Personality in Literature

by R. A. Scott-James

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 Baines is too out-of-date to resist.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.