Jonathan Dent
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Jonathan Dent
@jwdent.bsky.social
590 followers 830 following 70 posts
Lancastrian in Reading and Oxford, lexicographer.
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Reposted by Jonathan Dent
martynjb.bsky.social
...an article by Crawford that is a tad out of keeping with those other contributions. Essentially Crawford was a little angry with Cambridge dons in general and A. C. Benson in particular. I've found no other mention by Crawford of Benson ever, and this piece never appeared anywhere else. Enjoy.
The first of four images covering the whole of Crawford's article. Part 1 reads as follows: The Writings of Mr. A. C. Benson. Some years ago, when Tariff Reform was a common topic of conversation, a lady who was asked her opinion of it, said “I don’t of course understand it, but I feel very strongly about it.” That story very well describes Mr. A. C. Benson’s attitude towards the world; only his feelings can hardly be called strong. He is a typical don – kindly and well-meaning, full of a kind of sentimental sympathy, but without a spark of real insight or critical power. The don is a child who has never grown up. To him the world of nature and of men is like a fairy kingdom, full of strange beings whom he can not make out. His eyes grow round with wonder at their simplest actions. What, however, is natural and engaging in a child is out of place and even repellent in a grown-up man. It becomes a pathological symptom – a form of arrested development. The tears shed by a little girl over her broken doll are normal and healthy tears; The article continues: but these [tears] which fill the puzzled eyes of Mr. Benson as he regards the mysterious things around him are unnatural. For “men must work and women must weep.” Mr. Benson tells us that he takes more pleasure in writing than in anything else in the world. He thereby lays claim to be considered as a literary artist. In one of his essays – The Thread of Gold, page 63 – he says: “It is impossible not to feel, when one is brought into contact with an artistic temperament, that the basis of it is a kind of hardness, a fanaticism of spirit.” That is very true and very well put, but does one find any “hardiness or fanaticism” in Mr. Benson, as revealed in his writing? I trow not. On the contrary one finds there a certain flabbiness and lack of purpose which seems inseparable from the academic character. Literature is one of the greatest among the arts, but good writing need not be good literature and it is not always good art; good writing is meaningless if it is not rooted in reality. Mr. Benson’s essays have no roots; they are like the cowslip-balls of children, an ingenious exercise in stringing words melodiously together. The game may give pleasure to the player, just as there is a kind of pleasure to be derived from constructing Latin Verse. But it is a silly game. The books of an author should be like a lens through which we look at the world, or like the colour-screen which cuts out the haze in a landscape and casts a clear image on the plate. The writings of Mr. Benson are a mirror in which we see only the pale reflection of his won rather bloodless emotions. Continues: Mr. Benson is a great overgrown baby peering at a callous world through his college window. But he lacks the healthy savagery and red blood of youth. It is significant that the one solitary essay in “The Thread of Gold” in which he touches the discoveries of modern science should refer to an extinct reptile of gigantic proportions. Like all children he is attracted by strange beasts. And that is all that the head of a Cambridge college can find in science. Ye Gods! Can he indeed be deaf to the multitudinous tramp of Darwin’s mighty army, and to the rhythmical blows of Huxley’s oratory breaking on the muddy sands of orthodoxy? Can it be that all that is vital in modern thought eludes him and his like? The article concludes: Unfortunately one knows from personal experience that it does, and that of all those dons and tutors only a very few have any idea of what is being said and done in the busy world outside. It has been said that the mind of a British Philistine is impervious to ideas; if that is so, then Mr. Benson and his fellow dons are typical Philistines for whom there is but little hope. A whisper will arouse a sleeping dog, but not all the shouting in the world can disturb the peaceful slumber of a jelly-fish.
November 11, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Dent
mrchrisbarrett.bsky.social
Sibelius *could* have watched the Panorama spaghetti tree hoax.
October 8, 2025 at 11:48 AM