Part 10

"A Mummer's Wife" is a powerful story, told in a skilful and impressive fashion, but it leaves the reader less conscious of life than of mechanics. As a piece of construction it is a better novel than "The Brook Kerith," but as a piece of literature it is not. The quality of life is dusty and arranged in the early book, but it is alert and vibrant and natural in the later one. One notable feature of "A Mummer's Wife" is the display of knowledge by Mr. Moore of things and of places with which one would not expect him to be familiar. His acquaintance with grooms and horse-racing, manifested in "Esther Waters," is understandable in a man who was reared in a country-house where the language of the stable must have been familiar. But how did Mr. Moore obtain his intimacy with the interior of a small draper's and milliner's shop in one of the Five Towns in Staffordshire, together with his knowledge of the details of life lived by a touring theatrical company? Mr. Arnold Bennett's knowledge of the Five Towns and the interior of a small shop is explained by the fact that he was born in such circumstances in one of the Five Towns. Mr. Leonard Merrick's intimate knowledge of the life of a travelling theatrical company is explained by the fact that he was once an actor in such a company. But how did Mr. Moore, the son of a prosperous Irish landowner of aristocratic origin, acquire his close intimacy with the details of such life? It is this aspect of the book which reveals the existence in Mr. Moore of a high faculty which was absent from the mind of his first master, Zola, the faculty of imagination. Zola made his novels out of things actually witnessed or learned from books, but Mr. Moore made his novels out of his own imagination. Zola could only write about life in a small shop in a small town after he had actually lived in it, but Mr. Moore wrote "A Mummer's Wife," with no more knowledge of Hanley than a person passing through it might possess, and gave his readers an impression of deep intimacy with it.

This book, notable in itself, had a notable result. It was read by a young writer, named Enoch Arnold Bennett, then engaged in journalism and the production of semi-sensational novels. Bennett was a native of "the Five Towns" district, born in a place called Shelton to the north-east of the town of Hanley which is the scene of "A Mummer's Wife." Mr. Bennett himself told me that until he read "A Mummer's Wife" he never thought of writing about "the Five Towns." The Staffordshire people had no literary significance to him until that significance was revealed by "A Mummer's Wife." Mr. Bennett probably exaggerates the extent of his debt to Mr. Moore. He would, sooner or later, have explored the rich mine from which he produced the ore of "The Old Wives' Tale" and "Clayhanger"--it is ludicrous to imagine that but for the happy accident of reading "A Mummer's Wife" he would never have done so--but it is not improbable that Mr. Moore's story brought him to his proper milieu earlier than he might otherwise have reached it. The reader can profitably entertain himself by comparing "the Five Towns," the places and the people, of "A Mummer's Wife" with "the Five Towns," places and people of "The Old Wives' Tale" and "Clayhanger." The difference between Mr. Moore's account and Mr. Bennett's is the difference between careful and acute observation by an intelligent stranger, alien in birth and tradition and training, and the knowledge, inherited from his forefathers and acquired in childhood and youth, of a native. Mr. Moore had to "mug up" his subject, as schoolboys say, but Mr. Bennett was born with most of it. The description of Hanley in the first chapter of "The Old Wives' Tale" (where it is named Hanbridge by Mr. Bennett) contrasts remarkably with the description of the same town in "A Mummer's Wife," as does the description of a pottery seen through Mr. Bennett's eyes in "Leonora" with that of a pottery seen through Mr. Moore's eyes in the fourth chapter of "A Mummer's Wife." These differences of description are, of course, the result of a difference in temperament between the two men which is perhaps most clearly revealed in the way in which they portray old women in their books and deal with scenes of suffering. An intelligent reader of "A Mummer's Wife" and "The Old Wives' Tale," having made allowance for the fact that the first-named was written by a young man beginning his career, and the second by a man approaching middle-age and the apex of his power, could draw up a fairly accurate statement of the character of each of the authors by comparing the figure of old Mrs. Ede in Mr. Moore's novel with that of old Mrs. Baines in Mr. Bennett's. The contrast between the scene of suffering pictured in the first chapter of "A Mummer's Wife" and that in the first chapter of "The Old Wives' Tale" would considerably assist him in making the statement. The painful insistence on the details of the asthma which afflicted Mr. Ede is in sharp opposition to the almost jocular fashion in which Mr. Povey's toothache is described. Both books end with the death of the principal figures. Kate Ede dies disquietly. One might say that Constance and Sophia Baines also die disquietly. But there is a difference in the disquiet. Constance and Sophia had had their share of disappointment and trouble and had lost their illusions, but at least they had had their fill of life, each as she desired it, and if there had been disappointment, there had also been satisfaction: the illusions were lost, but while they lasted they were agreeable. Kate died before she had had her fill of life, without illusions and also, which is worse, without agreeable memories. Youth insists that life is either very gay or very dismal--and "A Mummer's Wife" was written by a young man; but Maturity knows that the colours of life are mingled rather than uniform, and that even when the end is a dismal one, the journey to it has not been without moments of fragrance and pleasure--and "The Old Wives' Tale" was written by a man in his maturity. The similarities between these two books are as interesting as their differences, and a close study of them leaves the reader at once aware of very dissimilar personalities and with enhanced respect for both of them.

VII

It is when we come to such novels as "The Lake" and "The Brook Kerith" that we discover Mr. Moore at his greatest. Zola is forgotten and only the strength of Mr. Moore himself is now displayed. "The Lake" is among the most beautiful stories of our time, a finely-conceived and finely-wrought book, more complete and unified than "The Brook Kerith," which, in spite of much beauty and scholarship, is marred organically by a dispersal of the interest. The latter novel is in three sections, the first dealing with Joseph of Arimathea, the second with Jesus, and the third with Paul. Each of these sections by itself is well and even superbly done, although in my judgment, the first of them is much the best of the three; but the interest which the reader has in any one of the three sections is not felt in the whole book because the three great figures are not grouped together. We begin with Joseph and then, at the point when we are absorbed in him, are hurried on to Jesus, undergoing a similar experience with Him when we are hurried off to Paul. The book is not a closely-knit drama in which the characters constantly act and re-act upon each other, but is more akin to three separate plays in which certain figures recur in greater or less positions. Mr. Moore, in short, was uncertain whether to make Joseph or Jesus or Paul the hero of his story, and he unwisely compromised by making each of them hero for a portion of it, with the result that each is of supreme importance for a third of the book and of subordinate importance for the remainder of it. "The Brook Kerith" is, nevertheless, a considerable achievement and is in itself sufficient to secure a high place in English letters for its author.

The legend is that Mr. Moore is a trifler with life, a man without purpose, immensely egotistical, having some of the simplicity of the buffoon. The truth is that he is an audacious, exceedingly adroit and utterly unthwartable artist who bends the visible world to his purpose of discovering and perfecting a formula of words with which to express his vision of the invisible world. He has, indeed, a simplicity of character, but it is not the simplicity of the buffoon: it is the immense and dissolving simplicity of the man of genius.

BERNARD SHAW

I

There is a kind of shy, embarrassed man of merit who cannot keep or even reach to his proper position in the world without making some sort of pretence about himself. Mr. Bernard Shaw is such a man. He has created his legend with such extraordinary skill that those who know him well have great difficulty in persuading the general public, which has neither the time nor the intelligence to understand a man of marked personality, to believe that the legend _is_ a legend, that the reputed Bernard Shaw is not the real Bernard Shaw. The common notion is that he has an insatiable craving for publicity, is immensely conceited and self-centred, and does not care what folly of thought or conduct he commits if by so doing he draws attention to himself. The truth about him is that he is a shy and nervous man, singularly humble-minded and sincere, very courageous and full of quick, penetrating wisdom, and so generous and kindly that he may be said to be willing to do more for his friends than his friends will do for themselves. He is a Don Quixote without illusions. When he tilts at windmills, he does so because they are _wind_mills in private ownership, and he wishes them to be driven by electricity and owned by the local authority. In print and on platforms, Mr. Shaw brags and boasts and lays claim to an omniscience that would scandalize most deities, but no one who has the ability to distinguish between sincerity and mere capering is in the least deceived by his platform conceit. He is one of the very few men in the world who can brag in public without being offensive to his auditors. He can even insult his audience without hurting its feelings. There is a quality of geniality and kindliness in his most violent and denunciatory utterance that reconciles all but the completely fat-headed to a patient submission to his chastisement; and his most perverse statements are so swiftly followed by things profoundly true and sincerely said that those who listen to him are less conscious of his platform tricks than are those who merely read newspaper reports of his speeches. This is largely due to the fact that the newspapers print only his flippant and fantastic stuff, and omit his vital matter. I have seen reporters at one of his meetings sitting with their pencils loosely dangling from their fingers while Mr. Shaw spoke wisely and deeply, and then, when he uttered some trivial or outrageous thing, coming to life and hastily scribbling the jape into their notebooks.

It is my purpose here to insist that Mr. Shaw is a shy man with a large element of the gawky school boy in him so that he is awkward and embarrassed when he comes suddenly into the presence of strangers without having been warned that strangers are to be encountered. I have seen him blush like a boy on finding people in a room which he had expected to find unoccupied, and when one meets him casually in the street he is at first nonplussed and without conversation or power to do more than smile amiably. It is not easy to make this shyness of his plain to those who have met him once or twice because he has remarkable powers of recovery and can cover up his initial embarrassment with very great skill; and also because his platform manners are very easy and his general social manners are exceedingly gracious. He has made many pretences in his life, but the one pretence that he has never succeeded in maintaining is the pretence that he is a bad-mannered man. There are stories told of him that seem to show him in a graceless, even cruel, character, but these are no more than might be expected from a man of nervous temperament who is being bothered excessively by the demands of people who have no right to make demands on him at all. Against those stories may be set far more stories of acts of exceptional kindliness to those who are in trouble or in need of advice and encouragement. Very few great men have given so generously of their time and strength to helping young men of talent to obtain recognition as Mr. Shaw has done.

His awkwardness of manner when taken unawares is very different from that of Mr. Yeats in similar circumstances. Mr. Shaw is shy and awkward with strangers, but Mr. Yeats, who has never been shy in his life, is only awkward. Mr. Shaw, because he is naturally gracious, recovers himself more quickly than Mr. Yeats, who has cultivated his graciousness; and it may be said of them that Mr. Shaw has the manners of a man instinctively gentle, whereas Mr. Yeats has the manners of a man who has practised deportment before a cheval glass.

II

It is obvious that a man so shy and easily embarrassed as Mr. Shaw is cannot hope to make a swift impression upon his contemporaries unless he commits an outrage upon his own nature. A world which regards modesty as a sign of incompetence, if not of actual imbecility, is slow to recognize the real merits of a man unless he lays claim to merits which he has not got. In the long run, the crowd pays tribute to great men, but Mr. Shaw was anxious that tribute should be paid to him immediately. Fame at the age of eighty offered few inducements to him, and posthumous fame offered no inducements at all. He had something to say to a world disinclined to listen to him, and he felt that he could not persuade it to do so unless he first of all performed some unusual platform tricks to catch its attention. Something of his principle seemed to be in the mind of a tipster whom I saw on Epsom racecourse before the war began. I was walking in the crowd on the course, which the police were not yet clearing, when suddenly a very well-dressed man in my neighbourhood seemed to go out of his mind. He whirled violently round, uttered a fierce yell, flung an expensive silk hat into the air and waved his gold-headed cane in a very disturbing fashion. He then began to chant in a manner not unlike the way in which Mr. Vachel Lindsay recites his poem on the Congo!... By the time he had finished this performance, a considerable crowd had collected around him. I was in the forefront of it, and while I was wondering how long it would be before the police arrived to take charge of the demented man, he recovered his sanity and proceeded to sell tips for the two-thirty race. I bought one of them. I put money that was rare and precious on the horse which he commended to my patronage. And the horse lost the race!... Mr. Shaw climbed on to platforms and into newspapers, shouting at the top of his voice, "I am better than Shakespeare" in the hope that he might convince the world that he had any merit at all. He performed tricks in public in order to make people believe that he could think in the theatre. He wore comic clothes and refused to shave and conducted a rebellion against evening dress and silk hats and boiled shirts. He declined to eat meat, to smoke tobacco or to drink wine. He said that he was an atheist and an immoral writer. He tried to train his eyebrows into the shape which is called Mephistophelian. He saw himself in the role of the Fat Boy in "Pickwick Papers" trying to make men's flesh creep, and was disgusted to find that the Fat Boy's most valuable asset, his obesity, had been denied to him and given to Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, who would not make any one's flesh creep for the value of the world! Finally, he announced that he was a Socialist. His Socialism was not a platform trick: it was his serious faith; but it became so associated in the public mind with his platform tricks that he had only to say in public that he was a Socialist and his audience would giggle as if that were the most amusing thing they had ever heard. This habit of performing platform tricks undoubtedly drew a large crowd to listen to him, and he did not fail to deliver himself of his peculiar faith to that crowd when he had collected it; but there were considerable drawbacks to his method of securing attention. The crowd could never quite rid itself of the belief that he was "one of those comic chaps." It admitted that he was a very clever "comic chap," but firmly at the back of the popular mind was the belief that he did not mean one half of what he said and was not entirely sincere about the remaining half. It liked to see him performing in public, and it paid large sums of money to hear him lecture in behalf of causes that were abhorrent to it. Duchesses, for example, contributed heavily to the funds of Socialist societies simply for the privilege of hearing him speak, and duchesses do not love Socialist societies. The crowd talked about him to a remarkable extent; it read his books; it attended performances of his plays; it went to hear him lecture ... but it insisted that what was important about him was, not his advocacy of this or that, but his power to excite laughter. When he was most in earnest, the crowd said, "He's so witty!" and left the matter there. That, perhaps, is why "Common Sense and the War" aroused so much wrath in England. The crowd, accustomed to tittering behind its hand or laughing outright at Mr. Shaw's wit, was disconcerted by the serious way in which he dealt with the War in that notorious pamphlet. It was so shocked by what he said that it professed to be indignant that any man could cut comic capers at so awful a moment. Mr. Shaw was not cutting any capers, comic or otherwise, but the crowd, trained by him to believe that he was a comedian, could not believe that he was capable of being anything else. That pamphlet, ill-timed, perhaps, in some respects, was yet well-timed in this respect, that it reminded the British people of their most priceless privilege, the right of free speech. The whole of the British press collapsed before the Press Censor, and editors were afraid to open their mouths about things which were scandalous. Mr. Shaw restored the freedom of the press. He said what he had to say and he said it with the utmost courage and force, and within a week or two from the date of publication of his pamphlet, the timid editors were rearing up their heads and daring to say "Bo!" to the political geese.

There were times, perhaps, when he seemed to be yielding to the mob's desire to be tickled, when the one thing apparently that moved him was his delight in making the crowd giggle and guffaw; and now and then his friends felt that he was overdoing the tricks, that he was monotonously informing people that he was "better than Shakespeare," a statement that seemed as idle as if Anatole France were to say that he was "better than" Victor Hugo, when in fact the men are so dissimilar that there is no means of comparing them. But the danger, such as it was, amounted to little, for when all the discount is made that can be made for possible charlatanry in his character, there remains this indisputable fact that he has left a mark on the thought and life not only of the English-speaking world, but of the whole of Western civilization, which cannot be eradicated. We may go to the theatre to laugh at Mr. Shaw, but we remain to think with him.

III