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." ...