II

We should have only to remount the current with a certain energy to come

straight up against Tolstoy as the great illustrative master-hand on all

this ground of the disconnection of method from matter—which encounter,

however, would take us much too far, so that we must for the present but

hang off from it with the remark that of all great painters of the

social picture it was given that epic genius most to serve admirably as

a rash adventurer and a “caution,” and execrably, pestilentially, as a

model. In this strange union of relations he stands alone: from no other

great projector of the human image and the human idea is so much truth

to be extracted under an equal leakage of its value. All the proportions

in him are so much the largest that the drop of attention to our nearer

cases might by its violence leave little of that principle alive; which

fact need not disguise from us, none the less, that as Mr. H. G. Wells

and Mr. Arnold Bennett, to return to them briefly again, derive, by

multiplied if diluted transmissions, from the great Russian (from whose

all but equal companion Turgenieff we recognise no derivatives at all),

so, observing the distances, we may profitably detect an unexhausted

influence in our minor, our still considerably less rounded vessels.

Highly attaching as indeed the game might be, of inquiring as to the

centre of the interest or the sense of the whole in “The Passionate

Friends,” or in “The Old Wives’ Tale,” after having sought those

luxuries in vain not only through the general length and breadth of “War

and Peace,” but within the quite respectable confines of any one of the

units of effect there clustered: this as preparing us to address a like

friendly challenge to Mr. Cannan’s “Round the Corner,” say, or to Mr.

Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”—should we wish to be very friendly to Mr.

Lawrence—or to Mr. Hugh Walpole’s “Duchess of Wrexe,” or even to Mr.

Compton Mackenzie’s “Sinister Street” and “Carnival,” discernibly, we

hasten to add, though certain betrayals of a controlling idea and a

pointed intention do comparatively gleam out of the two fictions last

named. “The Old Wives’ Tale” is the history of two sisters, daughters of

a prosperous draper in a Staffordshire town, who, separating early in

life, through the flight of one of them to Paris with an ill-chosen

husband and the confirmed and prolonged local pitch of the career of the

other, are reunited late in life by the return of the fugitive after

much Parisian experience and by her pacified acceptance of the

conditions of her birthplace. The divided current flows together again,

and the chronicle closes with the simple drying up determined by the

death of the sisters. That is all; the canvas is covered, ever so

closely and vividly covered, by the exhibition of innumerable small

facts and aspects, at which we assist with the most comfortable sense of

their substantial truth. The sisters, and more particularly the less

adventurous, are at home in their author’s mind, they sit and move at

their ease in the square chamber of his attention, to a degree beyond

which the production of that ideal harmony between creature and creator

could scarcely go, and all by an art of demonstration so familiar and so

“quiet” that the truth and the poetry, to use Goethe’s distinction, melt

utterly together and we see no difference between the subject of the

show and the showman’s feeling, let alone the showman’s manner, about

it. This felt identity of the elements—because we at least consciously

feel—becomes in the novel we refer to, and not less in “Clayhanger,”

which our words equally describe, a source for us of abject confidence,

confidence truly _so_ abject in the solidity of every appearance that it

may be said to represent our whole relation to the work and completely

to exhaust our reaction upon it. “Clayhanger,” of the two fictions even

the more densely loaded with all the evidence in what we should call the

case presented did we but learn meanwhile for what case, or for a case

of what, to take it, inscribes the annals, the private more

particularly, of a provincial printer in a considerable way of business,

beginning with his early boyhood and going on to the complications of

his maturity—these not exhausted with our present possession of the

record, inasmuch as by the author’s announcement there is more of the

catalogue to come. This most monumental of Mr. Arnold Bennett’s

recitals, taking it with its supplement of “Hilda Lessways,” already

before us, is so describable through its being a monument exactly not to

an idea, a pursued and captured meaning, or in short _to_ anything

whatever, but just simply _of_ the quarried and gathered material it

happens to contain, the stones and bricks and rubble and cement and

promiscuous constituents of every sort that have been heaped in it and

thanks to which it quite massively piles itself up. Our perusal and our

enjoyment are our watching of the growth of the pile and of the

capacity, industry, energy with which the operation is directed. A huge

and in its way a varied aggregation, without traceable lines, divinable

direction, effect of composition, the mere number of its pieces, the

great dump of its material, together with the fact that here and there

in the miscellany, as with the value of bits of marble or porphyry, fine

elements shine out, it keeps us standing and waiting to the end—and

largely just because it keeps us wondering. We surely wonder more what

it may all propose to mean than any equal appearance of preparation to

relieve us of that strain, any so founded and grounded a postponement of

the disclosure of a sense in store, has for a long time called upon us

to do in a like connection. A great thing it is assuredly that _while_

we wait and wonder we are amused—were it not for that, truly, our

situation would be thankless enough; we may ask ourselves, as has

already been noted, why on such ambiguous terms we should consent to be,

and why the practice doesn’t at a given moment break down; and our

answer brings us back to that many-fingered grasp of the orange that the

author squeezes. This particular orange is of the largest and most

rotund, and his trust in the consequent flow is of its nature

communicative. Such is the case always, and most naturally, with that

air in a person who has something, who at the very least has much to

tell us: we _like_ so to be affected by it, we meet it half way and lend

ourselves, sinking in up to the chin. Up to the chin only indeed, beyond

doubt; we even then feel our head emerge, for judgment and articulate

question, and it is from that position that we remind ourselves how the

real reward of our patience is still to come—the reward attending not

at all the immediate sense of immersion, but reserved for the

after-sense, which is a very different matter, whether in the form of a

glow or of a chill.

If Mr. Bennett’s tight rotundity then is of the handsomest size and his

manipulation of it so firm, what are we to say of Mr. Wells’s, who, a

novelist very much as Lord Bacon was a philosopher, affects us as taking

all knowledge for his province and as inspiring in us to the very

highest degree the confidence enjoyed by himself—enjoyed, we feel, with

a breadth with which it has been given no one of his fellow-craftsmen to

enjoy anything. If confidence alone could lead utterly captive we should

all be huddled in a bunch at Mr. Wells’s heels—which is indeed where we

_are_ abjectly gathered so far as that force does operate. It is

literally Mr. Wells’s own mind, and the experience of his own mind,

incessant and extraordinarily various, extraordinarily reflective, even

with all sorts of conditions made, of whatever he may expose it to, that

forms the reservoir tapped by him, that constitutes his provision of

grounds of interest. It is, by our thinking, in his power to name to us,

as a preliminary, more of these grounds than all his contemporaries put

together, and even to exceed any competitor, without exception, in the

way of suggesting that, thick as he may seem to lay them, they remain

yet only contributive, are not in themselves full expression but are

designed strictly to subserve it, that this extraordinary writer’s spell

resides. When full expression, the expression of some particular truth,

seemed to lapse in this or that of his earlier novels (we speak not here

of his shorter things, for the most part delightfully wanton and

exempt,) it was but by a hand’s breadth, so that if we didn’t

inveterately quite know what he intended we yet always felt sufficiently

that _he_ knew. The particular intentions of such matters as “Kipps,” as

“Tono-Bungay,” as “Ann Veronica,” so swarmed about us, in their

blinding, bluffing vivacity, that the mere sum of them might have been

taken for a sense over and above which it was graceless to inquire. The

more this author learns and learns, or at any rate knows and knows,

however, the greater is this impression of his holding it good enough

for us, such as we are, that he shall but turn out his mind and its

contents upon us by any free familiar gesture and as from a high window

forever open—an entertainment as copious surely as any occasion should

demand, at least till we have more intelligibly expressed our title to a

better. Such things as “The New Machiavelli,” “Marriage,” “The

Passionate Friends,” are so very much more attestations of the presence

of material than attestations of an interest in the use of it that we

ask ourselves again and again why so fondly neglected a state of leakage

comes not to be fatal to _any_ provision of quantity, or even to stores

more specially selected for the ordeal than Mr. Wells’s always strike us

as being. Is not the pang of witnessed waste in fact great just in

proportion as we are touched by our author’s fine off-handedness as to

the value of the stores, about which he can for the time make us believe

what he will? so that, to take an example susceptible of brief

statement, we wince at a certain quite peculiarly gratuitous sacrifice

to the casual in “Marriage” very much as at seeing some fine and

indispensable little part of a mechanism slip through profane fingers

and lose itself. Who does not remember what ensues after a little upon

the aviational descent of the hero of the fiction just named into the

garden occupied, in company with her parents, by the young lady with

whom he is to fall in love?—and this even though the whole opening

scene so constituted, with all the comedy hares its function appears to

be to start, remains with its back squarely turned, esthetically

speaking, to the quarter in which the picture develops. The point for

our mortification is that by one of the first steps in this development,

the first impression on him having been made, the hero accidentally

meets the heroine, of a summer eventide, in a leafy lane which supplies

them with the happiest occasion to pursue their acquaintance—or in

other words supplies the author with the liveliest consciousness (as we

at least feel it should have been) that just so the relation between the

pair, its seed already sown and the fact of that bringing about all that

is still to come, pushes aside whatever veil and steps forth into life.

To show it step forth and affirm itself as a relation, what is this but

the interesting function of the whole passage, on the performance of

which what follows is to hang?—and yet who can say that when the

ostensible sequence is presented, and our young lady, encountered again

by her stirred swain, under cover of night, in a favouring wood, is at

once encompassed by his arms and pressed to his lips and heart (for

celebration thus of their third meeting) we do not assist at a well-nigh

heartbreaking miscarriage of “effect”? We see effect, invoked in vain,

simply stand off unconcerned; effect not having been at all consulted in

advance she is not to be secured on such terms. And her presence would

so have redounded—perfectly punctual creature as she is on a made

appointment and a clear understanding—to the advantage of all

concerned. The bearing of the young man’s act is all in our having begun

to conceive it as possible, begun even to desire it, in the light of

what has preceded; therefore if the participants have _not_ been shown

us as on the way to it, nor the question of it made beautifully to

tremble for us in the air, its happiest connections fail and we but

stare at it mystified. The instance is undoubtedly trifling, but in the

infinite complex of such things resides for a work of art the shy

virtue, shy at least till wooed forth, of the whole susceptibility. The

case of Mr. Wells might take us much further—such remarks as there

would be to make, say, on such a question as the due understanding, on

the part of “The Passionate Friends” (not as associated persons but as a

composed picture), of what that composition is specifically _about_ and

where, for treatment of this interest, it undertakes to find its centre:

all of which, we are willing however to grant, falls away before the

large assurance and incorrigible levity with which this adventurer

carries his lapses—far more of an adventurer as he is than any other of

the company. The composition, as we have called it, heaven saving the

mark, is simply at any and every moment “about” Mr. Wells’s general

adventure; which is quite enough while it preserves, as we trust it will

long continue to do, its present robust pitch.

We have already noted that “Round the Corner,” Mr. Gilbert Cannan’s

liveliest appeal to our attention, belongs to the order of

_constatations_ pure and simple; to the degree that _as_ a document of

that nature and of that rigour the book could perhaps not more

completely affirm itself. When we have said that it puts on record the

“tone,” the manners, the general domestic proceedings and _train de vie_

of an amiable clergyman’s family established in one of the more sordid

quarters of a big black northern city of the Liverpool or Manchester

complexion we have advanced as far in the way of descriptive statement

as the interesting work seems to warrant. For it _is_ interesting, in

spite of its leaving itself on our hands with a consistent indifference

to any question of the charmed application springing from it all that

places it in the forefront of its type. Again as under the effect of Mr.

Bennett’s major productions our sole inference is that things, the

things disclosed, _go on and on, in any given case, in spite of

everything_—with Mr. Cannan’s one discernible care perhaps being for

how extraordinarily much, in the particular example here before him,

they were able to go on in spite of. The conception, the presentation of

this enormous inauspicious amount as bearing upon the collective career

of the Folyats is, we think, as near as the author comes at any point to

betraying an awareness of a subject. Yet again, though so little

encouraged or “backed,” a subject after a fashion makes itself, even as

it has made itself in “The Old Wives’ Tale” and in “Clayhanger,” in

“Sons and Lovers,” where, as we have hinted, any assistance rendered us

for a view of one _most_ comfortably enjoys its absence, and in Mr. Hugh

Walpole’s newest novel, where we wander scarcely less with our hand in

no guiding grasp, but where the author’s good disposition, as we feel

it, to provide us with what we lack if he only knew how, constitutes in

itself such a pleading liberality. We seem to see him in this spirit lay

again and again a flowered carpet for our steps. If we do not include

Mr. Compton Mackenzie to the same extent in our generalisation it is

really because we note a difference in him, a difference in favour of

his care for the application. Preoccupations seem at work in “Sinister

Street,” and withal in “Carnival,” the brush of which we in other

quarters scarce even suspect and at some of which it will presently be

of profit to glance. “I answer for it, you know,” we seem at any rate to

hear Mr. Gilbert Cannan say with an admirably genuine young pessimism,

“I answer for it that they were really _like_ that, odd or unpleasant or

uncontributive, and therefore tiresome, as it may strike you;” and the

charm of Mr. Cannan, so far as up or down the rank we so disengage a

charm, is that we take him at his word. His guarantee, his straight

communication, of his general truth is a value, and values are rare—the

flood of fiction is apparently capable of running hundreds of miles

without a single glint of one—and thus in default of satisfaction we

get stopgaps and are thankful often under a genial touch to get even so

much. The value indeed is crude, it would be quadrupled were it only

wrought and shaped; yet it has still the rude dignity that it counts to

us for experience or at least for what we call under our present pitch

of sensibility force of impression. The experience, we feel, is ever

something to conclude upon, while the impression is content to wait; to

wait, say, in the spirit in which we must accept this younger bustle if

we accept it at all, the spirit of its serving as a rather presumptuous

lesson to us in patience. While we wait, again, we are amused—not in

the least, also to repeat, up to the notch of our conception of

amusement, which draws upon still other forms and sources; but none the

less for the wonder, the intensity, the actuality, the probity of the

vision. This is much as in “Clayhanger” and in “Hilda Lessways,” where,

independently of the effect, so considerably rendered, of the long lapse

of time, always in this type of recital a source of amusement in itself,

and certainly of the noblest, we get such an admirably substantial thing

as the collective image of the Orgreaves, the local family in whose

ample lap the amenities and the humanities so easily sit, for Mr.

Bennett’s evocation and his protagonist’s recognition, and the manner of

the presentation of whom, with the function and relation of the picture

at large, strikes such a note of felicity, achieves such a simulation of

sense, as the author should never again be excused for treating, that is

for neglecting, as beyond his range. Here figures signally the

interesting case of a compositional function absolutely performed by

mere multiplication, the flow of the facts: the Orgreaves, in

“Clayhanger,” are there, by what we make out, but for “life,” for

general life only, and yet, with their office under any general or

inferential meaning entirely unmarked, come doubtless as near squaring

esthetically with the famous formula of the “slice of life” as any

example that could be adduced; happening moreover as they probably do to

owe this distinction to their coincidence at once with reality and

charm—a fact esthetically curious and delightful. For we attribute the

bold stroke they represent much more to Mr. Arnold Bennett’s esthetic

instinct than to anything like a calculation of his bearings, and more

to his thoroughly acquainted state, as we may again put it, than to all

other causes together: which strikingly enough shows how much complexity

of interest may be simulated by mere presentation of material, mere

squeezing of the orange, when the material happens to be “handsome” or

the orange to be sweet.