We’ve been talking about why Pope Francis recommended Robert
Hugh Benson’s novel, Lord of the World. We’ve gone into the background of the
novel. We’ve even given a brief rundown
of the author himself. What else is
there to say? Well . . . maybe a little
something about the novel itself might be in order, don’t you think? . . .
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| What's the big deal? |
So, aside from the ideological colonization that Pope
Francis mentioned, what is there in Lord of the World that should
interest us? Besides a good,
well-crafted story, that is, and a thought-provoking commentary on how the
world has managed to screw itself up even more since Benson did his
writing? (You mean, that’s not enough?)
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| Edwardian Snobs |
Lord of the World marked a turning point in Benson’s
literary career. After its publication his satire was much stronger and often
the thinly veiled thrust of the work. The smugness and self-satisfied snobbery
of the English upper classes were hammered flat — albeit more gently than the
world has grown accustomed to since. Benson could not have written his masterpiece, An Average Man or his damning indictment of upper class
ideology, The Coward,
before Lord of the World.
The elements Benson used in Lord of the World to construct the world of the year 2000 were
familiar to his readers before he put pen to paper. His contribution, as with
all his fiction, was to add an explicitly religious theme to the work. This
was, not surprisingly, Benson’s chief accomplishment as a
popular writer. It appeared from the very first, in one of his earliest written
(but almost last published) novels, Oddsfish!, a
Restoration adventure, and was present in each of his works of fiction.
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| P.G. "Plum" Wodehouse |
Other writers were beginning to experiment with frank
discussions of human sexuality, a trend frequently ridiculed by P.G. Wodehouse. For example, Grant Allen’s “frank” sex novel,
the rather turgid The Woman Who Did
(1895), managed to get itself transformed into Men Who Did and Women Who Shouldn’t Have But Took a Pop at It in
Wodehouse’s inimitable musical comedy universe. (And who can forget Offal, the product of another fictional sex novelist in the Mister
Mulliner stories? One is left with the
impression that “Plum” wanted to entertain, not sicken his readers.)
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| "Sign and become Catholic, or. . . ." |
Benson brought into the light of day (or at least the
glare of popular culture) the other
“forbidden” subject: the Catholic Church. His Elizabethan
swashbucklers took the usual presentation of the Catholic Church (and, of
course, the Jesuit Order) as the stock villain, complete with black cape and
twirling mustachios, and turned it on its head. It strikes modern readers
simply as giving equal time to an unpopular group, but a century ago this was
considered revolutionary.
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| Steampunk ... from the Age of Steam |
Also revolutionary was Benson’s refusal either to deify or
to reject technology. Science was not a
villain for Benson, but neither was it a savior.
Father Franklin in Lord of the World is startled to find a typewriter (still relatively
rare in 1907) in the Vatican — but why not? Technology is simply a thing,
potentially beneficial or potentially harmful, particularly when worshipped as
a false god.
Benson thought highly of Americans, but (as we noted) he made
the antagonist in Lord of the World an American. Most “future war” novels,
although written largely by English authors, made Americans the heroes,
sometimes virtual demigods. Americans, however, are not demigods, but as fallible
and as subject to great evil as any other people. The Germans would prove this
in the next generation with the rise of Hitler among a nation presumed to be
one of the most civilized on earth.
