THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
By
ARNOLD BENNETT
WORKS BY ARNOLD BENNETT
NOVELS
A Man from the North
Anna of the Five Towns
Leonora
A Great Man
Sacred and Profane Love
Whom God hath Joined
Buried Alive
The Old Wives' Tale
The Glimpse
Helen with the High Hand
Clayhanger
The Card
Hilda Lessways
The Regent
FANTASIAS
The Grand Babylon Hotel
The Gates of Wrath
Teresa of Watling Street
The Loot of Cities
Hugo
The Ghost
The City of Pleasure
SHORT STORIES
Tales of the Five Towns
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
The Matador of the Five Towns
BELLES-LETTRES
Journalism for Women
Fame and Fiction
How to become an Author
The Reasonable Life
How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
The Human Machine
Literary Taste
The Feast of St Friend
Those United States
The Plain Man and His Wife
Paris Nights
DRAMA
Polite Farces
Cupid and Common Sense
What the Public Wants
The Honeymoon
The Great Adventure
* * * * *
(_In Collaboration with EDEN PHILLPOTTS_)
The Sinews of War: A Romance
The Statue: A Romance
(_In Collaboration with EDWARD KNOBLAUCH_)
Milestones: A Play
THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
By
ARNOLD BENNETT
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
Printed in 1914
CONTENTS
PART I.
SEEING LIFE
PART II.
WRITING NOVELS
PART III.
WRITING PLAYS
PART IV.
THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC
PART I
SEEING LIFE
I
A young dog, inexperienced, sadly lacking in even primary education,
ambles and frisks along the footpath of Fulham Road, near the mysterious
gates of a Marist convent. He is a large puppy, on the way to be a dog
of much dignity, but at present he has little to recommend him but that
gawky elegance, and that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which
distinguish the normal puppy. He is an ignorant fool. He might have
entered the convent of nuns and had a fine time, but instead he steps
off the pavement into the road, the road being a vast and interesting
continent imperfectly explored. His confidence in his nose, in his
agility, and in the goodness of God is touching, absolutely painful to
witness. He glances casually at a huge, towering vermilion construction
that is whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of
brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it as less
important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the mud. The next
instant he is lying inert in the mud. His confidence in the goodness of
God had been misplaced. Since the beginning of time God had ordained him
a victim.
An impressive thing happens. The motor-bus reluctantly slackens and
stops. Not the differential brake, nor the foot-brake, has arrested the
motor-bus, but the invisible brake of public opinion, acting by
administrative transmission. There is not a policeman in sight.
Theoretically, the motor-'bus is free to whiz onward in its flight to
the paradise of Shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by dread. A
man in brass buttons and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the
blackened demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it, and they
move gingerly towards the puppy. A little while ago the motor-bus might
have overturned a human cyclist or so, and proceeded nonchalant on its
way. But now even a puppy requires a post-mortem: such is the force of
public opinion aroused. Two policemen appear in the distance.
"A street accident" is now in being, and a crowd gathers with calm joy
and stares, passive and determined. The puppy offers no sign whatever;
just lies in the road. Then a boy, destined probably to a great future
by reason of his singular faculty of initiative, goes to the puppy and
carries him by the scruff of the neck, to the shelter of the gutter.
Relinquished by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal
attitude, and seems bent upon repose. The boy lifts the puppy's head to
examine it, and the head drops back wearily. The puppy is dead. No cry,
no blood, no disfigurement! Even no perceptible jolt of the wheel as it
climbed over the obstacle of the puppy's body! A wonderfully clean and
perfect accident!
The increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity. People emerge
impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus and slip down
from its back, and either join the crowd or vanish. The two policemen
and the crew of the motor-bus have now met in parley. The conductor and
the driver have an air at once nervous and resigned; their gestures are
quick and vivacious. The policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their
slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs. And they could not be
more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had them manacled and
leashed. The conductor and the driver admit the absolute dominion of the
elephantine policemen; they admit that before the simple will of the
policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages,
count as less than naught. And the policemen are carelessly sublime,
well knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary on his
throne--yes, and a whole system of conspiracy and perjury and
brutality--are at their beck in case of need. And yet occasionally in
the demeanour of the policemen towards the conductor and the driver
there is a silent message that says: "After all, we, too, are working
men like you, over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in
the service of the pitiless and dishonest public. We, too, have wives
and children and privations and frightful apprehensions. We, too, have
to struggle desperately. Only the awful magic of these garments and of
the garter which we wear on our wrists sets an abyss between us and
you." And the conductor writes and one of the policemen writes, and they
keep on writing, while the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them.
The still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure blankness of
pleasure. A close-shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a copy of
_The Sportsman_ in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus,
starts stamping his feet. "I was knocked down by a taxi last year," he
says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of _that_! Are they going to
stop here all the blank morning for a blank tyke?" And for all his
respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet
of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the
thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. Then a man passes
wheeling a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long time with the other
uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd
never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops and picks
up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and
yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and passes on. And only that
which is immortal and divine of the puppy remains behind, floating
perhaps like an invisible vapour over the scene of the tragedy.
The crowd is tireless, all eyes. The four principals still converse and
write. Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they are about. At length
the driver separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is
commenced. But everything ends. The policemen turn on their immense
heels. The driver and conductor race towards the motor-bus. The bell
rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears snorting round the corner
into Walham Green. The crowd is now lessening. But it separates with
reluctance, many of its members continuing to stare with intense
absorption at the place where the puppy lay or the place where the
policemen stood. An appreciable interval elapses before the "street
accident" has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.
The members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the course of
the day remark to acquaintances:
"Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the Fulham Road this morning!
Killed dead!"
And that is all they do remark. That is all they have witnessed. They
will not, and could not, give intelligible and interesting particulars
of the affair (unless it were as to the breed of the dog or the number
of the bus-service). They have watched a dog run over. They analyse
neither their sensations nor the phenomenon. They have witnessed it
whole, as a bad writer uses a _cliché_. They have observed--that is to
say, they have really seen--nothing.
II
It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of condescension
towards the crowd. Because in the matter of looking without seeing we
are all about equal. We all go to and fro in a state of the observing
faculties which somewhat resembles coma. We are all content to look and
not see.
And if and when, having comprehended that the _rôle_ of observer is not
passive but active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves from
the coma and really to see the spectacle of the world (a spectacle
surpassing circuses and even street accidents in sustained dramatic
interest), we shall discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act
of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let a man
resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a
morning," and the probability if that for many mornings he will see
naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective will be
absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly
attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal.
Travel makes observers of us all, but the things which as travellers we
observe generally show how unskilled we are in the new activity.
A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right off that the
carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar. He
was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observed almost
nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his
perspective. He returned home and announced that Paris was a place where
people rode on the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the
first time--and no English person would ever guess the phenomenon which
vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day. She saw a cat
walking across a street. The vision excited her. For in Paris cats do
not roam in thoroughfares, because there are practically no houses with
gardens or "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement
of cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very early and
making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn in quest of
interesting material. And the one note I gathered was that the ground in
front of the all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! What I
needed then was an operation for cataract. I also remember taking a man
to the opera who had never seen an opera. The work was _Lohengrin_. When
we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather stiff." And it was all
he did say. We went and had a drink. He was not mistaken. His
observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those
literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of
syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical admission that the novel
under survey is not wholly tedious.
But a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large number of
facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of observation. I have
read, in some work of literary criticism, that Dickens could walk up one
side of a long, busy street and down the other, and then tell you in
their order the names on all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an
illustration of his great powers of observation. Dickens was a great
observer, but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had
he been a little less pre-occupied with trivial and unco-ordinated
details. Good observation consists not in multiplicity of detail, but in
co-ordination of detail according to a true perspective of relative
importance, so that a finally just general impression may be reached in
the shortest possible time. The skilled observer is he who does not have
to change his mind. One has only to compare one's present adjusted
impression of an intimate friend with one's first impression of him to
perceive the astounding inadequacy of one's powers of observation. The
man as one has learnt to see him is simply not the same man who walked
into one's drawing-room on the day of introduction.
There are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are
sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the first
glance: women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic gift with which
rumour credits them, they are never mistaken. It is merely not true.
Women are constantly quite wrong in the estimates based on their
"feminine instinct"; they sometimes even admit it; and the matrimonial
courts prove it _passim_. Children are more often wrong than women. And
as for dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by
plausible scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom
have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of deceived dogs.
Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the infallibility of women,
children, and dogs, will persist in Anglo-Saxon countries.
III
One is curious about one's fellow-creatures: therefore one watches them.
And generally the more intelligent one is, the more curious one is, and
the more one observes. The mere satisfaction of this curiosity is in
itself a worthy end, and would alone justify the business of
systematised observation. But the aim of observation may, and should, be
expressed in terms more grandiose. Human curiosity counts among the
highest social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest
defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of character
and temperament and thereby to a better understanding of the springs of
human conduct. Observation is not practised directly with this high end
in view (save by prigs and other futile souls); nevertheless it is a
moral act and must inevitably promote kindliness--whether we like it or
not. It also sharpens the sense of beauty. An ugly deed--such as a deed
of cruelty--takes on artistic beauty when its origin and hence its
fitness in the general scheme begin to be comprehended. In the
perspective of history we can derive an æsthetic pleasure from the
tranquil scrutiny of all kinds of conduct--as well, for example, of a
Renaissance Pope as of a Savonarola. Observation endows our day and our
street with the romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity--not
the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity which
puts itself to the trouble of understanding. The one condition is that
the observer must never lose sight of the fact that what he is trying to
see is life, is the woman next door, is the man in the train--and not a
concourse of abstractions. To appreciate all this is the first inspiring
preliminary to sound observation.
IV
The second preliminary is to realise that all physical phenomena are
interrelated, that there is nothing which does not bear on everything
else. The whole spectacular and sensual show--what the eye sees, the ear
hears, the nose scents, the tongue tastes and the skin touches--is a
cause or an effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as
negligible, as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would
beyond all others see life for himself--I naturally mean the novelist
and playwright--ought to embrace all phenomena in his curiosity. Being
finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot! But he can, by obtaining a broad
notion of the whole, determine with some accuracy the position and
relative importance of the particular series of phenomena to which his
instinct draws him. If he does not thus envisage the immense background
of his special interests, he will lose the most precious feeling for
interplay and proportion without which all specialism becomes distorted
and positively darkened.
Now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet itself. Any
logically conceived survey of existence must begin with geographical and
climatic phenomena. This is surely obvious. If you say that you are not
interested in meteorology or the configurations of the earth, I say that
you deceive yourself. You are. For an east wind may upset your liver and
cause you to insult your wife. Beyond question the most important fact
about, for example, Great Britain is that it is an island. We sail amid
the Hebrides, and then talk of the fine qualities and the distressing
limitations of those islanders; it ought to occur to us English that we
are talking of ourselves in little. In moments of journalistic vainglory
we are apt to refer to the "sturdy island race," meaning us. But that we
are insular in the full significance of the horrid word is certain. Why
not? A genuine observation of the supreme phenomenon that Great Britain
is surrounded by water--an effort to keep it always at the back of the
consciousness--will help to explain all the minor phenomena of British
existence. Geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment, for the
varying physical characteristics of the earth are the sole direct
terrestrial influence determining the evolution of original vital
energy.
All other influences are secondary, and have been effects of character
and temperament before becoming causes. Perhaps the greatest of them are
roads and architecture. Nothing could be more English than English
roads, or more French than French roads. Enter England from France, let
us say through the gate of Folkestone, and the architectural
illustration which greets you (if you can look and see) is absolutely
dramatic in its spectacular force. You say that there is no architecture
in Folkestone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of
architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on its
causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you thousands of squat
little homes, neat, tended, respectable, comfortable, prim, at once
unostentatious and conceited. Each a separate, clearly-defined entity!
Each saying to the others: "Don't look over my wall, and I won't look
over yours!" Each with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own
individuality! Each a stronghold--an island! And all careless of the
general effect, but making a very impressive general effect. The English
race is below you. Your own son is below you insisting on the
inviolability of his own den of a bedroom! ... And contrast all that
with the immense communistic and splendid façades of a French town, and
work out the implications. If you really intend to see life you cannot
afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena.
Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of walking
through a French street and through an English street, and noting
chiefly that whereas English lamp-posts spring from the kerb, French
lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not that that detail is not
worth noting. It is--in its place. French lamp-posts are part of what we
call the "interesting character" of a French street. We say of a French
street that it is "full of character." As if an English street was not!
Such is blindness--to be cured by travel and the exercise of the logical
faculty, most properly termed common sense. If one is struck by the
magnificence of the great towns of the Continent, one should
ratiocinate, and conclude that a major characteristic of the great towns
of England is their shabby and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It is so.
But there are people who have lived fifty years in Manchester, Leeds,
Hull and Hanley without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy is in that
awful external slovenliness too, causing it, and being caused by it.
Every street is a mirror, an illustration, an exposition, an
explanation, of the human beings who live in it. Nothing in it is to be
neglected. Everything in it is valuable, if the perspective is
maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow individualistic novels of
English literature--and in some of the best--you will find a domestic
organism described as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the Sahara,
or between Heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was
reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately rendered
without reference to anything exterior to itself. How can such novels
satisfy a reader who has acquired or wants to acquire the faculty of
seeing life?
V
The net result of the interplay of instincts and influences which
determine the existence of a community is shown in the general
expression on the faces of the people. This is an index which cannot lie
and cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly easy, and extremely interesting, to
decipher. It is so open, shameless, and universal, that not to look at
it is impossible. Yet the majority of persons fail to see it. We hear of
inquirers standing on London Bridge and counting the number of
motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses that pass over
the bridge in an hour. But we never hear of anybody counting the number
of faces happy or unhappy, honest or rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind
or cruel, that pass over the bridge. Perhaps the public may be surprised
to hear that the general expression on the faces of Londoners of all
ranks varies from the sad to the morose; and that their general mien is
one of haste and gloomy preoccupation. Such a staring fact is paramount
in sociological evidence. And the observer of it would be justified in
summoning Heaven, the legislature, the county council, the churches, and
the ruling classes, and saying to them: "Glance at these faces, and
don't boast too much about what you have accomplished. The climate and
the industrial system have so far triumphed over you all."
VI
When we come to the observing of the individual--to which all human
observing does finally come if there is any right reason in it--the
aforesaid general considerations ought to be ever present in the
hinterland of the consciousness, aiding and influencing, perhaps
vaguely, perhaps almost imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. If
they do nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to the
highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena. Especially in
England a haphazard particularity is the chief vitiating element in the
operations of the mind.
In estimating the individual we are apt not only to forget his
environment, but--really strange!--to ignore much of the evidence
visible in the individual himself. The inexperienced and ardent
observer, will, for example, be astonishingly blind to everything in an
individual except his face. Telling himself that the face must be the
reflection of the soul, and that every thought and emotion leaves
inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate on the face, singling it
out as a phenomenon apart and self-complete. Were he a god and
infallible, he could no doubt learn the whole truth from the face. But
he is bound to fall into errors, and by limiting the field of vision he
minimises the opportunity for correction. The face is, after all, quite
a small part of the individual's physical organism. An Englishman will
look at a woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman or a plain
woman. But a woman may have a plain face, and yet by her form be
entitled to be called beautiful, and (perhaps) _vice versâ_. It is true
that the face is the reflexion of the soul. It is equally true that the
carriage and gestures are the reflection of the soul. Had one eyes, the
tying of a bootlace is the reflection of the soul. One piece of
evidence can be used to correct every other piece of evidence. A refined
face may be refuted by clumsy finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the
voice; the gait may nullify the smile. None of the phenomena which every
individual carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus
terrorising the streets of London is meaningless or negligible.
Again, in observing we are generally guilty of that particularity which
results from sluggishness of the imagination. We may see the phenomenon
at the moment of looking at it, but we particularise in that moment,
making no effort to conceive what the phenomenon is likely to be at
other moments.
For example, a male human creature wakes up in the morning and rises
with reluctance. Being a big man, and existing with his wife and
children in a very confined space, he has to adapt himself to his
environment as he goes through the various functions incident to
preparing for his day's work. He is just like you or me. He wants his
breakfast, he very much wants to know where his boots are, and he has
the usually sinister preoccupations about health and finance. Whatever
the force of his egoism, he must more or less harmonise his
individuality with those of his wife and children. Having laid down the
law, or accepted it, he sets forth to his daily duties, just a fraction
of a minute late. He arrives at his office, resumes life with his
colleagues sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the office for
an expedition extending over several hours. In the course of his
expedition he encounters the corpse of a young dog run down by a
motor-bus. Now you also have encountered that corpse and are gazing at
it; and what do you say to yourself when he comes along? You say: "Oh!
Here's a policeman." For he happens to be a policeman. You stare at him,
and you never see anything but a policeman--an indivisible phenomenon of
blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and a helmet; "a
stalwart guardian of the law"; to you little more human than an
algebraic symbol: in a word--a policeman.
Only, that word actually conveys almost nothing to you of the reality
which it stands for. You are satisfied with it as you are satisfied with
the description of a disease. A friend tells you his eyesight is
failing. You sympathise. "What is it?" you ask. "Glaucoma." "Ah!
Glaucoma!" You don't know what glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you
were before. But you are content. A name has contented you. Similarly
the name of policeman contents you, seems to absolve you from further
curiosity as to the phenomenon. You have looked at tens of thousands of
policemen, and perhaps never seen the hundredth part of the reality of a
single one. Your imagination has not truly worked on the phenomenon.
There may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a policeman,
because a uniform is always a thick veil. But you--I mean you, I, any
of us--are oddly dim-sighted also in regard to the civil population. For
instance, we get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the
street accident, and examine the men and women who gradually fill it.
Probably we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of
life. All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past and are
moving towards a future. But how often does our imagination put itself
to the trouble of realising this? We may observe with some care, yet
owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human
individuals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in
motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present! No
human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination has placed it
back into its past and forward into its future. And this is the final
process of observation of the individual.
VII
Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with seeing the
individual. Neither does it end with seeing the individual. Particular
and unsystematised observation cannot go on for ever, aimless, formless.
Just as individuals are singled out from systems, in the earlier process
of observation, so in the later processes individuals will be formed
into new groups, which formation will depend upon the personal bent of
the observer. The predominant interests of the observer will ultimately
direct his observing activities to their own advantage. If he is excited
by the phenomena of organisation--as I happen to be--he will see
individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation, and will
insist on the variations from type due to that grouping. If he is
convinced--as numbers of people appear to be--that society is just now
in an extremely critical pass, and that if something mysterious is not
forthwith done the structure of it will crumble to atoms--he will see
mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to him, the
human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies, while they should
not be resisted too much, since they give character to observation and
redeem it from the frigidity of mechanics, should be resisted to a
certain extent. For, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of
sentimentality, the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common
sense.