Chapter VII: Part THREE: Literature and Men (2)

But Mr. Wells intends something more than to explain the state of mind which led a distinguished politician and moralist, a married, middle-aged man, to victimise--that is the "worldly" way of looking at it--a beautiful young girl who had fallen in love with his genius. Here we have the life-story and character of Remington portrayed at full length--Remington an individual product of our social environment--Remington in relation to the vast national processes which have been changing England from the "muddle" of the Victorians to the muddle of to-day--a Remington clever enough to see our representative institutions stripped of their hollowness and their cant; quick to pierce through the shell of Liberalism, not perhaps quite to the kernel of it, but to the insincere part of it; quick to see a profound psychological meaning in the Suffragette movement, and to distinguish between the outer bearing of public men and the individuality behind it--the "hinterland." The whole was a brilliant analysis of England in macrocosm and microcosm welded into the life-story of Remington. And his hero is not like one of Mrs. Humphry Ward's puppets, set up to be a great politician. Remington as a thinker is almost a great man; he is a profound analyst of society on its human side; he _is_ a gifted critic of public institutions; even his absurd perversity in trying to invent a constructive, motherhood-endowing Toryism is the perversity of a versatile and clever man whose action is precipitated by bitterness or pique.

But the extraordinary thing about _The New Machiavelli_ is, that this envisaging of England in her social, political, and intellectual life, this acutely and almost diabolically observed crowd of _real_ persons, this minute psychology, this exact history, this elaborate philosophy--all are subservient to the purpose of explaining how it was that Remington was driven into the net of sex, and Isabel was enabled to "darn his socks." _Parturiunt montes_. Is it thus that Remington will make himself immortal in literature, the twentieth-century Benvenuto Cellini, swaggering, in a self-conscious, twentieth-century way, through the tale of his glorious peccadilloes? Or is it to be a Jonathan Wild, memorable as the hero of a hundred magnificent felonies with which a Fielding or a Wells could glorify a sturdy vagabond? But Remington writes in bitterness. His pen is steeped in the gall of Swift. He feels rancour against Altiora, against the Cramptons, against all the "Pinky-Dinkies" who prescribe morals for a genius erratic in his desires.

The successive mental stages by which Remington emerges had been set forth before in other books. They are here brought together and surveyed in a comprehensive whole. He is anxious to strip off the disguises of human nature, and to expose, in each of the persons arrayed before us, the "self-behind-the-frontage." "In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in the House and in smoking-room groups, you really have as much of a man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice." His ideal is the individual who lives and acts in the full light of that "self-behind-the-frontage"--the "hinterland," as he calls him; and his literary method in this book is to expose the emptiness of the shop-window, to cast his satire upon the poor show.

The weakness of his attacks is that the ideal with which he would illuminate his background is shifty, uncertain, ill-realised; being undetermined, the function that is allotted to the human ideal is actually left to chance, to accidental impulse rather than to conscious will--to human frailty rather than to human strength. Hence it is that he declares the rights of sex where its claims are weakest; now applauds the conduct of Remington, now apologises for it; now explains elaborately that his mere sensual side would assert itself, now that sex never appealed to him without an admixture of the ideal; now cries out for discussion and public enlightenment on this subject, and now acknowledges that Remington, who had discussed it for years, acted on impulse, in the dark. How uncertain it all is, how mixed in its motives, how brilliantly bewildering in its conclusions--and yet how clever!

It was probably a passing phase in Mr. Wells' history, an unhappy phase for him, presumably, but inevitable. In the uneasy period of irritation and defiance he lost none of his skill in self-portraiture, in projecting himself upon the canvas of modern life. It was that vein of undefined Romanticism in him, according so ill with the life of "public affairs," that put him out of harmony with himself. Such an ideal as he had formed for himself could never by its nature completely satisfy any but the solitary recluse, and had little to give to man in his social capacity, still less to the man whom he depicted in _Marriage_, irritated, frustrated, drained of his higher energies by the irritating calls of society. Long before, in _A Modern Utopia_, he had prescribed for his Samurai rulers a periodical course of solitude and meditation in the desert. In the book which, while I write, is the last of his books--_Marriage_--he comes back to the same idea. He depicts a hero full of scientific ardour and intellectual ambition who finds that in the social life there is nothing to satisfy his deepest needs, and that only in turning his back on the world of people and flying to commune with God, nature, and himself, in solitude, can he attain the mystical peace he longs for. The social world which becomes an obsession to Trafford, his hero, is made to swarm about him through the inevitable net of marriage--although it is marriage to a fascinating woman whom he still loves. At first he had sacrificed his scientific ideal to the domestic and material needs. He had abandoned research in order to make Marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness. The comfortable house, the artistic surroundings, the social pleasures, and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity seemed destined to live. He sees the impulses under which men and women seek to escape "from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitive motives of low-grade and law-abiding prosperity." Marriage is the social bond which has involved him in this. Marjorie herself has become the feminine embodiment of that urgent life of "getting on," of just "doing," which seeks to trammel, stifle, and kill the spirit and higher intelligence of man. Through marriage the earthy sociality of life had thrust itself upon him, and was killing what was apprehensive, curious, spiritually and intelligently aspiring within him. He rebels. He flies to the wintry wilds of Labrador, and takes Marjorie with him.

There, in a merely fantastic but brilliantly described scene, amid the thrilling dangers of a wild solitude and a grim winter, they discover themselves. They come near to one another in moments of peril, deprivation, and self-sacrifice. He passionately asserts, she passionately agrees, that "we can't _do_ things. We don't bring things off!" ... "The real thing is to get knowledge and express it" ... "This Being--using its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend it. Every good thing in man is that--looking and making pictures, listening and making songs, making philosophies and sciences, trying new powers, bridge and engine, spark and gun. At the bottom of my soul, _that_." He sees man without "eyes for those greater things, but we've got the promise--the intimation of eyes."

This is not, it is to be feared, a very satisfactory solution for the average man or woman who is suffering either from destiny unrealised or from the milder malady of nerves. The medical or the spiritual adviser who should prescribe a course of Labrador whenever we are physically or spiritually "run down" would be of little use to the majority of us. We see here the monkish side of Mr. Wells' temperament deliberately torturing the social and worldly side of him, the spirit suggesting to the flesh and the devil that they ought to be content with spiritual contemplation. The mystic has the final word in those humorous-passionate conversations in which first and last things are discussed by the man and the woman in the wild--the man and woman, still comparatively young, about to return to a new life in civilisation. But what will they become when they return? What will Marjorie do when the shops once again lie temptingly before her, and when her aunt Plessington's guests once more besiege her, and social life presents itself again in its garish variety? Is this visit to the wild more decisive than marriage itself? Will their brief vision of God, their intellectual and spiritual conversion, make them "live happily ever after?" Mr. Wells, at least, should know that it will not; he will surely be bound to write another novel to show the final stage of Marjorie and Trafford, the renewed conflict, within them and between them, of the world and the spirit. For it is a conflict without end, a conflict which Mr. Wells, as he goes on writing the history of his own most interesting self in relation to his own most interesting environment, must contrive to present to us in each new book that he writes.

III

ARNOLD BENNETT

Mr. Arnold Bennett has often been spoken of as if he were a sort of revised edition of Mr. Wells. In reality the contrast which these two writers present is far more remarkable than the resemblance. The important works of Mr. Wells came first in order of time, and Mr. Bennett would readily admit that he owes much to the other's imaginative pictures of a changing civilisation. He belongs also, like Mr. Wells, to the essentially English tradition of fiction. In spite of an admiration for French literature which has had a refreshing effect upon his style, he has written many of his novels as Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray wrote theirs--out of the abundance of his imagination, from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life in all its profusion, in its littleness and its greatness, a colossal whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes the selection. In his longer books he has adopted the epic rather than the dramatic method of writing fiction. He will often indulge his fancy for insubordinate episodes, so long as they are in some way characteristic. He loves abundance of description--there is scarcely any novelist who is more precise in describing all the minutiæ of a place or the physical traits of a person. This sort of profusion is very English; and Mr. Wells, too, is essentially English.

The two men were born at about the same time. They came from families which belonged, broadly speaking, to the same social class. They have both of them written with perfect frankness of the sort of people they have known intimately in their youth. And there, I think, the resemblance ends.

The contrast is far more striking. All the most important of Mr. Wells' books have been written about himself. Mr. Bennett has never written about himself excepting in an early book like _The Man from the North_, in certain inferior books of his middle period, and when he is deliberately writing his impressions of places, as in his book about America. It is always the personality of Mr. Wells with which Mr. Wells is most concerned, and the world as related to him. The personality of Mr. Bennett is kept in the background. He is an interested observer, and he gives what he has seen or believes that he has seen--he reports faithfully as one who might be held responsible for the actuality of his vision. Men and women, places and things, are all to him curious phenomena which it will be worth his while to note, to try to understand, to record in so far as they are significant.

Mr. Wells has an extraordinary intellectual capacity of interpreting his own impressions, and lighting upon truths by some romantic or instinctive process of his own. Mr. Bennett has a very much harder sense of fact. He understands romance, but he is not himself romantic. His interests are all in the understanding and interpreting of the significant facts of life, and he cares very little for the pleasure of living outside that kind of living which is artistic perception. And yet he has so much practicality and common sense--the sense of fact which in his art stands him in such good stead--that he has even been prepared to sacrifice his art to the main practical necessities of life. At any rate, it is upon this hypothesis that we must explain some of the very poor books which he perpetrated before it became worth his while to protect his reputation--the only other possible explanation being that, as he writes at all times and in all moods, much of his work might be expected to be below his proper level.

But Mr. Bennett is not only extraordinarily versatile in his observations of people, places, books--anything whatsoever that he comes upon--but he has the faculty always of seeing objects as if he saw them for the first time; that is to say, he brings imaginative curiosity to bear upon them. He is not personally distressed, like Mr. Wells, about the evil fate of the world any more than he would be elated by its good fortune. But he is interested. He looks for character, and he finds it. He looks for situation, and he makes it. He can be content with a light comic situation, as in _Helen with the High Hand_, and the result is admirable. He can present with equal skill profoundly poignant situations, such as occur in _Clayhanger_ and _Hilda Lessways_. He is aware of the fact that life is a spectacle; and that to make it interesting you must make it vivid, you must show it as something that is intense and passionate. And he is also aware of the fact that the feeling of intensity and passion may be elicited from a sense of the monotonous, the trivial, and the vapid; that tragic effect may be gained by the spectacle of men seeking an ideal which is beyond their powers, or grasping at an ideal which proves unworthy, or indifferent to an ideal which we see to be within their reach.

It may be taken as certain that, with or without the example of Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett must inevitably have been affected by the sense of the changing conditions of modern life, and the passing of the generations from one set of habits to another. For it must be remembered that he was born and brought up in the Potteries in the middle and later Victorian periods; that as a young man he left those provinces, and in course of time found himself engaged in the profession of literature at a safe distance from them. He wrote about all sorts of subjects--and in every sort of style--articles, didactic books, fantasies, novels--but as a good journalist he at length discovered that on one subject he was a specialist, that to his accounts of one part of the world he could supply "local colour"--that part of the world being, of course, the Five Towns of the Potteries. He made this region his own. He adopted it for literary purposes. And in writing _Anna of the Five Towns_, _Tales of the Five Towns_, _The Grim Smile of the Five Towns_, and his more famous later novels he naturally found himself describing the Potteries as they were when he was a young man, but as they no longer are to-day. What was more natural than that, as he passed from the last generation to the present, writing in the present about the remarkably different past, he should become supremely impressed with the very fact of the transition--that fact of changing and growing old which dominates _The Old Wives' Tale_, and supplies him with his theme in the play of _Milestones_?

In _The Old Wives' Tale_ he presents a series of pictures which make us realise that there are men and women about us who were brought up in a world so totally unlike ours that we regard it as purely historical. He has brought out this fact in a way that may cause misgivings even to those who are still considered young. He takes us back to the most vivid memories of our childhood. He recalls to us what England was like and what people were like in an age when electric trams were unknown, when bicycles were rare, when the retail trader was a person who could still call his soul his own. He has shown us people born in one world and growing old in another. He has presented to us the fantastic but true panorama of certain persons who were young and idealistic, who became middle-aged and practical, who are now old and acquiescent; of persons who were born mid-Victorians, who became later-Victorians, who to this day survive grotesquely among the moderns--and again young men and women of to-day who themselves will survive to a derelict old age among people as unlike us as we are unlike the heroes of Mrs. Ward Beecher Stowe. No one of us will attain a ripe old age without experiencing three different generations marked by three different sets of habits, sentiments, ideals. Mr. Bennett's subject is the tragi-comedy of growing old.

The author presented his people, and the places in which they lived, in all the minutiæ of their and its existence. He combined the realistic modern method with the bitter, ironical, sententious method of Thackeray. There is nothing in the first half of this book which Thackeray would have done better, and Thackeray never illustrated a law of life remorselessly working itself out as Mr. Bennett has done. His mind and his perceptions are at work simultaneously. He is alternately humorous and grim, but is too philosophical, interested, and detached ever to be bitter. That was the world our fathers were born in--he shows it to us--that is what our fathers are among us to this day--and again we have the picture. "You cannot step twice into the same river," said Heraclitus. "You cannot go back to the town you were born in," Mr. Bennett means to say; and his book makes his meaning clear.

Two sisters, Constance and Sophia, are the girls, women, widows whom we see growing up from the 'fifties to the latter part of the first decade of the twentieth century. When we meet them first they are young girls--fifteen and sixteen--"rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, roguish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise"--at an age when "if one is frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn: one has learnt simply everything in the previous six months." These two young people are unconscious of "the miraculous age which is us." They lived in the Potteries before the Potteries had acquired that big black spot on the map which now dignifies and degrades their existence. They lived in and around the important draper's shop in "The Square," under the wing of their respected parents, the once active citizen, now paralytic, Mr. Baines, and Mrs. Baines, the ruler, the dictator of the household and of the morals of all its members.

In the first stage we see Constance and Sophia subject to this parental rule. They take castor oil when they are bidden. They do not leave the house without the sanction of Mrs. Baines. They must not, needless to say, realise the fact that marriageable young men are real facts. They must pay attention to the shop, preserving a proper distance from the assistants. They must be careful that Maggie, the servant, does not overhear familiar conversations. They must not go into the drawing-room except on Sunday afternoons. They must wait upon the paralytic father with proper punctilio. And they must be quiet and attentive when Mrs. Baines is directing their morals. Then Mr. Baines dies, because Sophia has been looking out of the window at a dashing commercial traveller; and Mr. Bennett soliloquises:

John Baines had belonged to the past, to the age when men really
did think of their souls, when orators by phrases could move
crowds to fury or to pity, when no one had learnt to hurry, when
Demos was only turning in his sleep, when the sole beauty of
life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when hell
really had no bottom and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the
secret of England's greatness. Mid-Victorian England lay on
that mahogany bed. Ideals had passed away with John Baines. It
is thus that ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of
honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly, while one's head is
turned.

But the generation of the Baineses does not give place easily; it tries to shut its ears to the knocking at the door, insistently as it may knock in the whimsical, assertive personality of Sophia. The romantic commercial traveller whose fault it was that Mr. Baines died a premature, though, scientifically speaking, a belated death, is the symbol of the new influence which Mrs. Baines is too out-of-date to resist. Sophia runs away with the commercial traveller, makes him marry her, and is translated from "The Square" to Paris. Poor Sophia! She is the victim of being half a generation ahead of her time, a suffragette before it was an honour to be a martyr to the cause. But in Constance the old influences are stronger. She persists like a piece of old furniture which survives the relic-hunters and the broker's men. She marries that trusted servant, Mr. Povey, who has such a head for inventing tickets and labels and sign-boards, who himself outdistances Mr. Baines as railway trains outdistance stage coaches, and as aeroplanes will outdistance motor-cars. The married couple naturally displace Mrs. Baines, and Constance notices her mother shortly after the honeymoon--"Poor dear!" she thought, "I'm afraid she's not what she was." "Incredible that her mother could have aged in less than six weeks! Constance did not allow for the chemistry that had been going on in herself."

And so they go on, till Mr. Povey is "forty next birthday," though, dear innocent soul, he scarcely notices it as we notice it tragically in these days of quick living. And Constance buries her mother, and becomes engrossed in Cyril, her son, and scarcely observes how the atmosphere in the Potteries gets blacker and blacker, and the trains run nearer and more frequently, and the electric trams replace the horse trams, linking up the Five Towns of the "District." And Mr. Povey too gets buried, and Constance's son goes to London, and her hair grows white, and at last--at last Sophia comes back to live with her in the old house in the modern Potteries. And still those two old women are living there together.

I shall not dwell upon the career of Sophia--who has pursued her life in Paris very wisely, shrewdly, circumspectly, not to say commercially, thus showing how honest bourgeois ancestry can triumph over the flightiest of modern temperaments. Suffice it that she is now an aged widow, a contemporary of the Crimean veterans, living to this day in comfortable and old-maidish sobriety in the Potteries, hardly conscious of the fact that aeroplanes are an innovation. It is Mr. Bennett, not the Sophias, who makes us conscious of the strange, portentous progress of evolution; of the lapse of time; the changing mind of man; the desperate love of what has been; the inevitableness of what is to come, of what is to replace us, and put us, too, on the shelf among outworn things.

In _Clayhanger_ and _Hilda Lessways_, the first two books of a trilogy which, at the time when I write, is still unfinished, Mr. Bennett again presents the process of the generations, but he has given us a more intense dramatic interest, he has singled out a few persons for more significant characterisation; he has focussed his picture better, concentrated the interest, and produced emotional tension. The reason why _Pickwick_ retains its place as the first of Dickens' novels is that it is almost the only book he wrote which had a really satisfactory hero--an individual character. _Clayhanger_ has two such persons--Edwin, and Darius his father, as well as a dozen or more of interesting subordinate characters. There are other things with which Mr. Bennett is concerned in this book beside the transition from youth to old age, from Victorian to Edwardian. But he does not let us forget this transition. "To Edwin, Darius was exactly the same father, and for Darius, Edwin was still aged sixteen. They both of them went on living on the assumption that the world had stood still in those seven years between 1873 and 1880. If they had been asked what had happened during those seven years, they would have answered, 'Oh, nothing particular.'"

Ordinary, humdrum life, an integral part of the national life, enacting by slow, imperceptible changes the processes of the Time-Spirit, still occupies Mr. Bennett's attention. He has again traced for a score of years the lives of a group of people belonging to the risen, well-to-do tradesman class in the latter part of the Victorian era. With the successive cross-sections of life which he draws for us he again makes us look backwards and forwards to the England of yesterday and the England of to-morrow: the England which has been revolutionising its conditions of life once or twice in every generation, and has been giving its persons different food for ideas, different standards to act upon, different habits to conform to or revolt against: people whose parents were nurtured in the sweated atmosphere of factories before the Factory Acts, and whose sons will be the people of 1913. He shows us a whole generation of persons who, living through these prodigious changes and being asked what has happened, reply, "Oh, nothing particular." But though the score of people in the Potteries with whom we are concerned are but individually selected from the swarm that is provincial England, they are none the less intensely individual. Darius Clayhanger, the hero's father, the man who has emerged from the pit, and by sheer obstinacy in work has made himself well off with his printing shop, stands out clear as life with all his idiosyncrasies. Hard, plain-spoken, without conscious ideals, satisfied with the _status quo_ (since the Corn Laws were passed), unelastic, relentless, he is yet capable of bursting out emotionally in a manner that displeases his more guarded son. We have memorable persons in Big James, the foreman; Mr. Shushions, the aged Primitive Methodist; Aunt Clara, the lady whose business in life was tact; Mr. Orgreave, the architect; Janet Orgreave, his daughter; and others who come familiarly in and out.

All of these persons whom I have mentioned, completely different as one is from another, are none the less normal provincial characters. They have a natural place in the Five Towns; their ambition does not stretch out beyond the finite limits of Bursley unless it be to the mild ecstasies of conventional religion or the generous aspiration which accompanies song.

But the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, is something different. In the head of Edwin the boy "a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire." But would the atmosphere of the Potteries be damp enough to quench that flame? Or did that flame burn intensely enough to survive so that his spirit should rise out of the commerce, the routine, the unaspiring neighbourly atmosphere which is the dull _clay_ of life? He longed to be an architect. He did not understand architecture, he was unaware of its finest possibilities, but something in him akin to the art-impulse made him long to be an architect. But his father stamped out that ambition. He entered his father's works, and, however rebellious at heart, was continually submissive to his overmastering will. But once, when the routine was settling down upon him, illumined only a little by vaguely directed reading, his soul was burst out of its environment by a passionate love which grew in a day; which seemed to win success; but was thwarted by the woman who, without a word, incomprehensibly, jilts him.

The years pass on--Mr. Bennett's transitions make us imagine forlorn, almost intolerable passages of years in which the human soul trudges stupidly and wearily towards death, discussing muffins and tea whilst the Cosmos is plotting upheavals for the sole benefit of stupidity in the mass--and Edwin, suffering at his father's hands, triumphing over him in old age, is becoming an ordinary inhabitant of Bursley, working, resting, taking his ease. Sometimes the smouldering flame bursts out in him again, and he would perceive that he had been nothing, achieved nothing, that he had been a mere "spendthrift of time and years." "And there was he, Edwin, eating bacon and eggs opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at Bleakridge."

But the flame breaks out once more. Art had had no chance to claim him for its own, and Love had cheated him. But when he discovers Hilda, and Hilda's son, and Hilda's misery--Hilda, "with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night!"-with her, love, passion, pity, intensity of living come back to him.

It is interesting to turn from _Clayhanger_ to the story of _Hilda Lessways_. This story has not quite the distinctive note which Mr. Bennett struck in the two preceding novels. What we miss is, first of all, the "local colour" which is the author's speciality, most of the scenes being laid in Brighton or London; and second, that detached manner which enabled Mr. Bennett to present his persons as if he were himself indifferent to their fate, with the result that they stand or fall entirely on their own merits. Here we feel that he is a partisan. He has taken up Hilda's case. He is evidently prepared to champion her against all the world. Hence the very femininity of the heroine which he has so cleverly created, to some extent colours the book itself, as if by a kind of sympathy between author and heroine. The perfervid woman has sometimes communicated too much of her fervour to the very language of the author.

But in other respects the book shows an advance in Mr. Bennett's art. For the first time in his life he has resisted the temptation to overwhelm us with the wealth of invention which his fertile mind is busy upon. He has pruned away the unessential details. He has cut away the delightful but irrelevant details which even in _The Old Wives' Tale_ and in _Clayhanger_ threatened to shatter the perspective; and has concentrated on the matter in hand with enormous advantage to the dramatic sharpness and distinctness of his story.

He has made a further gain in intensity by using the story of Clayhanger as a background to the present story. The technical difficulty in all creative literature is a difficulty of language and symbols--the difficulty of so speaking to the reader that he may see moods, moments, situations, concurrences of life and forces of passion in the fine, dry, intense light in which the author has seen them. That is the infinite difficulty of all literature--to find a language and to create an atmosphere which may become familiar to the reader without becoming commonplace. How much do we gain in the reading of Shakespeare by the fact that from the sheer poetry of the thing we have been compelled to read him a score of times! How fully the Greek dramatists understood that to be instantly appreciated they must deal with stories every detail of which was stored with friendly associations for the audience!

Mr. Bennett elicits something of this effect of the marvellous from the familiar by putting the life-story of Hilda Lessways on a foreground behind which lies the already familiar story of Edwin Clayhanger. We remember Clayhanger living in the printing shop in the Potteries; his uncouthness, his shyness, his pertinacity; his desire to be an architect and to live the imaginative life, thwarted by his grim old father; and the manner in which Hilda dawned upon him, entered into his experience in a brief rapture of passion, and disappeared, leaving Clayhanger to grope again with the commonplaces. And in this new story we see the life of the girl, the woman; she, too, groping among the commonplaces, with her heart set upon a wider experience, till a moment comes when her story coincides with and is complementary to that of Clayhanger. The speeches which we heard her make in the earlier story are heard again here, with greater comprehension; the apparently trifling words which fell from the lips of Clayhanger, scarcely heeded, are heard again now, and heard as they sounded to Hilda, grasping after a purpose and a fulfilment of herself.

Mr. Bennett has endeavoured to examine the mind and heart of this woman from the inside. Whether the machinery of the emotions, the will, and the intellect really do work out just like this is a matter harder for a man to decide than for a woman; but to me Mr. Bennett's account seems plausible. What is mainly important is that Hilda, whether she is psychologically true to life or not, is, at any rate, a conceivable person. She is presented as one more example of the spirit too large for its habitation. Cooped up with her mother in a little house in the Five Towns, she was in trouble not the less acute because "the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what." Hilda, maturing, steadfast, idealistic, with a desperate readiness to live through the inferior things of life if she could not now grasp the best, with a vitality which enables her to emerge again and again from tragedy that for most people would be final, is a contrast to her rather futile, fussy, merely experienced mother. Hilda flings herself into the work of a provincial newspaper office with the ardour of her idealism. Here was something she had set her mind on, and the practical quest was a religious passion, tragic in its way because the real result of the work was so paltry and sordid.

What was she? Nothing but a clerk at a commencing salary of fifteen shillings per week! Ah! but she was a priestess! She had a vocation which was unsoiled by the economic excuse. She was a pioneer. No young woman had ever done what she was doing. She was the only girl in the Five Towns who knew shorthand.

And Mr. Bennett succeeds in interesting us in the ambitious, speculative Cannon mainly by reason of the pathetically inadequate objects on which he lavishes the passion of his energies and his ideals--on a newspaper, a corrupt thing--on a boarding-house, a centre of triviality. And Miss Gailey, whose heart is set on her hot-water bottle and her cup of tea, and the easing of her rheumatism, interests us profoundly, because it is such death-in-life which may prove tragically destructive to the ascendant nature of a Hilda.

Mr. Bennett is not afraid of the drab side of life. But he never shows peevishness on the one side nor bloodless romanticism on the other. He sees this drab side, and he sees the passion of life--the aspiring human always trying to be more than it is, or can be, in some desperate, foolish way. This is the tragedy and the hopefulness of tragedy which Mr. Bennett has grasped. To possess a keen faculty of observation by which to present life exactly and realistically, and at the same time to re-imagine these facts so that the vividness, the intensity, the pitiful passion of life are what we mainly remember--to combine these two qualities as Mr. Bennett combines them is to hold a unique position in contemporary literature.

IV

GILBERT CHESTERTON

It has often been pointed out that the intellectuals--the people whose business it is to formulate opinions in Parliament, Press, and Pulpit--are not really expressing public opinion; they are only expressing the opinion of the intellectuals. Perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say that every civilised or semi-civilised human being may be divided into two persons, the one an individual who chooses, walks, eats, feels, and imagines in a private and personal way; the other a sort of official person who registers formal opinions when called upon to do so. The latter corresponds to the "intellectual," and is the dominant element in the souls of the ruling classes; whilst the former--the instinctive, the spontaneous, the common-sense element--dominates the man in the street.

It would not be far wrong to describe Mr. Chesterton's philosophy as a sort of sublimated public opinion _minus_ the opinion of the intellectuals. To get at what I mean I must for the moment ask the reader to think of Mr. Chesterton as an abstraction. Let him conceive an Englishman, unlike any existing Englishman, who has never heard of Darwin or Spencer; who has never been impregnated with the theory of induction or analytical psychology; an Englishman who has never read or heard of Macaulay, Froude, Carlyle, Ruskin, Bagehot, Mill, Seeley, or Mr. Frederic Harrison; who has read none of the poets since Milton; who has never been asked to consider the Reform Bill or the Education Bill, the Oxford Movement or the Æsthetic Movement, Realism or Impressionism, Non-Resistance or the Will to Power, Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Aylmer Maude, the Primrose League or the Labour Party, Mr. Yeats or even Mr. O'Finnigan. Let us imagine that this agreeable abstraction is in the habit of moving about among other abstractions like himself; that he knows a horse when he sees it (even if he cannot ride it); that he is accustomed to hospitable inn-parlours where you may discuss any philosophy so long as it is not a system; that he has a chivalrous admiration for women; that he likes sunshine and adores the moon; that he believes in God, the respectability of wives, ballad poetry, good fellowship, and good wine.

And now, having stripped Mr. Chesterton so that he is no longer even an attenuated ghost of himself, let us re-clothe him and present him decent and as he is. We must imagine this abstracted personage, ignorant and therefore unbiassed, suddenly introduced to all the learned jargon of the day. He still retains his simple views about things out of date, and is called upon to pronounce views upon entirely new matters--aristocracy and democracy, religion and scepticism, art and morality, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. A welter of odd ideas and delirious fanaticisms is suddenly sprung upon his simple consciousness. He finds all the intellectual circles in England working themselves into a fury about ideas, factitious ideas, which positively did not exist for him when he was a happy abstraction. Naturally, in his brief visit to the unabstracted world he has not time to study in detail all the philosophies which have been invented for the purpose of debate. But he goes round from circle to circle, listens to this argument and to that, notices the effect which the various philosophies have upon the characters of their exponents, and himself enters into the fun of debate as if he had never been an abstraction at all. He accepts the terminology which he finds ready made, but of course uses it in his own way--he is obviously unable to take anything for granted like the people who have always been intellectuals. He continually comes across queer verbal usages, and feels bound to declare that what we call free-thinking is not what we call free; that what we call certainties are also what we call uncertain; that aristocrats are unaristocratic; that doubters are dogmatists; and that tradition is an "extension of the franchise." And then the world, having never been out of its own generation, having never been anything so shocking as an abstraction, dismisses Mr. Chesterton with the smiling remark that he is, after all, a brilliant writer of paradoxes.

Let us for a moment put aside our own intellectual prejudices, our preconceptions, and follow Mr. Chesterton along his path of common sense. He himself, in his book on _Orthodoxy_, throws over the intellectuals. It is not that he refutes them--that would be a denial of his own method; nor that he has completely studied them--that would be a denial of his own character; but he does show us what havoc their methods may work upon the mind, what an overthrow of our workaday notions, our most vivid and keen impressions. If all the things that we seem to know the best, the emotions most natural to men "fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea"--if all these things stand for nothing, if they are not to be thought about by our philosophers, what have we got left? The cosmos? "The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in." He finds that the great popular thinkers--and it is right that he, a potent popular writer, should concern himself with these rather than with the systematic philosophers who observe conventions incomprehensible to the common mind--are each and all of them prone to follow exclusively some strange bent of thought, leading by pure reason to one of those awful conclusions which "tend to make a man lose his wits:" Tolstoy, for instance, reaching an unthinkable doctrine of self-sacrifice, Nietzsche an equally unthinkable doctrine of egoism, Ibsen, Haeckel, Mr. Shaw, Mr. McCabe--that never-to-be-forgotten Mr. McCabe--each of them by sheer force of logic betrayed into insanity.

Just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers. That unmistakable mood or note that I hear from Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses than one. They all have exactly that combination we have noted; the combination of one expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense. They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far. But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black. Like the lunatic, they cannot alter their standpoint, they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white.

Madness, he says, is "reason used without root, reason in the void." "Madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness." For he notes how some of the rationalists, in doubting everything, have cast doubt even on the validity of thought. The complete sceptic says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." The intellect has destroyed, but has not constructed; there is no proposition which is not doubted, no ideal which is not an object of attack; there is no rebel who has a sure faith in his own revolt, no fanatic except the fanatic about nothing. Where are the common things--the things we used to know and care about--the self-contradictory things if you like, but the realities--the things which make men kill their enemies, go gladly to the stake, or shut themselves in a hermitage?

All these are things which, Mr. Chesterton thinks, the intellectual is willing to throw overboard at the bidding of intellect. But he would rather throw over intellectualism. He prefers to abide by the "test of the imagination," the "test of fairyland." "The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a _magic_ tree. Water runs down-hill because it is bewitched." The so-called "laws of nature" are not one whit less mysterious because of their uniformity. And again: "It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clock-work." Mr. Chesterton supposes exactly the opposite. "Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again;' and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun, and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon.... Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop."

Is not this, someone will say, only the _Religio Medici_ over again? Is it not more than two and a half centuries since Sir Thomas Browne said: "That there was a deluge once seems not to me so great a miracle as that there is not one always;" and "where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy;" and "I can answer all the objections of Satan and every rebellious reason, with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, _Certum est quia impossibile est?_" Yes, it has all been expressed in the _Religio_; but it is no small matter that, in spite of Spencer, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, and Mr. Sidney Webb, there should still be a modern and a popular way of using the thoughts of Sir Thomas Browne. Mr. Chesterton has been driven into this apparent reaction by the scientific thinkers to whom he was introduced with the scantiest preparation. "It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to Orthodox theology." His supernaturalism, which he identifies with orthodox Christianity, I should prefer to call the Romance of Christianity--Romance implying not falsity, but the desirable and the ideal. He deliberately takes that which he and other people _admire_ or _want_ as the standard of truth. "I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I." "The _heart_ of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more _satisfied_ by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice...." Mr. Chesterton defends what he calls Christianity not so much on the ground that it is credible, but on the ground that it is satisfying, that it is agreeable.

I say "what he calls Christianity," for his argument is prone to fall into a vicious circle; he arbitrarily calls all that is satisfying to him by the name of Christianity. It endorses, he says, a "first loyalty to things" and enjoins the "reform of things;" it commands a man "not only to look inwards, but to look outwards." God is a part of the cosmos, and yet he is distinct from it and from us, or we could not worship him. Christianity commands us to desire to live, and it commands us to be glad to die (and this contradiction, he says, like all the others, is human, just as the virtue of courage is human; for does not courage mean "a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die?"). It is against compromise, against the "dilution of two things" neither of which "is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour;" it endorses the extremes of pride and humility, anger and love, mercy and severity. It is full-blooded, allowing place for every human emotion, directing anger against the crime, and love towards the criminal. And he draws a fanciful and grotesque picture of the Christian Church as a "heavenly chariot" whirling through the ages "fierce and fast with any war-horse," swerving "to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous obstacles."

I shall not examine this fanciful picture. The Christian Church may have indulged every extreme in human life, but the Christianity of the Bible takes sides more definitely. And as for the Catholic Church, embracing as it did so many seemingly contradictory elements, it is nevertheless true that at one time it failed to satisfy human nature because it was too ascetic, and at another time it caused bloody revolt because it was worldly and luxurious. I need not pursue this question, for the "orthodoxy" which Mr. Chesterton defends is not the teaching of the Christian Churches. At first sight it seems to be anarchy modified by mysticism and friendship for persons. But it is more than that. Negatively it is a protest against false culture and cant, and we cannot fail to see that it is at the same time a protest against that virtue which is the predecessor of false culture--the incessant, arduous effort to seek truth with the help of the intellect and the reason. Positively, it champions the spiritual perceptions on the one hand, and the physical sensations on the other--the excellences of the manifold activities of the human body and soul. Both in his view provide the proper avenues of truth. Every spiritual emotion and every animal passion are in themselves good and excellent. For him the struggle of life resolves itself into a romantic game, with immortality as its conclusion. The one discipline which he upholds, the only precept he has really taken from Christianity, is that arising from love for your neighbour. That unnamable quality in life which in every deeper feeling and every keen perception lights the spirit and charges it with intuitive knowledge is in his philosophy the love of God and the source of the love for persons.

V

SOME MODERN POETS

A few years ago it was the fashion to lament the dearth of promising authors, especially poets. But since then we have assured ourselves that we are still, after all, a poetical people. The reproach against the age was taken as a challenge by dozens of young adventurers, who resolved to prove in their own persons that the twentieth century was not without poets. Tiny volumes of verse fluttered forth from the press. Poetry Societies were started, and Poetry Reviews, and men and women met in the darkened hall of Clifford's Inn to hear Mr. Sturge Moore declaim sonorous verses. Publishers began to advertise new genius, and reviewers began to attend to poetry as if it were really a serious business. The opening pages of _The English Review_ were devoted to poems which seemed to be appreciated in proportion to their ever-increasing length. Mr. John Masefield had a success such as had been attained by no poet since Stephen Phillips in his prime. It is true that Mr. W.H. Davies might have starved if he had not received a Government pension; that Mr. Yeats--I believe I am right--never entertained the idea of supporting himself by poetry; that Mr. Doughty has not so much as been heard of by one Englishman in a thousand. Nevertheless, poetry has now become a mentionable subject in decent society; and it is no longer synonymous with Tennyson or Mr. Kipling. It has become a modern thing, lending itself to new experiments, a possible vehicle for new ideas, a means even of becoming notorious on a grand scale.

But before considering some of these younger authors who represent newer phases in poetry I should like to dwell a little upon the work of an elder--one who is not by any means so exquisite a poet as Mr. Robert Bridges, who cannot compare in creative vigour with the greater poets who were contemporary with him, nor with his junior, Mr. W.B. Yeats--but interesting for purposes of comparison because his poetry, even his quite recent poetry, has in it the ring of a past age, of a poetic ideal to which we are not likely to return in this century. I allude to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whom we all think of as a distinguished student and critic of literature, but it is very seldom that we hear any allusion to his poetical work. "Anyone who has the patience to turn over these pages," he says in the Preface to his _Collected Poems_, "will not need to be told that the voice is not of 1911--it is of 1872, or of a still earlier date--since my technique was determined more than forty years ago, and what it was it has remained." When first I read these words they sounded strangely to me. It was only the other day that he began to edit a distinguished literary page for a daily paper. Still more recently I heard him speaking on a public platform. His activity does not seem to be a thing of yesterday, and it was he who wrote the most intimate and, perhaps, the most interesting biographical study of recent years; as editor and critic he is still amongst active living writers. In reading his later poems we can see how keen is his desire to retain sensibility to the full, not to become stereotyped by the past, or blind to the newer beauties. He is conscious of the passage of the Time-Spirit and the changed ways of men, and the passionate desire of all vital minds to be fully percipient to the last.

So, if I pray for length of days,
It is not in the barren pride
That looks behind itself, and says,
"The Past alone is deified!"

Nay, humbly, shrinkingly, in dread
Of fires too splendid to be borne--
In expectation lest my head
Be from its Orphic shoulders torn--