AC Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – “vulgar stuff and not my manner at all”. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master.
Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered “the diarists’ pantheon”.
But though he met plenty of writers and other figures of note, he has little of value to say about them. Indeed his literary judgments are crass when not philistine: Henry James’s “idea of art was to tell a tale that few could understand or to present figures so faint & vague as seldom to be more than hypothetical”; Arnold Bennett was “a cad”; of Housman: “I don’t think he is quite a gentleman”.
His musical opinions were even worse. In a concert that included works by Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, he declared the best work to be one by Waldemar Bargiel, a composer otherwise unknown to history; while, “fifty years hence people will probably talk of Wagner as claptrap and wonder how anyone could admire”.
Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys
His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares?
Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam are, unlike Benson, distinguished academics. They have bestowed on these diaries all the apparatus of contemporary research, treating the commonplace utterances of obscure dons as if they came from great statesmen – but to what end? Anyone with misplaced nostalgia for a supposedly golden age of civilised living – an age that fortunately is long gone and which no one of sense would wish to see resurrected – may enjoy immersing themselves in Benson’s observations. But they would have to be almost as steeped in a certain crusted-over establishment atmosphere as he was. Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys.
In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship. No doubt the question of whether the master’s children should be allowed to use the Fellows’ Garden was a matter of great moment to the dons in May 1914 but its historical import is unclear. The account of college squabbles lacks even the waspishness that we find, for example, in the letters of AJP Taylor or Hugh Trevor-Roper. They at least serve to confirm Henry Kissinger’s dictum that academic disputes are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. What the diaries offer, as was once said – perhaps unfairly – of Trollope, is the sedative of gossip. They provide the illusion that one is in communion with great writers and powerful people, but it’s one we shouldn’t fall for.
• The Benson Diary by AC Benson, edited Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam, is published by Pallas Athene (£60). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
