has done. It is the product of his emotional detachment and it commonly
reveals itself as an inability to take his own story seriously.
Sometimes he pokes open fun at it, as in “The Roll-Call”; more often he
simply abandons it before it is done, as if weary of a too tedious
foolery. This last process is plainly visible in “The Pretty Lady.” The
thing that gives form and direction to that story is a simple enough
problem in psychology, to wit: what will happen when a man of sound
education and decent instincts, of sober age and prudent habit, of
common sense and even of certain mild cleverness—what will happen,
logically and naturally, when such a normal, respectable, cautious
fellow finds himself disquietingly in love with a lady of no position at
all—in brief, with a lady but lately of the town? Bennett sets the
problem, and for a couple of hundred pages investigates it with the
utmost ingenuity and address, exposing and discussing its sub-problems,
tracing the gradual shifting of its terms, prodding with sharp insight
into the psychological material entering into it. And then, as if
suddenly tired of it—worse, as if suddenly convinced that the thing has
gone on long enough, that he has given the public enough of a book for
its money—he forthwith evades the solution altogether, and brings down
his curtain upon a palpably artificial dénouement. The device murders
the book. One is arrested at the start by a fascinating statement of the
problem, one follows a discussion of it that shows Bennett at his
brilliant best, fertile in detail, alert to every twist of motive,
incisively ironical at every step—and then, at the end, one is
incontinently turned out of the booth. The effect is that of being
assaulted with an ice-pick by a hitherto amiable bartender, almost that
of being bitten by a pretty girl in the midst of an amicable buss.
That effect, unluckily, is no stranger to the reader of Bennett novels.
One encounters it in many of them. There is a tremendous marshaling of
meticulous and illuminating observation, the background throbs with
color, the sardonic humor is never failing, it is a capital show—but
always one goes away from it with a sense of having missed the
conclusion, always there is a final begging of the question. It is not
hard to perceive the attitude of mind underlying this chronic evasion of
issues. It is, in essence, agnosticism carried to the last place of
decimals. Life itself is meaningless; therefore, the discussion of life
is meaningless; therefore, why try futilely to get a meaning into it?
The reasoning, unluckily, has holes in it. It may be sound logically,
but it is psychologically unworkable. One goes to novels, not for the
bald scientific fact, but for a romantic amelioration of it. When they
carry that amelioration to the point of uncritical certainty, when they
are full of “ideas” that click and whirl like machines, then the mind
revolts against the childish naïveté of the thing. But when there is no
organization of the spectacle at all, when it is presented as a mere
formless panorama, when to the sense of its unintelligibility is added
the suggestion of its inherent chaos, then the mind revolts no less. Art
can never be simple representation. It cannot deal solely with precisely
what is. It must, at the least, present the real in the light of some
recognizable ideal; it must give to the eternal farce, if not some
moral, then at all events some direction. For without that formulation
there can be no clear-cut separation of the individual will from the
general stew and turmoil of things, and without that separation there
can be no coherent drama, and without that drama there can be no
evocation of emotion, and without that emotion art is unimaginable. The
field of the novel is very wide. There is room, on the one side, for a
brilliant play of ideas and theories, provided only they do not stiffen
the struggle of man with man, or of man with destiny, into a mere
struggle of abstractions. There is room, on the other side, for the most
complete agnosticism, provided only it be tempered by feeling. Joseph
Conrad is quite as unshakable an agnostic as Bennett; he is a ten times
more implacable ironist. But there is yet a place in his scheme for a
sardonic sort of pity, and pity, however sardonic, is perhaps as good an
emotion as another. The trouble with Bennett is that he essays to sneer,
not only at the futile aspiration of man, but also at the agony that
goes with it. The result is an air of affectation, of superficiality,
almost of stupidity. The manner, on the one hand, is that of a highly
skillful and profoundly original artist, but on the other hand it is
that of a sophomore just made aware of Haeckel, Bradlaugh and Nietzsche.
Bennett’s unmitigated skepticism explains two things that have
constantly puzzled the reviewers, and that have been the cause of a
great deal of idiotic writing about him—for him as well as against him.
One of these things is his utter lack of anything properly describable
as artistic conscience—his extreme readiness to play the star houri in
the seraglio of the publishers; the other is his habit of translating
platitudes into racy journalese and gravely offering them to the
suburban trade as “pocket philosophies.” Both crimes, it seems to me,
have their rise in his congenital incapacity for taking ideas seriously,
even including his own. “If this,” he appears to say, “is the tosh you
want, then here is another dose of it. Personally, I have little
interest in that sort of thing. Even good novels—the best I can do—are
no more than compromises with a silly convention. I am not interested in
stories; I am interested in the anatomy of human melancholy; I am a
descriptive sociologist, with overtones of malice. But if you want
stories, and can pay for them, I am willing to give them to you. And if
you prefer bad stories, then here is a bad one. Don’t assume you can
shame me by deploring my willingness. Think of what your doctors do
every day, and your lawyers, and your men of God, and your stockbrokers,
and your traders and politicians. I am surely no worse than the average.
In fact, I am probably a good deal superior to the average, for I am at
least not deceived by my own mountebankery—I at least know my sound
goods from my shoddy.” Such, I daresay, is the process of thought behind
such hollow trade-goods as “Buried Alive” and “The Lion’s Share.” One
does not need the man’s own amazing confidences to hear his snickers at
his audience, at his work and at himself.
The books of boiled-mutton “philosophy” in the manner of Dr. Orison
Swett Marden and Dr. Frank Crane and the occasional pot-boilers for the
newspapers and magazines probably have much the same origin. What
appears in them is not a weakness for ideas that are stale and obvious,
but a distrust of all ideas whatsoever. The public, with its mob
yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands
certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is
true and that is false. But there _are_ no certainties. _Ergo_, one
notion is as good as another, and if it happens to be utter flubdub, so
much the better—for it is precisely flubdub that penetrates the popular
skull with the greatest facility. The way is already made: the hole
already gapes. An effort to approach the hidden and baffling truth would
simply burden the enterprise with difficulty. Moreover, the effort is
intrinsically laborious and ungrateful. Moreover, there is probably no
hidden truth to be uncovered. Thus, by the route of skepticism, Bennett
apparently arrives at his sooth-saying. That he actually believes in his
own theorizing is inconceivable. He is far too intelligent a man to hold
that any truths within the comprehension of the popular audience are
sound enough to be worth preaching, or that it would do any good to
preach them if they were. No doubt he is considerably amused _in petto_
by the gravity with which his bedizened platitudes have been received by
persons accustomed to that sort of fare, particularly in America. It
would be interesting to hear his private view of the corn-fed critics
who hymn him as a profound and impassioned moralist, with a mission to
rescue the plain people from the heresies of such fellows as Dreiser.
So much for two of the salient symptoms of his underlying skepticism.
Another is to be found in his incapacity to be, in the ordinary sense,
ingratiating; it is simply beyond him to say the pleasant thing with any
show of sincerity. Of all his books, probably the worst are his book on
the war and his book on the United States. The latter was obviously
undertaken with some notion of paying off a debt. Bennett had been to
the United States; the newspapers had hailed him in their side-show way;
the women’s clubs had pawed over him; he had, no doubt, come home a good
deal richer. What he essayed to do was to write a volume on the republic
that should be at once colorably accurate and discreetly agreeable. The
enterprise was quite beyond him. The book not only failed to please
Americans; it offended them in a thousand subtle ways, and from its
appearance dates the decline of the author’s vogue among us. He is not,
of course, completely forgotten, but it must be plain that Wells now
stands a good deal above him in the popular estimation—even the later
Wells of bad novel after bad novel. His war book missed fire in much the
same way. It was workmanlike, it was deliberately urbane, it was
undoubtedly truthful—but it fell flat in England and it fell flat in
America. There is no little significance in the fact that the British
government, in looking about for English authors to uphold the British
cause in America and labor for American participation in the war, found
no usefulness in Bennett. Practically every other novelist with an
American audience was drafted for service, but not Bennett. He was _non
est_ during the heat of the fray, and when at length he came forward
with “The Pretty Lady” the pained manner with which it was received
quite justified the judgment of those who had passed him over.
What all this amounts to may be very briefly put: in one of the
requisite qualities of the first-rate novelist Bennett is almost
completely lacking, and so it would be no juggling with paradox to argue
that, at bottom, he is scarcely a novelist at all. His books,
indeed,—that is, his serious books, the books of his better canon—often
fail utterly to achieve the effect that one associates with the true
novel. One carries away from them, not the impression of a definite
transaction, not the memory of an outstanding and appealing personality,
not the after-taste of a profound emotion, but merely the sense of
having witnessed a gorgeous but incomprehensible parade, coming out of
nowhere and going to God knows where. They are magnificent as
representation, they bristle with charming detail, they radiate the
humors of an acute and extraordinary man, they are entertainment of the
best sort—but there is seldom anything in them of that clear, well-aimed
and solid effect which one associates with the novel as work of art.
Most of these books, indeed, are no more than collections of essays
defectively dramatized. What is salient in them is not their people, but
their backgrounds—and their people are forever fading into their
backgrounds. Is there a character in any of these books that shows any
sign of living as Pendennis lives, and Barry Lyndon, and Emma Bovary,
and David Copperfield, and the George Moore who is always his own hero?
Who remembers much about Sophia Baines, save that she lived in the Five
Towns, or even about Clayhanger? Young George Cannon, in “The
Roll-Call,” is no more than an anatomical chart in a lecture on modern
marriage. Hilda Lessways-Cannon-Clayhanger is not only inscrutable; she
is also dim. The man and woman of “Whom God Hath Joined,” perhaps the
best of all the Bennett novels, I have so far forgotten that I cannot
remember their names. Even Denry the Audacious grows misty. One
remembers that he was the center of the farce, but now he is long gone
and the farce remains.
This constant remainder, whether he be actually novelist or no novelist,
is sufficient to save Bennett, it seems to me, from the swift oblivion
that so often overtakes the popular fictioneer. He may not play the game
according to the rules, but the game that he plays is nevertheless
extraordinarily diverting and calls for an incessant display of the
finest sort of skill. No writer of his time has looked into the life of
his time with sharper eyes, or set forth his findings with a greater
charm and plausibility. Within his deliberately narrow limits he had
done precisely the thing that Balzac undertook to do, and Zola after
him: he has painted a full-length portrait of a whole society,
accurately, brilliantly and, in certain areas, almost exhaustively. The
middle Englishman—not the individual, but the type—is there displayed
more vividly than he is displayed anywhere else that I know of. The
thing is rigidly held to its aim; there is no episodic descent or ascent
to other fields. But within that one field every resource of
observation, of invention and of imagination has been brought to bear
upon the business—every one save that deep feeling for man in his bitter
tragedy which is the most important of them all. Bennett, whatever his
failing in this capital function of the artist, is certainly of the very
highest consideration as craftsman. Scattered through his books, even
his bad books, there are fragments of writing that are quite unsurpassed
in our day—the shoe-shining episode in “The Pretty Lady,” the adulterous
interlude in “Whom God Hath Joined,” the dinner party in “Paris Nights,”
the whole discussion of the Cannon-Ingram marriage in “The Roll-Call,”
the studio party in “The Lion’s Share.” Such writing is rare and
exhilarating. It is to be respected. And the man who did it is not to be
dismissed.
IV. THE DEAN
Americans, obsessed by the problem of conduct, usually judge their
authors not as artists, but as citizens, Christians, men. Edgar Allan
Poe, I daresay, will never live down the fact that he was a periodical
drunkard, and died in an alcoholic ward. Mark Twain, the incomparable
artist, will probably never shake off Mark Twain, the after-dinner
comedian, the haunter of white dress clothes, the public character, the
national wag. As for William Dean Howells, he gains rather than loses by
this confusion of values, for, like the late Joseph H. Choate, he is
almost the national ideal: an urbane and highly respectable old
gentleman, a sitter on committees, an intimate of professors and the
prophets of movements, a worthy vouched for by both the _Atlantic
Monthly_ and Alexander Harvey, a placid conformist. The result is his
general acceptance as a member of the literary peerage, and of the rank
of earl at least. For twenty years past his successive books have not
been criticized, nor even adequately reviewed; they have been merely
fawned over; the lady critics of the newspapers would no more question
them than they would question Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, or Paul Elmer
More, or their own virginity. The dean of American letters in point of
years, and in point of published quantity, and in point of public
prominence and influence, he has been gradually enveloped in a web of
superstitious reverence, and it grates harshly to hear his actual
achievement discussed in cold blood.
Nevertheless, all this merited respect for an industrious and
inoffensive man is bound, soon or late, to yield to a critical
examination of the artist within, and that examination, I fear, will
have its bitter moments for those who naïvely accept the Howells legend.
It will show, without doubt, a first-rate journeyman, a contriver of
pretty things, a clever stylist—but it will also show a long row of
uninspired and hollow books, with no more ideas in them than so many
volumes of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_, and no more deep and contagious
feeling than so many reports of autopsies, and no more glow and gusto
than so many tables of bond prices. The profound dread and agony of
life, the surge of passion and aspiration, the grand crash and glitter
of things, the tragedy that runs eternally under the surface—all this
the critic of the future will seek in vain in Dr. Howells’ elegant and
shallow volumes. And seeking it in vain, he will probably dismiss all of
them together with fewer words than he gives to “Huckleberry Finn.” ...
Already, indeed, the Howells legend tends to become a mere legend, and
empty of all genuine significance. Who actually reads the Howells
novels? Who even remembers their names? “The Minister’s Charge,” “An
Imperative Duty,” “The Unexpected Guests,” “Out of the Question,” “No
Love Lost”—these titles are already as meaningless as a roll of Sumerian
kings. Perhaps “The Rise of Silas Lapham” survives—but go read it if you
would tumble downstairs. The truth about Howells is that he really has
nothing to say, for all the charm he gets into saying it. His psychology
is superficial, amateurish, often nonsensical; his irony is scarcely
more than a polite facetiousness; his characters simply refuse to live.
No figure even remotely comparable to Norris’ McTeague or Dreiser’s
Frank Cowperwood is to be encountered in his novels. He is quite unequal
to any such evocation of the race-spirit, of the essential conflict of
forces among us, of the peculiar drift and color of American life. The
world he moves in is suburban, caged, flabby. He could no more have
written the last chapters of “Lord Jim” than he could have written the
Book of Mark.
The vacuity of his method is well revealed by one of the books of his
old age, “The Leatherwood God.” Its composition, we are told, spread
over many years; its genesis was in the days of his full maturity. An
examination of it shows nothing but a suave piling up of words, a vast
accumulation of nothings. The central character, one Dylks, is a
backwoods evangelist who acquires a belief in his own buncombe, and ends
by announcing that he is God. The job before the author was obviously
that of tracing the psychological steps whereby this mountebank proceeds
to that conclusion; the fact, indeed, is recognized in the canned
review, which says that the book is “a study of American religious
psychology.” But an inspection of the text shows that no such study is
really in it. Dr. Howells does not _show_ how Dylks came to believe
himself God; he merely _says_ that he did so. The whole discussion of
the process, indeed, is confined to two pages—172 and 173—and is quite
infantile in its inadequacy. Nor do we get anything approaching a
revealing look into the heads of the other converts—the
saleratus-sodden, hell-crazy, half-witted Methodists and Baptists of a
remote Ohio settlement of seventy or eighty years ago. All we have is
the casual statement that they are converted, and begin to offer Dylks
their howls of devotion. And when, in the end, they go back to their
original bosh, dethroning Dylks overnight and restoring the gaseous
vertebrate of Calvin and Wesley—when this contrary process is recorded,
it is accompanied by no more illumination. In brief, the story is not a
“study” at all, whether psychological or otherwise, but simply an
anecdote, and without either point or interest. Its virtues are all
negative ones: it is short, it keeps on the track, it deals with a
religious maniac and yet contrives to offer no offense to other
religious maniacs. But on the positive side it merely skims the skin.
So in all of the other Howells novels that I know. Somehow, he seems
blissfully ignorant that life is a serious business, and full of
mystery; it is a sort of college town _Weltanschauung_ that one finds in
him; he is an Agnes Repplier in pantaloons. In one of the later stories,
“New Leaf Mills,” he makes a faltering gesture of recognition. Here, so
to speak, one gets at least a sniff of the universal mystery; Howells
seems about to grow profound at last. But the sniff is only a sniff. The
tragedy, at the end, peters out. Compare the story to E. W. Howe’s “The
Story of a Country Town,” which Howells himself has intelligently
praised, and you will get some measure of his own failure. Howe sets
much the same stage and deals with much the same people. His story is
full of technical defects—for one thing, it is overladen with melodrama
and sentimentality. But nevertheless it achieves the prime purpose of a
work of the imagination: it grips and stirs the emotions, it implants a
sense of something experienced. Such a book leaves scars; one is not
quite the same after reading it. But it would be difficult to point to a
Howells book that produces any such effect. If he actually tries, like
Conrad, “to make you hear, to make you feel—before all, to make you
_see_,” then he fails almost completely. One often suspects, indeed,
that he doesn’t really feel or see himself....
As a critic he belongs to a higher level, if only because of his eager
curiosity, his gusto in novelty. His praise of Howe I have mentioned. He
dealt valiant licks for other débutantes: Frank Norris, Edith Wharton
and William Vaughn Moody among them. He brought forward the Russians
diligently and persuasively, albeit they left no mark upon his own
manner. In his ingratiating way, back in the seventies and eighties, he
made war upon the prevailing sentimentalities. But his history as a
critic is full of errors and omissions. One finds him loosing a fanfare
for W. B. Trites, the Philadelphia Zola, and praising Frank A.
Munsey—and one finds him leaving the discovery of all the Shaws, George
Moores, Dreisers, Synges, Galsworthys, Phillipses and George Ades to the
Pollards, Meltzers and Hunekers. Busy in the sideshows, he didn’t see
the elephants go by.... Here temperamental defects handicapped him. Turn
to his “My Mark Twain” and you will see what I mean. The Mark that is
exhibited in this book is a Mark whose Himalayan outlines are discerned
but hazily through a pink fog of Howells. There is a moral note in the
tale—an obvious effort to palliate, to touch up, to excuse. The poor
fellow, of course, was charming, and there was talent in him, but what a
weakness he had for thinking aloud—and such shocking thoughts! What
oaths in his speech! What awful cigars he smoked! How barbarous his
contempt for the strict sonata form! It seems incredible, indeed, that
two men so unlike should have found common denominators for a friendship
lasting forty-four years. The one derived from Rabelais, Chaucer, the
Elizabethans and Benvenuto—buccaneers of the literary high seas, loud
laughers, law-breakers, giants of a lordlier day; the other came down
from Jane Austen, Washington Irving and Hannah More. The one wrote
English as Michelangelo hacked marble, broadly, brutally, magnificently;
the other was a maker of pretty waxen groups. The one was utterly
unconscious of the way he achieved his staggering effects; the other was
the most toilsome, fastidious and self-conscious of craftsmen....
What remains of Howells is his style. He invented a new harmony of “the
old, old words.” He destroyed the stately periods of the Poe tradition,
and erected upon the ruins a complex and savory carelessness, full of
naïvetés that were sophisticated to the last degree. He loosened the
tightness of English, and let a blast of Elizabethan air into it. He
achieved, for all his triviality, for all his narrowness of vision, a
pungent and admirable style.
V. PROFESSOR VEBLEN
Ten or twelve years ago, being engaged in a bombastic discussion with
what was then known as an intellectual Socialist (like the rest of the
_intelligentsia_, he succumbed to the first fife-corps of the war,
pulled down the red flag, damned Marx as a German spy, and began
whooping for Elihu Root, Otto Kahn and Abraham Lincoln), I was greatly
belabored and incommoded by his long quotations from a certain Prof. Dr.
Thorstein Veblen, then quite unknown to me. My antagonist manifestly
attached a great deal of importance to these borrowed sagacities, for he
often heaved them at me in lengths of a column or two, and urged me to
read every word of them. I tried hard enough, but found it impossible
going. The more I read them, in fact, the less I could make of them, and
so in the end, growing impatient and impolite, I denounced this Prof.
Veblen as a geyser of pishposh, refused to waste any more time upon his
incomprehensible syllogisms, and applied myself to the other Socialist
witnesses in the case, seeking to set fire to their shirts.
That old debate, which took place by mail (for the Socialist lived like
a munitions patriot on his country estate and I was a wage-slave
attached to a city newspaper), was afterward embalmed in a dull book,
and made the mild pother of a day. The book, by name, “Men vs. the Man,”
is now as completely forgotten as Baxter’s “Saint’s Rest” or the
Constitution of the United States. I myself, perhaps the only man who
remembers it at all, have not looked into it for six or eight years, and
all I can recall of my opponent’s argument (beyond the fact that it not
only failed to convert me to the nascent Bolshevism of the time, but
left me a bitter and incurable scoffer at democracy in all its forms) is
his curious respect for the aforesaid Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen, and
his delight in the learned gentleman’s long, tortuous and (to me, at
least) intolerably flapdoodlish phrases.