IIMR. ARNOLD BENNETT CONFESSES

Mr. Bennett is at once a connoisseur and a card. He not only knows things but has an air of knowing things. He lets you know that he is “in the know.” He has a taking way of giving information as though it were inside information. He is the man of genius as tipster. InThings That Have Interested Mehe gives us tips about painting, music, literature, acting, war, politics, manners and morals. He never hesitates: even when he is hinting about the future, he seems to do it with a nod that implies, “You may take my word for it.” There was never a less speculative author. Mr. Wells precipitates himself into eternity or the twenty-first century in search of things that really matter. Mr. Bennett is equally inquisitive, but he is inquisitive in a different way and almost entirely about his own time. Where Mr. Wells speculates, Mr. Bennett finds out, and, “when found, makes a note.” He gives one the impression of a man with apassion for buttonholing experts. He could interest himself for a time in any expert—an expert footballer or an expert Civil Servant or an expert violinist or an expert washerwoman. He likes to see the wheels of contemporary life—even the smallest wheel—at work, and to learn the secrets of the machine. His attitude to life is suggested by the fact that he has written a book calledThe Human Machine, and that it is inconceivable that he should write a book calledThe Human Soul. This is not to deny Mr. Bennett’s vivid imaginative interest in things. It is merely to point out that it is the interest not of a mystic but of a contemporary note-taker. That is the circle within which his genius works, and it is a genius without a rival of its kind in the literature of our time. He pursues his facts with something of the appetite of a Boswell, though more temperately. He has common sense where Boswell was a fool, however. Mr. Bennett, finding that even a glass of champagne and, perhaps, a spoonful of brandy taken regularly had the effect of clogging his “own particular machine,” decided to drink no alcohol at all. Boswell might have taken the same decision, but he could not have kept to it. Mr. Bennett, none the less, is as fantastic in his common sense as was Boswell in his folly. Each of them is a fantastic buttonholer.It is this element in him that raises Mr. Bennett so high above all the other more or less realistic writers of his time.

Things That Have Interested Meis a book of confessions that could have been written by no other living man. His style—perky, efficient, decisive—is the echo of a personality. What other critic of the arts would express his enthusiasm for great painting just like this?

It was fortunate for Turner that Girtin died early. He might have knocked spots off Turner. And, while I am about the matter, I may as well say that I doubt whether Turner was well advised in having his big oil-paintings hung alongside of Claude’s in the National Gallery. The ordeal was the least in the world too severe for them. Still, I would not deny that Turner was a very great person.

Such a paragraph, with its rapid series of terse judgments, is defiantly interesting. It is not only the “You may take it from me” attitude that fascinates us: it is the “me” from whom you may take it. It is an excited “me” as well as a cocksure “me.” Mr. Bennett is an enthusiast, as you may see when, writing of Brabazon, he affirms:

In my opinion his “Taj Mahal” is the finest water-coloursketchever done. He probably did it in about a quarter of an hour.

Or, turning to literature, he will tell you:

Similarly will a bond be created if you ask a man where is the finest modern English prose and he replies: “InThe 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’sCountry of the Blind, and Mr. Bennett’s ownMatador 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 Iknow 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 Lostis 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 consciousgaucherieof 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 bookis 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 wroteCupid 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 inThings that Have Interested Mefor 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 ofthe 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.

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