IF taking a map
of
The belief is
as old as county pride, and it arises from two circumstances. The first of
these was early isolation from the rest of the community; the second, great
industrial wealth and distinction in the nineteenth century. As to the first,
there was formerly little communication between Staffordshire and London or the
sea; and although at the beginning of the eighteenth century Daniel Defoe said
its men were famous as fine runners, and at Penkridge,
near Stafford, found them impressive horse-dealers, he remarked no industries
in the county except the brewing of good ale at Tamworth and a recent local
increase in the clothing trade. English roads were then extremely primitive;
national business was done in the great ports, such as
But as the
eighteenth century ended Staffordshire began to move towards its later
prosperity. Its water-logged mines were pumped and good coal was obtained. Iron
was worked. And Josiah Wedgwood developed what had been a small village
industry into a great craft and the most celebrated source of the county's immense
wealth.
Staffordshire
men, inheriting the pride of their ancestors in isolation, were no longer
members of a sparse and unrecognized community. They were respected as
craftsmen all over the world. The villages where pottery was made became towns—Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Tunstall,
and Longton—and sent their wares by every new means
of transport to centres from which they travelled across the oceans. Pride of
craft, pride in uncommon wisdom, pride in prosperity
gave the whole county an assurance of being and making the best there was in
Pride was
justified. Staffordshire had in fact produced one man whose predominant
characteristics were those of the whole race. He was born in the south of the
county, in the city of
Johnson was the
most stupendous of all the sons of Staffordshire. As, however, for more than
fifty years, he lived and worked and triumphantly browbeat his conversational
opponents in London, he is often taken for a true-born Cockney; and therefore
Staffordshire has had as little general credit for him as for another classic
English writer, Izaak Walton, who was born in
Stafford itself. Only the work and fame of the original Josiah Wedgwood, and
the anonymous work of other fine craftsmen, have saved the county from apparent
bankruptcy in the arts. It produced pottery, coal, and iron; but in every other
respect remained entirely undistinguished.
A dreary
county, men thought, passing through it to the more eminent beauties of north
or south; black, inhuman, uninteresting. The fame of its pottery was of course
tremendous. But the potter's craft had made it merely repulsive. So much was
shown by George Moore in A Mummer's Wife, when he pictured the outlook from
Hanley as:
One of those terrible cauldrons in which man
melts and moulds this huge age of iron. Of what
did this valley consist? of black plains that the sunlight could not change in
colour; of patches of grass, hard and metallic in hue, of tanks of water
glittering like blades of steel; of gigantic smoke clouds rolling over the
stems of a thousand factory chimneys....
Kate stood on the side of a steep
declivity. Through its worn sides black cinders protruded, and the ruins of
deserted collieries stood close at hand.... So black was everything that even
the spire of the church remained a silhouette in the liquid sun-light that was
poured as out of a diamond vase from the long pale space of sky which rose
behind the hills.
That was
Staffordshire as a stranger saw it in 1885 Who would
have supposed that it could produce an artist who, without falsification, would
give the county in the eyes of the world a new air of life, beauty, and
romance? Yet it was within sight of such a scene as this that, on 27 May 1867,
Enoch Arnold Bennett was born; and it was from youth spent in these
surroundings that he drew the inspiration for the whole of his best work. How
was it done? I shall try to explain.
The place of
his birth was go
This was the
man who for the first time made five continents aware of Staffordshire as
Staffordshire saw itself. The county is now grateful to Arnold Bennett for
doing it an immense service. If little gratitude was shown during his lifetime,
that is in accordance with the Staffordshire character, which exhibits a cool unreadiness to display— perhaps even to feel—deep emotion,
and which sternly checks all such display in others. When Arnold Bennett, as a
man of celebrated middle-age, allowed himself any exuberance of humour in his
mother's presence, she would calmly suppress him with the voice of all Staffordshire.
'Nay, Enoch', she would quietly say, deliberately using his discarded first
name. It was enough. He was at once restored to the state of being 'outwardly
brusque, stoical, undemonstrative, scornful of the
impulsive'.
Working in the
same
At this time he
made other friends; and it was taken for granted by them, for they were
artists, that he would one day become a writer. He became a writer. At first
his efforts were slight, the humorous condensation into a couple of thousand
words of a long novel by James Payn, and some popular
articles about legal details; but his experiences of free-lance journalism were
not happy, and he was soon glad to obtain the sub-editorship of a weekly
journal called Woman. He became editor of this journal, wrote a short story
which, rejected by Tit-Bits, was accepted by The Yellow Book; and
resolved to write a novel. It was to be 'unlike all English novels except those
of one author' (George Moore); and, 'life being grey, sinister, and melancholy,
the novel must be grey, sinister, and melancholy'. His own life was by no
means, he later remarked, grey or sinister, or melancholy; but he was in the
grip of French realism, and the fact that Moore had set the scene of A
Mummer's Wife in the Potteries had a great effect upon Bennett's mind. It
proved in the end to be crucial.
This first novel,
finally entitled A Man from the North, was published in 1898 by
Realism,
however, was not abandoned. A Mummer's Wife had impressed him very much
with its power and its Staffordshire setting; and he had seen how well fitted
he was by experience to become the historian of life in the
Anna of the
Five Towns was for long Bennett's most ambitious book; and it seems to me most
interesting to contrast the description it contains of industrial Staffordshire
with the one by George Moore which I quoted earlier. Besides remarking that
Bennett varied the names of the Five Towns for his own reasons, I should like
especially to draw attention to his emphasis, which is so characteristic, on
the beauty and the romance of what
Bursley, the
ancient home of the potter, has an antiquity of a thousand years. It lies
towards the north end of an extensive valley, which must have been one of the
fairest spots in Alfred's England, but which is now defaced by the activities
of a quarter of a million people. Five contiguous towns— Turnhill,
Bursley, Hanbridge, Knype, and Longshaw—united by a
single winding thoroughfare some eight miles in length, have inundated the
valley like a succession of great lakes. Of these five Bursley
is the mother, but Hanbridge is the largest. They are
mean and forbidding of aspect—sombre, hard-featured, uncouth;
and the vaporous poison of their ovens and chimneys has soiled and shrivelled
the surrounding countryside tiff there is no village lane within a league but
what offers a gaunt and ludicrous travesty of rural charms. Nothing could be
more prosaic than the huddled, red-brown streets; nothing more seemingly remote
from romance. Yet be it said that romance is even here—the romance which, for
those who have an eye to perceive it, ever dwells amid the seats of industrial manufacture,
softening the coarseness, transfiguring the squalor, of these mighty alchemic
operations. Look down into the valley from this terrace-height,
. . . embrace the whole smoke-girt amphitheatre in a glance, and it may
be that you will suddenly comprehend the secret and superb significance of the
vast Doing which goes forward below. Because they seldom think, the townsmen
take shame when indicted for having disfigured half a county in order to live.
They have not understood that this disfigurement is merely an episode in the
unending warfare of man and nature.
You will see
from these phrases that Bennett already half-consciously indicated the
difference of his own attitude from that of previous English realists such as
Gissing, and from that of George Moore. Though the difference was no more than
indicated, though he still saw the novelist's art through the eyes of Moore and
the brothers de Goncourt, he showed that, for him, realism must be coloured
with his own temperamental humanity. It was not enough for him to see and
record, or, as Gissing did, to arraign; he must, because that was his nature,
see as a god, and record as one who looked, not sentimentally, but with
compassion, for what is good or tolerable in mankind. 'Essential characteristic
of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion', he had
already noted in his Journal. This remained throughout life his aim as a man.
At the time he wrote Anna of the Five Towns, however, he was still
young, actively curious about everything he had not experienced, and decidedly
ambitious. The stammer was his great handicap; otherwise he could dissemble his
fears, boast, be downright as Samuel Johnson was down-right, and, to his secret
surprise, impress others as a man of destined success. He had resigned the
editorship of Woman in 1900, retired to Bedfordshire to live with his
mother and sister, and become both a publisher's reader and a man of letters.
Having decided, after the publication of Anna of the Five Towns and The
Grand Babylon Hotel, that he could make a living by writing novels of three
kinds—realistic, sensational, and humorous—short stories, articles, and plays,
he felt it his duty as a good realist to do what George Moore had done, and go
to live in Paris, the home of modern realism.
He lived in
Paris or Fontainebleau for the next ten years, fell in love with an American
girl, married a French woman, matured, wrote all the kinds of work he had
planned to write, did in fact far too many things less well than he might have
done them, and was inspired to write the novel which is regarded as his
masterpiece. When he returned to
The masterpiece
was called The Old Wives' Tale. The first notion for it came to him in
1903, when he went out to dine alone in his- usual cheap Parisian restaurant.
He discovered that:
A middle-aged woman, inordinately stout
and with pendent cheeks, had taken the seat opposite to my prescriptive seat. I
hesitated, as there were plenty of empty places, but my waitress requested me
to take my usual chair. I did so, and immediately
thought: with that thing opposite to me my dinner will be spoilt!' But the
woman was evidently also cross at my filling up her table, and she went away,
picking up all her belongings, to another part of the restaurant, breathing
hard.
Then she abandoned her second choice for a
third one. My waitress was scornful and angry at this desertion, but laughing
also. soon all the waitresses were privately laughing
at the goings-on of the fat woman, who was being served by the most beautiful
waitress I have ever seen in any Duval. The fat woman was dearly a crotchet, a
'maniaque', a woman who lived much alone. Her cloak
(she displayed on taking off it a simply awful light puce flannel dress) and
her parcels were continually the object of her attention and she was always
arguing with her waitress. And the whole restaurant secretly made a butt of
her. she was repulsive; no one could like her or
sympathize with her, but I thought—she has been young and slim once. And I
immediately thought of a long 10 or 15 thousand words short story, The History of Two Old
Women. I gave this woman a sister, fat as herself. And the
first chapter would be in the restaurant (both sisters) something like
to-night—and written rather cruelly. Then I would go back to the infancy of
these two, and sketch it all. One should have lived ordinarily married
prosaically, and become a widow. The other should have become a whore, and all
that; 'guild splendour', both are overtaken by age, not too rich, a nuisance to
themselves and to others.... I saw the whole work quite clearly, and hope to do
it.
He must have
pondered that story for several years; and as his imagination worked on the
material it changed the story from a short one to a very long one, warmed it, gave it colour and humour and great kindness. Nothing in the
book was written 'rather cruelly'. The sisters did not become 'a nuisance to
themselves and to others. The less prosaic of them kept her virtue. And neither
the restaurant nor the infancy figured in The Old Wives' Tale. But,
above all, imagination told Bennett to set the book's main scene in the heart
of Staffordshire, the heart of
Not the infancy
of the sisters, but their girlhood, opens The Old Wives' Tale and gives
it immediate life:
Those two girls, Constance and Sophia
Baines, paid no heed to the manifold interest of their situation, of which,
indeed, they had never been conscious. They were, for example, established
almost precisely on the fifty-third parallel of latitude. A little way to the
north of them, in the creases of a hill famous for its religious orgies, rose the river
Fifty pages
later, when Mr. Baines, dying, has forbidden Sophia to become a teacher, and
she is unwell with agitation, their mother waits upon the two girls, to give
Sophia a dose of quite superfluous castor-oil:
'I
don't want any, Mother,' said Sophia, in dejection. 'I'm quite well.'
'You
simply ate nothing all day yesterday,' said Mrs. Baines. And she added, 'Come!'
As if to say, 'There's always this silly fuss with castor-oil. Don't keep me
waiting.'
'I
don't want any,' said Sophia, irritated and captious.
The
two girls lay side by side, on their backs. They seemed very thin and fragile
in comparison with the solidity of their mother.
Mrs.
Baines put her lips together, meaning: This is becoming tedious. I shall have to
be angry in another moment.'
'Come!'
said she again.
The
girls could hear her foot tapping on the floor.
'I
really don't want it, Mamma,' Sophia fought. 'I suppose I ought to know whether
I need it or not!' This was insolence.
'Sophia,
will you take this medicine, or won't you?'
In
conflicts with her children, the mother's ultimatum always took the formula in
which this phrase was cast. The girls knew, when things had arrived at the
pitch of 'or won't you', spoken in Mrs. Baines's
firmest tone, that the end was upon them. Never had the ultimatum failed.
There
was a silence.
'And
I'll thank you to mind your manners,' Mrs. Brines added.
'I
won't take it,' said Sophia, sullenly and flatly; and she hid her face in the
pillow.
It
was a historic moment in the family life. Mrs. Baines thought the last day had
come. But still she held herself in dignity while the apocalypse roared in her
ears.
'Of
course I can't force you to take it,' she said with superb evenness, masking
anger by compassionate grief 'You're a big girl and a naughty girl. And if you
will be ill you must.'
Upon
this immense admission, Mrs. Baines departed.
Sophia is the
rebel; but it is Constance who has the endurance to make her life in the Five
Towns and, at the end of the book, to survive her sister for a little while.
And at the end of her days:
Nobody in
I have written,
he once admitted, between seventy and eighty books. But also I have only
written four: The Old Wives' Tale, The Card, Clayhanger, and Riceyman
Steps. All the others are made a reproach to me because they are neither The
Old Wives' Tale, nor The Card, nor Clayhanger,
nor Riceyman Steps.
It was from The
Old Wives' Tale that he never escaped.
However, his
reputation was made in 1908, and he continued to behave, with his pen, as if he
were still the unknown young man of 1900 who could produce sensational serials,
'frolics' (such as A Great Man and The Card ), short stories,
articles, and plays, without anybody sharply calling him to order for
frivolity. Censors were soon aroused. But what these censors did not realize
was that, while in
Of those other
books by which Bennett claimed that he was judged, he
wrote The Card, an extravaganza portraying a typical Five Towns
adventurer, while on holiday in
Clayhanger itself, with fine pictures of the constraints and
spiritual adventures of young life in the
I have always
believed that this first of the overwhelming wars of our time destroyed
Bennett's confidence in the importance of his own work. He still continued
doggedly to produce These Twain in the midst of every other activity and
in spite of every other demand upon his strength; but the strength was impaired
and the belief that novel-writing was an occupation worthy of man was shaken.
His sensitiveness was highly abnormal; the characteristics of modern warfare
horrified him; his old rigid Methodism was deeply shocked by the avid
sensationalism of a kind of society which he now entered for the first time. He
remembered, of course, that he belonged to the North, and that he must continue
to be 'outwardly brusque, stoical, undemonstrative, scornful of the impulsive',
and he wrote journalism the object of which was to sustain the civilian
population of Great Britain. He worked at the Ministry of Information; he met
and corresponded with the war leaders in both
I said that
Bennett wrote wartime journalism. He had been a journalist all his life. From
the time when, as a boy, he supplied little paragraphs to the Hanley newspaper,
and, as sub-editor and editor of Woman, gossip and advice to his
readers, and critical reviews to the Academy, short homilies (afterwards
reprinted in book form under self-help titles such as 'How to Live on
Twenty-four Hours a Day', and 'Mental Efficiency') to T.P.'s Weekly, and occasional contributions
to many other newspapers, to the time when he made all London talk of his
brilliant causeries about books (collected in Books and Persons) in The
New Age, he was in constant action. Then, during the 1914-18 war, he contributed
regularly to the Daily News; and at last, until his death, he wrote for
the Evening Standard the most highly paid book reviews in
He was not
therefore a journalist when he wrote novels; and it is upon his novels that
Bennett's ultimate reputation as a writer will depend. The novels, as I have
indicated, belong to three orders; the realistic studies of men and women in
their appropriate environment, the sensational or extravagant presentations of
men and women in environments wholly fantastic, the humorous—some say
facetious—comedies of character and circumstance of which The Card is
the best example, although Buried Alive, the book on which his play The
Great Adventure is based, has many delights. In every case the best of his
novels has its main scene in the
In person he
was of the middle height—five feet ten inches—and except for one period during
the first world war, when he put on flesh and was caricatured as a fat man with
a quiff of hair, a fob and a pompous manner, was slightly built. One shoulder
was always held, stiffly, rather above the other, and he walked slowly and very
erect. His stammer I have described; it was not a stutter, but a complete,
rocking inability to produce the word he eventually, by force of will, uttered.
This stammer communicated itself to some of his work, and made it seem
unnecessarily abrupt. His natural humour was without self-consciousness, and
never caused him to speak unkindly. When he was harsh, it was towards scoundrelism: he would say of a rogue 'He . . . is a bad
man'. He could and did talk very well in congenial company; otherwise he
remained silent. What he thought, he wrote. He was a writer.
If you have
noted the difference between the paragraph with which he began The Old
Wives' Tale and the paragraph describing the neighbourhood of Hanley which
I quoted from Anna of the Five Towns, you will have seen that when once
Bennett had assumed his natural style he was not afraid to allow humour to
colour his most realistic work. He was still afraid of humour when he wrote the
best of his early serious tales, Whom God Hath Joined; but by the time
he came to The Old Wives' Tale he was entirely at ease with his own
method. The humour was humane; he really liked men and women. It was one of his
dogmatic remarks that nine out of ten of them improved on acquaintance; and he
was so well acquainted with the people in his novels that, from Mr. Povey to Denry Machin, and Edwin Clay-hanger to Auntie Hamps,
they are seen with, as it were, improved comprehension. They are our friends;
but not inconveniently our friends.
When he let his
humour drop, and became very serious (or very French), as in Sacred and
Profane Love or The Glimpse, the
result was hard, superficial, and incredible. When he gave it rein, as in A
Great Man, Buried Alive, The Card, The Regent, or Mr.
Prohack, it was sometimes triumphant but
sometimes, if the liveliness of composition had faded, less irresistible than
it might have been. In The Regent it had lost all liveliness and become
jocularity. When he carried it into adventure stories, such as The Grand
Babylon Hotel, Hugo, and other, less successful, tales, it often robbed the
adventures of danger. In plays it was almost always extremely effective in the
theatre; such plays as What the Public Wants, The
Title, The Great Adventure were all delightful entertainment. No more than
that. They represented the easiest of fun for Bennett. He did not attach the
smallest importance to them, or to the more uniformly successful play in which
he collaborated with Edward Knoblock, Milestones.
It was,
however, the union of humour with resolute truthfulness which gave Bennett his
distinction. He would lie in fun, and with extravagance; but the prime quality
in his most ambitious writing is its integrity. There is no falsification.
Those who suppose that he compromised, or wrote for money or popularity, do not
understand that he was—what they are not—tolerant of defects in mankind. He was
not tolerant of the petty vices of deceit, treachery, spitefulness, and
censoriousness. For those he felt contempt. But he was tolerant of the faults
of character. When he said, early in his life, that the characteristic of a
great novelist should be a Christ-like compassion, he spoke for his whole
history as a man and a writer. He could laugh—at, for example, the foibles of
dwellers in the Five Towns—but he did not laugh cruelly. No less cruel
man ever lived. And that freedom from cruelty in its every form, from bad
conscience and from hatred and jealousy, is to be read in all his novels. All
are humane.
The faults of
his work, which, as in the case of all great, unequal writers, are many, can be
briefly indicated. He wrote at several levels. He was, being a Staffordshire
man, either incapable of showing passion or of feeling it; I think the latter.
He could be grim, sardonic, accusing; but he had learned as a boy to be
stoical, and I believe that, for all the virtues of restraint in literature, he
could with advantage have been more emotional. When he tried to express an abandonment to emotion, as in Sacred and Profane Love,
he failed. The weakest part of The Pretty Lady is the part relating to
the lady's emotions. The weakest part of The Old Wives' Tale is the part
in which Sophia ceases to belong to the Five Towns. And, finally, in his plays,
his lesser books, and even in the Clayhanger trilogy,
there is a meagreness or carelessness of design. I think this also arose from
his Staffordshire upbringing; a mistrust of the grandiose, of, in fact, the
tragic. 'In the county excess is deprecated.' For him, the nearest approach to
tragedy is the pathos of old age. That pathos runs through all his books; but there
is nothing in them of tragedy. His attitude is that of
Within his
range, however, which he perfectly understood and commanded, Bennett has a
mastery not approached by any other realistic novelist of our age. His
characters are there as people; they are there as types of the
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