I've got that as clear and plain--as prison whitewash. I am
convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now--I
mean it--until every corner of our world knows this story, knows
it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story
and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all the other
stories that have kicked man after man out of English public
life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong
initiative. To think this tottering, old-woman-ridden Empire
should dare to waste a man on such a score!"
But Mr. Wells intends something more than to explain the state of mind
which led a distinguished politician and moralist, a married,
middle-aged man, to victimise--that is the "worldly" way of looking at
it--a beautiful young girl who had fallen in love with his genius.
Here we have the life-story and character of Remington portrayed at
full length--Remington an individual product of our social
environment--Remington in relation to the vast national processes
which have been changing England from the "muddle" of the Victorians
to the muddle of to-day--a Remington clever enough to see our
representative institutions stripped of their hollowness and their
cant; quick to pierce through the shell of Liberalism, not perhaps
quite to the kernel of it, but to the insincere part of it; quick to
see a profound psychological meaning in the Suffragette movement, and
to distinguish between the outer bearing of public men and the
individuality behind it--the "hinterland." The whole was a brilliant
analysis of England in macrocosm and microcosm welded into the
life-story of Remington. And his hero is not like one of Mrs. Humphry
Ward's puppets, set up to be a great politician. Remington as a
thinker is almost a great man; he is a profound analyst of society on
its human side; he _is_ a gifted critic of public institutions; even
his absurd perversity in trying to invent a constructive,
motherhood-endowing Toryism is the perversity of a versatile and
clever man whose action is precipitated by bitterness or pique.
But the extraordinary thing about _The New Machiavelli_ is, that this
envisaging of England in her social, political, and intellectual life,
this acutely and almost diabolically observed crowd of _real_
persons, this minute psychology, this exact history, this elaborate
philosophy--all are subservient to the purpose of explaining how it
was that Remington was driven into the net of sex, and Isabel was
enabled to "darn his socks." _Parturiunt montes_. Is it thus that
Remington will make himself immortal in literature, the
twentieth-century Benvenuto Cellini, swaggering, in a self-conscious,
twentieth-century way, through the tale of his glorious peccadilloes?
Or is it to be a Jonathan Wild, memorable as the hero of a hundred
magnificent felonies with which a Fielding or a Wells could glorify a
sturdy vagabond? But Remington writes in bitterness. His pen is
steeped in the gall of Swift. He feels rancour against Altiora,
against the Cramptons, against all the "Pinky-Dinkies" who prescribe
morals for a genius erratic in his desires.
The successive mental stages by which Remington emerges had been set
forth before in other books. They are here brought together and surveyed
in a comprehensive whole. He is anxious to strip off the disguises of
human nature, and to expose, in each of the persons arrayed before us,
the "self-behind-the-frontage." "In the ostensible self who glowed under
the approbation of Altiora Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised
and depreciated, in the House and in smoking-room groups, you really
have as much of a man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary
notice." His ideal is the individual who lives and acts in the full
light of that "self-behind-the-frontage"--the "hinterland," as he calls
him; and his literary method in this book is to expose the emptiness of
the shop-window, to cast his satire upon the poor show.
The weakness of his attacks is that the ideal with which he would
illuminate his background is shifty, uncertain, ill-realised; being
undetermined, the function that is allotted to the human ideal is
actually left to chance, to accidental impulse rather than to
conscious will--to human frailty rather than to human strength. Hence
it is that he declares the rights of sex where its claims are weakest;
now applauds the conduct of Remington, now apologises for it; now
explains elaborately that his mere sensual side would assert itself,
now that sex never appealed to him without an admixture of the ideal;
now cries out for discussion and public enlightenment on this subject,
and now acknowledges that Remington, who had discussed it for years,
acted on impulse, in the dark. How uncertain it all is, how mixed in
its motives, how brilliantly bewildering in its conclusions--and yet
how clever!
It was probably a passing phase in Mr. Wells' history, an unhappy
phase for him, presumably, but inevitable. In the uneasy period of
irritation and defiance he lost none of his skill in self-portraiture,
in projecting himself upon the canvas of modern life. It was that vein
of undefined Romanticism in him, according so ill with the life of
"public affairs," that put him out of harmony with himself. Such an
ideal as he had formed for himself could never by its nature
completely satisfy any but the solitary recluse, and had little to
give to man in his social capacity, still less to the man whom he
depicted in _Marriage_, irritated, frustrated, drained of his higher
energies by the irritating calls of society. Long before, in _A
Modern Utopia_, he had prescribed for his Samurai rulers a periodical
course of solitude and meditation in the desert. In the book which,
while I write, is the last of his books--_Marriage_--he comes back to
the same idea. He depicts a hero full of scientific ardour and
intellectual ambition who finds that in the social life there is
nothing to satisfy his deepest needs, and that only in turning his
back on the world of people and flying to commune with God, nature,
and himself, in solitude, can he attain the mystical peace he longs
for. The social world which becomes an obsession to Trafford, his
hero, is made to swarm about him through the inevitable net of
marriage--although it is marriage to a fascinating woman whom he still
loves. At first he had sacrificed his scientific ideal to the domestic
and material needs. He had abandoned research in order to make
Marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness. The
comfortable house, the artistic surroundings, the social pleasures,
and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as
frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity
seemed destined to live. He sees the impulses under which men and
women seek to escape "from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitive
motives of low-grade and law-abiding prosperity." Marriage is the
social bond which has involved him in this. Marjorie herself has
become the feminine embodiment of that urgent life of "getting on," of
just "doing," which seeks to trammel, stifle, and kill the spirit and
higher intelligence of man. Through marriage the earthy sociality of
life had thrust itself upon him, and was killing what was
apprehensive, curious, spiritually and intelligently aspiring within
him. He rebels. He flies to the wintry wilds of Labrador, and takes
Marjorie with him.
There, in a merely fantastic but brilliantly described scene, amid the
thrilling dangers of a wild solitude and a grim winter, they discover
themselves. They come near to one another in moments of peril,
deprivation, and self-sacrifice. He passionately asserts, she
passionately agrees, that "we can't _do_ things. We don't bring things
off!" ... "The real thing is to get knowledge and express it" ...
"This Being--using its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend it. Every
good thing in man is that--looking and making pictures, listening and
making songs, making philosophies and sciences, trying new powers,
bridge and engine, spark and gun. At the bottom of my soul, _that_."
He sees man without "eyes for those greater things, but we've got the
promise--the intimation of eyes."
This is not, it is to be feared, a very satisfactory solution for the
average man or woman who is suffering either from destiny unrealised
or from the milder malady of nerves. The medical or the spiritual
adviser who should prescribe a course of Labrador whenever we are
physically or spiritually "run down" would be of little use to the
majority of us. We see here the monkish side of Mr. Wells' temperament
deliberately torturing the social and worldly side of him, the spirit
suggesting to the flesh and the devil that they ought to be content
with spiritual contemplation. The mystic has the final word in those
humorous-passionate conversations in which first and last things are
discussed by the man and the woman in the wild--the man and woman,
still comparatively young, about to return to a new life in
civilisation. But what will they become when they return? What will
Marjorie do when the shops once again lie temptingly before her, and
when her aunt Plessington's guests once more besiege her, and social
life presents itself again in its garish variety? Is this visit to the
wild more decisive than marriage itself? Will their brief vision of
God, their intellectual and spiritual conversion, make them "live
happily ever after?" Mr. Wells, at least, should know that it will
not; he will surely be bound to write another novel to show the final
stage of Marjorie and Trafford, the renewed conflict, within them and
between them, of the world and the spirit. For it is a conflict
without end, a conflict which Mr. Wells, as he goes on writing the
history of his own most interesting self in relation to his own most
interesting environment, must contrive to present to us in each new
book that he writes.
III
ARNOLD BENNETT
Mr. Arnold Bennett has often been spoken of as if he were a sort of
revised edition of Mr. Wells. In reality the contrast which these two
writers present is far more remarkable than the resemblance. The
important works of Mr. Wells came first in order of time, and Mr.
Bennett would readily admit that he owes much to the other's
imaginative pictures of a changing civilisation. He belongs also, like
Mr. Wells, to the essentially English tradition of fiction. In spite
of an admiration for French literature which has had a refreshing
effect upon his style, he has written many of his novels as Fielding,
Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray wrote theirs--out of the abundance of
his imagination, from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life
in all its profusion, in its littleness and its greatness, a colossal
whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes the
selection. In his longer books he has adopted the epic rather than the
dramatic method of writing fiction. He will often indulge his fancy
for insubordinate episodes, so long as they are in some way
characteristic. He loves abundance of description--there is scarcely
any novelist who is more precise in describing all the minutiæ of a
place or the physical traits of a person. This sort of profusion is
very English; and Mr. Wells, too, is essentially English.
The two men were born at about the same time. They came from families
which belonged, broadly speaking, to the same social class. They have
both of them written with perfect frankness of the sort of people they
have known intimately in their youth. And there, I think, the
resemblance ends.
The contrast is far more striking. All the most important of Mr.
Wells' books have been written about himself. Mr. Bennett has never
written about himself excepting in an early book like _The Man from
the North_, in certain inferior books of his middle period, and when
he is deliberately writing his impressions of places, as in his book
about America. It is always the personality of Mr. Wells with which
Mr. Wells is most concerned, and the world as related to him. The
personality of Mr. Bennett is kept in the background. He is an
interested observer, and he gives what he has seen or believes that he
has seen--he reports faithfully as one who might be held responsible
for the actuality of his vision. Men and women, places and things, are
all to him curious phenomena which it will be worth his while to note,
to try to understand, to record in so far as they are significant.
Mr. Wells has an extraordinary intellectual capacity of interpreting
his own impressions, and lighting upon truths by some romantic or
instinctive process of his own. Mr. Bennett has a very much harder
sense of fact. He understands romance, but he is not himself romantic.
His interests are all in the understanding and interpreting of the
significant facts of life, and he cares very little for the pleasure
of living outside that kind of living which is artistic perception.
And yet he has so much practicality and common sense--the sense of
fact which in his art stands him in such good stead--that he has even
been prepared to sacrifice his art to the main practical necessities
of life. At any rate, it is upon this hypothesis that we must explain
some of the very poor books which he perpetrated before it became
worth his while to protect his reputation--the only other possible
explanation being that, as he writes at all times and in all moods,
much of his work might be expected to be below his proper level.
But Mr. Bennett is not only extraordinarily versatile in his
observations of people, places, books--anything whatsoever that he
comes upon--but he has the faculty always of seeing objects as if he
saw them for the first time; that is to say, he brings imaginative
curiosity to bear upon them. He is not personally distressed, like Mr.
Wells, about the evil fate of the world any more than he would be
elated by its good fortune. But he is interested. He looks for
character, and he finds it. He looks for situation, and he makes it.
He can be content with a light comic situation, as in _Helen with the
High Hand_, and the result is admirable. He can present with equal
skill profoundly poignant situations, such as occur in _Clayhanger_
and _Hilda Lessways_. He is aware of the fact that life is a
spectacle; and that to make it interesting you must make it vivid, you
must show it as something that is intense and passionate. And he is
also aware of the fact that the feeling of intensity and passion may
be elicited from a sense of the monotonous, the trivial, and the
vapid; that tragic effect may be gained by the spectacle of men
seeking an ideal which is beyond their powers, or grasping at an ideal
which proves unworthy, or indifferent to an ideal which we see to be
within their reach.
It may be taken as certain that, with or without the example of Mr.
Wells, Mr. Bennett must inevitably have been affected by the sense of
the changing conditions of modern life, and the passing of the
generations from one set of habits to another. For it must be
remembered that he was born and brought up in the Potteries in the
middle and later Victorian periods; that as a young man he left those
provinces, and in course of time found himself engaged in the
profession of literature at a safe distance from them. He wrote about
all sorts of subjects--and in every sort of style--articles, didactic
books, fantasies, novels--but as a good journalist he at length
discovered that on one subject he was a specialist, that to his
accounts of one part of the world he could supply "local colour"--that
part of the world being, of course, the Five Towns of the Potteries.
He made this region his own. He adopted it for literary purposes. And
in writing _Anna of the Five Towns_, _Tales of the Five Towns_, _The
Grim Smile of the Five Towns_, and his more famous later novels he
naturally found himself describing the Potteries as they were when he
was a young man, but as they no longer are to-day. What was more
natural than that, as he passed from the last generation to the
present, writing in the present about the remarkably different past,
he should become supremely impressed with the very fact of the
transition--that fact of changing and growing old which dominates _The
Old Wives' Tale_, and supplies him with his theme in the play of
_Milestones_?
In _The Old Wives' Tale_ he presents a series of pictures which make
us realise that there are men and women about us who were brought up
in a world so totally unlike ours that we regard it as purely
historical. He has brought out this fact in a way that may cause
misgivings even to those who are still considered young. He takes us
back to the most vivid memories of our childhood. He recalls to us
what England was like and what people were like in an age when
electric trams were unknown, when bicycles were rare, when the retail
trader was a person who could still call his soul his own. He has
shown us people born in one world and growing old in another. He has
presented to us the fantastic but true panorama of certain persons who
were young and idealistic, who became middle-aged and practical, who
are now old and acquiescent; of persons who were born mid-Victorians,
who became later-Victorians, who to this day survive grotesquely among
the moderns--and again young men and women of to-day who themselves
will survive to a derelict old age among people as unlike us as we are
unlike the heroes of Mrs. Ward Beecher Stowe. No one of us will attain
a ripe old age without experiencing three different generations marked
by three different sets of habits, sentiments, ideals. Mr. Bennett's
subject is the tragi-comedy of growing old.
The author presented his people, and the places in which they lived,
in all the minutiæ of their and its existence. He combined the
realistic modern method with the bitter, ironical, sententious method
of Thackeray. There is nothing in the first half of this book which
Thackeray would have done better, and Thackeray never illustrated a
law of life remorselessly working itself out as Mr. Bennett has done.
His mind and his perceptions are at work simultaneously. He is
alternately humorous and grim, but is too philosophical, interested,
and detached ever to be bitter. That was the world our fathers were
born in--he shows it to us--that is what our fathers are among us to
this day--and again we have the picture. "You cannot step twice into
the same river," said Heraclitus. "You cannot go back to the town you
were born in," Mr. Bennett means to say; and his book makes his
meaning clear.
Two sisters, Constance and Sophia, are the girls, women, widows whom
we see growing up from the 'fifties to the latter part of the first
decade of the twentieth century. When we meet them first they are
young girls--fifteen and sixteen--"rather like racehorses, quivering
with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting
proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, roguish,
prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise"--at an age when "if
one is frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn: one has
learnt simply everything in the previous six months." These two young
people are unconscious of "the miraculous age which is us." They lived
in the Potteries before the Potteries had acquired that big black
spot on the map which now dignifies and degrades their existence. They
lived in and around the important draper's shop in "The Square," under
the wing of their respected parents, the once active citizen, now
paralytic, Mr. Baines, and Mrs. Baines, the ruler, the dictator of the
household and of the morals of all its members.
In the first stage we see Constance and Sophia subject to this
parental rule. They take castor oil when they are bidden. They do not
leave the house without the sanction of Mrs. Baines. They must not,
needless to say, realise the fact that marriageable young men are real
facts. They must pay attention to the shop, preserving a proper
distance from the assistants. They must be careful that Maggie, the
servant, does not overhear familiar conversations. They must not go
into the drawing-room except on Sunday afternoons. They must wait upon
the paralytic father with proper punctilio. And they must be quiet and
attentive when Mrs. Baines is directing their morals. Then Mr. Baines
dies, because Sophia has been looking out of the window at a dashing
commercial traveller; and Mr. Bennett soliloquises:
John Baines had belonged to the past, to the age when men really
did think of their souls, when orators by phrases could move
crowds to fury or to pity, when no one had learnt to hurry, when
Demos was only turning in his sleep, when the sole beauty of
life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when hell
really had no bottom and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the
secret of England's greatness. Mid-Victorian England lay on
that mahogany bed. Ideals had passed away with John Baines. It
is thus that ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of
honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly, while one's head is
turned.
But the generation of the Baineses does not give place easily; it
tries to shut its ears to the knocking at the door, insistently as it
may knock in the whimsical, assertive personality of Sophia. The
romantic commercial traveller whose fault it was that Mr. Baines died
a premature, though, scientifically speaking, a belated death, is the
symbol of the new influence which Mrs. Baines is too out-of-date to
resist. Sophia runs away with the commercial traveller, makes him
marry her, and is translated from "The Square" to Paris. Poor Sophia!
She is the victim of being half a generation ahead of her time, a
suffragette before it was an honour to be a martyr to the cause. But
in Constance the old influences are stronger. She persists like a
piece of old furniture which survives the relic-hunters and the
broker's men. She marries that trusted servant, Mr. Povey, who has
such a head for inventing tickets and labels and sign-boards, who
himself outdistances Mr. Baines as railway trains outdistance stage
coaches, and as aeroplanes will outdistance motor-cars. The married
couple naturally displace Mrs. Baines, and Constance notices her
mother shortly after the honeymoon--"Poor dear!" she thought, "I'm
afraid she's not what she was." "Incredible that her mother could have
aged in less than six weeks! Constance did not allow for the chemistry
that had been going on in herself."
And so they go on, till Mr. Povey is "forty next birthday," though,
dear innocent soul, he scarcely notices it as we notice it tragically
in these days of quick living. And Constance buries her mother, and
becomes engrossed in Cyril, her son, and scarcely observes how the
atmosphere in the Potteries gets blacker and blacker, and the trains
run nearer and more frequently, and the electric trams replace the
horse trams, linking up the Five Towns of the "District." And Mr.
Povey too gets buried, and Constance's son goes to London, and her
hair grows white, and at last--at last Sophia comes back to live with
her in the old house in the modern Potteries. And still those two old
women are living there together.
I shall not dwell upon the career of Sophia--who has pursued her life
in Paris very wisely, shrewdly, circumspectly, not to say
commercially, thus showing how honest bourgeois ancestry can triumph
over the flightiest of modern temperaments. Suffice it that she is now
an aged widow, a contemporary of the Crimean veterans, living to this
day in comfortable and old-maidish sobriety in the Potteries, hardly
conscious of the fact that aeroplanes are an innovation. It is Mr.
Bennett, not the Sophias, who makes us conscious of the strange,
portentous progress of evolution; of the lapse of time; the changing
mind of man; the desperate love of what has been; the inevitableness
of what is to come, of what is to replace us, and put us, too, on the
shelf among outworn things.