The Levity of Mr. Arnold Bennett

A Comment upon the Man and His If Works—An Interpretation—and a Few Excuses

PHILIP GUEDALLA

WHEN Edward Henry Machin, at the age of thirty-four, had danced with a Countess at the Town Hall, driven downhill into a canal in a runaway furniture van, and become the youngest Mayor in England, an indignant Town Councillor inquired with what great cause he was identified. " He's identified", someone replied, "with the great cause of cheering us all up. " Those are precisely the credentials which his creator has presented to the solemn guardians of the Anglo-Saxon Parnassus; and that, if one may attempt diagnosis without impertinence, is exactly what is the matter with Mr. Bennett's literary reputation.

He began to write at an epoch sufficiently distant from our own to be infected with the queer, half-forgotten notion that authors write in order to be read. Stevenson had been read; Wilde had been read; even Mr. Pater had been readable. And it was a pardonable error in a young author to imagine that there was a more than accidental connection between the design of the writer and the enjoyment of his reader. The thing might, of course, be carried too far. Mr. Hall Caine was manifestly read too much; and perhaps Miss Marie Corelli wrote with a pen that strayed uncontrolled all over the paper, while her eye wandered perpetually out of the window to where her darling public stood waiting in serried ranks. But there was in those days a very definite intention on the part of the writer, even of the more distinguished, to be read by someone.

IN these days, alas! the bright case is sadly altered. We are slowly learning that the writer exists simply to deliver his own soul, if possible, in solitude. The strange, retiring creature mutters his soliloquy to the listening stars, whilst his readers hover uncertainly around, an unwanted audience. The table of modern letters is spread in the sight of no man. Perhaps a few of the author's friends (who write a little themselves) may be asked in. But the public is an uninvited guest, whose feelings are a matter of the profoundest indifference to everyone, except, perhaps (if such persons still survive in this rarefied air), to publishers. Even the critics have almost ceased to matter, since nowadays, by an ingenious device, the authors criticize each other.

Keats waited for the critics; and as a result, the critics waited, in a more sinister sense, for Keats. But if he had lived today, he would have been one of them. Eor criticism has become a side-line of half our authors. The accomplished Mr. X., whose verses we are all waiting for, pronounces the final verdict of British taste upon Mr. Y. as novelist; and when those rhymes appear, Mr. Y., as critic, will signify, if he is half the man that we take him for, in the usual manner.

On this idyllic scene, where the unread exchange their mutual raptures, Mr. Bennett lingers as a strange survival. This oldworld figure writes with an obstinate determination to be read. He seems to believe, in the fearless old fashion, that this is what books are made for. His plays, with a quaint adherence to tradition, are even designed to "run". It appears to be the author's queer design to give pleasure to large numbers of persons who pay for tickets on successive evenings, rather than to qualify the Sabbath gloom of a select company which gets its seats for nothing at one performance on a Sunday night. One expects such conduct from classics. Homer had tried to please his public; Euripides had even entered for competitions; Dickens and Balzac were not, one must admit, insensible to "sales". But in a contemporary it somehow seemed indelicate. Living writers are expected to cultivate their unpopularity in a literary suburb; and one can hardly wonder that the young lions of modern letters roared their astonishment, as Mr. Bennett took the center of the road as a successful author.

IT has been a strange career. He has left far behind him the jeweled revolvers and hissing whispers of the Grand Babylon Hotel. He has passed the innumerable lamp posts in Trafalgar Road and the shop window in St. Luke's Square, where Constance and Sophia stared out on life. His admiration of the dark Miss Lessways, which began one evening at the Orgreaves', has dwindled into a respectful feeling for a married woman; and he has launched Mr. Machin on a successful career in the mysterious world of the London theater, where he has since been followed by less desirable industrialists from the many provinces.

Innumerable gas jets in back kitchens have squealed and fluttered under his hand, and bath taps (he has a genius for hygienic gadgets) have confessed to him all their secrets. He has watched Suffragists, and football matches, and the slow unfolding of unpleasant symptoms; and he has stood by countless death-beds, for Mr. Bennett has something of Mr. Lytton Strachey's peculiar aptitude for last moments. And at the end of it all, he moves with the assured ease of an established writer, who can find a respectful hearing for his lightest reflections on stray operas or the cookery of small French towns.

One feels that he has enjoyed himself enormously, that he has done it all with tremendous gusto. What fun it must have been to escape from the prim confinement of a solicitor's office, in order to write Gargantuan "shockers" about elephants and automobiles and mammoth emporia. How entertaining to kick up sedate professional heels in reviews of unexampled arrogance. And then, what an unrivaled lark, to give the whole literary show away, to tell The Truth about an Author, to deride the "contc—exquisitely Gallic as to spirit and form"—and the novel that "was to be entirely unlike all English novels, except those of one author ... to imitate what I may call the physical characteristics of French novels. There were to be no poetical quotations in my novel, no titles to the chapters; the narrative was to be divided irregularly into sections by Roman numerals only; and it was indispensable that a certain proportion of these sections should begin or end abruptly . . . O succession of dots, charged with significance vague but tremendous, there were to be hundreds of you in my novel, because you play so important a part in the literature of the country of Victor Hugo and M. Loubet! . . . The sentences were to perform the trick of 'the rise and fall'. The adjectives were to have color, the words were to have color, and perhaps it was a sine qua non that even the pronouns should be prismatic—I forget."

It is precisely that cheerful irreverence about the mysteries of his craft, that obstinate refusal to prostrate himself before the Ark of the Covenant, which has scandalized the more solemn of Mr. Bennett's critics. It was intolerable that he should titter about inspiration; it was unbearable that he should inform the world that "dramatic composition for the market is child's play compared to the writing of decent average fiction"; and it was almost beyond endurance that such a person should persist, in writing extremely good plays and one of the five best novels in the English language. It was as though this frivolous young man from Staffordshire had strayed onto holy ground, and when the grave voice of criticism informed him of the fact from the burning bush, he obstinately declined to remove his shoes.

CRITICISM has hardly yet forgiven Mr. Trollope the confession that he wrote for three hours every morning, that it was "my custom to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. . . . This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year."

There is something of that brisk Victorian efficiency in Mr. Bennett's attitude to literature; and those drooping spirits, which seek in affectations of fastidiousness an excuse for their own debility, will quail before the towering column of his bibliography. But he, one feels, has enjoyed every word of it. He seems to giggle over the jokes in his own plays and to thrill with his own spectacular effects. His short stories have been too short for him, and his long novels not nearly long enough. He has even derived a queer avuncular pleasure from those improving volumes of good advice with which, alone in English letters since Samuel Smiles, he helps his fellowcountrymen on their way through the world. He enjoys, he must enjoy, the exercise of that sharp, superficial observation which fills page after page of fiction with a vivid counterfeit of physical reality; and he brings out tiny, unknown facts with the mild delight of a collector exhibiting his miniatures. But most of all, he seems to find his pleasure in being "in the know", in nudging his reader with a halfspoken hint that not everybody could have told him that. He loves to flit about behind the scenes, to learn how the fine ladies get their finest effects, to see where dapper gentlemen buy those miraculous boots of theirs. He has a wicked knowledge of the dressing table; millinery is an open book to him, and over Jermyn Street, he has flung his shoe. With that equipment, and a lucid cursive hand, he has written fine fiction and made the English theater almost endurable.