Chapter VIII

iii

“Yet, if I were to begin again, I would go through it all, the rejections at the beginning, the hard work, the envious and malicious hands reached up to pull down anyone who has risen ever so little above his fellows. Not for the money reward, although that has been large, not for the publicity, although I am frank enough to say I would probably miss being pointed out in a crowd! But because of two things: the friends I have made all over the world, and the increased outlook and a certain breadth of perception and knowledge that must come as the result of years of such labour. I am not so intolerant as in those early days. I love my kind better. I find the world good, to work and to play in.

“I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career, that I should say: ‘First, pick your husband.’

“It is impossible to try to tell how I have attempted to reconcile my private life with my public work without mentioning my husband. Because, after all, it requires two people, a man and a woman, to organise a home, and those two people must be in accord. It has been a sort of family creed of ours that we do things together. We have tried, because of the varied outside interests that pull hard, to keep the family life even more intact than the average. Differing widely as they do, my husband’s profession and my career,we have been compelled to work apart. But we have relaxed, rested and played, together.

“And this rule holds good for the family. Generally speaking, we have been a sort of closed corporation, a board of five, with each one given a vote and the right to cast it. Holidays and home matters, and picnics and dogs, and everything that is of common interest all come up for a discussion in which the best opinion wins. The small boy had a voice as well as the biggest boy. And it worked well.

“It is not because we happened to like the same things. People do not happen to like the same things. It is because we tried to, and it is because we have really all grown up together.

“Thus in the summer we would spend weeks in the saddle in the mountains of the Far West, or fishing in Canada. But let me be entirely frank here. These outdoor summers were planned at first because there were four men and one woman in our party. Now, however, I love the open as the men do.”

“Writing is a clean profession. The writer gets out of it exactly what he puts in, no more and no less. It is one-man work. No one can help. The writer works alone, solitary and unaided. And, contrary to the general opinion, what the writer has done in the past does not help him in thefuture. He must continue to make good, day after day.

“More than that he must manufacture a new article every day, and every working hour of his day. He cannot repeat himself. Can you imagine a manufacturer turning out something different all the time? And his income stopping if he has a sick headache, or goes to a funeral?”

Next to the vitality, the variety of Mrs. Rinehart’s work is most noticeable. Her first novel,The Circular Staircase, was a mystery tale, and so was her second,The Man in Lower Ten. She has, from time to time, continued to write excellent mystery stories.The Breaking Pointis, from one standpoint, a first class mystery story; and then there is that enormously successful mystery play, written by Mrs. Rinehart in conjunction with Avery Hopwood,The Bat. Nor was this her first success as a playwright for she collaborated with Mr. Hopwood in writing the farceSeven Days. Shall I add that Mrs. Rinehart has lived part of her life in haunted houses? I am under the impression that more than one of her residences has been found to be suitably or unsuitably haunted. There was that house at Bellport on Long Island—but I really don’t know the story. I do know that the family’s experience has been such as to provide material for one or more very good mysterynovels. My own theory is that Mrs. Rinehart’s indubitable gift for the creation of mystery yarns has been responsible for the facts. I imagine that the haunting of the houses has been a projection into some physical plane of her busy sub-consciousness. I mean, simply, that instead of materialising as a story, her preoccupation induced a set of actual and surprising circumstances. Why couldn’t it? Let Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Society for Psychical Research, anybody who knows about that sort of thing, explain!

Consider the stories about Letitia Carberry. Tish is without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement loving, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other elderly maidens like herself; with a nephew who throws up hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Tish is funny beyond all description.

Just as diverting, in a quite different way, is Bab, the sub-deb and forerunner of the present-day flapper.

Something like a historical romance isLong Live the King!—a story of a small boy, Crown Prince of a Graustark kingdom, whose scrapes and friendships and admiration of Abraham Lincoln are strikingly contrasted with court intrigues and uncovered treason.

The Amazing Interludeis the story of Sara Lee Kennedy, who went from a Pennsylvania city to the Belgian front to make soup for the soldiersand to fall in love with Henri.... But one could go on with other samples of Mrs. Rinehart’s abundant variety. I think, however, that the vitality of her work, and not the variety nor the success in variety, is our point. That vitality has its roots in a sympathetic feeling and a sanative humour not exceeded in the equipment of any popular novelist writing in America today.

Booksby Mary Roberts Rinehart

Books

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASETHE MAN IN LOWER TENWHEN A MAN MARRIESTHE WINDOW AT THE WHITE CATTHE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRYWHERE THERE’S A WILLTHE CASE OF JENNY BRICETHE AFTER HOUSETHE STREET OF SEVEN STARSKTHROUGH GLACIER PARKTISHTHE ALTAR OF FREEDOMLONG LIVE THE KINGTENTING TO-NIGHTBAB, A SUB-DEBKINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNSTHE AMAZING INTERLUDETWENTY-THREE AND A HALF HOURS’ LEAVEDANGEROUS DAYSMORE TISHLOVE STORIESAFFINITIES AND OTHER STORIES“ISN’T THAT JUST LIKE A MAN?”THE TRUCE OF GODA POOR WISE MANSIGHT UNSEEN AND THE CONFESSIONTHE BREAKING POINT

THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE

THE MAN IN LOWER TEN

WHEN A MAN MARRIES

THE WINDOW AT THE WHITE CAT

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY

WHERE THERE’S A WILL

THE CASE OF JENNY BRICE

THE AFTER HOUSE

THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS

THROUGH GLACIER PARK

TISH

THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM

LONG LIVE THE KING

TENTING TO-NIGHT

BAB, A SUB-DEB

KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS

THE AMAZING INTERLUDE

TWENTY-THREE AND A HALF HOURS’ LEAVE

DANGEROUS DAYS

MORE TISH

LOVE STORIES

AFFINITIES AND OTHER STORIES

“ISN’T THAT JUST LIKE A MAN?”

THE TRUCE OF GOD

A POOR WISE MAN

SIGHT UNSEEN AND THE CONFESSION

THE BREAKING POINT

Sourceson Mary Roberts Rinehart

Sources

on Mary Roberts Rinehart

“My Creed: The Way to Happiness—As I Found It,” by Mary Roberts Rinehart. AMERICAN MAGAZINE, October, 1917.

“Mary Roberts Rinehart as She Appears” by Robert H. Davis, AMERICAN MAGAZINE, October, 1917.

“My Public” by Mary Roberts Rinehart, THE BOOKMAN, December, 1920.

The Women Who Make Our Novels, by Grant Overton, MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY.

Who’s Who in America.

Chapter VIIITHEY HAVE ONLY THEMSELVES TO BLAME

If people will write memoirs, they must expect to suffer. They have only themselves to blame if life becomes almost intolerable from the waves of praise and censure. I am going to speak of some books of memoirs and biography—highly personal and decidedly unusual books, in the main by persons who are personages.

The Life of Sir William Vernon Harcourtconcerns Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, who was born in 1827 and died in 1904. He was an English statesman, grandson of Edward Vernon Harcourt, Archbishop of York. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1854. He entered Parliament (for Oxford) in 1868, sat for Derby 1880-95, and for West Monmouthshire, 1895-1904. He was Solicitor-general 1873-74, Home Secretary 1880-85 and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1886, 1892-94 and 1894-95. From March, 1894, to December, 1898, he was leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons.He wrote in the London Times under the signature of “Historicus” a series of letters on International Law, which were republished in 1863. His biography, which begins before Victoria ascended the throne and closes after her death, is the work of A. G. Gardiner.

Memoirs of the Memorableis by Sir James Denham, the poet-author of “Wake Up, England!” and deals with most of the prominent social names of the end of the last and commencement of this century, including Mr. Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Robert Browning, the Bishop of London, Cardinal Howard, Lord Dunedin, Lewis Carroll, Lord Marcus Beresford and the late Bishop of Manchester. The book also deals with club life and the leading sportsmen.

The Pomp of Poweris by an author who very wisely remains anonymous, like the author ofThe Mirrors of Downing Street. I shall not run the risks of perjury by asserting or denying that the author ofThe Mirrors of Downing Streethas writtenThe Pomp of Power. As to the probability perhaps readers ofThe Pomp of Powerhad better judge. It is an extremely frank book and its subjects include the leading personalities of Great Britain today and, indeed, all the world. Lloyd George, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Lord Haig, Marshal Joffre, Lord Beaverbrook, Millerand, Loucheur, Painleve, Cambon, Lord Northcliffe, Colonel Repington and Krassin ofSoviet Russia are the persons principally portrayed. The book throws a searchlight upon the military and diplomatic relations of Britain and France before and during the war, and also deals with the present international situation. It may fairly be called sensational.

Especially interesting is the anonymous author’s revelation of the rôle played in the war by Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, so lately assassinated in London. The author was evidently an intimate of Sir Henry and, just as evidently, he is intimately acquainted with Lloyd George, apparently having worked with or under the Prime Minister. He is neither Lloyd George’s friend nor enemy and his portrait of the Prime Minister is the most competent I can recall. Can he be Philip Kerr, Lloyd George’s adviser?

I praise, in this slightly superlative fashion, the picture of the British Prime Minister by the author ofThe Pomp of Power... and I pick up another book and discover it to be E. T. Raymond’sMr. Lloyd George: A Biographical and Critical Sketch. The author ofUncensored Celebritiesis far too modest when he calls his new work a “sketch.” It is a genuine biography with that special accent due to the biographer’s personality and his power of what I may call penetrative synthesis. By that I mean the insight into character which coördinates and builds—the sort of biography that makes a legend about a man.

Mr. Raymond does not begin with the “little Welshman” but with a Roman Emperor, Diocletian, our first well-studied exemplar of the “coalition mind.” These are the words with which, after a brilliant survey of the Prime Minister’s career, the author closes:

“If, however, we withhold judgment on every point where a difference of opinion is possible, if we abandon to destructive criticism every act of administrative vigour which is claimed by his admirers as a triumph, if we accept the least charitable view of his faults and failures, there still remains more than enough with which to defy what Lord Rosebery once called ‘the body-snatchers of history, who dig up dead reputations for malignant dissection.’ If only that he imparted, in a black time, when it appeared but too likely that the Alliance might falter and succumb from mere sick-headache, his own defying, ardent, and invincible spirit to a tired, puzzled, distracted and distrustful nation; if only that he dispelled the vapours, inspired a new hope and resolution, brought the British people to that temper which makes small men great, assured our Allies that their cause was in the fullest sense our own, and finally achieved the great moral victory implied in ‘unity of command’—if these things be alone considered, he will be judged to have earned for his portrait the right to a dignified place in the gallery of history; and some future generation will probably recall with astonishmentthat it was considered unfit to adorn the dining-room of a London club.”

And here are two new books by Margot Asquith! One isMy Impressions of America, the other continuesThe Autobiography of Margot Asquith. Of the first of these books there is to say that it represents Mrs. Asquith’s matured impressions and will have a value that could not possibly attach to interviews or statements she gave on this side. It also gives, for the first time, her frank and direct analyses of the personalities of the distinguished people whom she met in America. The continuation of herAutobiographyis a different matter. Those who have readThe Autobiography of Margot Asquithwill be prepared for the new book. At least, I hope they will be prepared and yet I question whether they will. There is, after all, only one person for Mrs. Asquith to surpass, and that is herself; and I think she has done it. This new book will add Volumes III. and IV. toThe Autobiography of Margot Asquith.

InThe Memoirs of Djemal Pasha: Turkey 1913-21will be found the recollections of a man who was successively Military Governor of Constantinople, Minister of Public Works and Naval Minister and who, with Enver Bey and Talaat Bey, formed the triumvirate which dictated Turkish policy and guided Turkey’s fate after the coup d’état of 1913. I believe these memoirs are of extraordinary interest and the greatest importance.They give the first and only account from the Turkish side of events in Turkey since 1913. The development of relations with Germany, France and England immediately before the war is clearly traced, and a graphic account is given of the first two months of the war, the escape of the Goeben and the attempts made to keep Turkey neutral. When these failed, Djemal Pasha was sent to govern Syria and to command the Fourth Army, which was to conquer Egypt. The attack on the Suez Canal is described, and then the series of operations which culminated in the British reverses in the two battles of Gaza. Further important sections are devoted to the revolt of the Arabs and the question of responsibility for the Armenian massacres.

The value ofMiscellanies—Literary and Historical, by Lord Rosebery, consists not so much in his recollections of people as in the delight of reading good prose. Lord Rosebery has a natural dignity and a charm of lucid phrasing that adapts itself admirably to the essay form he has chosen. The subjects he takes up are beloved figures of the past. Robert Burns, as Lord Rosebery talks of him, walks about in Dumfries and holds spellbound by sheer personal charm the guests of the tavern. There are papers on Burke, on Dr. Johnson, on Robert Louis Stevenson, and others as great. One group deals with Scottish History and one with the service of the state. The last is a study of thegenius lociof such places of mellowassociations as Eton and the Turf. The sort of book one returns to!

I was going to say something about Andrew C. P. Haggard’s book,Madame de Staël: Her Trials and Triumphs. But so profoundly convinced am I of the book’s fascination that I shall reprint the first chapter. If this is not worthy of Lytton Strachey, I am no judge:

“In the year 1751 a young fellow, only fourteen years of age, went to Magdalen College at Oxford, and in the same year displayed his budding talent by writingThe Age of Sesostris, Conqueror of Asia, which work he burnt in later years.

“The boy was Edward Gibbon, who, after becoming a Roman Catholic at the age of sixteen, was sent by his father to Switzerland, to continue his education in the house of a Calvinist minister named M. Pavilliard, under the influence of which gentleman he became a Protestant again at Lausanne eighteen months later.

“The young fellow, while leading the life of gaiety natural to his age in company with a friend named Deyverdun, became an apt student of the classics and was soon a proficient in French, in which tongue he wrote before long as fluently as in English. With young Deyverdun he worked, and in his company Edward Gibbon also played. After visiting frequently at the house of the celebratedVoltaire at Monrepos, and after being present when the distinguished French philosopher played in his own comedies and sentimental pieces, the young fellow’s thoughts soon turned to the theme which was the continual subject of conversation of the ladies and gentlemen who were Voltaire’s guests and formed the company of amateurs with whom the great dramatic writer was in the habit of rehearsing his plays. This was, as might have been suspected in such a society, the theme of love.

“As it happened, there was in the habit of visiting Lausanne a young lady who was a perfect paragon. Her name was Suzanne Curchod, and she was half Swiss and half French, her father being a Swiss pastor and her mother a Frenchwoman.

“Very handsome and sprightly in appearance, the fair Suzanne was well instructed in sciences and languages. Her wit, beauty and erudition made her a prodigy and an object of universal admiration upon the occasion of her visits to her relations in Lausanne. Soon an intimate connection existed between Edward Gibbon and herself; he frequently accompanied her to stay at her mountain home at Grassy, while at Lausanne also they indulged in their dream of felicity. Edward loved the brilliant Suzanne with a union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, and was in later years proud of the fact that he was once capable of feeling such an exalted sentiment.There is no doubt that, had he been able to consult his own inclinations alone, Gibbon would have married Mademoiselle Curchod, but, the time coming when he was forced to return to his home in England his father declared that he would not hear of ‘such a strange alliance.’

“‘Thereupon,’ says Gibbon in his autobiography, ‘I yielded to my fate—sighed as a lover, obeyed as a son, and my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence and new habits of life.’

“These habits of life included four or five years’ service in the Hampshire Militia, in which corps Suzanne’s lover became a captain, the regiment being embodied during the period of the Seven Years’ War.

“Upon returning to Lausanne, at the age of twenty-six, in 1763, Edward Gibbon was warmly received by his old love, but he heard that she had been flirting with others, and notably with his friend M. Deyverdun. He himself, while now mixing with an agreeable society of twenty unmarried young ladies who, without any chaperons, mingled with a crowd of young men of all nations, also ‘lost many hours in dissipation.’

“He was not long in showing Suzanne that he no longer found her indispensable to his happiness, with the result that she assailed him, although in vain, with angry reproaches. Notwithstanding that she begged Gibbon to be her friend if no longer her lover, while vowing herself to be confiding and tender, he acted hard-heartedly anddeclined to return to his old allegiance, coldly replying: ‘I feel the dangers that continued correspondence may have for both of us.’

“It is impossible to feel otherwise than sorry for the brilliant Suzanne at this period, as although from her subsequent manœuvres it became evident that her principal object in life was to obtain a rich husband, from the manner in which she humiliated herself to him it is evident that she was passionately in love with the author ofThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

“Eventually the neglected damsel gave up the siege of an unwilling lover, while assuring her formerly devoted Edward that the day would come ‘when he would regret the irreparable loss of the too frank and tender heart of Suzanne Curchod.’

“Had the pair been united, one wonders what would have been the characteristics of the offspring of an English literary man like Gibbon, who became perhaps the world’s greatest historian, and a beautiful woman of mixed nationality, whose subsequent career, although gilded with riches and adorned with a position of power, displays nothing above the mediocre and commonplace.

“Edward Gibbon’s fame, which was not long in coming, was his own, and will remain for so long as a love of history and literature exists in the world, whereas that of Suzanne Curchod rests upon two circumstances—the first that she wasonce the sweetheart of Gibbon, the second that she was the mother of a Madame de Staël.

“When finally cast off by the Englishman, the Swiss Pastor’s daughter remembered that, if pretty, she was poor, and had her way to make in the world. She commenced to play fast and loose with a M. Correvon, a rich lawyer, whom she said she would marry ‘if she had only to live with him for four months in each year.’

“The next lover was a pastor, who was as mercenary as herself, for he threw her over for a lady with a large fortune. After this failure to establish herself, Suzanne became tired of seeking a husband in Switzerland and went to Paris as the companion of the rich and handsome Madame Vermoneux, the supposed mistress of Jacques Necker, the rich Swiss banker, who was established in the French capital. Once in Paris, it was not long before by her seductions Suzanne succeeded in supplanting Madame Vermoneux in the still young banker’s affections, with the result that she married him in 1764.

“Gibbon, whom she had last seen in 1763, returned to the side of his former love when she was at length safely married to another man. We find him writing in 1765, to his friend Lord Sheffield, formerly Mr. Holroyd, that he had spent ten delicious days in Paris about the end of June. ‘She was very fond of me, and the husband was particularly civil.’ He continues confidentially: ‘Could they insult me more cruelly? Ask meevery evening to supper, go to bed and leave me alone with his wife—what an impertinent security!’

“It was in the month of April in the following year, 1766, that was born Madame Necker’s only child, Anne Louise Germaine, who was destined to become one of the most remarkable women of modern times. From the great literary talent displayed by this wonderfully precocious child from girlhood, it is difficult not to imagine but that in some, if merely spiritual, way the genius of her mother’s old lover had descended through that mother’s brain as a mantle upon herself. That she learnt to look upon Gibbon with admiration at an early age is sure. Michelet informs us that owing to the praises showered upon the historian by M. Necker, Germaine was anxious, as her mother had been before her, to become Gibbon’s wife. She was, however, destined to have another husband—or rather we should say two other husbands.”

iii

Recollections and Reflectionsby a Woman of No Importance has added greatly to the number of this author’s readers, gained in the first instance by herMemories Discreet and Indiscreet, which was followed byMore Indiscretions.

Recollections and Reflectionsconsists of random memories of lords and ladies, sportsmen,Kings, Queens, cooks, chauffeurs and Empresses, related with a great deal of philosophy and insight and no little wit.

There are stories of Gladstone’s lovemaking, of Empress Eugenie and the diamond the soldier swallowed, of Balfour’s hats, Henry Irving’s swelled head and the cosmetics of Disraeli. There are stories of etiquette at a hair-dressers’ ball side by side with comments on Kitchener’s waltzing.

Lady Angela Forbes was the daughter of the fourth Earl of Rosslyn and the youngest child of one of the largest and most prominent families in England. Kitchener, Lord Roberts, Disraeli, the Kaiser, Prince Edward—she has dined or sailed or hunted with them all on the most informal terms. She tells, with engaging frankness, inMemories and Base Details, of the gaieties, the mistakes and tragedies of herself and her friends.

It was Baron von Margutti who informed the Emperor Francis Joseph in 1914 that Serbia had rejected his ultimatum. The character of the Emperor is a moot question.The Emperor Francis Joseph and His Times, reminiscences by Baron von Margutti, is by a man who knew the Emperor intimately and who knew the men and women who surrounded him daily. Baron von Margutti met all the distinguished European figures, such as Edward VII, Emperor Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas and the Empress Eugenie who came to Austria to visit. He watched from a particularlyfavourable vantage point the deft moves of secret diplomacy which interlaced the various governments.

Lord Frederic Hamilton, born in 1856, the fourth son of the first Duke of Abercorn, was educated at Harrow, was formerly in the British Diplomatic Service and served successively as Secretary of the British Embassies in Berlin and Petrograd and the Legations at Lisbon and Buenos Aires. He has travelled much and, besides being in Parliament, was editor of the Pall Mall Magazine till 1900. The popularity of his books of reminiscences is explained by the fascinating way in which he tells a story or illuminates a character. Other books of memoirs have been more widely celebrated but I know of none which has made friends who were more enthusiastic.The Vanished Pomps of Yesterday,Days Before YesterdayandHere, There and Everywhereare constantly in demand.

But, all along, a surprise has been in store and the time is now here to disclose it! The talent for this delightful species of memoirising runs through the family; and Sir Frederic Hamilton’s brother, Lord Ernest Hamilton, proves it. Lord Ernest is the author ofForty Years On, a new book quite as engaging asHere, There and Everywhere, and the rest of Sir Frederic’s. Word from London is that Sir Frederic will have no new book this year; he steps aside with a gallant bow for Lord Ernest. I have been turning pagesinForty Years Onand reading about such matters as the Copley curse, school life at Harrow where Shifner and others bowed the knee to Baal, bull fights in Peru and adventures in the Klondike. Personally the most amusing moments of the book I find to be those in which Lord Ernest describes his experiments in speaking ancient Greek in modern Greece. But this is perhaps because I, too, have tried to speak syllables of Xenophon while being rapidly driven (in a barouche) about Patras—with the same lamentable results. It is enough to unhinge the reason, the pronunciation of modern Greek, I mean. But maybe your hobby is bathing? Lord Ernest has a word in praise of Port Antonio, Jamaica, as a bathing ground.

What he says about hummingbirds—but I mustn’t!Forty Years Onis a mine of interest and each reader ought to be pretty well left to work it for himself.

Chapter IXAUDACIOUS MR. BENNETT

Mr. Bennett’s audacity has always been evident. One might say that he began by daring to tell the truth about an author, continued by daring to tell the truth about the Five Towns, and has now reached the incredible stage where he dares to tell the truth about marriage. This is affronting Fate indeed. It was all very well for Arnold Bennett to write a play calledCupid and Commonsense. Perhaps, in view of the fact that it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, it was all right for him to createThe Old Wives’ Tale; but it cannot be all right for him to compose such novels asMr. Prohackand his still newer story,Lilian.

Think of the writers who have stumbled and fallen over the theme of marriage. There is W. L. George ... but I cannot bring myself to name other names and discuss their tragic fates. There are those who have sought to make the picture of marriage a picture of horror; but that was because they did not dare to tell thetruth. That marriage is all, no one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise. No one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise that, as between husband and wife, there are no such things as moral standards, there can be no such thing as an ethical code, there can be no interposition of lofty abstractions which Men call principles and appeal to as they would appeal to a just God, Himself. No one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise that the relation between a man and his wife necessarily transcends every abstraction, brushes aside every ideal of “right” and “wrong.” Mr. Bennett, in the course of the amazing discoveries of an amazing lifetime, has made the greatest discovery possible to mortals of this planet. He has discovered that marriage occurs when a man and a woman take the law into their own hands, and not only the human law, but the divine.

It would be impossible for the hero of a Bennett novel of recent years to be a character like Mark Sabre inIf Winter Comes. Arnold Bennett’s married hero would realise that the health, comfort, wishes, doubts, dissimulations; the jealousies, the happiness or the fancied happiness, and the exterior appearances of the woman who was his wife abolish, for practical purposes, everything else. It is due to Mr. Bennett more than to anyone else that we now understand that while “husband” may be a correct legal designation, “lover” is the only possible æsthetic appellation of the man who is married. If he is not a lover he is not a husband except for statutory purposes—that is all.

ARNOLD BENNETT

It is hard to describeLilian. I will let you taste it:

“Lilian, in dark blue office frock with an embroidered red line round the neck and detachable black wristlets that preserved the ends of the sleeves from dust and friction, sat idle at her flat desk in what was called ‘the small room’ at Felix Grig’s establishment in Clifford Street, off Bond Street. There were three desks, three typewriting machines and three green-shaded lamps. Only Lilian’s lamp was lighted, and she sat alone, with darkness above her chestnut hair and about her, and a circle of radiance below. She was twenty-three. Through the drawn blind of the window could just be discerned the backs of the letters of words painted on the glass: ‘Felix Grig. Typewriting Office. Open day and night.’ Seen from the street the legend stood out black and clear against the faintly glowing blind. It was eleven p.m.

“That a beautiful girl, created for pleasure and affection and expensive flattery, should be sitting by herself at eleven p.m., in a gloomy office in Clifford Street, in the centre of the luxurious, pleasure-mad, love-mad West End of London seemed shocking and contrary to nature, andLilian certainly so regarded it. She pictured the shut shops, and shops and yet again shops, filled with elegance and costliness—robes, hats, stockings, shoes, gloves, incredibly fine lingerie, furs, jewels, perfumes—designed and confected for the setting-off of just such young attractiveness as hers. She pictured herself rifling those deserted and silent shops by some magic means and emerging safe, undetected, in batiste so rare that her skin blushed through it, in a frock that was priceless and yet nothing at all, and in warm marvellous sables that no blast of wind or misfortune could ever penetrate—and diamonds in her hair. She pictured thousands of smart women, with imperious command over rich, attendant males, who at that very moment were moving quickly in automobiles from theatres towards the dancing-clubs that clustered round Felix Grig’s typewriting office. At that very moment she herself ought to have been dancing. Not in a smart club; no! Only in the basement of a house where an acquaintance of hers lodged; and only with clerks and things like that; and only a gramophone. But still a dance, a respite from the immense ennui and solitude called existence!”

After Lilian’s mother died she had been “Papa’s cherished darling. Then Mr. Share caught pneumonia, through devotion to duty and died in a few days; and at last Lilian felt on her lovely cheek the winds of the world; at last she was free. Of high paternal finance she had neverin her life heard one word. In the week following the funeral she learnt that she would be mistress of the furniture and a little over one hundred pounds net. Mr. Share had illustrated the ancient maxim that it is easier to make money than to keep it. He had held shipping shares too long and had sold a fully-paid endowment insurance policy in the vain endeavour to replace by adventurous investment that which the sea had swallowed up. And Lilian was helpless. She could do absolutely nothing that was worth money. She could not begin to earn a livelihood. As for relatives, there was only her father’s brother, a Board School teacher with a large vulgar family and an income far too small to permit of generosities. Lilian was first incredulous, then horror-struck.

“Leaving the youth of the world to pick up art as best it could without him, and fleeing to join his wife in paradise, the loving, adoring father had in effect abandoned a beautiful idolised daughter to the alternatives of starvation or prostitution. He had shackled her wrists behind her back and hobbled her feet and bequeathed her to wolves. That was what he had done, and what many and many such fathers had done, and still do, to their idolised daughters.

“Herein was the root of Lilian’s awful burning resentment against the whole world, and of a fierce and terrible determination by fair means or foul to make the world pay. Her soul was ahorrid furnace, and if by chance Lionel Share leaned out from the gold bar of heaven and noticed it, the sight must have turned his thoughts towards hell for a pleasant change. She was saved from disaster, from martyrdom, from ignominy, from the unnameable, by the merest fluke. The nurse who tended Lionel Share’s last hours was named Grig. This nurse had cousins in the typewriting business. She had also a kind heart a practical mind, and a persuasive manner with cousins.”

Lilian in the office late at night has been engaged in conversation by her employer, Mr. Grig, and Mr. Grig has finally come to the point.

“‘You know you’ve no business in a place like this, a girl like you. You’re much too highly strung for one thing. You aren’t like Miss Jackson, for instance. You’re simply wasting yourself here. Of course you’re terribly independent, but you do try to please. I don’t mean try to please merely in your work. You try to please. It’s an instinct with you. Now in typing you’d never beat Miss Jackson. Miss Jackson’s only alive, really, when she’s typing. She types with her whole soul. You type well—I hear—but that’s only because you’re clever all round. You’d do anything well. You’d milk cows just as well as you’d type. But your business is marriage, and a good marriage! You’re beautiful, and, as I say, you have an instinct to please. That’s the important thing. You’d make a success of marriagebecause of that and because you’re adaptable and quick at picking up. Most women when they’re married forget that their job is to adapt themselves and to please. That’s their job. They expect to be kowtowed to and spoilt and humoured and to be free to spend money without having to earn it, and to do nothing in return except just exist—and perhaps manage a household, pretty badly. They seem to forget that there are two sides to a bargain. It’s dashed hard work, pleasing is, sometimes. I know that. But it isn’t so hard as earning money, believe me! Now you wouldn’t be like the majority of women. You’d keep your share of the bargain, and handsomely. If you don’t marry, and marry fifty miles above you, you’ll be very silly. For you to stop here is an outrage against commonsense. It’s merely monstrous. If I wasn’t an old man I wouldn’t tell you this, naturally. Now you needn’t blush. I expect I’m not far off thirty years older than you—and you’re young enough to be wise in time.’”

iii

It will be seen thatLilianhas all the philosophy and humour which makeMr. Prohacka joy forever, and in addition the new novel has the strong interest we feel in a young, beautiful, attractive, helpless girl, who has her way to make in the world. And yet, I loveMr. Prohack. Ithink I have by heart some of the wisdom he utters; for instance—

On women: “Even the finest and most agreeable women, such as those with whom I have been careful to surround myself in my domestic existence, are monsters of cruelty.”

On women’s clubs: “You scarcely ever speak to a soul in your club. The food’s bad in your club. They drink liqueurs before dinner at your club. I’ve seen ’em. Your club’s full every night of the most formidable spinsters each eating at a table alone. Give up your club by all means. Set fire to it and burn it down. But don’t count the act as a renunciation. You hate your club.”

On his wife: “You may annoy me. You may exasperate me. You are frequently unspeakable. But you have never made me unhappy. And why? Because I am one of the few exponents of romantic passion left in this city. My passion for you transcends my reason. I am a fool, but I am a magnificent fool. And the greatest miracle of modern times is that after twenty-four years of marriage you should be able to give me pleasure by perching your stout body on the arm of my chair as you are doing.”

On his daughter: “In 1917 I saw that girl in dirty overalls driving a thundering great van down Whitehall. Yesterday I met her in her foolish high heels and her shocking openwork stockings and her negligible dress and her exposed throat and her fur stole, and she was sodelicious and so absurd and so futile and so sure of her power that—that—well ... that chit has the right to ruin me—not because of anything she’s done, but because she is.”

On kissing: “That fellow has kissed my daughter and he has kissed her for the first time. It is monstrous that any girl, and especially my daughter, should be kissed for the first time.... It amounts to an outrage.”

On parenthood: “To become a parent is to accept terrible risks. I’m Charlie’s father. What then?... He owes nothing whatever to me or to you. If we were starving and he had plenty, he would probably consider it his duty to look after us; but that’s the limit of what he owes us. Whereas nothing can put an end to our responsibility towards him.... We thought it would be nice to have children and so Charlie arrived. He didn’t choose his time and he didn’t choose his character, nor his education, nor his chance. If he had his choice you may depend he’d have chosen differently. Do you want me, on the top of all that, to tell him that he must obediently accept something else from us—our code of conduct? It would be mere cheek, and with all my shortcomings I’m incapable of impudence, especially to the young.”

On ownership: “Have you ever stood outside a money-changer’s and looked at the fine collection of genuine banknotes in the window? Supposing I told you that you could look at them, and enjoythe sight of them, and nobody could do more? No, my boy, to enjoy a thing properly you’ve got to own it. And anybody who says the contrary is probably a member of the League of all the Arts.”

On economics: “That’s where the honest poor have the advantage of us.... We’re the dishonest poor.... We’re one vast pretence.... A pretence resembles a bladder. It may burst. We probably shall burst. Still, we have one great advantage over the honest poor, who sometimes have no income at all; and also over the rich, who never can tell how big their incomes are going to be. We know exactly where we are. We know to the nearest sixpence.”

On history: “Never yet when empire, any empire, has been weighed in the balance against a young and attractive woman has the young woman failed to win! This is a dreadful fact, but men are thus constituted.”

On bolshevism: “Abandon the word ‘bolshevik.’ It’s a very overworked word and wants a long repose.”

The best brief sketch of Arnold Bennett’s life that I know of is given in the chapter on Arnold Bennett in John W. Cunliffe’sEnglish Literature During the Last Half Century. Professor Cunliffe, with the aid, of course, of Bennett’s own story,The Truth About an Author, writes as follows:

“He was born near Hanley, the ‘Hanbridge’ of the Five Towns which his novels were to launch into literary fame, and received a somewhat limited education at the neighbouring ‘Middle School’ of Newcastle, his highest scholastic achievement being the passing of the London University Matriculation Examination. Some youthful adventures in journalism were perhaps significant of latent power and literary inclination, but a small provincial newspaper offers no great encouragement to youthful ambition, and Enoch Arnold Bennett (as he was then called) made his way at 21 as a solicitor’s clerk to London, where he was soon earning a modest livelihood by ‘a natural gift for the preparation of bills for taxation.’ He had never ‘wanted to write’ (except for money) and had read almost nothing of Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and George Eliot, though he had devoured Ouida, boys’ books and serials. His first real interest in a book was ‘not as an instrument for obtaining information or emotion, but as a book, printed at such a place in such a year by so-and-so, bound by so-and-so, and carrying colophons, registers, water-marks, andfautes d’impression.’ It was when he showed a rare copy ofManon Lescautto an artist and the latter remarked that it was one of the ugliest books he had ever seen, that Bennett, now in his early twenties, first became aware of the appreciation of beauty. He won twenty guineas in a competition, conductedby a popular weekly, for a humorous condensation of a sensational serial, being assured that this was ‘art,’ and the same paper paid him a few shillings for a short article on ‘How a bill of costs is drawn up.’ Meanwhile he was ‘gorging’ on English and French literature, his chief idols being the brothers de Goncourt, de Maupassant, and Turgenev, and he got a story into the Yellow Book. He saw that he could write, and he determined to adopt the vocation of letters. After a humiliating period of free lancing in Fleet Street, he became assistant editor and later editor of Woman. When he was 31, his first novel,A Man From the North, was published, both in England and America, and with the excess of the profits over the cost of typewriting he bought a new hat. At the end of the following year he wrote in his diary:

“‘This year I have written 335,340 words, grand total: 224 articles and stories, and four instalments of a serial calledThe Gates of Wrathhave actually been published, and also my book of plays,Polite Farces. My work included six or eight short stories not yet published, also the greater part of a 55,000 word serialLove and Lifefor Tillotsons, and the whole draft, 80,000 words of my Staffordshire novelAnna Tellwright.’

“This last was not published in book form till 1902 under the title ofAnna of the Five Towns; but in the ten years that had elapsed since he cameto London, Bennett had risen from a clerk at six dollars a week to be a successful ‘editor, novelist, dramatist, critic, connoisseur of all arts’ with a comfortable suburban residence. Still he was not satisfied; he was weary of journalism and the tyranny of his Board of Directors. He threw up his editorial post, with its certain income, and retired first to the country and then to a cottage at Fontainebleau to devote himself to literature.

“In the autumn of 1903, when Bennett used to dine frequently in a Paris restaurant, it happened that a fat old woman came in who aroused almost universal merriment by her eccentric behaviour. The novelist reflected: ‘This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heart-rending novel out of a woman such as she.’ The idea then occurred to him of writing the book which afterwards becameThe Old Wives’ Tale, and in order to go one better than Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Une Vie’ he determined to make it the life-history of two women instead of one. Constance, the more ordinary sister, was the original heroine; Sophia, the more independent and attractive one, was created ‘out of bravado.’ The project occupied Bennett’s mind for some years, during which he produced five or six novels of smaller scope, but in the autumn of 1907 he began to writeThe Old Wives’ Taleand finished it inJuly, 1908. It was published the same autumn and though its immediate reception was not encouraging, before the winter was over it was recognised both in England and America as a work of genius. The novelist’s reputation was upheld, if not increased, by the publication of Clayhanger in 1910, and in June, 1911, the most conservative of American critical authorities, the New York Evening Post, could pronounce judgment in these terms:

“‘Mr. Bennett’s Bursley is not merely one single stupid English provincial town. His Baineses and Clayhangers are not simply average middle class provincials foredoomed to humdrum and the drab shadows of experience. His Bursley is every provincial town, his Baineses are all townspeople whatsoever under the sun. He professes nothing of the kind; but with quiet smiling patience, with a multitude of impalpable touches, clothes his scene and its humble figures in an atmosphere of pity and understanding. These little people, he seems to say, are as important to themselves as you are to yourself, or as I am to myself. Their strength and weakness are ours; their lives, like ours, are rounded with a sleep. And because they stand in their fashion for all human character and experience, there is even a sort of beauty in them if you will but look for it.’”

Back to Index Next