It is interesting to turn from Clayhanger to the story of Hilda Lessways. This story has not quite the distinctive note which Mr. Bennett struck in the two preceding novels. What we miss is, first of all, the "local colour" which is the author's speciality, most of the scenes being laid in Brighton or London; and second, that detached manner which enabled Mr. Bennett to present his persons as if he were himself indifferent to their fate, with the result that they stand or fall entirely on their own merits. Here we feel that he is a partisan. He has taken up Hilda's case. He is evidently prepared to champion her against all the world. Hence the very femininity of the heroine which he has so cleverly created, to some extent colours the book itself, as if by a kind of sympathy between author and heroine. The perfervid woman has sometimes communicated too much of her fervour to the very language of the author.
But in other respects the book shows an advance in Mr. Bennett's art. For the first time in his life he has resisted the temptation to overwhelm us with the wealth of invention which his fertile mind is busy upon. He has pruned away the unessential details. He has cut away the delightful but irrelevant details which even in The Old Wives' Tale and in Clayhanger threatened to shatter the perspective; and has concentrated on the matter in hand with enormous advantage to the dramatic sharpness and distinctness of his story.
He has made a further gain in intensity by using the story of Clayhanger as a background to the present story. The technical difficulty in all creative literature is a difficulty of language and symbols—the difficulty of so speaking to the reader that he may see moods, moments, situations, concurrences of life and forces of passion in the fine, dry, intense light in which the author has seen them. That is the infinite difficulty of all literature—to find a language and to create an atmosphere which may become familiar to the reader without becoming commonplace. How much do we gain in the reading of Shakespeare by the fact that from the sheer poetry of the thing we have been compelled to read him a score of times! How fully the Greek dramatists understood that to be instantly appreciated they must deal with stories every detail of which was stored with friendly associations for the audience!
Mr. Bennett elicits something of this effect of the marvellous from the familiar by putting the life-story of Hilda Lessways on a foreground behind which lies the already familiar story of Edwin Clayhanger. We remember Clayhanger living in the printing shop in the Potteries; his uncouthness, his shyness, his pertinacity; his desire to be an architect and to live the imaginative life, thwarted by his grim old father; and the manner in which Hilda dawned upon him, entered into his experience in a brief rapture of passion, and disappeared, leaving Clayhanger to grope again with the commonplaces. And in this new story we see the life of the girl, the woman; she, too, groping among the commonplaces, with her heart set upon a wider experience, till a moment comes when her story coincides with and is complementary to that of Clayhanger. The speeches which we heard her make in the earlier story are heard again here, with greater comprehension; the apparently trifling words which fell from the lips of Clayhanger, scarcely heeded, are heard again now, and heard as they sounded to Hilda, grasping after a purpose and a fulfilment of herself.
Mr. Bennett has endeavoured to examine the mind and heart of this woman from the inside. Whether the machinery of the emotions, the will, and the intellect really do work out just like this is a matter harder for a man to decide than for a woman; but to me Mr. Bennett's account seems plausible. What is mainly important is that Hilda, whether she is psychologically true to life or not, is, at any rate, a conceivable person. She is presented as one more example of the spirit too large for its habitation. Cooped up with her mother in a little house in the Five Towns, she was in trouble not the less acute because "the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what." Hilda, maturing, steadfast, idealistic, with a desperate readiness to live through the inferior things of life if she could not now grasp the best, with a vitality which enables her to emerge again and again from tragedy that for most people would be final, is a contrast to her rather futile, fussy, merely experienced mother. Hilda flings herself into the work of a provincial newspaper office with the ardour of her idealism. Here was something she had set her mind on, and the practical quest was a religious passion, tragic in its way because the real result of the work was so paltry and sordid.
What was she? Nothing but a clerk at a commencing salary of fifteen shillings per week! Ah! but she was a priestess! She had a vocation which was unsoiled by the economic excuse. She was a pioneer. No young woman had ever done what she was doing. She was the only girl in the Five Towns who knew shorthand.
And Mr. Bennett succeeds in interesting us in the ambitious, speculative Cannon mainly by reason of the pathetically inadequate objects on which he lavishes the passion of his energies and his ideals—on a newspaper, a corrupt thing—on a boarding-house, a centre of triviality. And Miss Gailey, whose heart is set on her hot-water bottle and her cup of tea, and the easing of her rheumatism, interests us profoundly, because it is such death-in-life which may prove tragically destructive to the ascendant nature of a Hilda.
Mr. Bennett is not afraid of the drab side of life. But he never shows peevishness on the one side nor bloodless romanticism on the other. He sees this drab side, and he sees the passion of life—the aspiring human always trying to be more than it is, or can be, in some desperate, foolish way. This is the tragedy and the hopefulness of tragedy which Mr. Bennett has grasped. To possess a keen faculty of observation by which to present life exactly and realistically, and at the same time to re-imagine these facts so that the vividness, the intensity, the pitiful passion of life are what we mainly remember—to combine these two qualities as Mr. Bennett combines them is to hold a unique position in contemporary literature.