Monastic Night's Entertainment

Extract

Few people now read Vathek, and Redding’s Memoirs of William Beckford are probably read even less often. Indeed the book is not easy reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it ‘prolix,’ and someone recently said that it was the worst biography he knew. With the advent of other biographies of Beckford it may cease to be even useful. Yet the patient reader is not wholly unrewarded. There are passages in it that he would be sorry to have missed, even though the feelings they arouse are not precisely those intended by the author. Thus in a long and reverential account of Beckford’s travels we mark with pleasure that he left Bologna, ‘renowned for sausages and lap-dogs,’ ‘as an earthquake had just before put the land and people much out of humour.’

But it is when the Church is concerned, and especially monasticism, that Redding is most interesting. Catholic worship always fascinated Beckford, and its lasting effect on his mind will appear from later extracts. He was at the Grande Chartreuse when he was nineteen. He stayed there three days, read the works of St. Bruno, and wrote with some enthusiasm of the place. Indeed he left some exceedingly poor lines in the album of the monastery, ‘the larger portion being those of the tutor, Dr. Lettice, the pupil being, perhaps, not at the moment duly inspired.’ These favourable impressions never wholly faded, but other experiences were not so happy. In 1780 he made another tour, and in the Low Countries ‘he was active, and visited all the public buildings, and lions in the churches, such as the statuary and pictures.