Literary Close-ups

Arnold Bennett: a Pen Portrait of the Man, by a Friendly Hand

HUGH WALPOLE

I REMEMBER, years ago, a number of men were discussing Arnold Bennett in the innermost sacristy of a London club. It was at the time of "The Old Wives' Tale"— that time when the world found that a man pould apparently produce a masterpiece as carelessly as he could a jeu d'esprit and claim no more for its production.

Only one man in the group knew Arnold Bennett: the rest of us judged by photographs, by the written .works, by the pronouncements that Bennett had made about himself in public. We all said our say. The man who knew Bennett waited until the end, then quietly chided us: "You none of you know anything about it," he said, "the two principal characteristics of Bennett are his romantic nature and his kindliness of heart."

I am amused now to look back and remember how ardently we all protested against this outrageous judgment.

Romantic nature!—and he had written "Anna of the Five Tpwns" and "Whom God Hath Joined," above all, the last pages of "The Old Wives' Tale"—kind-hearted! Fresh in all our memories were those caustic judgments given week by week in The New Age under the pseudonym of "Jacob Tonsen"— Romantic! Kind-hearted! We laughed aloud.

His friend smiled with the darkcertainty of one who knows. ,

"All right. You'll see. Before he's finished he'll write a tale round the Arthurian legend— and a good tale, too."

NOW, when I look back on that little conversation, I marvel at my earlier presumption. How sure I was, how sure all of us in that club were! Are we all as wrong about everybody whom we estimate from a distance? And is every one as wrong about ourselves?

In this present instance the central figure has, I am glad to think, very much himself to blame. How sedulously and for how many years has Arnold Bennett been elaborating that public figure of himself, the figure that goes with the public photographs, with the self-confessions of "The Plain Man, and His Wife," "Twenty-four Hours a Day," "Self and Self-Management," the inimitable "Truth About an Author" and above all "The Card", and its sequel "The Regent."

It is not to be wondered that the world in general has taken this official figure and accepted it as the genuine article—a man stridently self-confident, full of push and assurance, complacent, humorously satirical about poor blundering humanity wasting its time over sloppy idealism, a man who can do anything he desires. "A masterpiece! . .... The easiest thing in the world." "A successful play. . . Why, any fool can manage it." "Criticism? Why, you simply say what you think." "Politics. Any fool can be a politician . . and so on, and so on.

The world in general has accepted this selfportrait because it feels it to be so charmingly in tune with the times. "No more ideals for us. We are the Twentieth Century. No flies on us. Here comes this man from the Five Towns and shows us how pretentious we have

all been. Practical Common Sense is what we want—none of your poetry."

HOW comes it then that the longer one knows Arnold Bennett—and indeed I am not alone in this discovery—the less one feels sure of this same Practical Common Sense and the more one is aware of the poetry; the less one sees of the Realism the more of the Romance ; the less of the Card and the more of— well—the Ettrick Shepherd.

I don't mean to say that Bennett isn't practical. In his house in Essex he has just those hot-water pipes and elaborate fittings to the baths that you would expect him to have. I've heard him talk of politics, and publishers and the Income Tax and Lloyd George and Bernard Shaw and drainage and haberdashery— of any number of other commonplace things and he has given the common sense view about them all. But I have also heard him talk of yachting, and water-colour painting and H. G. Wells' novels and the Russian Ballet and Rops and Paul Nash and Tchekov—and the voice behind these things has been the voice of the idealist, the enthusiast, the poet, the Romantic.

I believe it to be because he is passionately aware of the distance that his enthusiasm may carry him that he has developed this attitude of determined indifference before the revelations of life. It is as though some aged relation, years ago, in the Five Towns had said to him: "Now, Enoch, you are going into the world. Remember to show astonishment at nothing—and remember that everything is astonishing."

It is this contrast that has made him romantic—that makes him more incurably romantic every year of his life. . And the romance breaks out of him at every point. I cannot see him save in a background of colours. Comarques, his house in Essex, blazes in colour, colour, often enough, of so strange a mixture of period and mood and design that, with any other character behind it, it would fall into a tangle of confusion. There are gold beds and gold chairs and gold frames in the Essex house, and post-impressionist pictures and Eighteenth Century portraits; the walls are ornamented with strange designs in red and green, the carpets in. any other house would never settle down with the wall-paper, the house would never take its place in the quiet towers and trees of the beautiful English garden. And yet all is right! I know of no other house in the world that has so obediently followed the dictates of its master and become the real and inevitable expression of his personality.

I remember once being present at some party in a London house when all the latest patterns in poets and artists were present. Bennett was there, silent and observant in his comer, very ready to talk, if someone wished to talk, but quite happy to watch and listen in silence. There was a great deal of noise, a flood of discussion of methods and processes, much scorn of everything in art that was more than twenty years old, ardent defence of every possible extravagance and eccentricity. The room itself was bizarre with coloured hangings, and paintings like anatomical charts: and there were the fantastic dresses of the women. I remember a young poet, flushed with the success of a recitation of two of his own works, going up to Bennett and asking him whether he had any use for any of the "old stuff."

"Old stuff?" said Bennett, "well—I don't know. There's 'Job' you know, and 'Ezekiel.' "

"Oh, the Bible," said the writer, contemptuously.

"It's pretty good," said Bennett "You read it."

Mr. Walpole, one of the most successful of living British men of letters, and a son of the Bishop of Edinburgh, is at present in America, where he will stay for several months, travelling, lecturing land no one can lecture more artfully or more absorbingly) and observing the land and the people. He will contribute to this magazine a regular series of critical and biographical papers, dealing, in turn, with such familiar literary figures as Galsworthy, Wells, May Sinclair, Joseph Conrad, and W. Somerset Maugham, all of them, it may be added, close personal friends of Mr. Walpole's

AND SO, through all the shifting contemporary fashions of art, he preserves his own indestructible standards. To hear Bennett say of something "Well—it's a Book; you know" is to make you aware that the work in question* however scornfully dismissed by you, must be considered and examined again.

More than any artist I know he is free of prejudices, jealousies, pettinesses. There are authors who are, he is convinced, bad authors. He will tell you so without a motnent's hesitation. They may, in the long run of time, prove to be very good authors. That does not effect his judgment because a man cannot do more than apply his own personal tests. He does not care whether you are convinced or no by his admiration for Wells' novels or Tchekov's stories. It is his own personal affair, every man must judge for himself but, having judged, he must speak out without fear; without jealousy, without patronage.

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He literally does not know the meaning of the words disloyalty, jealousy, hypocrisy in the judging of works of art.

In some fashion of his own he has succeeded in bringing his romance, his loyalty, his humors, into his physical expression of himself. He stands and moves awkwardly. Although he is spotlessly neat he achieves a kind of bizarrerie with his coloured waistcoats, his spotted ties. He watches you with challenging amusement as you approach him. That is his final expression of his romantic nature—his intense amusement at himself.

I SHOULD imagine that in the most desperate hours of his life he has been of an unswerving courage and that largely because, as he stands outside himself and watches he is absorbed by the ridiculous combinations and contrasts that go to form the human soul. He can take any criticism with a smile partly because he cannot take himself seriously, partly because he takes himself with so desperate a seriousness.

Coloured waistcoats, elaborate bathfittings, plays like "Judith" and "Don Juan," the marvellous manuscripts of his novels (the most beautiful things of their kind in the world), Bach, his yacht, the Reform Club, and the Westminister Gazette, his own loyalties and heroisms and sarcasms, these are, one and all, the shining expressions of his romantic nature.

He has written at least one masterpiece, that will, I think, endure so long as English novels interest a living world. In that he is a happy man indeed.

I find that in all this I have said nothing of his kindliness of heart. I should only rouse his sarcasm if I did. But there can be no acquaintance of his, of however short a period, who will not know what I mean.