II
MR. 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. In Things That Have Interested Me he 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 a passion 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 called The Human Machine, and that it is inconceivable that he should write a book called The 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 Me is 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-colour sketch ever 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: “In The 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’s Country of the Blind, and Mr. Bennett’s own Matador 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 I know 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”: