trilogy which, at the time when I write, is still unfinished, Mr.
Bennett again presents the process of the generations, but he has
given us a more intense dramatic interest, he has singled out a few
persons for more significant characterisation; he has focussed his
picture better, concentrated the interest, and produced emotional
tension. The reason why _Pickwick_ retains its place as the first of
Dickens' novels is that it is almost the only book he wrote which had
a really satisfactory hero--an individual character. _Clayhanger_ has
two such persons--Edwin, and Darius his father, as well as a dozen or
more of interesting subordinate characters. There are other things
with which Mr. Bennett is concerned in this book beside the transition
from youth to old age, from Victorian to Edwardian. But he does not
let us forget this transition. "To Edwin, Darius was exactly the same
father, and for Darius, Edwin was still aged sixteen. They both of
them went on living on the assumption that the world had stood still
in those seven years between 1873 and 1880. If they had been asked
what had happened during those seven years, they would have answered,
'Oh, nothing particular.'"
Ordinary, humdrum life, an integral part of the national life,
enacting by slow, imperceptible changes the processes of the
Time-Spirit, still occupies Mr. Bennett's attention. He has again
traced for a score of years the lives of a group of people belonging
to the risen, well-to-do tradesman class in the latter part of the
Victorian era. With the successive cross-sections of life which he
draws for us he again makes us look backwards and forwards to the
England of yesterday and the England of to-morrow: the England which
has been revolutionising its conditions of life once or twice in every
generation, and has been giving its persons different food for ideas,
different standards to act upon, different habits to conform to or
revolt against: people whose parents were nurtured in the sweated
atmosphere of factories before the Factory Acts, and whose sons will
be the people of 1913. He shows us a whole generation of persons who,
living through these prodigious changes and being asked what has
happened, reply, "Oh, nothing particular." But though the score of
people in the Potteries with whom we are concerned are but
individually selected from the swarm that is provincial England, they
are none the less intensely individual. Darius Clayhanger, the hero's
father, the man who has emerged from the pit, and by sheer obstinacy
in work has made himself well off with his printing shop, stands out
clear as life with all his idiosyncrasies. Hard, plain-spoken, without
conscious ideals, satisfied with the _status quo_ (since the Corn Laws
were passed), unelastic, relentless, he is yet capable of bursting out
emotionally in a manner that displeases his more guarded son. We have
memorable persons in Big James, the foreman; Mr. Shushions, the aged
Primitive Methodist; Aunt Clara, the lady whose business in life was
tact; Mr. Orgreave, the architect; Janet Orgreave, his daughter; and
others who come familiarly in and out.
All of these persons whom I have mentioned, completely different as
one is from another, are none the less normal provincial characters.
They have a natural place in the Five Towns; their ambition does not
stretch out beyond the finite limits of Bursley unless it be to the
mild ecstasies of conventional religion or the generous aspiration
which accompanies song.
But the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, is something different. In the head of
Edwin the boy "a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire." But would
the atmosphere of the Potteries be damp enough to quench that flame?
Or did that flame burn intensely enough to survive so that his spirit
should rise out of the commerce, the routine, the unaspiring
neighbourly atmosphere which is the dull _clay_ of life? He longed to
be an architect. He did not understand architecture, he was unaware of
its finest possibilities, but something in him akin to the art-impulse
made him long to be an architect. But his father stamped out that
ambition. He entered his father's works, and, however rebellious at
heart, was continually submissive to his overmastering will. But once,
when the routine was settling down upon him, illumined only a little
by vaguely directed reading, his soul was burst out of its environment
by a passionate love which grew in a day; which seemed to win success;
but was thwarted by the woman who, without a word, incomprehensibly,
jilts him.
The years pass on--Mr. Bennett's transitions make us imagine forlorn,
almost intolerable passages of years in which the human soul trudges
stupidly and wearily towards death, discussing muffins and tea whilst
the Cosmos is plotting upheavals for the sole benefit of stupidity in
the mass--and Edwin, suffering at his father's hands, triumphing over
him in old age, is becoming an ordinary inhabitant of Bursley,
working, resting, taking his ease. Sometimes the smouldering flame
bursts out in him again, and he would perceive that he had been
nothing, achieved nothing, that he had been a mere "spendthrift of
time and years." "And there was he, Edwin, eating bacon and eggs
opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at Bleakridge."
But the flame breaks out once more. Art had had no chance to claim him
for its own, and Love had cheated him. But when he discovers Hilda,
and Hilda's son, and Hilda's misery--Hilda, "with her passion for
Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate
surreptitiously at night!"-with her, love, passion, pity, intensity of
living come back to him.
It is interesting to turn from _Clayhanger_ to the story of _Hilda
Lessways_. This story has not quite the distinctive note which Mr.
Bennett struck in the two preceding novels. What we miss is, first of
all, the "local colour" which is the author's speciality, most of the
scenes being laid in Brighton or London; and second, that detached
manner which enabled Mr. Bennett to present his persons as if he were
himself indifferent to their fate, with the result that they stand or
fall entirely on their own merits. Here we feel that he is a partisan.
He has taken up Hilda's case. He is evidently prepared to champion her
against all the world. Hence the very femininity of the heroine which
he has so cleverly created, to some extent colours the book itself, as
if by a kind of sympathy between author and heroine. The perfervid
woman has sometimes communicated too much of her fervour to the very
language of the author.
But in other respects the book shows an advance in Mr. Bennett's art.
For the first time in his life he has resisted the temptation to
overwhelm us with the wealth of invention which his fertile mind is
busy upon. He has pruned away the unessential details. He has cut away
the delightful but irrelevant details which even in _The Old Wives'
Tale_ and in _Clayhanger_ threatened to shatter the perspective; and
has concentrated on the matter in hand with enormous advantage to the
dramatic sharpness and distinctness of his story.
He has made a further gain in intensity by using the story of
Clayhanger as a background to the present story. The technical
difficulty in all creative literature is a difficulty of language and
symbols--the difficulty of so speaking to the reader that he may see
moods, moments, situations, concurrences of life and forces of passion
in the fine, dry, intense light in which the author has seen them.
That is the infinite difficulty of all literature--to find a language
and to create an atmosphere which may become familiar to the reader
without becoming commonplace. How much do we gain in the reading of
Shakespeare by the fact that from the sheer poetry of the thing we
have been compelled to read him a score of times! How fully the Greek
dramatists understood that to be instantly appreciated they must deal
with stories every detail of which was stored with friendly
associations for the audience!
Mr. Bennett elicits something of this effect of the marvellous from
the familiar by putting the life-story of Hilda Lessways on a
foreground behind which lies the already familiar story of Edwin
Clayhanger. We remember Clayhanger living in the printing shop in the
Potteries; his uncouthness, his shyness, his pertinacity; his desire
to be an architect and to live the imaginative life, thwarted by his
grim old father; and the manner in which Hilda dawned upon him,
entered into his experience in a brief rapture of passion, and
disappeared, leaving Clayhanger to grope again with the commonplaces.
And in this new story we see the life of the girl, the woman; she,
too, groping among the commonplaces, with her heart set upon a wider
experience, till a moment comes when her story coincides with and is
complementary to that of Clayhanger. The speeches which we heard her
make in the earlier story are heard again here, with greater
comprehension; the apparently trifling words which fell from the lips
of Clayhanger, scarcely heeded, are heard again now, and heard as they
sounded to Hilda, grasping after a purpose and a fulfilment of
herself.
Mr. Bennett has endeavoured to examine the mind and heart of this
woman from the inside. Whether the machinery of the emotions, the
will, and the intellect really do work out just like this is a matter
harder for a man to decide than for a woman; but to me Mr. Bennett's
account seems plausible. What is mainly important is that Hilda,
whether she is psychologically true to life or not, is, at any rate,
a conceivable person. She is presented as one more example of the
spirit too large for its habitation. Cooped up with her mother in a
little house in the Five Towns, she was in trouble not the less acute
because "the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what." Hilda,
maturing, steadfast, idealistic, with a desperate readiness to live
through the inferior things of life if she could not now grasp the
best, with a vitality which enables her to emerge again and again from
tragedy that for most people would be final, is a contrast to her
rather futile, fussy, merely experienced mother. Hilda flings herself
into the work of a provincial newspaper office with the ardour of her
idealism. Here was something she had set her mind on, and the
practical quest was a religious passion, tragic in its way because the
real result of the work was so paltry and sordid.
What was she? Nothing but a clerk at a commencing salary of fifteen
shillings per week! Ah! but she was a priestess! She had a vocation
which was unsoiled by the economic excuse. She was a pioneer. No young
woman had ever done what she was doing. She was the only girl in the
Five Towns who knew shorthand.
And Mr. Bennett succeeds in interesting us in the ambitious,
speculative Cannon mainly by reason of the pathetically inadequate
objects on which he lavishes the passion of his energies and his
ideals--on a newspaper, a corrupt thing--on a boarding-house, a centre
of triviality. And Miss Gailey, whose heart is set on her hot-water
bottle and her cup of tea, and the easing of her rheumatism, interests
us profoundly, because it is such death-in-life which may prove
tragically destructive to the ascendant nature of a Hilda.
Mr. Bennett is not afraid of the drab side of life. But he never shows
peevishness on the one side nor bloodless romanticism on the other. He
sees this drab side, and he sees the passion of life--the aspiring
human always trying to be more than it is, or can be, in some
desperate, foolish way. This is the tragedy and the hopefulness of
tragedy which Mr. Bennett has grasped. To possess a keen faculty of
observation by which to present life exactly and realistically, and at
the same time to re-imagine these facts so that the vividness, the
intensity, the pitiful passion of life are what we mainly remember--to
combine these two qualities as Mr. Bennett combines them is to hold a
unique position in contemporary literature.
IV
GILBERT CHESTERTON
It has often been pointed out that the intellectuals--the people whose
business it is to formulate opinions in Parliament, Press, and
Pulpit--are not really expressing public opinion; they are only
expressing the opinion of the intellectuals. Perhaps it would be
nearer the mark to say that every civilised or semi-civilised human
being may be divided into two persons, the one an individual who
chooses, walks, eats, feels, and imagines in a private and personal
way; the other a sort of official person who registers formal opinions
when called upon to do so. The latter corresponds to the
"intellectual," and is the dominant element in the souls of the ruling
classes; whilst the former--the instinctive, the spontaneous, the
common-sense element--dominates the man in the street.
It would not be far wrong to describe Mr. Chesterton's philosophy as a
sort of sublimated public opinion _minus_ the opinion of the
intellectuals. To get at what I mean I must for the moment ask the
reader to think of Mr. Chesterton as an abstraction. Let him conceive
an Englishman, unlike any existing Englishman, who has never heard of
Darwin or Spencer; who has never been impregnated with the theory of
induction or analytical psychology; an Englishman who has never read
or heard of Macaulay, Froude, Carlyle, Ruskin, Bagehot, Mill, Seeley,
or Mr. Frederic Harrison; who has read none of the poets since Milton;
who has never been asked to consider the Reform Bill or the Education
Bill, the Oxford Movement or the Æsthetic Movement, Realism or
Impressionism, Non-Resistance or the Will to Power, Mr. Bernard Shaw
or Mr. Aylmer Maude, the Primrose League or the Labour Party, Mr.
Yeats or even Mr. O'Finnigan. Let us imagine that this agreeable
abstraction is in the habit of moving about among other abstractions
like himself; that he knows a horse when he sees it (even if he cannot
ride it); that he is accustomed to hospitable inn-parlours where you
may discuss any philosophy so long as it is not a system; that he has
a chivalrous admiration for women; that he likes sunshine and adores
the moon; that he believes in God, the respectability of wives, ballad
poetry, good fellowship, and good wine.
And now, having stripped Mr. Chesterton so that he is no longer even
an attenuated ghost of himself, let us re-clothe him and present him
decent and as he is. We must imagine this abstracted personage,
ignorant and therefore unbiassed, suddenly introduced to all the
learned jargon of the day. He still retains his simple views about
things out of date, and is called upon to pronounce views upon
entirely new matters--aristocracy and democracy, religion and
scepticism, art and morality, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. A welter of odd
ideas and delirious fanaticisms is suddenly sprung upon his simple
consciousness. He finds all the intellectual circles in England
working themselves into a fury about ideas, factitious ideas, which
positively did not exist for him when he was a happy abstraction.
Naturally, in his brief visit to the unabstracted world he has not
time to study in detail all the philosophies which have been invented
for the purpose of debate. But he goes round from circle to circle,
listens to this argument and to that, notices the effect which the
various philosophies have upon the characters of their exponents, and
himself enters into the fun of debate as if he had never been an
abstraction at all. He accepts the terminology which he finds ready
made, but of course uses it in his own way--he is obviously unable to
take anything for granted like the people who have always been
intellectuals. He continually comes across queer verbal usages, and
feels bound to declare that what we call free-thinking is not what we
call free; that what we call certainties are also what we call
uncertain; that aristocrats are unaristocratic; that doubters are
dogmatists; and that tradition is an "extension of the franchise." And
then the world, having never been out of its own generation, having
never been anything so shocking as an abstraction, dismisses Mr.
Chesterton with the smiling remark that he is, after all, a brilliant
writer of paradoxes.
Let us for a moment put aside our own intellectual prejudices, our
preconceptions, and follow Mr. Chesterton along his path of common
sense. He himself, in his book on _Orthodoxy_, throws over the
intellectuals. It is not that he refutes them--that would be a denial of
his own method; nor that he has completely studied them--that would be a
denial of his own character; but he does show us what havoc their
methods may work upon the mind, what an overthrow of our workaday
notions, our most vivid and keen impressions. If all the things that we
seem to know the best, the emotions most natural to men "fighting
peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea"--if all
these things stand for nothing, if they are not to be thought about by
our philosophers, what have we got left? The cosmos? "The cosmos is
about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in." He finds that
the great popular thinkers--and it is right that he, a potent popular
writer, should concern himself with these rather than with the
systematic philosophers who observe conventions incomprehensible to the
common mind--are each and all of them prone to follow exclusively some
strange bent of thought, leading by pure reason to one of those awful
conclusions which "tend to make a man lose his wits:" Tolstoy, for
instance, reaching an unthinkable doctrine of self-sacrifice, Nietzsche
an equally unthinkable doctrine of egoism, Ibsen, Haeckel, Mr. Shaw, Mr.
McCabe--that never-to-be-forgotten Mr. McCabe--each of them by sheer
force of logic betrayed into insanity.
Just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern
thinkers. That unmistakable mood or note that I hear from Hanwell, I
hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning
to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses
than one. They all have exactly that combination we have noted; the
combination of one expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted
common sense. They are universal only in the sense that they take one
thin explanation and carry it very far. But a pattern can stretch for
ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chess-board white on
black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on
black. Like the lunatic, they cannot alter their standpoint, they
cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white.
Madness, he says, is "reason used without root, reason in the void."
"Madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental
helplessness." For he notes how some of the rationalists, in doubting
everything, have cast doubt even on the validity of thought. The
complete sceptic says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no
right to think at all." The intellect has destroyed, but has not
constructed; there is no proposition which is not doubted, no ideal
which is not an object of attack; there is no rebel who has a sure
faith in his own revolt, no fanatic except the fanatic about nothing.
Where are the common things--the things we used to know and care
about--the self-contradictory things if you like, but the
realities--the things which make men kill their enemies, go gladly to
the stake, or shut themselves in a hermitage?
All these are things which, Mr. Chesterton thinks, the intellectual is
willing to throw overboard at the bidding of intellect. But he would
rather throw over intellectualism. He prefers to abide by the "test of
the imagination," the "test of fairyland." "The only words that ever
satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy
books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the
arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because
it is a _magic_ tree. Water runs down-hill because it is bewitched."
The so-called "laws of nature" are not one whit less mysterious
because of their uniformity. And again: "It is supposed that if a
thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of
clock-work." Mr. Chesterton supposes exactly the opposite. "Because
children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce
and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They
always say, 'Do it again;' and the grown-up person does it again until
he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult
in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It
is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun, and
every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon.... Repetition may go on for
millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop."
Is not this, someone will say, only the _Religio Medici_ over again? Is
it not more than two and a half centuries since Sir Thomas Browne said:
"That there was a deluge once seems not to me so great a miracle as that
there is not one always;" and "where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love
to humour my fancy;" and "I can answer all the objections of Satan and
every rebellious reason, with that odd resolution I learned of
Tertullian, _Certum est quia impossibile est?_" Yes, it has all been
expressed in the _Religio_; but it is no small matter that, in spite of
Spencer, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, and Mr. Sidney Webb, there should still
be a modern and a popular way of using the thoughts of Sir Thomas
Browne. Mr. Chesterton has been driven into this apparent reaction by
the scientific thinkers to whom he was introduced with the scantiest
preparation. "It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who
brought me back to Orthodox theology." His supernaturalism, which he
identifies with orthodox Christianity, I should prefer to call the
Romance of Christianity--Romance implying not falsity, but the desirable
and the ideal. He deliberately takes that which he and other people
_admire_ or _want_ as the standard of truth. "I want to love my
neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I." "The
_heart_ of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much
more _satisfied_ by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the
Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well
as justice...." Mr. Chesterton defends what he calls Christianity not so
much on the ground that it is credible, but on the ground that it is
satisfying, that it is agreeable.
I say "what he calls Christianity," for his argument is prone to fall
into a vicious circle; he arbitrarily calls all that is satisfying to
him by the name of Christianity. It endorses, he says, a "first
loyalty to things" and enjoins the "reform of things;" it commands a
man "not only to look inwards, but to look outwards." God is a part of
the cosmos, and yet he is distinct from it and from us, or we could
not worship him. Christianity commands us to desire to live, and it
commands us to be glad to die (and this contradiction, he says, like
all the others, is human, just as the virtue of courage is human; for
does not courage mean "a strong desire to live taking the form of a
readiness to die?"). It is against compromise, against the "dilution
of two things" neither of which "is present in its full strength or
contributes its full colour;" it endorses the extremes of pride and
humility, anger and love, mercy and severity. It is full-blooded,
allowing place for every human emotion, directing anger against the
crime, and love towards the criminal. And he draws a fanciful and
grotesque picture of the Christian Church as a "heavenly chariot"
whirling through the ages "fierce and fast with any war-horse,"
swerving "to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous
obstacles."