"Clayhanger" with its sequels, "Hilda Lessways" and "These Twain,"
makes up an imposing and convincing trilogy of middle-class life in
the English Pottery Towns. To these books should be added "Old Wives'
Tale," "Anna of the Five Towns" and all the others among this writer's
works which deal with these Pottery places he knows so superbly well.
Outside the Five Towns Mr. Bennett loses something of the power of his
touch. He is an interesting example of a writer with a definite
"milieu" out of whose happy security he is always ill-advised to
stray.
But within his own region he is a powerful master. No one in modern
English fiction has treated so creatively and illuminatingly the least
interesting and least romantic strata of human society which is
perhaps to be found in the whole world.
And yet he endows this paralyzing bourgeoisie with astonishing life.
One turns back from much more exciting literature to these ignorant,
conceited, restricted and undistinguished people.
One turns back to them because Mr. Bennett shows one the tragic
humanity, eternally and mysteriously fascinating, to be found beneath
these vulgar and unlovely exteriors. Nor when it comes to the problem
of sex itself is this writer less of a master. Never has the undying
conflict, the world-old struggle, between those who, in the Catullian
phrase, "love and hate" at the same time, been more convincingly
brought into the light than in the relations between these
uninteresting but strangely appealing people.
Arnold Bennett's knowledge of the Five Towns gives to his work a
background of significant congruity whose interaction upon the
characters of his plots has the same kind of weight and portentousness
as the interaction of Nature in the books of Mr. Hardy.
Such a background may be in itself materialistic and sordid, but in
the imaginative reaction it produces upon the characters it has the
genuine poetic quality.