The Facts of Fiction (29 page)

But quotations from
The Brook Kerith
tend to run on from sentence to sentence, and even from chapter to chapter.
The real reason is that, artist as he is, Mr. Moore is primarily a story-teller, and a story is something that lives only in its own completeness.

It is a strange thing that Mr. Moore's art should have so obscured his intention. But it has done so. Most people remember Gosse's description of Moore as “one of the most conscientious and chastened artificers of the written page whom English literature possesses,” and forget that Moore is also of the type of the everlasting yarn-spinner.

His industry has magnified itself in the public eye out of all proportion, and his name has shrunk in the public ear, until George Moore has become a sort of mythical, solitary figure, a little shrunk with age and a little out of temper with the world, indefatigably crossing out, and rewriting and amending, in his quiet study in Ebury Street.

With the turn of the century, competent novelists crop up like thistles; and like thistles spread their seed. In choosing such writers as Henry James and George Moore and D. H. Lawrence in preference to those men who are more generally popular I do not pretend to have chosen men who are necessarily the best novelists, but merely those who are the most novel; men who found fiction doing one thing and taught it how to do another.

Yet simply because one artistically adventurous man discovers that old bottles can be used not as bottles to hold liquor, but as vases to hold strange flowers, or as ornaments to hold nothing, there is no call to despise the less experimental and curious men who continue to use the bottles for their original purpose of having new wine put into them. And the main stream of the novel was fed not by the experimentalists but by such men as Arnold Bennett and Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy, and later by Mr. J. B. Priestley.

The English novel was never successfully written by gentlemen since the eighteenth century when gentlemen could live like rakes in the intervals of living like royalty. Thackeray and Disraeli and Lytton were all bothered by their breeding just as Mr. Galsworthy has been by his to-day. In the early twentieth century, the two great novelists who were of the people and for the people, were Bennett and Mr. Wells. It is true that the former organised himself into a syndicate of Bennetts for the writing of novels, short-stories, articles, advice on self-management and the general acquisition of culture, and kept the firm
so constantly busy that at times the head of it was doing the work that should have been left to the junior clerk who was turning out any trash. It is true also that the other became the supreme popular newspaper scientist and sociologist, whose facts strangely enough were always scientifically unassailable. But despite the width of their other interests it is these two novelists who have provided the real substance of modern, if not modernistic, fiction.

Arnold Bennett became a novelist in the same irreverent spirit in which he wrote. At the age of twenty he had not even read anything of importance. And he wrote nothing until a provincial paper advertised for a story with local interest. Then he wrote a novel designed to illustrate “the evils of marrying a drunken woman.” It was not a flattering view of the local interest, and nothing came of it.

But if it had been a design for a new local town hall, the opportunist soul of Arnold Bennett would still have urged him to compete. Instead of precariously apprenticing himself to literature without tools or training, he went into a solicitor's office, where the strict suppression of anything approaching originality drove his mind to some sort of imaginative recreation, a sort of kick of the heels, as soon as he got away.

And so it was that at the age of twenty-six, having read widely meanwhile, he felt near enough to the spirit of the Muses to apply for the post of assistant-editor of a woman's magazine. And the woman's magazine felt him to be near enough to the spirit of the masses to accept him. And under the name of “Gwendolen ” he learnt how to be effortlessly and aimlessly entertaining. A lesson that had very much the effect of a music-hall part on an actor, and nearly ruined him for anything else.

It would have ruined him completely if he had not been
so much in love with success, and had not seen that even to be the editor of a woman's magazine was not quite the Alexandrian conquest of life that he had planned. He therefore definitely and deliberately set out to write a great novel and make a great reputation; a reputation that would enable him to unbend and perform—for higher fees—the sort of work that he had naturally been doing all the time.

The reputation came with the publication in 1908 of
The Old Wives' Tale,
which, being based on French models that were worshipped at the moment, satisfied the critics, and being based also on common sense satisfied the public. Thenceforward Arnold Bennett was his own conception of a great man, and his admiration for himself and his life became immense.

He always remained the Provincial in Piccadilly, agape at the lights and the ladies, and at himself also because he, Enoch Arnold Bennett, who had risen in brilliance from the smoke of the Five Towns, was probably better able to afford the gilt on his gingerbread than any of them. Arnold Bennett was always the huge vulgarian, whose clothes were wrong, whose boots were wrong, whose Bank-Holidayish forelock was wrong, and whose voice was wrong, who had somehow contrived to get himself admitted among the Really Right People.

That, at least, is what it has come to be the custom to say about him. But people are apt to talk as though Bennett, the man who knew at least modern French literature better than most Englishmen know English, who knew the vintages of wines as well as he knew the dates of first editions, the man who collected pictures and adored music, the man who knew the whole delicate business of living daintily, was the one boorish Philistine in a London of fashionable fastidious æsthetes.

The real trouble with Arnold Bennett was that as he cultivated those qualities that usually distinguish a man for his discernment and good taste, he cultivated also his native capacity for enjoyment. And obvious, naked pleasure at being alive has rather sadly never been one of the characteristics of the æsthetic life.

It is perfectly true that Bennett enjoyed the mirrors and marbles of the kind of high life that can be paid for; which was vulgar. But he also enjoyed enjoying them; which was merely artistic. And somehow neither of these figures, the provincial or the provincial snob, or the two of them together, quite add up to the conscious and conscientious novelist who produced
The Old Wives' Tale.

With an air of immense cunning people have long hit on one of Bennett's contributions to the literature of Success,
The Card,
and have thenceforward exhibited Bennett as a living, conquering Denry. But Denry could not have written
The Old Wives' Tale;
he could not even have written
The Card.
And this view of Bennett as the bourgeois Epicurean simply does not include the whole of the scene. It is perfectly true that the Bennett of
The Old Wives' Tale
is not the whole Bennett that only he and his Maker knew about. But it is equally true that it is the Bennett—the man who won the Success that justified his writing about it—who is respected as the novelist that rejected the machine-made plots of the moment and set out to make a new one by hand.

Admittedly, it might be said that when finished
The Old Wives' Tale
was not only hand-made but second-hand made. For when Arnold Bennett came to write he was as much under the influence of Maupassant as though he had been mesmerised. In
The Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett defied convention, though his manner was so
orderly and conventional that the revolution that he led was bloodless.

In keeping up with his heroines even into middle-age and after, he dismissed sentiment from the novel and sacrificed the spinner-of-dreams type of novelist to the new type of the omniscient reporter. His achievement is indisputable, even though at the moment we are beginning to wonder whether Zola, Balzac and Maupassant are by so much greater than the English novelists as we used to think.

The Old Wives' Tale
was designed in the spirit in which Hampton Court was designed: to provide England with something as fine as the finest on the Continent. “In the 'sixties,” Bennett wrote, “we used to regard
Une Vie
with mute awe, as being the summit of achievement …
Une Vie
relates the entire life history of a woman. I settled in the privacy of my own head that my book about the development of a young girl into a stout old lady must be the English
Une Vie.
I have often been accused of every fault except lack of self-confidence, and in a few weeks I settled a further point, namely, that my book must go one better than
Une Vie,
and that to this end it must be the life-history of two women instead of one.”

Sheer nonsense, of course! As for going one better by dealing with two heroines instead of one it might just as well have been really ambitious and dealt with a family of a dozen daughters and so automatically have been twelve times as good. If in the end
The Old Wives' Tale
did turn out to be the better book, it was simply because Arnold Bennett's was a sanely informed mind and Maupassant's was not. And Bennett was not going out for the blood of anything as Maupassant was going out for the blood of the Catholic Church.

The real contribution of naturalistic novelists such as
Maupassant to the practice of fiction is that they presented the novelist with a passport of the imagination entitling the holder to roam freely through all the inner domains of life, and not merely to coast up and down looking at marriage through a telescope held politely to the blind eye. Arnold Bennett used the same passport, but set off on a totally different tour from Maupassant.

He was not interested in those variations in the human orbit that arise from sexual attraction half so much as he was in the whole bright spectacle of human revolution. And except for the fact that
The Old Wives' Tale
presents the complete picture of two lives, with a growing interest in the women who live them as they grow older and richer in character and personality, there really is very little—except the suppression of himself—that he learnt from the French.

There is about all Bennett's novels of the Five Towns a deliberate, rather impudent search after the raw material of romance that reminds one of the crack detective's search in fiction for clues in unlikely spots. This appreciation of the surprising little views that suddenly appear through the chinks in the dullest and most impossible places was very largely a substitute for other kinds of beauty with Bennett.

Thus he found a great hotel enthralling whereas most other people would find it merely expensive. In the matter of hotels, ultimately, he was unfortunate. When he first invented the Grand Babylon Hotel—which was a childishly simple device for concentrating a collection of oddities of character—everyone found it fascinating because it was strange. But by the time he had invented Imperial Palace—which was a much more finely imagined structure—the public had grown a little tired of these mountainous bergs that had so suddenly arisen and
blocked out the old skyline of Park Lane. And his huge attempt to show the human beehive of a great hotel in full buzz failed not because it was superficial, but because it was superfluous.

Apart from
The Old Wives' Tale,
Bennett reached the kind of supremacy that lasts, twice; and the kind of supremacy that technically and temporarily satisfies, a hundred-and-one times. The first was reached in
Clay-hanger,
the second in
Riceyman Steps,
where he was again searching for the finger-prints of romance, this time in the dust and dirt of a miser's frowsty life. One useful result of
Riceyman Steps
was that it showed that Bennett, in writing the literature of the Five Towns, was not simply a local novelist in the way in which Barrie or Blackmore was, but was a cosmopolitan with the sense to write only about what he knew intimately.

Before he knew the life of London with more than provincial penetration he merely extemporised brilliantly on the external scene.

When he got to know the real London he discovered that the Five Towns were not the only place where a shaft of intelligent sunlight striking through gloom could pave a dull street with gold and set the individual lives of passers-by glowing like jewels. And he never tired of talking about his discovery.

* * *

If it is difficult to account for all the Arnold Bennetts whose divided activities together add up to Arnold Bennett, it is wellnigh impossible to make a list of all the H. G. Wellses in Mr. H. G. Wells. To consider Mr. Wells purely as a novelist is rather like considering Mr. Gordon Selfridge purely as a greengrocer, or a sports-outfitter, or
a hairdresser, or any other of the small tradesmen he happens to include within his enormous self.

For years now Mr. Wells has been a novelist only in the intervals of being a sociologist, or an international linguist, or a Utopian, or a prophet, or an historian, or a scientist, or a working journalist, or a barn-ball player. One might say that he has been a novelist in the intervals of working his mind; one might even say that he has been a novelist in the intervals of changing his mind.

Certainly fiction with him has been either a recreation or a last resource. Either he was writing
Kipps
simply to amuse his busy brain, or he was writing
Meanwhile,
or
Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island,
or
The World of William Clissold
because he had a great many things of importance to say, and he had learnt from experience that people would listen to them only if they were disguised to look as though they were really of no importance at all.

Because Mr. Wells can do so many things a rumour has gone out that he must do some of them rather badly. Thus despite the fact—or more probably because of the fact that Mr. Wells's novels such as
Kipps
and
Tono-Bungay
are so perfectly stimulating and satisfying to the mind—it has become the essence of Wellsian criticism to discover why they are not satisfying to the ear and the eye as well, and to refer to the clumsy, bungled sentences, the ungraceful constructions, and the hard, ugly words; to say in effect that poor Mr. Wells is only an honest workman with a brain and not a cunning artist with a soul.