Part 4

One night, some years before the outbreak of the European War, I arrived in the town of Hanley in the County of Stafford in the midlands of England to deliver a lecture on some subject, the name of which I do not now remember, although I suspect it was connected with the general improvement of mankind. I had accepted the invitation to lecture in Hanley, not because I had anything of importance to say to its inhabitants, but because I had lately read "The Old Wives' Tale" by Mr. Arnold Bennett, and was eager to see the place and the people from which that great book had sprung. My recollections of the visit are very vague now, but I remember that my host, a man of serious mind, a little over-weighted, perhaps, by the troubles of the universe, took me for a walk on Sunday morning through some of "the Five Towns," in the course of which he displayed much knowledge of the topography of Mr. Bennett's books without displaying much knowledge of the books themselves. He informed me that the real name of "Trafalgar Road" in "The Old Wives' Tale" is "Waterloo Road" and that the fictitious name of Hanley is "Hanbridge." He speculated incuriously on the oddness which had caused Mr. Bennett to alter real names in this palpable manner, and ended his discourse with the statement that he seldom read novels (which he persisted in calling "Works of Fiction") being more inclined to the study of serious books. I learned that he read chiefly in the writings of sociologists and political economists and similar serious persons. I suggested to him that he might more profitably read novels than sociological books if he wished to discover something about human character. He was a polite and kindly man, and he did not abruptly tell me of my folly, but I could see that he considered me to be a fool or, at best, a flippant person, and I am sure that had he not been my host he would not have troubled to attend my lecture that evening. He smiled in the benign way men have when they abstain from expressing their frank opinion, as he listened to me saying that he would find in novels a greater fund of information about human nature than he could hope to find in all the works that all the sociologists in the world have written. Men of affairs, I said, spend their lives in writing ponderous volumes on society which are out-of-date as soon as they are published, whereas the novel or the play of a man of genius remains true for ever. Henry Fielding and Adam Smith were contemporaries, but I imagine few will deny that there is more durable stuff, stuff more continuously applicable to human concerns, in "Tom Jones" than there is in "The Wealth of Nations." But my friend would have none of this, and seemed to think that any man who spent time in reading Fielding's novel which might be spent in reading Adam Smith was shamefully misusing his mind. He led me, I remember, through much of the territory which is generically known as "the Five Towns." I saw the Square in which the Baineses lived, and was told that although Mr. Bennett called it "St. Luke's Square" in "The Old Wives' Tale," the local authorities preferred to call it after St. John. So great was the influence of the novel upon me that when I peered through the window of the shop in which, so I was told, Constance and Sophia Baines were born, I almost expected to see the half-heroic figure of Samuel Povey behind the counter or to meet the cold, un-human glance of that frozen spinster, Miss Marie Insull, who once, and once only, displayed signs of human emotion--on the occasion when Mr. Critchlow brought her into the presence of the widowed Constance to announce his betrothal to her:

The dog had leisurely strolled forward to inspect the edges of the fiancé's trousers. Miss Insull summoned the animal with a noise of the fingers, and then bent down and caressed it. A strange gesture proving the validity of Charles Critchlow's discovery that in Maria Insull a human being was buried.

My host led me up stony streets, in which every sort of domestic architecture was visible--for "the Five Towns" are so independent that even in the workmen's houses there is no uniformity of style or harmony of design, a fact which makes, not for a pleasing diversity, but for shapelessness and incoherence--and pointed to places in the ground where, so he said, the earth had opened, owing to underground operations, and swallowed whosoever should happen to be passing over it. There was a story of a man who had set forth in the morning to go to his work, but, before he had travelled many yards from his home, was suddenly consumed by the opening earth and was never seen again. I will admit that I trod those streets thereafter with trepidation and considerable care! I had begun to tire of the ugly houses with their insufferable architecture, and of the grime caused by innumerable chimneys emitting thick, black smoke, when I was led up a steep street at the top of which I was told to halt and gaze about me. I saw the whole of "the Five Towns" and much of the surrounding country spread out like the kingdoms of the world and realized how strangely moving such a scene can be because of its suggestion of human presences. It was not without beauty, in spite of the gloom of an industrial area, but it impressed me most by its air of effort and power and achievement. I became conscious of the activities of men and women, of great labours, of confused strivings out of which some human need is satisfied, and I came away, as I always come away from such sights, immensely impressed by human organization and very satisfied with great machines. When we had descended from that high street and had walked elsewhere, I found myself suddenly confronting a railway station on which I saw the romantic name of ETRURIA.

II

Etruria, the country of the Etruscans in Italy, was, I suppose, a very different place from Etruria, the small town between Hanley and Burslem ("Hanbridge" and "Bursley") where Josiah Wedgwood founded his pottery in the eighteenth century, but the spirit which produced the Etruscan ceramics was not dissimilar from the spirit which produces the famous Wedgwood ware; and I thought to myself as I looked at the romantic name of that grimy-looking town in Staffordshire that I had stumbled on the secret of Mr. Bennett. Underneath the plain appearance of the pottery town, there is a spirit which has persisted in the production of beautiful things for the best part of two centuries, a spirit so much in love with delicate ware that it calls an unsightly town by the name of an ancient and reputedly beautiful one; and underneath the hard and fact-ridden style of Mr. Bennett there is an ineradicable desire for romance. I said of him once that he fights the battles of the romantic with the weapons of the realist, and that description seems to me to be strictly accurate. Mr. Bennett mingles, even in his Christian names, the gritty and the graceful in a way that is singularly characteristic of the people of his district. "Enoch Arnold Bennett" is a combination of names not easily imagined, but it is not more unusual than the combination of Etruria and Staffordshire, of lovely ceramics and "the Five Towns." Mr. Bennett has many times been charged with addiction to dusty realism, a dull love of facts. His critics say of him, after reading such a book as "Your United States," that he must have spent his time on the liner in which he went to America in counting the rivets in her plates for the sheer love of counting them, and they conclude that he is a materialist because of his interest in numbers and in things. They even complain of him that he is infatuated with largeness, just as Queen Victoria was, and that he imagines a thing to be good when it is merely big. This is undiscerning criticism. It is as if a child were charged with being a disciple of Haeckel because it thinks that ten things are more wonderful than one thing. We may think that Mr. Bennett is a fact-ridden modern, incapable of romance, because he inordinately admires electricity, but to do so is to announce ourselves as dunderheads for not discovering that his love of electricity is the Romantic's love of the Magic Lamp! How easily most of us are dissuaded from our faith in romantic things! We are in ecstasies when we hear of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the fishes and the birds and addressing them as little brothers, but we are horribly shocked and humiliated when Mr. Bernard Shaw makes the mad priest in "John Bull's Other Island" speak of a pig as our little brother! There is prettiness in the community of men and birds, even of men and the smaller fish, but pigs--PORK!! We find romance in the spectacle of a man rubbing a dirty lantern with his fingers in order to summon up a serving genie, but cannot perceive the greater romance found by Mr. Bennett in the spectacle of a man pressing a switch and illuminating a room with power drawn by wires from a station many miles away! We are enchanted with the thought of transport on Magic Carpets, but unmoved by the thought that presently great ships will be guided into New York Harbour, not by pilots, but by means of wireless telegraphy! Some dullards have exclaimed despairingly of Mr. Bennett because of what they called his trivial and commonplace interests as revealed in that enthralling book, "Things That Have Interested Me," failing utterly to discern that it is his interest in these things which is so infallible a sign of his zest for life. Any one can be interested in the Rocky Mountains, but it is only a superbly romantic man who can be absorbed in Tarrytown. There is not anything in the round world, made by God or by man, which does not interest Mr. Bennett. Familiarity breeds contempt in most of us, but it does not breed contempt in him. _He never gets used to things._ Most of us are too dull of mind, too destitute of imagination to feel interest or astonishment unless we are abruptly confronted with the unusual or the violent, and our capacity for romantic enjoyment is limited and soon exhausted. We would exclaim with astonishment on beholding an eruption of Mount Vesuvius for the first time, but we would exclaim rather less on perceiving the ninety-ninth eruption. Mr. Bennett would experience as much excitement on the ninety-ninth occasion as he would on the first. Nothing less than an earthquake is necessary to stir some of us, but Mr. Bennett can be stirred by the sight of a taxicab. The genesis of "The Old Wives' Tale," as described in the preface to one of the later editions, is a clear illustration of his romantic possession:

In the autumn of 1903 [he writes], I used to dine frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others, two waitresses that attracted my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to whom I never spoke, for she was employed far away from the table I affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged, managing Breton woman, had sole command over my table and me, and gradually she began to assume such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I was absent for a couple of nights running she would reproach me sharply: "What! you are unfaithful to me?" Once when I complained about some French beans, she informed me roundly that "French beans were a subject which I did not understand...."

I break the quotation here to exclaim at the obtuseness of that Breton woman who, in the course of her management of Mr. Bennett, failed to discover that he loves to regard himself as an authority on such matters as French beans. There is a kind of romantic pride which makes some men believe that they know the one place in a city where the best brand of a particular article is to be purchased. Mr. Bennett has that pride. The heaviness of the Breton's blow to it can be imagined after reading the next sentence in the passage from which I am making the quotation:

I then decided to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I abandoned the restaurant. A few nights before the final parting an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was burdened with a lot of small parcels which she kept dropping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose another; and then another. In a few moments she had the whole restaurant laughing at her. That my middle-aged Breton should laugh was indifferent to me, but I was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling on the pale face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I had never spoken. I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as she. Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque--far from it!--but there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout, ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. And the fact that the change from the young girl to the stout, ageing woman is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unperceived by her, only intensifies the pathos. It was at that instant that I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately became "The Old Wives' Tale." ...

III

In that passage there is revealed much, I think, of Mr. Bennett's character and spirit. He dislikes the sensation of being managed because he likes the sensation of managing. The Breton woman could have won him to faithful service for ever if she had deferred to him in the matter of French beans, and who knows what tricks of duplicity she could have played upon him had she stooped to guile? But she wounded him in his pride when she bluntly told him that her judgment on beans was sounder than his, and thus lost the custom of the most interesting of her diners. The first fact, therefore, that one discovers in this passage is that Mr. Bennett has a profound respect for his own opinion: he feels pretty sure of himself. This may be considered to be a sign of conceit, but that consideration is not necessarily true. It could only be a sign of conceit if Mr. Bennett's respect for his own opinion were misplaced, and there is nothing in his record to show that it is misplaced. There is, on the contrary, much to show that it is placed with the utmost propriety. He has done many of the things which he said he would do, and has done them exceedingly well. If all of us could have faith in ourselves with as much justification as Mr. Bennett has faith in himself, we would do well to practice our faith with fervour. The second fact about Mr. Bennett which is revealed by this passage is the romantic nature of him, but before I discuss it, I wish to point out a third and minor fact which is something of a flaw in him, not an important flaw, but one which must be remembered by his admirers. It is his occasional tendency to let his romanticism degenerate into sentimentality. Observe how he seems to have romanced about the pale and beautiful waitress to whom he never spoke, how he assumes that because she is beautiful she must also be generous and sympathetic and kindly, with what dismay he discovers that, just as a man can smile and smile and be a villain, so a woman can be pale and beautiful, and yet be as cruel or lacking in perception as the ruddiest and least lovely of her sex. He declares, indeed, that he quitted the restaurant in the Rue de Clichy because of the insolence of the Breton woman who disputed his authority on beans, but may he not be deceiving himself, may he not in fact have quitted that place because his illusion about the beautiful, pale young waitress was shattered by her coarse grimaces, her unkindly giggles? After all, it is easy enough to live with those who will not accept our estimate of ourselves, but how hard it is to live with lost beliefs. One of the most painful things about shell-shock cases resulting in mental derangement is that the patient seems to loathe most those whom he formerly loved most, and here in England many of us know of pitiful women who dare not go to see their unbalanced husbands because the mere sight of them throws the unhappy men into paroxysms of rage and anguish!...

But it is when we come to consider Mr. Bennett's attitude towards the foolish old woman who changed her seat and dropped her parcels so often in the restaurant in the Rue de Clichy that we discover his chief characteristic. If he were the fact-ridden realist that some of his critics pronounce him to be, he could not possibly have perceived in that old woman, "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque," the lineaments of a girl, "young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms." A fact-ridden realist might not have joined in the laughter of the Breton woman and the giggling pale waitress, but he would have judged the old woman with harsh contempt, more intolerable even than mocking laughter, and he would have turned away from her in irritation and disgust because of her inefficiency, her clumsiness, her indecision, her displeasing exterior. At best, he would have seen her solely as a fat, ugly and grotesque person who had always been incompetent, fat, ugly and grotesque. But Mr. Bennett, incorrigibly romantic, regarding her closely and with kindliness, insists that beneath the bulk of her body there is a soul, that the too, too solid flesh once wore "the feature of blown youth," even as Ophelia found it in Hamlet! She may not be beautiful now, he tells himself, but how beautiful may she not once have been. That is the spirit of romance. It is a certain sign of the romantic in a man that he will not permit himself to be bluffed by appearances when appearances are bad, although he may often be bluffed by them when they are good. Mr. Bennett was not deceived by the old woman's looks, but he was terribly deceived by the looks of the pale, young waitress, and it is true of him, I think, that he is very easily deceived by youth, to which he is uncommonly generous. Observe how he shows his willingness to be deceived by youth in the passage which I have quoted. He tells himself that the old woman was once "young, slim, perhaps beautiful," which is likely enough, but he goes on, not romantically, but sentimentally, to add, that she was "certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms." Now, there is no warrant in human experience for such an assumption. I am prepared to believe that an old woman, "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque" was once "slim, perhaps beautiful," but I am not prepared to believe that an indecisive, footling old woman was, in her girlhood, any other than indecisive and footling. We do not change our natures to that extent as we grow older unless we lose our wits or suffer gravely in health, and the tragedy of old age is that habits and mannerisms which are charming and attractive in youth are merely silly and annoying in age. We are amused by the violent opinions of a clever young man of twenty, inclined even to applaud him for holding them because they are significant of an active and developing mind, but they are less amusing to us and win less applause if they are still being expressed by him when he is thirty. We cease altogether to applaud or be amused when we hear him still at them when he is forty. We no longer describe him as a clever young man, but a damned fool. No one has any right to be a clever young man all his life. The law should forbid any one to be a clever young man after the age of twenty-seven. The world is entitled to demand that its clever young men shall grow up and achieve some sort of sanity and right judgment by the age of thirty, and if they refuse to grow up, then they are not free to complain if the world revises its judgment on them and inexorably thrusts them from its regard. Mr. Bennett's old woman dropped her parcels and changed her seat just as frequently in her youth as she did on that evening when he saw her in the Rue de Clichy, but she was young and perhaps pretty then, and people forgave her for her footling ways because of her youthfulness and in the hope that someday she would acquire steadiness of character and control over her packages. I think I can give a fairly accurate description of that old woman when she was a girl. She was always late for everything, but her demure ways and a sort of foal-like clumsiness about her made men willing to wait and be gracious about it. She always remembered at the last moment nineteen different things which she had forgotten to do, which must immediately be done, which inevitably caused greater delay. She could never find her railway ticket when the inspector came round to examine it and frequently held up trains while every one in her carriage hunted high and low for it. She persistently dropped her gloves, her handkerchief and her vanity-bag or left them behind her wherever she went. She never went out of doors without losing something. She never had any small change, and invariably tendered a ten-dollar bill, when buying a ten-cent newspaper, in the fond belief that the clerk at the news stand or even the boy in the street was certain to have plenty of change and be all too eager to oblige her. She always got on to the wrong train or trolley-car and did not discover her mistake until too late to dismount from it!... But she succeeded in putting over that sort of fatuous behaviour on the strength of her youth and prettiness; and men, who would go raving mad if they had to live with a middle-aged or elderly woman of such habits, readily excused her imbecilities because they were those of youth.