak, some Greek
word compounded with prepositions, and insist on the value of each,
overloading the dissected members of it with meanings that never
conceivably entered into the mind of its author, and his own style in
weighed and deliberate composition was founded on the model of these
interpretations; the sentences were overloaded with meanings beyond what
the language could bear; he packed his phrases till they creaked. But
highest of all in the beloved language, with a great gulf fixed below it
and above the masterpieces of classical literature, came the New
Testament, which he studied and interpreted to us as under a microscope.
That eager reverence was like a lover’s adoration: his interpretations
might be fanciful, and such as he would never have made in any other
commentings, but here his search for hidden meanings in simple phrases
had just that quality of tender and exquisite scrutiny. The subject of
this study was his life, and the smallest of its details must be
searched out, and squeezed to yield a drop more of sacred essence.... On
any other topic he would have criticized the Hellenistic Greek, as
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