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.
I wondered often, when I was in America, why I saw so many old or
middle-aged husbands with girl-wives. People told me that the cost of
living is so high in America that young men cannot afford to marry
young girls, but must either marry older and richer women or refrain
from marriage until they are middle-aged. Young women, so I was told,
must marry the elderly and the bald, the slack and the flabby because,
otherwise, they cannot hope for a good time until they are no longer
of an age to enjoy it. I do not much esteem young women who refuse
the great adventure of marriage with young, poor men in order that
they may have a good time with unenthusiastic, tamed and middle-aged
men, especially when I remember that a good time in such circumstances
means only a fatly comfortable one, being well-fed, well-housed and
well-clothed without ever having had the fun of fighting for such
comforts. But I am not entirely convinced by the arguments which were
put to me in explanation of this singular and unnatural conjunction
of the young and the middle-aged. There may be truth in the statement
that American girls marry elderly men for the comfort they receive,
but I doubt whether the elderly men marry for that reason. I am very
certain that such marriages are made because the men are romantic and
will not believe that the young girl's "charming ways" will not be
retained by her when she is no longer young. The plain and undeniable
fact is that elderly men marry girls because they cannot believe that
a girl who has foolish habits will not cease to have them when she is
older. The romantic is a man who is everlastingly hoping for the best,
everlastingly striving to obtain the best. A romantic realist is a man
who, while striving for the best, knows that he may only obtain the
worst. The sentimentalist is a man who removes himself from the region
of reality and refuses to admit that there is a worst, who insists
that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Mr.
Arnold Bennett is a romantic realist, with a slight tendency towards
sentimentalism.