“the spirit bloweth, and is still,”
and the author is dependent on such vagrant moods, and he justified his opinions and his practices by becoming one of the half dozen greater Victorian novelists.
I do not say that Arnold Bennett holds exactly the same beliefs and works in the same mechanical fashion, but that his literary outlook is as practical and business-like is apparent from “The Truth about an Author,” from “The Author’s Craft,” “Literary Taste,” and other of those pocket philosophies that he wrote in the days when he was pot-boiling, and also from the success with which, in the course of his career, he has put his own precepts into practice.
The author who is reared in an artistic atmosphere, free from monetary embarrassments, with social influence enough to smooth his road and open doors to him, seldom acquires any profound knowledge of life or develops any remarkable quality. But Bennett had none of these disadvantages. Nor was he an infant phenomenon, rushing into print before he was out of his teens; he took his time, and lived awhile before he began to write about life, and did not adopt literature as a means of livelihood until he had sensibly made up his mind what he wanted to do and that he could do it. He was employed in a lawyer’s office till he was twenty-six, and had turned thirty when he published his first novel, “A Man from the North.” Meanwhile, he had been writing stories and articles experimentally, and, having proved his capacity by selling a sufficient proportion of these to various periodicals, he threw up the law to go as assistant editor, and afterwards became editor, of a magazine for women—which may, in a measure, account for his somewhat cynical views on love and marriage and the rather pontifical cocksureness with which he often delivers himself on those subjects.
In 1900 he emancipated himself from the editorial chair and withdrew into the country to live quietly and economically and devote himself to ambitions that he knew he could realize. He had tried his strength in “A Man from the North,” and settled down now, deliberately and confidently, to become a novelist and a dramatist; he was out for success in both callings, and did not mean to be long about getting it, if not with the highest type of work, then with the most popular. For he was too eminently practical to have artistic scruples against giving the public what it wanted if by so doing he might get into a position for giving it what he wanted it to have. He expresses the sanest, healthfulest scorn for the superior but unsaleable author who cries sour grapes and pretends to a preference for an audience fit though few.
“I can divide all the imaginative authors I have ever met,” he has written, “into two classes—those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed loudly that they desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle contempt for popularity. The latter, however, always failed to conceal their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or religious life. And indeed, since the object of the artist is to share his emotions with others, it would be strange if the normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his emotions as much as possible to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest nonsense has been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course in the higher interests of creative authors, about popularity and the proper attitude of the artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a first-class artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.” And he proceeds to show from his letters how keenly Meredith desired to be popular, and praises him for compromising with circumstance and turning from the writing of poetry that did not pay to the writing of prose in the hope that it would. I doubt whether he would sympathize with any man who starved for art’s sake when he might have earned good bread and meat in another calling. The author should write for success, for popularity; that is his creed: “he owes the practice of elementary commonsense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at large.”
Bennett was born in 1887, and not for nothing was he born at Hanley, one of the Five Towns of Staffordshire that he has made famous in his best stories—a somber, busy, smoky place bristling with factory chimneys and noted for its potteries. How susceptible he was to the spell of it, how it made him its own, and how vividly he remembers traits and idiosyncrasies of local character and all the trivial detail in the furnishing of its houses and the manners and customs of its Victorian home-life are evident from his books. He came to London with the acute commonsense, the mother wit, the shrewd business instinct and energy of the Hanley manufacturer as inevitably in his blood as if he had breathed them in with his native air, and he adapted himself to the manufacture of literature as industriously and straightforwardly as any of his equally but differently competent fellow-townsmen could give themselves to the manufacture of pottery. He worked with his imagination as they worked with their clay; and it was essential with him, as with them, that the goods he produced should be marketable.
There is always a public for a good story of mystery and sensation so, in those days when he was feeling his way, he wrote “The Grand Babylon Hotel,” and did it so thoroughly, so efficiently that it was one of the cleverest and most original, no less than one of the most successful things of its kind. In the same year he published “Anna of the Five Towns,” which was less popular but remains among the best six of his finer realistic tales of his own people. He followed this with three or four able enough novels of lesser note; with a wholly admirable collection of short stories, “The Grim Smile of the Five Towns”; was busy with those astute, provocative pot-boiling pocket-philosophies, “Journalism for Women,” “How to Become an Author,” “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day,” and the rest; writing dramatic criticisms; plays, such as “Cupid and Commonsense,” “What the Public Wants”; and, over the signature of “Jacob Tonson,” one of the most brilliant and entertaining of weekly literary causeries.
Then, in 1908, he turned out another romance of mystery and sensation, “Buried Alive,” and in the same year published “The Old Wives’ Tale,” perhaps the greatest of his books, and one that ranked him unquestionably with the leading novelists of his time. A year later came “Clayhanger,” the first volume in the trilogy which was continued, in 1911, with “Hilda Lessways,” and completed, after a delay of five years, with “They Twain.” This trilogy, with “The Old Wives’ Tale,” and the much more recent “Mr. Prohack,” are Arnold Bennett’s highest achievements in fiction. The first four are stories of disillusion; the romance of them is the drab, poignant romance of unideal love and disappointed marriage, and the humor of them is sharply edged with irony and satire. In “Mr. Prohack” Bennett returns to the more genial mood of “The Card” (1911). Prohack is a delightful, almost a lovable creation, and the Card, with his dry, dour humor, for all his practical hardheadedness, is scarcely less so.
Unlike most men, who set out to do one thing and end by doing another, Bennett laid down the plan of his career and has carried it out triumphantly. He is a popular novelist, but, though he cheerfully stooped to conquer and did a lot of miscellaneous writing by the way, while he was building his reputation, the novels that have made him popular are among the masterpieces of latter-day realistic art. And with “Milestones” (in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch) and “The Great Adventure,” to say nothing of his seven or eight other plays, he is a successful dramatist. His versatility is as amazing as his industry. It may be all a matter of talent and commonsense perseverance but he seems to do whatever he chooses with an ease and a brilliance that is very like genius. His list of nearly sixty volumes includes essays, dramas, short stories, several kinds of novel, books of criticism and of travel; he paints deftly and charmingly in water-colors; and if he has written no poetry it is probably because he is too practical to trifle with what is so notoriously unprofitable, for if he decided to write some you may depend upon it he could. He has analyzed “Mental Efficiency” and “The Human Machine” in two of his little books of essays, and illustrated both in his life.