finest modern English prose and he replies: “In _The Revolution in
Tanner’s Lane_.”
Mr. Bennett is always hunting the superlative. He wants the best of
everything, and he won’t be happy till he tells you where you can get
it. It is true that he says: “Let us all thank God that there is no
‘best short story.’” But that is only because there are several, and
Mr. Bennett, one suspects, knows them all. “I am not sure,” he says
on this point, “that any short stories in English can qualify for the
championship.” Yet I fancy the editor of a collection of the world’s
best short stories would have to consider a good deal of Mr. Conrad,
Mr. Wells’s _Country of the Blind_, and Mr. Bennett’s own _Matador of
the Five Towns_.
Mr. Bennett’s chase of the superlative is not confined to the arts.
He demands superlative qualities even in barbers. He has submitted
his head to barbers in many of the countries of Europe, and he gives
the first prize to the Italians. “Italian barbers,” he declares, “are
greater than French, both in quality and in numbers.” At the same
time, taking barbers not in nations but as individuals, he tells us:
“The finest artist I know or have known is nevertheless in Paris. His
life has the austerity of a monk’s.” Judging them by nations, he gives
Denmark a “highly commended”:
I like Denmark because there some of the barbers’ shops have a thin
ascending jet of water whose summit just caresses the bent chin,
which, after shaving, is thus laved without either the repugnant
British sponge or the clumsy splashing practised in France and
Italy.
He knows about it all: he knows; he knows. And, knowing so much, he
is in all the better position to censure a certain British barber who
parted his hair on the wrong side:
When he came back he parted my hair on the wrong side--sure sign
of an inefficient barber. He had been barbering for probably
twenty years and had not learnt that a barber ought to notice
the disposition of a customer’s hair before touching it. He was
incapable, but not a bad sort.
And Mr. Bennett, even though he is perilously near being a teetotaller,
can discourse to you as learnedly on drinks as on ways of getting your
hair cut. “Not many men,” he says, “can talk intelligently about drink,
but far more can talk intelligently about drink than about food.” He
himself is one of the number, as witness:
There was only one wine at that dinner, Bollinger, 1911, a wine
that will soon be extinct. It was perfect, as perfect as the
cigars.... We decided that no champagne could beat it, even if any
could equal it, and I once again abandoned the belief, put into me
by certain experts, that the finest 1911 champagnes were Krug and
Duc de Montebello.
One of the especial charms of Mr. Bennett as a writer is that he talks
about painters and barbers, about champagne and short stories, in
exactly the same tone and with the same seriousness, and measures them,
so far as one can see, by the same standard. Indeed, he discusses epic
poetry in terms of food.
All great epics are full of meat and are juicy side-dishes, if only
people will refrain from taking them as seriously as porridge.
_Paradise Lost_ is a whole picnic menu, and its fragments make
first-rate light reading.
To write like this is to give effect of paradox, even when one
is talking common sense. It is clear that Mr. Bennett does it
deliberately. He does it as an efficient artist, not as a bungler. He
fishes for our interest with a conscious _gaucherie_ of phrase, as when
he ends his reference to the novels of Henry James with the sentence:
“They lack ecstasy, guts.”
One of the most amusing passages in the book is that in which Mr.
Bennett leaves us with a portrait of himself as artist in contrast to
Henry James, the writer of “pot-boilers.” It hardly needs saying that
in doing this Mr. Bennett is making no extravagant claims for himself,
but is merely getting in a cunning retort to some of his “highbrow”
critics. The comparison between his own case and that of James refers
only to one point, and arises from the fact that James wrote plays with
the sole object of making money. On this Mr. Bennett comments:
Somebody of realistic temperament ought to have advised James that
to write plays with the sole object of making money is a hopeless
enterprise. I tried it myself for several years, at the end of
which I abandoned the stage for ever. I should not have returned to
it, had not Lee Mathews of the Stage Society persuaded me to write
a play in the same spirit as I was writing novels. It was entirely
due to him that I wrote _Cupid and Commonsense_. Since then I have
never written a play except for my own artistic satisfaction.
Nor, one feels, did he write even the casual jottings on life and the
arts in _Things that Have Interested Me_ for any other reason than that
it pleased him to do it. The jottings vary in quality from ephemeral
social and political comment to sharply-realised accounts of “things
seen,” vivid notes of self-analysis, confessions of the tastes and
experiences of an epicure of life with a strong preference for leaving
the world better than he found it. Mr. Bennett gives us here a jigsaw
portrait of himself. We can reconstruct it from the bits--a man shy and
omniscient, simple and ostentatious, Beau Nash from the Five Towns.
III
MR. CONRAD AT HOME
Mr. Conrad is nothing of a peacock. You may stare at him as long as
you like, but he will never respond with a sudden spread of gorgeous
vanities. He is more like some bird that takes on the protective
colouring of the earth and delights in avoiding rather than in
attracting the prying eye. Flatter him as you will; call him a phœnix
or a bird of paradise: he may be secretly pleased but he will only
croak gruffly in reply, “To have the gift of words is no such great
matter.” He does not know how to play up to our inquisitive admiration.
We may think, as when we take up _A Personal Record_, that now at
last we have caught him in a position in which he is bound to show us
his fine feathers. But it is a vain hope. Glimpses we get--amazing
glimpses--but never the near and detailed spectacle we desire. He
protests that he is no cynic, but is he sure that he does not find
a cynical amusement in tantalising our curiosity? Otherwise, would
he have written in the preface to _Notes on Life and Letters_ that
“perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the
man, if it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back,
a little dusty (after the process of tidying-up), a little bowed, and
receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy, but
for other reasons that cannot be helped”? It may be that Mr. Conrad
can suggest more enticing mysteries by a portrait of a piece of an
author’s back than other writers can by a full-length representation,
showing the polish on the boots and the crease in the trousers. In art
the half (or very much less) is greater than the whole. Still, Mr.
Conrad’s principal object in showing us the back is that it may leave
us unsatisfied and speculating. He does not intend to satisfy us. It is
as though he had written on the title-page of his autobiography: “Thus
far and no further.”
At the same time, if he tells little about himself, he does not escape
giving himself away in his admiration for other men. He has an artistic
faith that breaks into his sentences as soon as he begins to talk of
Henry James or Maupassant or Turgenev. Not that he belongs to any
school in literature: he hates all references to schools. He becomes
sullenly hostile if anyone attempts to classify authors as romantics,
realists, naturalists, etc. Every great author is for him a man, not
a formula. He can hardly mention the word “formula” without disgust.
“No secret of eternal life for our books,” he declares, “can be found
among the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed
combination of drugs.” Again, “the truth is, that more than one kind of
intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas.” And once
more, in speaking of the good artist: “It is in the impartial practice
of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be
found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or
that particular method of technique or conception.” This may suggest
to the pedantic that Mr. Conrad has no critical standards, and he
certainly prefers to portray an author rather than to measure him with
a tape as if for a suit of clothes. And he is right; for to portray an
author truthfully is to measure him in a far profounder sense than can
be done with a tape run round his waist, and down the side of his leg.
Mr. Conrad’s quest is the soul of his author. If it be a noble soul, he
has a welcome for it, as Plutarch had in his biographies. He may not
agree with Maupassant’s deterministic view of life, but he salutes
Maupassant in passing with the remark: “The worth of every conviction
consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.” His
first demand of an author is truth--not absolute truth, but the truth
that is in him. “At the heart of fiction,” he declares, “even the least
worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found--if only the truth
of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels
of Dumas the father.”
Mr. Conrad, indeed, claims for fiction that it is nearer truth than
history, agreeing more or less on this point with Aristotle and
Schopenhauer:
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is
also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on
the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena,
whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print
and handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer
truth. But let that pass. An historian may be an artist, too, and a
novelist is an historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder,
of human experience.
I confess I dislike this contention among the various literary
forms--poetry, fiction, history, biography, drama and essay--as to
which of them is nearest grace. It is not the form that seizes the
truth, but the imagination of the artist working through the form.
Imagination and the sense of life are as necessary to a good historian
as to a good novelist. Artists need not quarrel for precedence for any
particular art in a world in which all the great books that have so far
been written could be packed into a little room. At the same time, it
is well that a novelist should take his art as seriously as Aristotle
took the art of poetry. It often requires an exaggeration to bring
the truth into prominence. And, in any case, the exaggerations of the
novelists in this respect have as a rule been modest compared to the
exaggerations of the poets.
If Mr. Conrad is to be believed, however, the novelist is the rival,
not only of the historian, but of the moralist. He warmly denies that
he is a didactic writer, but at least he holds that in all great
fiction a moral is implicit that he who runs may read:
That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up,
is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple
built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no
other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every
success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation.
One would have to think hard in order to fit _Tristram Shandy_ and _The
Pickwick Papers_ into this--if the word is not forbidden--formula.
Perhaps it is a formula more applicable to tragic than to comic
writing. Mr. Conrad as critic often seems to be defining his own art
rather than the art of fiction in general. He knows what he himself
is aiming at in literature, and he looks for the same fine purpose
in his fellow-writers. We feel this when he requires of the novelist
“many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an
undying hope.” This, he declares, “is the God-sent form of trust in
the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.”
“To be hopeful in an artistic sense,” he adds, “it is not necessary to
think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no
impossibility of its being made so.” There surely speaks the author of
_Youth_ and _Typhoon_. And the image of the same author may be seen in
the remark that “I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he”--the
novelist--“should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their
obscure virtues.” Mr. Conrad cannot escape from the shadow of his own
genius. It falls on every page of his criticism as fatally as any
formula, though more vividly. His protest against what has been called
“stylism” is simply the protest of one who did not approach the art of
literature through that door. He is praising not merely Maupassant but
his ideal self when he tells us:
His proceeding was not to group expressive words, that mean
nothing, around misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled
intellects and belonging neither to earth nor to heaven. His vision
by a more scrupulous, prolonged and devoted attention to the
aspects of the visible world, discovered at last the right words
as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and
events.
That, no doubt, is how Mr. Conrad learned the art of writing, and
we may read autobiography into his praise of Maupassant again when
he says: “He stoops to no littleness in his art--least of all to
the miserable vanity of a catchy phrase.” But his appreciation of
Maupassant, though admirable in so far as it defines certain qualities
in his own and Maupassant’s work, is worded in a manner that savours of
intolerance of the work of many other good writers, from Shakespeare to
Dickens and, if one may include a more Lilliputian artist, Stevenson.
Thus he observes:
He will not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment,
of eloquence, of humour, pathos; of all that splendid pageant of
faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank
sheet of paper, like the glittering cortège of deadly sins before
the austere anchorite in the desert air of the Thebaïde.
Maupassant’s austerity may have been an excellent thing for Maupassant,
but to write like this is surely to reduce austerity to the level of a
formula. That “splendid pageant of faults” may well be the salvation of
another writer. We may admit that they remain faults unless they fit in
as organic parts of a writer’s work. But Maupassant was a smaller, not
a greater, writer in so far as he was unable so to fit them in.
It would be going too far to suggest, however, that Mr. Conrad merely
emphasises in other writers those qualities which he himself either
possesses or desires to possess. Most good portraits are double
portraits: they portray both the painter and the sitter. Mr. Conrad
always does justice to his sitter, as when he writes: “Henry James is
the historian of fine consciences,” or as when he says of Maupassant:
“It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In him extreme energy
of perception achieves great results, as in men of action the energy
of force and desire.” At the same time, we read _Notes on Life and
Letters_ for the light it throws, not on this or that author or the
Polish question or the question of unsinkable ships, but on Mr. Conrad
himself. The essay on Anatole France, for instance, interests us mainly
because it reminds us that Mr. Conrad is as impatient of political
panaceas as of literary formulas. Remembering that Anatole France is
a Socialist, he observes characteristically: “He will disregard the
stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. His art
will find its own beauty in the imaginative presentation of wrongs,
of errors, and miseries that call aloud for redress.” He commands the
artist to hope, but he clearly forbids anybody to hope too much. His
“Note on the Polish Problem” shows that during the war the most he
hoped for his country was an Anglo-French protectorate. Humanitarians
horrify him with their dreams. He hates impossibilism as he hates the
talk about unsinkable ships. But what he really hates most, both in
politics and in ships, is the blind worship of machinery. He looks on
Socialism, I fancy, as an attempt on the part of machine-worshippers
to build an unsinkable State--a monstrous political _Titanic_, defiant
of the facts of nature and fore-doomed to catastrophe. And how this
old master of a sailing-ship hates the _Titanic_! He has little that
is good to say, indeed, of any steam vessels, at least of cargo steam
vessels--“a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors
by an improved generation of dull mechanical toilers, conceited and
without grace.” Progress? He retorts: “The tinning of salmon was
‘progress.’” And yet, when he met the men of the merchant service
during the war, he had to admit that “men don’t change.” That is a fact
at once reassuring and depressing. It is reassuring to know that human
beings, if they avoid the sin of idolaters, can make use of machines
with reasonable safety. The machine, like the literary formula, is a
convenience. Even the Socialist State would be only a convenience.
It would in all probability be very little more alarming than a
button-hook or a lead pencil.
IV
MR. WELLS AND THE WORLD
Mr. Wells is in love with the human race. It is one of the rarest of
passions. It is a passion of which not even all imaginative men are
capable. It was, perhaps, the grandest of Shelley’s grand passions,
and it was the demon in William Morris’s breast. On the other hand, it
played a small part if any, in the lives of Shakespeare and Dickens.
Their kaleidoscopic sympathy with human beings was at the antipodes
from Shelley’s angelic infatuation with the human race. The distinction
has often been commented on. It is the difference between affection and
prophecy. There is no reason, I suppose, why the two things should not
be combined, and, indeed, there have been affectionate prophets both
among the religious teachers and among men of letters. But, as a rule,
one element flourishes at the expense of the other, and Charles Lamb
would have been as incapable of even wishing to write the _Outline of
History_ as Mr. Wells would be of attempting to write the _Essays of
Elia_.
Not that Mr. Wells gives us the impression that he loves men in general
more than Charles Lamb did. It seems almost as if he loved the destiny
of man more than he loves man himself. His hero is an anonymous
two-legged creature who was born thousands of years ago and has been
reincarnated innumerable times and who will go on being re-born until
he has established the foundations of order amid the original slime of
things. That is the character in history whom Mr. Wells most sincerely
loves. He means more to him than Moses or any of Plutarch’s men.
Plutarch’s men, indeed, are for the most part men who might have served
man but preferred to take advantage of him. Compare Plutarch’s and Mr.
Wells’s treatment of Cato the Elder and Julius Cæsar, and you will see
the difference between sympathy with individual men and passion for
the purpose of man. You will see the same difference if you compare
the Bible we possess with the new Bible of which Mr. Wells draws up
a syllabus in _The Salvaging of Civilisation_. The older book at the
outset hardly pauses to deal with man as a generalisation, but launches
almost at once into the story of one man called Adam and one woman
called Eve. Mr. Wells, on the other hand, would begin the human part of
his narrative with “the story of our race”:
How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over
nature, hunted and presently sowed and reaped. How it learnt the
secrets of metals, mastered the riddle of the seasons, and took
to the seas. That story of our common inheritance and of our slow
upward struggle has to be taught throughout our entire community in
the city slums and in the out-of-the-way farmsteads most of all.
By teaching it, we restore again to our people the lost basis of a
community, a common idea of their place in space and time.
Mr. Wells’s attitude to men, it is clear, is primarily that of a
philosopher, while the attitude of the Bible is primarily that of a
poet. It remains to be seen whether a philosopher’s Bible can move the
common imagination as the older Bible has moved it. That it can move
and excite it in some degree we know. We have only to read the glowing
pages with which _The Salvaging of Civilisation_ opens in order to
realise this. Mr. Wells’s passion for the human group is infectious.
He expresses it with the vehemence of a great preacher. He plays, like
many great preachers, not on our sympathy so much as on our hopes and
fears. His book is a book of salvation and damnation--of warnings
to flee from the wrath to come, of prophecies of swords turned
into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks. He loves his ideal
group-man almost as Bunyan loved Christian. He offers him, it is true,
at the end of his journey, not Paradise, but the World-State. He offers
it to him, moreover, not as an individual but as a type. He bids men
be ready to perish in order that man may arrive at the goal. His book
is a call to personal sacrifice to the end, not of personal, but of
general salvation. That, however, is an appeal that has again and again
been proved effective in history. It is of the same kind as the appeal
of patriotism in time of war. “Who dies if England lives?” sang Mr.
Kipling. “Who dies if the World-State lives?” Mr. Wells retorts.
The question remains whether the ordinary man can ever be brought to
think of the world as a thing worth living and dying for as he has
often thought his country worth living and dying for. If the world were
attacked by the inhabitants of another planet, world-patriotism would
become a necessity of self-defence, and the peoples of the world would
be presented with the alternatives of uniting or perishing. Mr. Wells
believes, no doubt, that they are presented with these alternatives
already. But can they be made to realise this by anything but an
external enemy? It is external enemies that create and intensify
patriotism. Can human beings as a whole organise themselves against war
as the enemy with the same thoroughness with which Englishmen organised
themselves against Germany as the enemy? Mr. Wells obviously believes
that they can. But it is to the great religions, not to the great
patriotisms, that he looks for examples of how this can be done. He
recalls how the Christian religion spread in the first four centuries
and how the Moslem religion spread in the seventh century, and he
believes that these precedents “support a reasonable hope that such a
change in the minds of men, whatever else it may be, is a practicable
change.” His gospel of human brotherhood, indeed, is propounded as a
larger Christianity rather than as a larger patriotism. He realises,
however, the immensity of the difficulties in the way of the spread of
this gospel. He sees that the majority of men are still indifferent to
it. Unless they are in the vein for it, “it does not really interest
them; rather it worries them.” That is why he believes so ardently in
the need of a new Bible--a Bible of Civilisation--which will restore to
modern men “a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny, such
as no one in politics or literature seems to possess to-day.” That is
why he scorns such a compromise and concession to the frailty of human
nature as a League of Nations and calls on men to turn their eyes from
all such conveniences and makeshifts and to concentrate on the more
arduous ideal of human unity. Of the League of Nations he writes:
The praise has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty
and what devotion can we expect this multiple association to
command? It has no unity--no personality. It is like asking a man
to love the average member of a woman’s club instead of loving his
wife.
For the idea of man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the
one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not
for a miscellaneous assembly that will not mix--even in its name.
It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations
formula.